I did have other things to do... (I'm the author.) Also, I fumbled on the VM setup with VirtualBox—should have just used my vSphere Windows 10 instance, but it was already set up for sandboxing malware.

Yes, the UK government is paying Microsoft a ton of cash for XP support, so this is possible.

Is anyone actually using this?

About 40k downloads over the last year, 204 topics on the forum and 145 issues in the tracker so far. So, there is some activity.

They're hiring a webmaster. But I think it's in a different cold place: Madison, Wisconsin. http://icecube.wisc.edu/jobs/show/webmaster

By VPN startups, they mean initiation of a VPN session. Specifically, this means they can grab the credentials at the beginning of a PPTP VPN session, and then decrypt it. PPTP has been known to be vulnerable to this sort of attack for some time.

They're still supporting client-to-server XMPP, so third party apps can always just connect as a client rather than doing federation.

Having lost my brother to suicide just a year ago, I can empathize deeply with your loss. My thoughts are with your family.

Oh, yeah, because Pets.com would have worked so much better as a mobile app.

With the contract switching from Raytheon to Lockheed, the general NSF support contract should have a bunch of IT positions opening up next research season, I'd think.