The people selling us devices with these chips may see the convenient planned obsolescence as a huge upside.

Otherwise known as... an ad blocker!

Starbucks probably removes the balance once they are informed of the theft, but by then the thieves are long gone with their money so they don't care.

XMLHttpRequest.DONE === 4

Nobody bothers to use the long form. But it's there.

It is your IT dept's responsibility to keep the VPN working, not Google's. Google has chosen to drop support for a 20 year old insecure plugin architecture in favor of a more modern, secure one. Sure, it's one developed by Google, but 1) there wasn't an existing standard out there AFAIK so they had to make one and 2) the plugin interface is open source so anyone can go and implement it in their own browser, or in their own plugin.

Oracle's official stance seems to be that Java users should switch to Firefox or IE, rather than see themselves try and put any effort toward porting Java. To be fair, I don't know how well Java will mesh with PPAPI's sandboxing.

I wonder if they'll change their tune... Chrome has a pretty sizable user base now.

It was a design decision to improve browser security (NPAPI model is horribly outdated). Almost no one uses Java on the web any more so it was decided it was acceptable. Oracle is free to port Java to NaCl or PPAPI if they want to continue supporting Chrome.

Yeah it sucks for the small % of users who still want to use it, but it's necessary to move security forward.

VeraCrypt is incompatible with TrueCrypt containers (and vice versa).

Also, VeraCrypt apparently beefs up the security, which results in containers taking minutes to mount instead of seconds. Argh.

Someone (I think on reddit) pointed out that using the code name Spartan fits the "Halo" theme they've started with the "Cortana" search assistant.