Short-range drone jammers are already a thing. Now we could have services selling whitelists or blacklists based on IDs so we can choose which drones are allowed in our private airspace (in the US: 83 ft or the highest point of a ground-attached structure, whichever is lower, based on legal precedent).

Maybe not in response to this specific incident, but who's to say the US doesn't already have their hooks into places. See Stuxtnet and how long it took the world to discover it.

The term "cloud" and naming the cloud vendor is irrelevant here and used by news only as a troll tactic to stoke fear. Resellers were hacked and the attack vector was neither the cloud technology nor the hosting provider.

IE9 already does this.

When you want to continue believing your chosen investment (be it emotional, monetary, or time) in a brand is superior, even when evidence is mounting to the contrary, you have no choice but to abandon logic and attach to faith. That way you can keep believing your choice is right and present confident arguments to support it.

The recent stuxnet virus revealed that even PKI isn't foolproof, as someone issued stuxnet a valid verified realtek signature so that autorun could direct Windows to install the virus as a trusted signed-driver. Even companies that tried to be safe by enforcing policies that only allowed signed-drivers from trusted publishers on their systems were suddenly vulnerable. The next stop in raising the bar is to simply not allow autoruns. Malware authors kill all our fun features. :(

Yes, this update specifically updates autoplay's autorun functionality. You might be thinking of other types of "autoruns" such as the run key in the registry, etc, but those are out of scope for this update.

Libertarian here as well. I will never be able to look at a government regulation against a product and translate that into the free market and competition at work. Government and free markets (and hence true unfettered competition) are usually exclusive of one another. I would say they are mutually exclusive except there is the rare case that a harmful monopoly needs a check and balance, but I don't see that as the case here.

Many IT professionals including myself feel that IPv6 is a joke and is unnecessary in most practical scenarios. Arguments I tend to throw out on face value are "why not IPv6?" and "we're running out of IPv4 addresses". Keep NAT'ing IPv4 until the cows come home - no one except tech geeks will really care if we do.

"If Ikon goes off-line it will assume that there has been a catastrophe and will initiate launch on its own." -General Vostov

All this speculation about iThis and iThat is premature - this could be nothing more than a new foray into the new market known as cloud computing. Big bets suggest there is money to be made, though I'm not sure anyone has figured out the market enough yet to know how to make it. The very young cloud computing space is already crowded with the likes of Amazon, Intuit, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, and the list goes on. So it looks like here comes one more in Apple for the giant cage match. Like a lot of new areas of competition it will be interesting to see who buys which operation, which ones fail, and who is left standing at the end.