Actually I watched it last night... Streisand Effect and all. Only occurred to me this morning that the one big thing I hadn't heard before from all of this mess aside from specific details was that Manning was gay. So... that definitely leaves me with a less than stellar impression of the lulz crowd, not that I had one to begin with. The lulz crowd (all of them, not just that group) is just a very slight evolutionary step up from the script kiddies of a few years ago.

My first thought was "Script kiddies censored something? WTF? Now I'm curious..." Next thought was "Hello, Streisand Effect."

The documentary gets one thing stupidly wrong, considering who all they were talking to. They don't really bother to define "hacker" and they're pretty free with the term. Leads the average viewer to think there are organized, known clubs at universities structured around breaking into other people's computer systems.

I'm in complete agreement about this being the wrong question. Many companies have spent a ridiculous amount of money on telling the general public that The Cloud is a solution. It isn't. It's a tool, nothing more. It has it's upsides and it's downsides. But neither of those will matter when you're talking about a complex setup (millions of users, version control and virtualization are all somewhat involved to setup and maintain).

I've done work for hosting companies before. I've bailed people out after they got in over their heads on a daily basis. But I wasn't their system administrator. You need to realize that tech support at your hosting company isn't the same thing as having a sysadmin who is proactively setting your system up to handle the demands you place on it. The best question you can ask (and answer) right now is: Who is my system administrator? If it's you and you've guaged your admin abilities accurately you'll be lucky if you get the system setup. Even if you do, the first time you run into problems of any kind your customers are going to have a very bad experience and that pretty much makes your proposal a non-starter. Sorry to say something like that but honestly you're better off hearing it now while you can do something about it than later.

I love how they settled on the soft target of "identity theft protection" too. This is just a non-starter.

Let's see if we can boil down what a truthful ad for their spyware would look like.

"Hi! I want to provide you with a service we're going to say protects you from someone pretending to be you. Most likely we'll make sure you can't possibly sue us if someone does steal your identity or we'll just claim someone got your info offline or from a computer not covered by the service.

In return, you let is spy on you and use this to send ads to you. We promise not to look at certain types of info but this won't be transparent to you in any way. And realistically speaking, we can't possibly keep up with every site of the type we're saying we don't look at but we'll lie to you and say we won't look at email or sites with medical information anyway. By the way did we mention our EULA will immunize us from prosecution for doing it anyway?

In summary: We onwzorz your infos and you oggle our ads. We'll also make gratuitous statements about protecting your info but you won't be able to hold us to any of it. Have a good day! Big Brother is watching and he wants you (and your little wallet too)!

Huh. Interesting he should say that. Anyone know if he ever stole change from his mom's purse or something? Maybe we can shut him up. :)

Maybe... It's hard to say. You'd have a bit of a conundrum going on there. You see your "For the Children" groups and your "Security Through Endless Harassment" groups are generally on the same side, appealing to the same people. So who would win? I think it would come down to how often people in that demographic fly on commercial airplane flights.

Not certain what their take on events looks like but recently that seems to be a high priority secondary objective (money is always the primary objective with any corporation). Based on their activities or lack thereof in regards to the open source community surrounding java and OpenOffice they don't seem to think very highly of the standard slashdot crowd. Based on their recent high profile lawsuits, they don't seem to think much of other businesses either. I'm not sure who that leaves but whoever it is better have deep pockets or they're screwed.

If you really want to handle three different OSes then yeah, do so. You really haven't mentioned a single bit of information on how you want them to interoperate however and that's generally the part that's the real pain in the butt. If everyone can be migrated to an OSS office suite then you're good for tossing documents around. Email is an old enough standard that hardly anyone is stupid enough to really break it (even AOL has kind of figured this out). The difficulty there comes in with the scheduling and calendar stuff in Exchange/Outlook. I haven't looked in ages but last I heard there were attempts to replace this with a fully functioning OSS system but it didn't interest me enough to track whether the projects succeeded or not. Samba worked fine with XP, haven't tried it with Windows 7.

Ultimately though you generally do the whole replacement OS thing as a process. You start with the servers. If you're used to in-house mail you might be better off running a Linux or BSD mail server than going the Gmail route. Once you have all the servers done that you're going to do, then start planning out your app deployments and replacements. If you're thinking about swapping out MS Office for OpenOffice, try that before you shuffle OSes. It's free, it works on Windows and it's much easier to back out of if you change your mind (or have it changed for you by your users). Do that with every piece of software you conceivably can, one at a time and see what impact it has. If it all works and no gotchas pop up, you can go on to swap OSes, but I'd probably wait until there was a reason to get rid of Windows 7. When an Antivirus or some other piece of software requires a paid update, switching to Linux or whatever to avoid it will sound like a much better idea. This process will make an eventual OS replacement less painful for you and your users and you won't have to ask Slashdot how well it will work. You'll be seeing it yourself.

Just curious, but did the ruling happen to have any language that would keep you from doing the same sorts of web exposure for this case and all involved as you did to the original corporation? I mean, it pissed them off enough to engage in a stupid lawsuit, maybe it'll annoy the judge and the lawyers too.