and in the real world
"All of these communication techniques are unlikely to be blocked in corporate environments."
really? it's not unusual at all in most large corporates to block webmail, social networking, linked-in etc
Cybercrooks commonly run botnet command-and-control networks using servers or (less frequently) a peer-to-peer network, but one gang of scammers has broken the mould by managing a Trojan using Yahoo webmail. The recently discovered IcoScript Trojan is a classic remote administration tool (RAT), but what makes it highly unusual …
The browser choice option should have meant when selecting to use a browser that's not IE, that all the working components of IE are permanently removed from the system.
Yes, absolutely. I'm sure what the EU really wanted to demand was that it should be possible to remove IE completely from Windows and that all Windows's internal web communications (for things like Windows Update) should be made to work using third-party browsers; not simply that Microsoft should make it easy for users to install a third-party browser in addition to IE on a freshly-installed Windows system.
I'm equally sure that the reason they stopped short of that was that Microsoft (once again) argued that their own browser's code was so intimately embedded in the core of Windows itself that it could not be extracted without surgery from which the patient might not recover. (MS may also have felt that third-party browsers might be insufficiently bug-compatible with their own browser's HTML and JS implementations or their own websites' reliance on ActiveX.)
I can't help feeling that the answer to that should have been that if Windows was so poorly coded that the internal browser logic couldn't be removed without breaking it then perhaps it didn't deserve to live.
Or as Arthur Ransome put it:
BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN.
"The browser choice option should have meant when selecting to use a browser that's not IE, that all the working components of IE are permanently removed from the system."
What browser choice option is that?
Oh, you meen the one that accidentally on purpose went missing in Windows 7?
Note: It was missing from my copy of Windows 7 Ultimate bought in 2010.