While the 'free world' gets ever increasingly dumbed down OS choices, the BTIC nations seem to be embracing Linux and FOSS. This is not just a transfer of economics, it's a transfer of knowledge.

"Hotmail sent a message containing a malicious link to all of his contacts" Most likely, the user is at fault here. Does he really think it was Hotmail who sent him the message? Seriously? I get messages every so often on Hotmail claiming to be an admin of some sort, or "Hotmail Team" who wants to know my username and pass or else my account will be deleted. Does anyone fall for this? Maybe so.. In any case, a pc magazine editor shouldn't be falling for this kind of stuff, not so late in the game anyway. As a matter of fact, I still have a Hotmail account! (The horrors) I keep nothing of importance there and have had it since the 90s, before MS bought them. The pw is in lowercase, it's a dictionary term - all that would make you think I've been 'hacked' numerous times. But no! Not even once - I just don't go clicking every bloody email with the subject "Hotmail Team". It's still clean as a whistle. I'm aware that MS is not winning the local popularity contest and I got no qualms with that, as I also have my own reasons for wanting to stick it to them - but this is bordering on silliness. We all know it's the user, no matter how much we'd like the system to be at fault.

The current trend of forcing real-name policies is ridiculous. In smaller groups, a real name may benefit the group in communication and identification - but in large groups, like the internet, where the message is of more value and there is no reasonable desire/possibility to be able to identify the poster -why bother? Instead, people choose not to post, what might have been usable, valuable information.

Encrypting seems to be indicative of guilt or the need to hide something. The presumption of innocence suddenly does not seem to apply.

JavaFX did the same to front-end java developers. Turn the page and move on.

The words 'public school', where I'm from, are synonymous with very intelligent or highly capable, upper middle-class to stinking rich, right up to people with title and land.

Come on Diaspora, give these bullies a run for their money so they know that they're not the only kids in the sandpit.

because they'd go broke

Come up with a simple way of making his games not run. He will spend a lot of time figuring out why. Increase difficulty everytime he comes up with a solution. I learnt programming this way when our teacher simply took the games of our school LANtastic menu, in the process of figuring it out I read as many batch scripts as I could to alter the boot parameters to bypass the LANtastic password manager allowing to play golf and test-drive to my hearts content. He could have just taken these games off, but I think he wanted us to figure it out.