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It's the single greatest dilemma of modern society: How much freedom would you trade to get more security - or vice versa? Since Windows XP became the most exploited operating system in history, Microsoft has taken bold moves - not all of them very popular, but usually very effective - to sever the routes of exploit. User Account Control, though controversial, eliminated perhaps 90% of account-elevation exploits. Now the company makes another bold security move - changing how Windows 8 boots to increase security, potentially at the cost of some freedom for certain users and non-commercial developers.

You have just returned from a corporate retreat or some other business event that was well-documented with several amateur photographers. Now you want to share all of these pictures amongst your co-workers. The challenge is that you want to keep them private to the participants and not plaster them all over the Internets. What to do?

Infographics are still a thing with a lot of companies, if my inbox is any indication. Easel.ly, a service that recently debuted in beta, is making it easy to create infographics online. Whether it should is another question.

Virtualization security vendor BeyondTrust is acquiring eEye Digital Security for undisclosed terms. The two companies have leading technology in somewhat different but complementary security market spaces. BeyondTrust plans to integrate eEye’s Retina CS Vulnerability Management and Analytics solutions with its PowerBroker family of virtualization security products. The company claims that this will be the market’s first truly context-driven security and compliance solution.

The deal is an example of how the security world is moving to integrate the physical and virtual worlds, and to offer a common set of tools that can protect both with similar practices. BeyondTrust's headquarters will remain outside of San Diego and the combined entity will have 250 total employees and more than $70 million in annual revenues.

Most observers think of the big multinational technology outsourcing firms - especially the ones based in India - as a reliable source of relatively inexpensive technology expertise for routine IT projects. Not surprisingly, those firms desperately want to move up the food chain and become known for innovation as well.

A conversation with Dr. Gautam Shroff, Vice President at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and head of the TCS Technology Innovation Lab in Delhi, reveals that they’re making progress, but that they still have a ways to go.

Data transfer speeds have been getting faster and faster, but that doesn't mean that we're actually reaping the full benefits. A few years ago, Jim Gettys put his finger on the "criminal mastermind" behind poor networking performance. Dubbed Bufferbloat, the problem was not a simple one to solve. Not simple, but Controlled Delay (CoDel) active queue management (AQM) may provide serious progress towards a solution.

Your typical hard disk drive today measures its capacity in the half-terabytes. If you’ve got a 250GB drive – or maybe a half-dozen of them – you may think they're not good for much anymore. But what if you could use them to build a private cloud just like those OpenStack folks in the enterprise? In Windows 8, Microsoft is bringing the power of private clouds to consumers with the inclusion of Storage Spaces.

Yes, we all have to deal with IT becoming more consumerized, with BYOD and BYO apps, too. But will we start seeing people hawking apps walking through our halls, as peanut sellers do in ball games? It isn't too far from reality, as the folks who draw the Chief and Chuck cartoons have imagined here.

There's a reason that IDC, Forrester, and Gartner are so big. They offer scale and coverage that small firms can't match, and they attract industry heavyweights who can make or break emerging technologies. But there's a downside to scale. Unless you're a corporate whale, it's easy to get lost in the shuffle, and getting that superstar on the phone in a pinch might take more time than you have.

I'm certainly not suggesting that you throw away your existing subscriptions, particularly if you're a vendor or solution provider. Put some effort into those relationships, and they'll pay themselves back several times over. But there's something to be said for the little guy, and there are hundreds of smaller analysis firms that can provide you with the kind of service and support you need to make informed decisions on a daily basis.

We are surrounded by failure in the tech world, and some of those failures are big enough to sit in our memories for years. After the latest news from Google, we were reminded of many other shameful moments in tech. We put together our own RWW Hall of Shame to see if we could learn any lessons from these sordid tales of woe.