Even an AC should understand significant figures.
1.4 million Swedish kronor = 140000 Euros.

1,378,525 Swedish kronor, as was the exact number mentioned in the article, however, currently amounts to 136,420.70 Euros

It isn't word games, routers and firewalls are not the same thing.
You sound like the same person that calls your monitor a "computer" and your computer case a "hard drive" or "CPU". You also thought the year 2000 was the first year of the 21st century.
Just because a majority or people are ignorant to facts doesn't mean that I'm going to start calling a firewall a router. The common name is only a router because common people don't know what the hell they are talking about.

The point here is that the Government previously said it was legal.

Maybe, if you're talking about some hypothetical conversation between the NSA and the telecom people before they agreed to do what the government wanted. It sucks for the telecoms, and it may even get them at least partially off the hook come trial time, but then again that's why these massive corporations have general counsels. Chances are what they really did was to weigh the illegality of the actions against the potential monetary harm that might come their way from pissing off the government and decided they didn't care all that much about the law.

That said, in public "the Government" has done no such thing. In fact exactly the opposite; a grant of immunity is the legal of equivalent of "okay, so there's a pretty good chance the courts will bitchslap you for this, but we're not going to let that happen." If the actions were clearly legal, immunity wouldn't have been necessary. You don't need protection from prosecution for something that's not illegal.

In any event, as I'm sure you've often seen quoted, "ignorance of the law is no excuse." If I tell you murder is perfectly legal and you go and murder somebody, it doesn't get the off the hook. If the government tells the telecoms that what they're asking is perfectly legal and they do it, it doesn't get them off the hook. It was illegal or not regardless of who said what. All that matters is what laws were on the books when it happened.

I don't think it needs to be an extreme opinion - even types of behaviour is enough. People want to be themselves, without worrying about every possible impact. For example, I might choose to use language here that I wouldn't necessarily use at a job interview or at a meeting with a client... that's very mild behaviour compared to your average KKK member/child abuser and so on - but combine that with the fact that people are very judgmental and that first impressions are hard to overcome, and there is a good case to be made to obscure your identity online.

I don't know whether a full replacement identity/alias is really necessary, although I know that when I have to register for something not-so-trustworthy online I use the same (fake) date of birth, address etc - so that if I ever have to re-enter the data (for password resets or whatever) I will know what I said originally, without any obvious way to link the identify with the real me.

This is the same logic as having more than one e-mail address, one used for stuff that would attract SPAM.

I think it it more that people want to relax and just be themselves without worrying, from behind at least a thin veil of anonymity, rather than their being members of the KKK - and people want to be able to maintain a (perhaps not so realistic, but still necessary) persona of professionalism etc - they aren't protecting who they are socially by hiding online, they are protecting the image they project of themselves at work.

That's my take on it anyway, YMMV.

Moderated -1: Groan...

Even if you have total control over all physical access points to your LAN, and total trust in your user base, there is still a chance that internal people can try to do nasty things - and in some ways they may have more motivation to do so.

I think the concept of "internal/trusted network" is going to shrink - nowadays I tend to this of the "internal network" as ending at the edge of centralised server resources, and clients on what would have been called the "internal LAN" are actually outside of what I would now call the "trusted zone". Even then, SMB traffic is more likely to be open so this vulnerability is still a problem, and many organisations still concentrate on border protection without taking any defense-in-depth measures internally so they're probably wide-open to this.

I could be paranoid, but I don't want to be less strict with internal controls and then find out the hard way that I was right all along.

If I had mod points I'd be clicking on "insightful" right now.

My only hope is that as older people slowly leave the workplace, corporate governance structures will finally start to include at least one or two people have have even the smallest clue about technical stuff.

Funny, I probably have a worse view of HR than is probably deserved (at least I hope) because of my dealings with our HR area, and also some senior level non-IT managers who think they are more important than they are:

"Yeah, I know you're a regional manager - all that means to me is that you get paid *less than I do* - let's get our our payslips and see who is going to win this argument"

(:->)

Sometimes there are reasons for not supporting any app, not matter how dodgy it might be, or any client OS that someone might want to use - especially in places where HR want to run some dodgy app that they've wasted money on and now want IT to soak up many hours to deploy it and get it working with the rest of their apps, and then not use it or discover it isn't quite what they wanted...

