Microsoft will reportedly announce Windows 9 this fall, Russian hacker group WZor said on a forum last week, following the launch of Windows 8.1 Update 2, which will be the last major update Windows 8 will receive. Windows 8.1 Update 2 is expected to be released by mid-August, and while the OS will get subsequent updates, no new features will be added to Windows 8.1. Instead, Microsoft will focus on its next major product it wants to sell buyers, which is Windows 9.

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The late 1990s were defined by a number of ridiculous things, but somewhere near the top of the list was the panic that boiled over in 1999 as people prepared for the end of civilization as we knew it. Because of the “Y2K” bug, you see, anything and everything controlled by a computer would stop functioning when the clock struck midnight and December 31, 1999 rolled into January 1, 2000. That obviously didn’t happen, but the Y2K bug was a pretty sizable nightmare for programmers as they were made to pour through code and change two-digit year abbreviations to four digits.

Unfortunately, it looks like some programmers’ jobs still aren’t done.

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Apple recently acknowledged its in-app purchases issues that allowed children to purchase content without requiring verification and settled the FTC case agreeing to refund some $32 million in fraudulent in-app charges. But Amazon doesn’t want to go down without a fight, GigaOm reports, as the same Commission is investigating its own in-app purchase problems related to the Amazon Appstore that’s available on Android devices.

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As if Apple hadn’t made a strong enough case against Flash already, Adobe announced this week that a security vulnerability had been discovered in the most recent version of Flash Player. Adobe quickly addressed the issue, but Apple took safety measures a step further by adding any version of Adobe Flash Player version below 14.0.0.145 (and 13.0.0.231 on older machines) to its plugin blacklist.

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Netflix has really gotten under some major ISPs’ nerves over the past few months by picking high-profile fights with both Verizon and Comcast. In an interview with The Washington Post, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explains why he’s decided to call out ISPs for what he says is poor service and to weigh in against the controversial proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.

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We saw plenty of complaints arise when it was first discovered that Apple’s iOS 7 software included a “frequent locations” function in the iPhone. The feature, which can be easily disabled, tracks users’ locations in order to determine the locations they visit most frequently. All sorts of privacy concerns arose, naturally, but none were quite as intense as the warnings issued on Friday morning by state broadcasters in China.

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On Thursday we examined one aspect of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s new company manifesto that we thought was pretty overt: Namely, that the Xbox is here to stay and it would be incredibly stupid for the company to give it up. ZDNet’s Ed Bott, a seasoned Microsoft observer who’s adept at interpreting Redmond Kremlinology, reads between the lines of Nadella’s letter to Microsoft employees and lists some of the “hidden messages” the new CEO was trying to send. The most striking one for us? That Ballmer’s plan to transform Microsoft into a “devices and services” company is essentially toast.

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The potential sapphire display of the iPhone 6 has been rumored, substantiated and confirmed several times over the past year, but all we’ve ever heard about sapphire are its advantages. It’s durable, it’s scratch-resistant and Apple has even had experience using it in the past on protective glass covering the iPhone camera and the home button of the 5s, but there must be a downside, right?

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Sony’s smartphones don’t get nearly as much hype as new flagship phones from HTC, Samsung or LG, but Sony has been doing a nice job of improving its mobile phone offerings since the launch of the Xperia Z back in 2013. Now 9to5Google has snagged some pictures off of Chinese microblogging site Weibo that purportedly show us the Xperia Z3, which is tipped to be the next major flagship phone from Sony.

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The Power Company, which previously crowd-funded a Charged Card ultra-portable smartphone battery, is back with a new interesting Indiegogo project — a wallet-sized Smart Card that not only packs quite a punch when it comes to spare battery juice, but also offers other interesting features including an external hard drive.

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