Doesn't resemble MS to give stuff for free. So until we see the real deal, stay cautious. It's likely the offer will be something like "Free, but...".

The real problem is that without Snowden nobody would have known / suspected the slightest spying scandal.

Well, actually, in a way, it won thanks to an "innovative" concept..

Flappy Bird didn't gain popularity thanks to a great and innovative concept. It succeeded thanks to 1. initially fake reviews from the author 2. many people downloading it 3. and talking about it (basically asking the same question as yours) 4. more downloads. In other words, the snowball effect...

...or 127.0.222.173, ie hex 7F00.DEAD.

Many political figures have actually a "micro" view of events - i.e. the time difference [ NextElection - now ]. Not enough to accurately consider something as diluted in time as global warming.

TFA is confusing. The way I understand it is adding a TLD like '.home' may have some wrongly configured systems resolve something.home from the newly 'home' zone made available from the Internet DNS, instead of a local/intranet resolution. In order to help sysadmins to catch inappropriate Internet resolution of such TLD (in case that FQDN doesn't exist, I guess since not in TFA) is to return the 127.0.53.53 address, a particular loop-back address that allows particular settings to be implemented in order to log/show the user that the intranet domain is currently not available., e.g. for a user connected outside the company (guess 2).

I'm sorry, I feel the time for amateur hours exploded in the 21th century. Competency was diluted among the many so-called experts answering the huge demand of engineers. It seems in bigger companies IT management is confined to ensure IT services work fine - meaning in most cases implement the fewer changes as possible - "don't fix what isn't broken". Most teams are not used anymore to hacking, customizing, improving, innovating. When something a bit trickier than usual rears its nose on the horizon, they're lost. DNS implementation is one of these trickier thing.

53 is usually the port number from which DNS servers answer DN requests (usually UDP).

That solution is indeed hacky. But if the LAN is correctly setup, the collisions should be minimal. I.e. on a "home" workstation, named something like "linux.home", that very station identifies itself and if the other LAN members communicate with "linux.home" an entry is supposed to be already present in "hosts" (like) files - and, usually, "hosts" file resolution takes precedence over DNS. For bigger implementations a DNS server or equivalent should be in place, and forward the unknown domains to external (Internet) DNS - again, their local config should contain an entry for the ".home" zone, preventing an external resolution.

Is returning 127.0.53.53 instead of NOT FOUND a good idea? Not sure about that, since, for instance, a browser will say "Cannot connect to..." instead of "Domain not found" - which is actually the correct error message. The real problem is when the domain+subdomain exist on the Internet, users will process information from the wrong site instead of the intranet one

Of course all IT teams will have to be DNS competent - which is currently not (always) the case ...

Yes. Many non-IT companies require their users to use only IE, due to *security concerns* (the security concerns being that everybody should use the default browser provided with the OS, and not a random one of choice). This is usually the case where the CIO/IT management has been holding that same position for a relatively long time, signing that same yearly contract with Microsoft for OS+Office. In short, keeping the same IT environment is the recipe to ensuring there is no change on IT management side either.

Google is right because the message they display is right - or, at least, is not wrong. GEMA may not like it, and may feel offended, but YouTube is pushing to offer a service that requires users to *not* pay anything. GEMA fights against this, and Google explains that action clearly in their message.

Not exactly French. From the ITER site:

and (picture)

So, top management is made of
Director General: Osamu Motojima (Japan)
Deputy Director-General and Head of the ITER Project Department: Remmelt Haange (Netherlands)
Safety, Quality and Security: Carlos Alejaldre (Spain)

Or, look at the Organization Structure. No French in the top management

And after a couple of years, unexpectedly quickly actually, the system started to fail. The energy flow derailed from the original plan, and began to act as a giant hose - now fixed on the moon, the flow could be described as a destructive sinusoidal path on Earth. The good news is that we can predict with reliable accuracy where the hose is going to hit at any time. Thanks to Science, I know for sure that, in 23 days 7 hours and 2 minutes, my house will burn in flames.

Unfortunately, the younger generations who didn't live (as an adult) the eras before the early 2000's may not be aware of MS unfamous actions.