It was 6:20 a.m. March 7 when he and his wife were awakened by the sound of someone breaking down their rear door. He threw a robe on and walked to the top of the stairs, looking down to see seven armed people with jackets bearing the initials I-C-E, which he didn't immediately know stood for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"They are screaming at him, 'Get down! Get down on the ground!' He's saying, 'Who are you? Who are you?'"

"One of the agents runs up and basically throws him down the stairs, and he's got the cuts and bruises to show for it."

...

After a search of his devices proved the homeowner's innocence, investigators went back [and discovered that a neighbor had downloaded the material via unsecured wifi]

...

The homeowner later got an apology from U.S. Attorney William Hochul and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent in Charge Lev Kubiak.

Since when is it okay for our government to perform a paramilitary assault vs the home of a person accused of performing a non-violent crime. It does not even matter that the accused was innocent in this case. What matters is the complete disregard of individual rights by government authorities.

This wasn't a suspected meth lab. It wasn't the home of a long-time felon. It was the home that an ISP identified as having an IP address that was known by federal agents to be housing child pornography.

Someone decided that a SWAT team assault was the necessary and proper force required for detaining someone thought to be in possession of child pornography?!?! A detective and a couple of officers knocking on the front door wouldn't have been enough?

I just installed the WHS App on my Android phone. If you have a Windows Home Server you should definitely check this out. It provides you some admin functionality, but the killer feature for me is remote access to my music and photo libraries from anywhere. With this I can I can virtually carry my 25 GBs of mp3s and 10 GBs of family photos wherever I go. Future planned features include video streaming as well. Fantastic!

If you have a Windows Phone 7 - this is the WHS app that should have shipped with the phone. One complaint I and many people have about Microsoft's consumer products is the lack of integration across their product lines, something that Apple does very well. Windows Phone 7 should have native support for WHS, Xbox, Windows Media Center, etc. And don't even get me started about the lack of support for Windows Media Center on WHS. But back to the task at hand, this app definitely fills part of that void.

AFAIK there is no iPhone version of this yet. There is a WHS app for iPhone from another developer, I think it is called WHS Mobile, but it doesn't look like it has been updated in a while and it doesn't look as nice as this one.

Why I plan on using the new Windows Home Server 2011

...

Let’s start with the “Just Awesome” stuff… most of this bucket falls into the Remote Web Access site, so from the outside in we go!...

Remote Access is just Awesome!

Remote Silverlight Video Streaming

… But maybe it’s time to take a hard look at what data you’re hording on your server. Do you really need to be a digital hoarder and save everything? I mean even Mozy can’t deal with you, as they announced they are killing their unlimited data plan. People save a lot, and it costs money, but do you really need it all?...

Wow. I literally laughed my ass off for the last 30 minutes. I almost feel bad for the author of the blog post - eh, not really. He wrote some of the reasons why he thought Windows Home Server 2011 is better than WHSv1. Basically it was: Sorry we took away drive extender but look at these trinkets we did add like better Remote Access and cool Silverlight Video Streaming. And then he insinuated that anyone using more than a one or two TBs of storage space on their Home Server is "hoarding" and should consider trimming down.

The best part... 35 scathing comments from angry customers about how the WHS development team screwed the pooch, removed the single best feature of WHSv1 and didn't deliver any additional significant features in 2011 over v1. Not one comment of support. Not one comment of "hey I think you're right". 35 comments of "You're not listening to your customers!", "Please give us Drive Extender and back and add Windows Media Center on top of WHS", "We will give you our hard earned dollars if you just build what we want!!!!".

My guess is that if asked users would say that the #1 existing feature from v1 was Drive Extender and the #1 requested feature would be support for Windows Media Center to run on Windows Home Server. Neither of those are in Windows Home Server 2011. What did they include instead? A completely customizable Remote Web Access web site. Really?!? Really!?!

Wow