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Enlarge / The upgrade arc of Windows 10. (credit: Microsoft)

Over 270 million users have either upgraded to Windows 10 or bought a new Windows 10 PC since the operating system shipped in July of last year, a number that Microsoft says outpaces Windows 7 adoption by 145 percent. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that the operating system is the "fastest growing version of Windows for both consumers and enterprises," and Windows and Devices group VP Terry Myerson says it has been used for more than 75 billion hours.

Windows 10's adoption rate has been brisk since it was released thanks to positive buzz and the return of the Start menu: there were 14 million upgrades in the first day, 75 million in the first month, 110 million installs by early October, and 200 million by early January. Developers looking to build Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps for the Windows Store should be heartened by these numbers—the install base is already quite large, and it's continuing to grow.

Of course, Windows 10 adoption has also been helped along greatly by the fact that the operating system is available as a free download to all Windows 7 and Windows 8 users (in a handful of cases, it has been installed on systems whether users wanted it or not). The free upgrade is scheduled to end in July barring some extension from Microsoft, so we may see this relatively brisk adoption rate drop off after that.

(credit: Medium / Ruby)

If you were watching Steam over the weekend, you may have been among those to notice an odd game called "Watch paint dry" go up on the popular digital storefront. The "sports-puzzle game that evolves around one mysterious cutscene" wasn't a new low-point in Steam's increasingly permissive attitude toward letting games onto the service. Instead, it was the result of a now-patched exploit that let developers sneak games onto Steam without Valve's approval.

A teenage British Web developer going by the handle Ruby outlined the hacking process in a post on Medium earlier this week. Even before being fixed, this exploit wasn't available to any random Internet user, though, since it relied on access to the Steamworks Developer Program.

With that access secured (through unstated means), Ruby dove into the HTML for the Steamworks backend to look for weak points. By forcing an "editor ID" variable passed through the page to "1" (which Ruby assumed would be "someone who might work at Valve"), Ruby was able to access a new form that revealed the form data she needed to get an "approved" value for Steam Trading Cards, a first step in making her game look legitimate.

(credit: :D)

We've been reporting over and again about how the FBI is citing a 1789 law, the All Writs Act, to compel Apple to assist the authorities in unlocking the iPhone used by extremist Syed Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people in San Bernardino County in December.

In a sense, the law allows for judges to issue orders for people or companies to do something despite Congress not passing laws to cover specific instances. The All Writs Act is the law that led a federal magistrate ordering Apple to write code and unlock Farook's phone, an order that was no longer necessary because the authorities said Monday they cracked the phone without Apple's assistance. The government also said it wouldn't hesitate to use the "court system" to require other tech companies to weaken their security, too.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the US government has cited the All Writs Act in 63 cases since 2008 to compel Apple or Google to assist in accessing data stored on an iPhone or Android device. Most of the orders involved Apple. "To the extent we know about the underlying facts, these cases predominantly arise out of investigations into drug crimes," said Eliza Sweren-Becker, an ACLU attorney.

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft today accidentally re-activated "Tay," its Hitler-loving Twitter chatbot, only to be forced to kill her off for the second time in a week.

Tay "went on a spam tirade and then quickly fell silent again," TechCrunch reported this morning. "Most of the new messages from the millennial-mimicking character simply read 'you are too fast, please take a rest,'" according to the The Financial Times. "But other tweets included swear words and apparently apologetic phrases such as 'I blame it on the alcohol.'"

Tay's account, with 95,100 tweets and 213,000 followers, is now marked private. "Tay remains offline while we make adjustments," Microsoft told several media outlets today. "As part of testing, she was inadvertently activated on Twitter for a brief period of time."