After weighing up my options I decided to go with the "give one get one" program despite it being more expensive than getting something else because I thought I would be helping out some 3rd world child to get an education. I was told it wasn't available in my country.

They weren't selling the devices to the people that wanted to buy one. No matter how good your product is if you don't sell it to your market (even if its not the market you want) you will fail.

I'm actually not so sure that this is due to the user being stupid but more due to the person that's telling the user to 'just click continue anyway' not understanding the issue either. I have read a lot of replies to this story and it is very clear that even IT professionals don't understand the problem..

As a poster said somewhere above, the certificate is used for 2 important things. It is used to make an SSL connection (so the transport of the data is secure) and it tells you that the site you are sending your data too is the one it says it is. After giving us that gem of information they then went off on a tangent and said what we need is an SSL only certificate to secure the connection blah blah blah blah.. and they completely missed the point.

A valid certificate tells us that we have a secure connection and the site we are sending to is who it says it is. You need BOTH to be true to get any use out of this. Having a secure connection to some random site on the internet which may not be who its claiming to be is pointless. All the site would need to do is give you a self signed SSL certificate, log everything you give it and relay the pages from the real site. ie, man in the middle attack. Hopefully not having a secure connection has its own obvious flaw.

Its very evident from the discussion in here that IT professionals even have problems understanding why it is so important to prevent users from getting access to a site with an invalid certificate. If the professionals don't get it, what chance does the end user have?

Hi I'm your bank. I say im your bank and that's all that matters. Please enter you login details in the box below.

Because in 4 years time you might not like what the new iPod has become and your old one has died.. How you gona play that music you paid for on that fancy new now?

I will share a short story of why this announcement isn't worth anything to me. Its purely based on my experience and may or may not be indicative of the software as a whole.

I started a new system admin job around 12 months ago now. All of the servers were up and running happily when I started and I had little to no documentation (its always the case).

2 weeks after I start and im still trying to figure out how all the systems have been setup. I'm playing around on the file server trying to work out the file permissions or something equally as boring when I start to receive some calls saying the email isn't working. My email is working fine so I immediately try and work out what on the users machines is causing this. After a few hours it becomes evident that its effecting anyone that logged in to their system after about 9am, but the people already logged in to the before them are still working fine.

I figure its got to be something on the server end and im getting put under the pump to try and fix it, so I try a magic reboot of the exchange server. This makes it worse as now no one can log in at all. After some digging around I work out that somehow the firewall in Symantec Endpoint that has been installed on the exchange server has decided that its under a DDOS attack and is blocking all the exchange traffic thinking its part of that attack. I disable the firewall and all comes good.

Now it stays like this in its disabled state for a few weeks and I forget that it even had an issue as i battle with the network config (trying to work out whats what). Patch day comes around and exchange gets a patch that requires a reboot. System gos down overnight and when i come back in the morning, no email for everyone again. The firewall had turned its self back on after the reboot and gone back to blocking everything again. This time I uninstall it.

A short while after when doing a system audit I remember that the exchange server no longer has a firewall or antivirus on it, so being the good little system admin I attempt to reinstall endpoint. It refuses to reinstall.

I spend more hours digging around for a solution and I try the removal tool, but nothing I can do will get the system to a state when endpoint will reinstall.. So that is the state our exchange server is now it and has been in for a little under 12 months. I cant afford to rebuild the server, or even reboot it that often. Everything is working and I spend all day hoping that the remnants of endpoint don't suddenly decide to hose the system.

Now this would sound like a nice little isolated issue, however in the following 3 months I have had exactly the same thing happen to at least 3 more servers. All problems were solved by removing endpoint and then I could not reinstall it.

We are just starting the process of a server refresh (new hardware and a new version of windows to boot) and im not planing on running any antivirus on any of them, its just not worth the problems.

This would be the same antivirus that failed to pick up conficker in the first place would it?

The biggest problem is, as a user you get no control in what the webdevs decide to dev for. If they decide they are only going to make the site work in IE, then you use IE or don't use the site. As the 'dont use the site' option is, in many cases, not an option.....

This is why I STILL have the IETab extension installed in firefox (although I haven't used it in quite a while).

OR could advise them that the version of IE they have is now 2 versions out of date and is broken? Its not like MS charges for IE8 (or 7)

Where is the 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' tag?!

This is for all the 'piracy is good/bad' people..

I like to think of myself as a reformed pirate. Back in the day I used to download everything I could get my hands on and I rarely paid for a game. I mean why should I when I can just download them?

Then I got a well paying job and I thought to myself, I can actually afford these games now, I should give my money to the people that have worked hard on these games so they they can continue to make them.

Then something interesting happened. As the games were now woth actual money to me, I started to get picky about what I was going to buy. Read reviews, didn't get things on day 1, played demos. The end result is now I don't download games OR buy them. I have a few games that I bought that I am still interested in, and I pay a subscription on an MMO, but I pretty much no longer pay or play any other games.

nice to see slashdot is upholding the fine tradition of not running a single news story on this day of days.

Well bully for you. We run endpoint, so its totally pointless asking it anything as it doesn't know.

Being Australian I can believe this. Apart from the fact that we have significantly less capita to be 'per' of..

We have a HUGE amount of open desert space, and a fairly large proportion of sunlight, which would make for one of the best regions on the planet for a massive solar farm. But our government still likes to dig things up and burn it for power.

I have never understood that.

Wait? I have one of those phones and I didn't know that.. OMG, your right!

Nokia phones are even easier to 'tether'. Run nokia software (its not actually that bad and it gives you a backup feature for your contacts), click connect in that, let it do its thing. (assuming you have already previously paired the device)

Given that I don't even have to plug in my 3 year old Nokia to do this (Bluetooth) I just assumed that the iPhone could already do this..

At least most phone providers in australia have worked out if you let people do whatever they want with their phones they will use them more. Charge them for calls and data (at not massively high rates) and you make some cash.