Stupid Technology Tricks of 2007

Stupid Technology Tricks of 2007 by eWEEK Labs

Apple showed some significant disregard for its users in 2007-specifically, for those users trying to break free from Apple’s maniacal grip on its products and devices. iPhone firmware update 1.1.1 rendered any SIM-unlocked iPhones inoperable-an

Microsoft opted to make Aero Glass, Windows Vistas hardware-accelerated graphics subsystem, the star of the operating system show. Bad idea. Not only has the eye candy failed to measure up to similar features in Mac OS X and Linux, but the stiff hardware

On the other hand, theres Vistas BitLocker full-volume encryption, a feature thats not only infinitely more relevant than Aero Glass, but thats arguably better supported on existing hardware. However, Microsoft chose to use BitLocker as a lever to dri

Microsoft also caused a stir this summer, when its practice of silently installing code on Windows PCs came to light. The Automatic Updates client engine will covertly update itself without notifying the end user, even if the user had configured the clien

In January, TJX announced that its systems had been hacked. According to TJX, more than 100 million debit and credit cards had been exposed to potential fraud-possibly during the course of several years. The profoundly disturbing fact that TJX stores

Some Comcast users discovered that their Internet connections weren’t all that fast, especially when running certain applications. It turns out that Comcast is intentionally using technology to slow down services as diverse as BitTorrent and Lotus Notes o

Only a couple of months after eWEEK Labs analysts toured the massive backup power facilities of the 365 Main data center in San Francisco-the host to sites including Second Life, Craigslist, Yelp and LiveJournal-a July 24 power surge showed the

Social networks may be one of the biggest Web 2.0 stories, but most are still trying to figure out how to make money. Facebook thought it had a good plan when it launched Beacon, a service that tracked users on third-party sites and then sent those users’

In October, the General Services Administration had a bad case of overreaction when it took down-and then struggled to reinstate-the entire ca.gov domain service when it was discovered that the tiny Transportation Authority of Marin Web site had

In September, the entire Skype peer-to-peer IP telephony network shut down, forcing millions of users to stare forlornly at the spinning icon in their system tray or, you know, pick up a real phone. The apparent cause of the outage? A plurality of superno

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