Apparently, it still is:

In a recent interview with Business Week, Tim Cook said the practice is still in-place and even mentioned that he feels privileged to communicate with Apple's customers in this way. Here is a link to the story:

http://tinyurl.com/azzzbhy (BusinessWeek via TinyURL)

The credit card reform act did nothing to profit the credit card companies in any way whatsoever. There were a few (relatively speaking) financial institutions/credit card companies that were abusing their "powers" and charging their customers incredibly high penalty interest rates and fees (Capital One, MBNA, etc.).

An entire industry got penalized due to the egregious actions of a few bad guys.

The only thing I appreciated from this regulation is that the credit card companies now have to disclose how long it would take to pay off the entire balance (and how much it would cost in interest) by paying only the minimum payment - that is actually an informative bit of information.

Complying with each piece of the new regulation has cost the affected institutions a lot of money in reprogramming and retraining as well as direct loss of income on not being able to charge overlimit fees (certain situations can create an overlimit condition without the credit card company being at fault) without the customer opting in.

Disclaimer: I work in the industry

Actually you can do it. We used to do it at work between a couple of sites. We had a T1 and a DSL line. We used an off-the-shelf product from Fatpipe (http://www.fatpipeinc.com/) that can do just that over various types of connections. Not cheap/free, though, so it doesn't fit the poster's need.

I am sure there are several methods of accomplishing the same end. We liked the support they provided.

Do your homework on the company. Get a list of their current and former clients and call at least 10 of them (at least two of them that joined in the past 6 months).

Don't hire an individual. Make sure when you contract with an outsourced IT company that you have the following in place:

1. They must notify you prior to outsourcing any of their work to another party (subcontract the work to someone you may or may not approve of).

2. They provide background checks on their employees.

3. They have privacy and other policies which they follow that comply with GLBA, HIPPA, or Sarbanes-Oxley (if necessary for your industry)

4. They will provide you with audited financial statements on at least an annual basis (you don't want to trust your goodies to someone that is going under and my be "pushed" towards unscrupulous behavior when the going gets tough).

5. There is no "automatic" renewal of the contract. (you should review their service at least annually to ensure they are doing the right thing)

6. They provide you with a copy of their support practices. (how many privileges does each employee have? Do they each have separate logins so you can tell who was doing what, etc.)

7. What State (if in the USA) laws is the contract governed by. Make sure it's not a State which is highly favorable to the outsourcing company.

8. The company is to maintain an insurance/bond policy against it employee negligent or malicious actions that harm your company. The amount of the insurance or bond should be sufficient to cover your assets and your liabilities if data stolen from you led to a lawsuit against you or your company.

There is a lot more you can/should do. I would also have an attorney well-versed in contract law examine the contract to ensure it completely spells out the outsourcing company's responsibility and yours without favoring one party over the other.

Good luck!