News

Blizzard is facing new criticism over Diablo III (yes again). It seems that they payment verification methods (when you buy a digital copy of the game) are taking as long as 72 hours. During this time a prospective player is locked down to a “starter edition” of the game which only gives them access to Act I and really cannot do much more. Although Blizzard says this is a glitch they are still standing by the statement that it is meant to protect against fraud.

As part of their War on Apple, Samsung is pulling off some very neat tricks without having to spend a penny. Some of these are basic PR tricks like showing the phone off in the right ways with the right ads, giving extra color choices and also telling people how many other people want it. Of course we would never say that Samsung has not put in its fair share of money to get the Galaxy S III and other products off the ground (not including all of the law suits going on), but that sometimes the best tricks are the ones that do not cost you anything.

Firefox has caught up with Google’s Chrome browser when it comes to insecurity. After forcing updates on unsuspecting users (we turn on the computer the other day to be told it was already updated) the newest version of Firefox apparently takes screen shots of your pages to put them into their Tab-Thumbnail view including sites that might be encrypted or secure connections (like your banking information). This is a pretty big privacy issue and one that has quite a few people upset.

In our continuing coverage of Microsoft and their push to the cloud with their next generation of Windows we are hearing something that we expected people (consumers, analysts and journalists) to pick up on long ago. Microsoft has had a tradition of thinking “if we build it they will come”. This is mostly due to their heavy footprint in the marketplace. Let’s face it; Windows is the most widely used operating system in the world by a longshot while the Xbox is the most popular (in terms of sales) gaming console. The problem for Microsoft is that many consumers have bought into the push that hardware manufacturers (and yes software developers) have been touting “good enough” and the popular myth of “you can always upgrade”.