Bridgekeeper: Stop. Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see.
Sir Lancelot: Ask me the questions, bridgekeeper. I am not afraid.
Bridgekeeper: What... is your name?
Sir Lancelot: My name is Sir Lancelot of Camelot.
Bridgekeeper: What... is your quest?
Sir Lancelot: To seek the Holy Grail.
Bridgekeeper: What... is your favourite colour?
Sir Lancelot: Blue.
Bridgekeeper: Go on. Off you go.
Sir Lancelot: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.

The details are a little more specific. In the referenced PDF, the judge states specifically that the individual had no reasonable expectation of privacy on what was a -work- computer, because the employer's IT policies stated specifically that the computer and transmissions to and from it are not private and may be searched. The decision definitely involves some -significant- hair-splitting, and is troubling in several ways. But in and of itself it doesn't throw the fourth amendment out the window. Just my POV; IANAL.

In addition to the other replies, the FBI has stated that the statistics on justifiable homicides may have issues, as the data for the Uniform Crime Reporting Program is self reported by state and local police departments, which have differing standards for reporting. Some do not require reporting of justifiable homicides. http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/w... From the WSJ article: "...it isn’t required that agencies submit justifiable homicide data—submitted as the Supplementary Homicide Report—to participate in the program. This makes the largest database of justifiable homicides in the U.S. very incomplete. Among the missing states is New York, which had 684 killings in 2012. The third-most populated state, which likely had a number of justifiable homicides, doesn’t report justifiable homicide data, according to the FBI. Data from other highly populous states are missing or compromised as well. Agencies from Florida don’t follow Uniform Crime Reporting guidelines when submitting justifiable homicide data and Illinois only submits limited data. Various other agencies at multiple levels don’t submit justifiable homicide data for other reasons, resulting in fewer than half of the 18,000 agencies contributing this information."

Wilfred Owen. Nice choice.

One reason sites limit the length and character set is legacy code. I worked on some software a number of years ago at a bank. They wanted to allow people to use a single signon setup for convenience, so we were ordered to use the mainframe for password validation -- which couldn't use special characters, because they triggered special functions on the mainframe. Just about every one of the special characters you could embed in a password told the mainframe to login and run a program on the mainframe, or login and change the password to everything following the special character, or some other feature. And passwords maxed out at 6 characters because that's all the space they had allocated; can't increase that without rewriting every program on the mainframe and moving a crapload of disk data. Ick!

One more point: 5. You should have some reasonable reasons to believe that the closed-source app will not be killed, abandoned, or otherwise made unusable for your purposes for a period of time long enough to provide a safety factor. If this is for business, a support contract with (substantial) financial penalties is probably needed. And active peer support forums can also provide a safety factor. But you need to be prepared to dump and replace if the software does become abandoned.

Maybe; for the first time, I'm starting to see significant impetus in some very big, historically Microsoft-only corporations, trying to move away from MS. Directives like "No Microsoft tools for new internal software development; build it to run on Linux servers, run the web applications under Apache, and use MariaDB or PostgreSQL", and pushing the business staff to save files in more portable document formats.

A lot of companies are pissed at how they are trying to force everyone to new browser versions that won't run the internal apps they designed for MS technology, or change the operating systems all their people are using and retrain the on the new UI, or change the OS on their servers every couple of years.

That historical lock-in and upgrade cycle might be finally biting them in the ass.