Five Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week

LinkedIn Password Pilfering Puts 6.5 Million Customers At Risk

LinkedIn was hit with a breach this week that led to the compromise of nearly 6.5 million user passwords. An unknown party helpfully posted a file to the Web with all 6.5 million hashed passwords, and since then spammers and phishers have been having a field day by luring worried LinkedIn subscribers to click on shady links.

HTC Gets Snubbed By Microsoft On Windows 8 Tablets

Bad news for HTC this week as Bloomberg reported that Microsoft is barring the Taiwanese mobile device maker from the Windows 8 tablet market, saying that HTC doesn't have tablet experience or sales volume.

HTC makes several Android smartphones and a couple of tablets, but Microsoft apparently is not sufficiently impressed with the latter to allow the company to enter the potentially lucrative wonderland of Windows 8 development.

Dell Exec Trots Out 'iPads Unfit For Business' Argument

Have you heard that the iPad is unsuitable for use in businesses? This claim -- widely invoked by execs from companies not named Apple -- was repeated once again this week, this time by Dell Australia Managing Director Joe Kremer.

In an interview with Australia's Financial Review, Kremer acknowledged that some people are unable to resist the allure of "these shiny devices" but warned that iPads come with prohibitively expensive support costs. "I don't think this race has been run yet," Kremer said in the interview.

iPad sales to business are booming, to the extent that Apple is turning to Microsoft partners to handle large-scale enterprise integrations. Windows 8 may end up being the best operating system since the Big Bang, but to dismiss the iPad as a "shiny" object is a comically ostrichlike response.

HP Leaks Customer Cell Phone Numbers In Oracle Itanium Filing

It has been said that when elephants fight, it's the ants that get trampled. In the legal battle between Oracle and Hewlett-Packard over Itanium development, HP customers are the ants, but not the way you'd think.

According to a report from Wired, HP submitted to the Santa Clara Superior Court around 150 complaints from customers angry over Oracle's decision to stop developing software for Itanium. Only problem was, its lawyers failed to redact the names, job titles, company names, e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers of the irate customers.

The Santa Clara Superior Court, as a matter of policy, makes its records available online, which means the HP customers' data is now available to all and sundry. And to think, this case has just started.

AMD Overshadowed In Intel Ivy Bridge Lovefest At Computex

Microsoft's Windows 8, ARM and Intel Ivy Bridge were all the rage at the Computex conference in Taiwan this week, but as noted in media reports from the event, AMD's presence at the show was decidedly less impactful. Sure, AMD launched its next-generation Brazos 2.0 E-Series APUs, optimized for entry-level notebook and desktop PCs, but as noted by The Verge, AMD execs seemed oddly unaware of the market's lack of interest in the technology.

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