Almost a million people have signed a petition demanding Apple rethink its decision to pull a popular free-app-finding app from the App Store.

More than 12 million people have already downloaded the software, which offers a daily selection of free apps to download.

France's junior minister for digital economy, Fleur Pellerin, branded Apple’s decision “extremely brutal and unilateral".

If you haven't installed last week's patch from Oracle that plugs dozens of critical holes in its Java software framework, now would be a good time. As in immediately. As in, really, right now.

Oracle describes the vulnerability as allowing remote code execution without authentication. And that means you should install the patch before you do anything else today.

A Chinese group which has made it its mission to take a bite out of Apple’s iTunes revenue share is at it again, launching a full web version of its iOS app store jam-packed with pirated content.

Its mission: to allow local fanbois to download and install pirated apps on their iDevices without jailbreaking them in a quick, easy and secure manner – which was bad news for both Apple and community of iOS developers.

Sometimes you wish Microsoft would let customers decide when to delete a feature. Reader Dan Baechlin depends on Windows Explorer's ability to retain the selection of multiple files after changing the sort order. The feature has been removed from the version of Explorer in Windows 7 and 8.

Ramesh Srinivasan devised a Registry tweak that disables the Full Row Select option in Windows 7 and 8 Explorer windows, and that has the side-effect of preserving multifile selections when re-sorting from Name to Size, Date modified, or some other category.

Investors have often criticized Facebook for being slow to adapt to the transition from desktop to mobile. An own-branded phone would serve to demonstrate that Facebook is pushing all its chips forward to become a mobile-first company.

What's more, Facebook's messaging and camera apps will reportedly form the core functions of the phone, rather than the stock Android ones. The phone's primary contacts list will presumably be the user's Facebook friends, too.

Windows 8 PC sales are "horribly stalled," as O'Donnell put it. So maybe Microsoft should rethink the design, as O'Donnell -- whose business it is to get input from PC makers -- thinks the company may be doing.

"It's possible [Microsoft] is making changes to the OS [to allow a boot to desktop mode]. There's a lot of debate about it. Certainly if you talk to PC vendors, they'd like to see Microsoft do that. Because they recognize some of the challenges that consumers are facing."

A new Java 0-day vulnerability is being exploited in the wild. If you use Java, you can either uninstall/disable the plugin to protect your computer or set your security settings to “High” and attempt to avoid executing malicious applets.

We recommend that regardless of what browser and operating system you are using, you should uninstall Java if you don’t need it.

On the Windows and Windows Phone fronts, Blue is expected to include new features and even new programming interfaces designed to bring the different flavors of Windows closer together, from an app model/development model perspective. That said, it's not just Windows internals that will be updated with Blue. As the job posting above verifies, user interface and experience updates will be part of Blue, too.

Google, one of the leading open source and Linux companies, has declared Red Hat's RHEL 6 as obsolete. Jan Wildeboer, a Red Hat evangelist, has found that Google Chrome won't be updated on RHEL 6 anymore.

By cutting the support of enterprise distributions they simply tell me to move elsewhere. That's not a very encouraging thing.

For the second time in a month, Apple has silently blocked the latest version of Java 7 from running on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or higher via its XProtect antimalware tool.

The update to XProtect will continue to block Java on Macs until Oracle releases Update 12, whenever that occurs. In the meantime, one fix proposed by a couple of Mac forums users is to delete the XProtect source file that lists the blacklisted Java, then turning off automatic updates to the safe downloads list.