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Faking a computer science degree cost Scott Thompson his CEO job. But with one notable exception, most observers thought he was doing OK, under lousy circumstances.

Sure, the lying was wrong, but apart from that, would Thompson’s lack of a computer science degree have hurt his career? Does having the right degree - or any degree - really matter that much any more?

It is time for another look at enterprise IT from our friends Chief and Chuck. If your management still thinks Facebook and Twitter are fads, then perhaps this cartoon will hit home. After all, if we could only just not be bothered all the time from our customers when they have problems, right? One way is to just ignore them, and the message from this cartoon is clear: You do so at your own peril.

Is Google abusing its dominant position in online advertising and content delivery? On the very day when Google participated in a celebration of the free flow of information, a European Commission vice president warned that his office is within weeks of filing a formal Statement of Objections.

When your job is to be open to everyone's ideas, sometimes the hardest part for you is to just go with the right one. In Part 2 of ReadWriteWeb's interview with Internet Society (ISOC) senior public policy manager Sally Wentworth (Part 1 of which was published on Thursday), we discuss how difficult it can be to navigate the routes of change in Internet architecture, especially when everyone out there - ICANN, Comcast, Russia, etc. - seems to have a different idea.

If you are thinking about changing your online payment provider, you should take a moment to look at an interesting infographic from application performance management company New Relic. Turns out the most popular provider, PayPal, isn't even close to being the fastest processor. That distinction goes to Google Checkout. PayPal has the market share, but if performance is the critical metric for your company, you might want to consider the alternatives.

If Facebook’s massive IPO represents the wealth created by the rise of social networking, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT, these tectonic shifts hold dramatic challenges to old-line technology companies built on yesterday’s revolutions. So even as Facebook mints a crowd of new millionaires and billionaires, Hewlett-Packard is preparing to send pink slips to some 30,000 of its employees.

HP's Itanium debacle provides plenty of lessons for anyone who is willing to pay attention. For the past decade, HP has been making a valiant, if extremely misguided, attempt to support the high-end Itanium chip architecture and the HP-UX Unix implementation that runs on it. Oracle's open letter and drop of documents as part of the companies' legal battle shows just how much HP has been keeping from customers in order to prop up the good ship Itanic in the face of disinterest even from Intel, which actually makes the Itanium chip! Things are getting ugly.

Usually one good way to resolve a dispute among many parties is to have a mediator help everyone come to an agreement on something.  But the disparity between the way governments work and the way the Internet operates has only widened in the last year.  Now, the Internet Society's lead policy spokesperson says that governments won't be able to solve issues like piracy as long as they come at them from a standpoint of control.

It's the single greatest dilemma of modern society: How much freedom would you trade to get more security - or vice versa? Since Windows XP became the most exploited operating system in history, Microsoft has taken bold moves - not all of them very popular, but usually very effective - to sever the routes of exploit. User Account Control, though controversial, eliminated perhaps 90% of account-elevation exploits. Now the company makes another bold security move - changing how Windows 8 boots to increase security, potentially at the cost of some freedom for certain users and non-commercial developers.

You have just returned from a corporate retreat or some other business event that was well-documented with several amateur photographers. Now you want to share all of these pictures amongst your co-workers. The challenge is that you want to keep them private to the participants and not plaster them all over the Internets. What to do?