eWeek - December 7, 2009

Microsoft protested for a while that this behavior was by design, but the company eventually caved to logic and forced a UAC prompt when changing UAC settings in the RC and RTM versions of Windows 7.

—Andrew Garcia

to focus on breaking sync for Palm Pre users, i Tunes updates were an unpleasant experience.

i Tunes on my Windows system
has never run great. It often con-
sumes all of the CPU, which is why
it’s now caged and freed only when
I really need to synchronize my
iPhone for backup purposes. (The
upside to all this is my discovery of
the free Pandora music service, for
which I happily pay a yearly sub- Amazon played Big Brother when it came to “1984” on the Kindle.

STUPID FROM PAGE 26

ACTA
Big Brother Amazon

In July, e-tailing giant Amazon provided its Kindle customers— and everyone else—with a stark illustration of potential pitfalls that accompany the conveniences of electronically distributed goods. After learning that it had sold copies of George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” without proper authorization, Amazon used its wireless access to users’ Kindle e-book readers to zap those titles from the devices of customers who had purchased them.

Many people haven’t yet heard about the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. There’s a good reason for that, as

For a company that relies on building user trust in cloud-based services, this Big Brother move definitely merits our Stupid Tech Trick designation.

ACTA is being negotiated in secret by many of the world’s major countries. But, based on leaked information, ACTA looks to be essentially a wish list for the copyright lobbies that want to protect their businesses even if it means severely limiting the Internet and fair-use rights. This isn’t an anti-terrorism treaty—let the people see what is being negotiated so they can let their governments know whether they support these treaties.

Apple updates are out of (i)tune.

scription fee to get the premium experience of listening to a variety of music types without commercial interruption.)

It is one of my chief hopes that i Tunes gets a performance and optimization boost, and not a renewed focus on wasting my bandwidth with hacks to keep competitive devices from working.

—Cameron Sturdevant

—Jason Brooks

—Jim Rapoza

Watered-Down UAC
Apple iTunes

In the eyes of most Vista users, User Account Control was an unmitigated failure. So Microsoft watered down the security implementation in Windows 7 and provided simple controls so the user could further water it down or disable it entirely.

Updates

Unfortunately, Microsoft made things a little too easy, as proof-of-concept malware was able to disable UAC without explicit permission in early Win 7 betas, provided the user could be socially engineered to run

I’ve stopped updating iTunes on my Windows XP-based system at home. Even before Apple and Palm executives decided to play the childish game of “Yes I can,” “No you can’t” that resulted in at least one i Tunes update that seemed