A dedicated wireless network is one workable and practical solution. Assuming that the network is using business class equipment and is not running on a bunch of consumer grade equipment (which is NOT always a valid assumption,) it's also relatively straightforward to use wired networks. Computers which authenticate to the LAN are placed in a VLAN allowing them full access. Computers which do not authenticate are dynamically placed in a restricted VLAN that only allows access to the Internet,

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd wager he's in the marketing department.

Perhaps. It's also possible that he works in another department and brings his own computer because they won't allow the apps he wants to use on the hospital computers. I've used my personal computer for lots of work stuff because I wasn't allowed to install anything and the only text editor available was Notepad.

I'd echo the advice already given numerous times to stop checking email on anything other than a company machine. But for personal machines at work, it depends on why they're being used and why they're connected to the network. Are they actually being used to access local network resources or is the network merely being used to provide internet connectivity? If its the latter, it's not difficult to set up isolated VLANs and subnets which only have access to the internet. The hospital IT staff may not be willing to do this, of course, but it's a possible option to consider.

A number of facts are in dispute, or at least the interpretation of a number of facts, and that's why this case potentially "...puts all IT admins in danger..."

The city claims that Terry took a number of nefarious actions that endangered the network. They claim that he installed multiple modems connected to the network to allow him to access it without logging or auditing. Connecting a modem to the console port of a router or switch is a common back-up access method. It's the only way you can remotely get to a network device if the network is down. When you connect, you still need the username and/or password to get into the device and that access can be logged. It's no different from connecting your laptop directly to the console port.

They claimed that he disabled password recovery on network devices to prevent the city from accessing them. But all of the devices where password recovery was disabled appear to be devices that could not be physically secured. Disabling password recovery is, again, a common practice for devices that are physically accessible.

They claim he had sniffers installed on his computers in order to snoop on the network. How many network admins out there DON'T have a sniffer program installed for troubleshooting the network?

After he was arrested, his pager was taken and it went off with an alert from one of the routers. The city claims this was unauthorized access to the network. Again, it's extremely common for network admins to have monitor programs that send out an email or pager alert in the event of a failure.

I agree that Terry handled the situation poorly and was probably a bit of a jerk. But the city's attempts to pile on the charges in an attempt to get back at him do threaten to set dangerous precedents that could come back to bite any system or network admin.

There is nothing you can do to ensure that data you've already entered is gone. Even if you delete photos and change the info, there's no guarantee that the previous info is not stored. That being said, I deleted my account when I saw this earlier this morning on another site. When they asked me why I was deleting the account, I checked "Privacy concerns." In the comments section, I pasted a quote from the article noting what they were selling and followed it up with a single word: Bye. If enough people do this, Facebook will get the message that users are unhappy with this decision, even if deleting the account doesn't protect already-entered data.

And use DenyHosts

This case was settled, yes. But if you RTFA you'll note that there were several rulings that were issued and then appealed up to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Those rulings, which strongly favor F/OSS, ARE now binding, at least for that circuit.

It's also kind of hard to answer the question asked without knowing much about the software involved. We know it's a web project of some kind, but that doesn't do much to narrow things down. If it's a web application framework like Rails then promoting it would be a very different task than if it's a blog publishing application like Wordpress. Hopefully, it's not an exact duplicate of some other common open source project, of course. If, however, it does perform the same function as another well known program, particularly a closed source one, you might want to start by listing it on AlternativeTo.

Additionally, he says: "And at best I'd maybe get an injunction, not damages. And, really, they're not making enough money for me to regain my losses."

Uh, what losses? Granted, if he owns the copyright to the image, it's illegal to use them without his permission. But in what way did the use of those images actually cause him any losses? How was he actually harmed? I have no issue with him asking, or even demanding, that they stop using his artwork. But to claim "losses" is downright silly.

It's a sort of self perpetuating system. Originally, the Social Security Number was intended only for use with the Social Security system. However, because it's a controlled, unique number assigned to individuals, it's easy and convenient to use as a unique ID for all sorts of record systems. Having someone's name and SSN makes it fairly easy to do identity theft. Part of the problem is the ubiquity of the SSN as an identifier and part of it is sloppy procedures which don't verify that the name and SSN actually belong to the individual using them.