Where I work is somewhere in between the two scenarios you mentioned - I won't make changes to centralised infrastructure to suit 1 or 2 people who have a preference for a particular app, especially if there is a alternative that can do what they want to achieve (even one that's not quite as good - sorry). Having said that, if people want to go off on a tangent and use an app/client OS/e-mail client that is different from the standard, I don't have any dramas with that so long as

(1) they aren't introducing any security risks (no, sorry, you can't install "antiviruscleaner2009.exe"), and
(2) they are happy to fix it themselves - our level of support drops back to "best effort" only

Generally people who are interested in "outside the square" solutions are either technical enough to deal with any minor issues themselves and aware enough to understand when we say "sorry, not our problem...", or clueless enough so I can talk them out of what they want to do in the first place.

This might sound a bit harsh - I dunno - people do have the ability to make a case for what they want, we just actually make them do that rather than grabbing our ankles at the slightest whim of others - and if they can justify the business need for what they are after, not a problem and we'll jump in and get it done - and if they can't justify it, sorry, I got bigger stuff to deal with.

Don't forget also that MS are pushing SharePoint in a huge way (I mean MOS, not the basic SharePoint that ships with the OS) - and Office is basically mandatory once you start to use SharePoint for anything more complex than as a basic intranet.

(SharePoint personally leaves me completely cold...yuk.)

Allowing MAPI directly into an Exchange environment from any internet host isn't a great idea, surely - for starters that would allow someone to DoS your environment by authenticating with obviously invalid credentials and locking people out - expecially when a lot of environments will align user's e-mail address with their AD username. Plus ,the moment a vulnerability becomes known you're open to who knows what (and it is just a matter of time..?)

Allowing any IP into exchange over MAPI isn't what Exchange requires anyway, and is certainly not "best practice" - you can use Outlook Anywhere (RPC over SSL), ActiveSynch (again SSL) and Outlook Web Access (SSL). For a more secure solution preferably publish all of this through ISA Server using 2-factor or RADIUS etc. to protect Active Directory. To really take off this new client will need to support RPC over HTTPS, and have a cached mode equivalent, people in the corporate space will want to take their laptops home and connect to their mail without switching to OWA, and they will want to access their mail offline. (I am not sure if this client has this, too lazy to check - if it does, well done Apple.)

There is always a trade-off between security and usability.

Apple creating Exchange client software makes sense as it helps them aim at the corporate space, I don't see Microsoft having any issues with this as they still make money off it - any client/user requires a Client Access Licenses - one CAL for Exchange standard features (basic mail etc), one CAL for the underlying Windows Server access, and an Enterprise Exchange additive CAL for enterprise features (unified messaging (voice)/office communication server/etc).

It is the same logic as VMware driving sales of Microsoft server operating systems - sometimes decent competitor offerings aren't bad - more of a "co-opetition" than competition (up to a point anyway)

This story piqued my interest because I used to work writing programs to collect statistics for analysis. I am also someone that watches the press regarding piracy claims.

When I read the summary I wasn't concerned about the 136 people being their basis. The concern I had the most with was that the article stated that there were approximately 136 people out of roughly 1100 that admitted to using file sharing programs, yet neither this summary nor the article stated whether these individuals used them for the purpose of copyright infringement. And finally, I don't see it stated anywhere where they advise how the sampling was broken out (i.e., age and profession).

SOE = Sony Online Entertainment

Bad analogy, the stick of RAM *CAN* partially work, with data corruption, if some of the contacts are bad.

And, theoretically, the same mechanism could affect a SIM - SOME bad contacts causing corruption of the data being read.

You're just being silly. The Amiga was never viewed as a serious desktop productivity machine, to compete with Windows

Now you're just being silly. By "serious" I presume you mean "used in business" (viewed by whom? And what's a "non-serious" machine? Many people don't view Macs as serious machines, but that's not a valid argument). Yes, Windows was used by the vast majority of businesses rather than Amigas or anything else, but the same is still true now. So talking about OS X now is no more an argument than talking about alternative OSs to Windows 95.

Moreover, are business users going to be the kind that "house parties" are aimed at? I don't think so.

and 1995 was not a major year for Amigas.

Exactly the point - the issue was "for years" before.

Likely even Amiga fans were using Windows in their work, and would have welcomed the improvements in Windows 95.

And you think that no OS X users today aren't using Windows in their work?

And the Mac has had a Dock, and cool graphical effects, for years now; the slickest parts of Windows 7 aren't really that new.

So? And the Amiga had for years before all the slickest parts of Windows 95 that you just listed. First you only compare Windows to previous OSs from MS. Then you say it's okay to discount new features, if they're available in an alternative OS. Which is it? You can't have it both ways.

And if you dislike the Amiga so much, well if you prefer, use classic MacOS for your example, which also meant that Windows 95 was nothing new.

I don't disagree that the jump from DOS to Windows 95 was far bigger than XP/Vista to Windows 7 - I never suggested otherwise - but that wasn't the point the OP was making.