IMO people who demonize CIQ are missing the target. You should demonize the companies who employed CIQ technology to spy on their customers.

The only thing CIQ is guilty of is being a for-profit company in a capitalist society. Where there is demand (AT&T, HTC, Samsung, Motorola) there will be supply (CIQ). Just like the spam issue.

If you don't existinguish the demand by penalizing CIQ's customers, perhaps through legislature, CIQ 2.0 will be incorporated in no time and you better believe the next root kit will be a lot harder to detect.

AB

Big black smoking crater? You give Google too much credit. Have you forgotten they're just a search engine? If people want to see a video on ABC.com they just go to abc.com, they don't need Google's index for that.

I'll humor you though. Even if the only way people could reach abc.com was through a link at google.com, Google still wouldn't "block" ABC because they don't have the metal to diss the media companies like they dissed Zuckerberg. They don't need Facebook, but they need the media companies, much more than the media companies need Google, so they have to play nice and do what the media companies want ($$$), or go to court fighting for GTV's rights ($$$).

Sometimes I think for every Google Engineer who spends their 20% time on a project that might see daylight, Google should assign someone else an equal amount of time figuring out if the project will MAKE or LOSE the company money. RIP NexusOne, Wave, Buzz.

m

If you buy Exchange with 25 CAL's, that entitles you to run Outlook on 25 client computers. Not Office, just Outlook.

You still have to pay for the 25 seats of Windows, but if this is a business, chances are they've already bought OEM licenses of Windows from the hardware vendor (Dell/HP/IBM), which is MUCH less than $200 per seat.

Also, a small business with 25 users can just by one license of "Small Business Server" which includes AD, Exchange, SQL Server, etc, all in one package, meant to literally run on a single server, with CAL's included.

Microsoft makes their money with the Windows + Office + Active Directory + Exchange lock-in.

(Exchange requires Outlook, requires Windows, requires AD).

I live in San Francisco and a lot of people in the Bay Area currently use FastTrack to pay bridge toll, and one day it dawned on me that maybe people could use their FastTrack transmitter to pay for parking. It would require absolutely nothing to be done by the driver, assuming they have a FastTrack transmitter in their vehicle.

Imagine it: you pull up to a parking spot, a FastTrack sensor detects your car in spot #3, and it charges you for 15 minutes, you lock your car and walk away. The parking police only need to check the pay status of the parking spots on a central FastTrack terminal (or maybe an iPhone app), and if one isn't paid, they write a ticket.

This saves everyone a lot of time, and it uses technology that already exists and has proven to be reliable.

Considering how many people already have FastTrack, and that the transmitters are given away for free, I don't see why this idea wouldn't work incredibly well, at least for the SF Bay Area.

Unfortunately, MS encrypted folders use a key that is uniquely generated for your account, and once you lose the account (on the dead computer) you can't decrypt anything. There are ways to add corporate keys to the system, so that in a company setting it's possible to recover the data; however this is /way/ beyond abilities of a typical user.

If you have an encrypted file from a Windows XP computer, as long as you know the logon password for the account that encrypted the file, you can decrypt the file. Check out EFS Key.