Really? It may not "matter" in terms of galactic importance, but I think a case can be made for this article being "News" and/or "for Nerds". All work and no play, you know... And I'm not sure I would want to live in a world where repurposing dead cats doesn't count as play.

...to inflict this article on the unsuspecting, may I humbly suggest an inspired shortlink: http://tinyurl.com/freecats4all

No, it's what you inferred. What you READ is this: "My client is trying to protect his family from scammers and other unsavory types..." I'll bet you a donut that the target is either his daughter's boyfriend or his wife's boyfriend. And I'll bet the sprinkles that it's his wife's.

Because the "client" is a guy trying to catch his wife cheating on him and will soon land himself in divorce court. The "legal" issue is that wiretapping laws prevent him putting snoopware on to her machine(s) without her consent. Run away from this project as fast as you can. Unless you are working for the NSA, the first rule of data capture is that you JUST have the permission of the people whose data you're capturing. Bad things happen to techs who skip this step.

On the other hand, how refreshing is it to hear a CEO put his ego aside and say to his customer base, "you're right, that was a dumb idea; we'll undo it." How often have you seen them take the other approach - trying to prove that they were right all along by sticking MORE stubbornly to their plan? It's utopian to wish for CEO's never to do dumb things. But it would be a better world for consumers if CEO's - when they DO make dumb moves - would more often be willing to reverse course.

I am a full-time work-from-home WAN geek. I have Sprint data service, with an old PCMCIA card in a D-Link DIR-450 router; it's my backup Internet connection. From time to time, I've used it in short intervals (1 week) as my primary connection. I used to have problems with the connection resetting every 6 to 18 hours or so, although the connection state has seemed much more stable in the last few months. It still won't hold an outbound VPN connection for a full day at a time; my sessions last anywhere from 4 to 20 hours before needing to be restarted (and the same connection over DSL lasts for weeks). Throughput is more than servicable, and the rate is more constant than I'd expected. Jitter can be higher than you'd want for VoIP, especially if there's any other traffic on the line. The jitter could be mitigated if I used a decent router, but I still think I'd see a performance gap between wireless and wireline delay consistency. For mid-speed service and 99% uptime, it's a perfectly viable alternative. It's especially useful in some rural areas where the cellular data network reaches farther out in the country than DSL or cable. If you need great service 99.9%+ of the time with low latency and minimal jitter, stick with wireline.