Five Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week

ShoreTel Says Backup Facility Wasn't Online In Time For Hurricane

ShoreTel learned a valuable lesson about disaster preparedness when ShoreTel Sky, the company's hosted communications service, went down during Superstorm Sandy. According to one top executive, the outage occurred because a backup facility for ShoreTel's Manhattan data center wasn't ready when the storm hit.

"The advantage of having a data center in Manhattan is you have terrific access to just about every telecom carrier and network on the planet," Dan Hoffman, president and general manager of ShoreTel's Cloud Division, said in a Nov. 2 video post to the ShoreTel Sky blog. "The disadvantage we saw all too clearly in the last few days."

Apple Reportedly Eyeing ARM Alternatives To Intel Mac Chips

Intel could be in for a rude awakening if Apple does intend to replace Intel chips with its own internally designed ARM-based chips for the iPhone and iPad, as was reported by Bloomberg this week. Though such a transition wouldn't happen for a couple of years, Apple's engineers are confident that the ARM chips will be powerful enough to run Mac notebooks and desktops, according to the report.

Critical Vulnerabilities Discovered In Sophos Antivirus Software

Sophos antivirus software contains several "memory corruption issues and design flaws," according to a security bulletin from US-CERT that sent alarm bells ringing throughout the vendor's customer base. The flaws, uncovered by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy, included several with grave implications, but Sophos said in a blog post that it has not seen any "being exploited in the wild."

Nonetheless, the episode had to be embarrassing for Sophos, a scrappy smaller player that has not hesitated to point out the security shortcomings of other vendors.

Twitter Goes Overboard With Password-Resetting After Breach

Twitter's overzealous response to spammers breaching some of its users' accounts added to the frustration of the tweeting masses this week. According to Techcrunch, the social networking service acknowledged that in warning its users to reset their passwords after the breach, it unintentionally ended up sending email alerts to users that had not, in fact, been breached.

Google Smacked Down In Motorola Patent Claim Against Microsoft

Google earlier this year used a Motorola Mobility patent claim to halt Microsoft Windows 7 and Xbox sales in Germany, but this week a court denied its attempt to do the same in the U.S. The dispute revolves around Microsoft's use of the H.264 video compression standard, which Motorola has patents on, and serves as the latest example of mutual enmity between the IT industry's answer to the Hatfields vs. McCoys.