But that doesn't excuse the fact they messed up in the first place. What mozilla have done is plain careless. I know, 'accidents happen' - but I'd rather they didn't and I don't trust companies not to keep making mistakes with user data.

Surely using obscure or old systems for the sake of security is the flawed principle of security through obscurity.

All you can achieve using that method is reduce your chances of being subject to a random attack. An attack that is crafted specifically for you is likely to work. You said it yourself, the machines were easily hacked a few years ago. If someone specifically wanted to target x company for whatever reason - they would be committed enough to dig up a 10 year old text book. Your average botnet has more generic fish to fry, so aim at the pond with more fish. Your single fish in a small barrel isn't more secure than those other fish.

So, according to these USCG clowns, providing a working defence to the opposition is illegal?

That hard evidence is not actually that hard. It doesn't have any weight behind the idea of who committed the act using the IP address. Consider this scenario;

A teenager, Bob, downloads a few albums off the web. Bob's dad, John, is the account holder with the ISP. When lawyers go poaching and tell John's ISP that xyz IP address was used to download copyright content, the ISP gives them John's details. After getting a letter from the lawyers, John, denies downloading the content. Because he didn't. Or maybe the letter asks John who was downloaded the material x months ago at 20:32. John says "How tf am I supposed to know?" - maybe he has a few kids. Maybe he has a wireless network that isn't properly secured. Maybe the time in question is so long ago that it's unreasonable for John to know who was using what.

Saying an IP address downloaded something illegally is one thing. Pinning the crime onto an actual person is a very big leap and leaves lots of room for reasonable doubt imo. I'd love to hear of one of these cases going to court and someone tries the "I'm sorry, but I don't know who was using the computer then" defence.

Servers;
You say the media server will have a shed load of files in an archive. Does this mean it won't be regularly accessed? In which case, just get a bare-bones box and shove a million hard drives in it. You don't need extreme CPUs to just store stuff.
In house webserver. Development or production? How much traffic? Do you have client's work hosted on the webserver? IMO, internal's fine for development or even staging environments - but production is best handled by a company who know what they're doing - so use one of the million reputable hosting providers out there.
Do you actually need a server for user management? One company I worked for had a brilliant, simple solution. Everyone had their own seat in the office, so their PC was 'theirs' and they had an account for that PC. They also had a folder on the in-house webserver (development only) that they could call their own and were advised to save all their work there because only the server was regularly backed up, the individual PCs weren't.

Clients;
Ask the work force. Ask the managers. Don't think that "Oh yay! Laptops mean people can do work outside the office" - if those machines are contain sensitive material, the management probably don't want people to do work outside the office. Some people also just don't like working on laptops. I for one would hate to use a laptop for a long period of time (ie, 9-5). If there's not [i]need[/i] for laptops/thin-clients, save the company a buck & get what they actually need.

The UK's pretty similar. One example that always gets me is that we buy petrol by the litre, but measure fuel efficiency in miles per gallon.

We also buy our booze in pints unless we're buying bottles. Milk tends to also be in pints, but they've also started putting the litre equivalent on some bottle labels now. Meat is often bought by the kilo, but burgers are usually "1/4 pounders" and steaks are usually measured in oz. People, like Canada, are usually measured in feet and stone...unless you're at the doctors,in which case it's usually metric.

...but TFA fails to mention anything to do with user experience. How are well suited is the OS to small screen real estate?

For example, On Ubuntu, ccsm, doesn't fit on the screen (Image). Little like things like that crop up often with Ubuntu and it's really annoying.

I've no idea of Windows has similar issues because I don't have it installed, so perhaps somebody else will comment.

I've never used it personally, but IIRC from my functional programming unit at University, F# is MS's language for the functional programming paradigm. Similar to Haskell (which is what we did study). I *think* it also has elements of other programming paradigms too, but don't quote me on that (:

I've installed it on my Acer Aspire One netbook and for the most part it has been good. The new Unity interface has some severe performance problems in my experience though. Also, Unity doesn't currently let you do much in the way of customising it via GUI tools. Adding a custom launcher, for example, is quite long winded.

I'm using the standard gnome interface on my netbook now. I think Unity's got potential to become something really quite good, but I don't think it's ready yet.

Yeah. Lets spend years scanning everything and save it as a PDF/Word/Whatever file that probably won't be readable a few versions down the line. While we're at it, lets store it on Tape/CD/DVD/BluRay/HDD that also won't be readable in years to come. I think just getting a bigger book case is probably the best option as far as long term storage goes.

Not quite. It includes people who love themselves and people who hate themselves. Not people who are "average with themselves". That being said, the average person has 1 testicle and 1 boob, so maybe people who are average with themselves don't actually exist.

Why should TheDirt waste their money, resources and time to defend something that has absolutely nothing to do with them. Yeah, it probably would have just been a 5 minute "You've got the wrong website" statement, but that's still money that they shouldn't have to spend. IANAL, but I doubt TheDirt could claim all of their costs back from this daft cheerleader - especially considering the ridiculous method that's used to calculate costs. It's kind of depressing that "innocent until proven guilty" goes out the window when they can shoot for "proven guilty in absence".

They should counter-sue/appeal/whatever-it-is the cheerleader into oblivion for slandering their website.

Google need an IPC license to continue to operate 'in the light' - these licenses are given by the Chinese government. Google's license is up for renewal (which they applied for today). They're hoping that by making the redirection to Hong Kong servers manual they'll be on right side of the law and so get a their license renewed.

The original blog post makes the mention of "going dark" - but that's only if Google's IPC license isn't renewed by the Chinese government.

The BBC have a good article on this too.

"proper security measures shall be taken to protect against malicious software and remote attacks."

Define 'proper' in this context. Windows has come with built in firewall software for years, since XP SP2 IIRC. Is that 'proper' enough? What about the most up-to-date patched Windows 7 system? Where do you draw the line?

UNIX firewalls might be the best in the world today, but tomorrow someone might discover a critical flaw that opens up every Linux box to all kinds of nasties. Similarly, saying "Install Norton/Mcaffee/whatever" is susceptible to a similar flaw. It might be the recommended A/V product, but tomorrow some hax0rs might find a vulnerability with it and every computer in Australia is vulnerable to it.

They'll probably response by not trying to use it to play games.