It is nevertheless better to reserve a machine on your network for just this usage. Nothing installed on it but tcpdump and similar tools.

Or boot from a Linux Live CD.

Also, some switches support spanning ports, which will allow you to sniff the traffic on another port. Your typical home network dumb switch probably doesn't support this, but if you have temporary access to a higher end switch, it makes such tasks much easier. You can pick up older switches that support this fairly cheap on Ebay, although you probably won't want to spend the money for a one-time usage.

What brilliant ideas did Microsoft or Apple have? Microsoft was more lucky than anything else, and used mostly someone else's code to succeed. Apple didn't do anything there weren't dozens of other people trying to do. They just did it better. It was execution and implementation, not brilliant ideas. Edison might have had a few brilliant ideas but most of what he's known for weren't his ideas. He didn't invent the light bulb. In fact, he bought the patents from others who'd been there before him but weren't able to make it practical. See here. He created the first commercially practical lightbulb, and he did it based upon thousands of hours of trial and effort. Many of his other inventions have similar histories. It isn't some brilliant idea that leads to success. It's implementation.

As for the inventor of the burp-tank, several minutes of Googling turned up absolutely nothing. Unless you can provide some evidence, I'll assume that it's apocryphal.

I agree that there's nothing wrong with this scenario per se, so long as the transparency requirement is met. And I further agree that there will be backlash from the gamers over the issue, just as there's now a considerable hue and cry over C&C:4's announcement. But I suspect that people will get used to it and it will eventually become the norm.

The one issue I do have with it is that it cuts out certain segments of the market. For a personal example, I spent 20 years in the US Navy, and I did a lot of gaming to pass the time while on six month deployments. On a ship, you don't have an Internet connection for personal use. The same is true for other members of the Armed Forces who are deployed away from home, and undoubtedly for a multitude of other people who for various reasons won't have open Internet access. Unfortunately for them, they make up only a small percentage of the market. Sucks to be them, I suppose.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

The summary says Game publishers and developers may not like it, but people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them.

Don't bet on it. C&C:4 will require a constant Internet connection to play. How long do you think it will be before other games follow? And how long do you think it will be before most games have something like Microsoft's so-called Genuine Advantage, where each game comes with a serial number that must be validated before the game will play? Once that serial number is registered, selling the CD doesn't do any good at all. And game companies are under no obligation to allow you to transfer that serial number to someone else. Register the serial number with the server via your PC or with your XBox live account or your PS3 Online account and the media becomes worthless. In fact, they could simply give the game disks away and require you to pay online to receive an activation number or token.

Sure, the system can probably be cracked and it won't stop all piracy, but it will stop legal used games sales in its tracks.

Goodbye Gamestop, we hardly knew ye.

This has already been addressed in the IP specs: ECN

One of the big problems with getting ECN adopted has been that Windows hasn't supported it. Vista does and I haven't seen anything specific but I'm reasonably certain that Windows 7 does as well. MAC OSX 10.5 supports it as well. Linux has supported it for quite awhile. It's usually disabled by default, so that may be an issue in getting it widely supported. But the issue isn't that we don't know how to do it better. It's just overcoming the inertia.

Exactly how is this different from what we currently have?

Consider a conventional router receiving two packets that are part of the same video. The router looks at the first packet's destination address and consults a routing table. It then holds the packet in a queue until it can be dispatched. When the router receives the second packet, it repeats those same steps, not "remembering" that it has just processed an earlier piece of the same video.

Uh, no. This is called process switching. It hasn't been used in anything but the most low-end routers for quite some time. CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding) and MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) use flow control. The perform a lookup on the first packet, cache the information in a forwarding table and all further packets which are part of the same flow are switched, not routed, at effectively wire speeds. MPLS adds a label to the packet which identifies the flow, so it isn't even necessary to check the packet for the five components which define the flow. Just look at the label and send it on its way.

QOS (Quality Of Service) has multiple modes of operation and multiple queue types which address the issues of which packets to drop. It may or may not include deep packet inspection to attempt to determine the type of packet.

Perhaps they've come up with some new innovations that aren't obvious in the write-up because it's written at a relatively high level, but there's nothing here that isn't already implemented and that I don't already work with on a daily basis in production networks.