"Brand" and "Knock-off" should be carefully used in the same sentence.

For 10 seconds I thought that Apple was branching off and selling some new cola that tastes like Coke(tm).

Agreed, that to me seems a respectful way of treating your employees. People have families and commitments, the least you can do is give them notice as far ahead as possible. And some generous severance.

If you want to know more what each party is discussing with their national governments, can't think of a better place than hacking Belgian telecom.

This is why they did it.

Agreed. Chances are there are a bunch of PMPs and ITIL processes in place. Could be internal politics.

Coding a few minutes is a one thing. Testing it, getting someone to approve to move something to prod, and herding people to actually do work is a bunch of other things. Legal and PR may get involved too.

In some corps I worked, the finger-pointing usually takes days and involves a bunch of crappy meetings. It can be days before someone engages InfoSec or the developers to confirm a problem.

Two weeks is not terrible; better than most large corporations.

That's not too bad all things considering. Maybe they have a proper structured development shop (not too structured, since it obviously doesn't include code reviews or vuln scanning)? Maybe they had maintenance windows which they are contractually bound to (and more expensive to make an exception then to do deal with a flaw)? Maybe once they were made aware of the problem they were scanning the database system for odd entries or suspicious activity? Maybe they needed to get an independent audtor to review so they can appease their various stakeholders?

Hopefully they learned from this, and will at least run an automated vulnerability tool against the app for future releases.

Excellent question. Here's what I would do.

Treat a desktop like a desktop. Perhaps share elements of the Windows OS between platform (.NET framework, kernel, DirectX, etc) but the UI must be diffirent. In case of a hybrid device; let the user pick the experience he/she wants.

Continue the Home Server concept; partner with a company (D-Link) to create a stand-alone box. Don't screw this up. If you want a media box, do it properly. Get some content; pick a movie studio or two to back you up. Get an American TV channel. GET LIVE SPORTS, especially SOCCER!

Realize that you lost the smartphone market. Work towards creating a presence on the incumbents. Price the competition out of the water. Do a proper Office version.

Lower the OS price. Create three versions tops; Lite, Regular and Corporate.

They want an app store. Okay, that's fine. Create a "certified by Microsoft" program that provides some perks and allow people to buy stuff online. Fully-tested software (a proper QA process), no malware/spyware, backups, more generous licensing,

XBoXOne - give a free online experience. Support the indie community more. Don't release 20 variants of the console.

Forget doing a hardware media player like the zune. Do something that allows you to play music on existing smartphones. An app that allows you to stream the music from your media box (as mentioned above).

Pick another commercial product area. Perhaps education? Perhaps extend messaging.

Look at more reasonable pricing for CALs in the corporate market. Give better volume discounts.

Thanks; that's good info.

So the underlying convenience is at fault.

How about the fact that Chrome can import passwords stored in Safari to begin with?

So Safari has some security issues as well. Where is the "master key" to export passwords?

I guess the underlying message is that if you leave a computer unattended the information is accessible to anyone. E-mail, passwords, documents, MP3s, etc.

This is a convenience feature and 99% rather have the convenience of a cached web passwords on their personal computer then worrying about something walking by.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724832(v=vs.85).aspx

Well, at least it's not "man-in-the-middle" because that would be bad.

Would be one ... for the other two:
US patent office
FIFA

Can they force you to open a safe?

Or to use a car analogy; can they ask to unlock the car door?

There is a 4K hack of Pac-Man:

http://www.atariage.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1010

Video of it playing at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYuBcuvIww

By all means, please DO NOT link us to http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50146679n .

May not work on an iPad or Windows 8 tablet.

"We know this because our game contains some code to send anonymous-usage data to our server. Nothing unusual or harmful. Heaps of games/apps do this and we use it to better understand how the game is played. It’s absolutely anonymous and you are covered by our privacy policy. "

Yes, you want our sympathy because you're indie, but yet you have no qualms in playing big brother and monitoring your users without explictly stating that you do so. Yeah, a "privacy policy" makes it okay.

Sorry, in my book you guys are assholes just like EA by merely doing that. Not that you deserve having your game "pirated", but you're still assholes. Not mutually exclusive.