Top 10 news stories of the week: Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Maxwell and Satya Nadella all 'popular' for different reasons...

Although the release of the Apple iPad Air 2, Mini 3 and the 5K-resolution iMacs was only yesterday, the lure of Apple is such that normally, news about the new products would trounce everything before it in the news stakes – even on a site such as Computing.co.uk, which focuses on real-world enterprise computing.

But did it do so this time, bearing in mind that the release took place only yesterday?

10. DevOps – the latest in a long line of IT skills shortages, but how crucial is it?

Computing has recently been running a series of features examining the mysterious art of DevOps. OK, it may not be mysterious. Or an art, but it's certainly been read with great interest by our readers – especially given the opinions weighed in on the subject by such major organisations as BSkyB, Domino's Pizza and BNP Paribas.

The term "DevOps" refers to the integration of the roles of developers who build and test IT services and the teams that are responsible for deploying and maintaining IT operations. The model is becoming increasingly popular with cloud, enabling people to set up their own operational systems with little more than a company credit card – a far cry from the days when you needed a few grand to buy your own hardware.

One of our commenters provided a possible reason for all the interest in DevOps: "All Devs want to be DevOps, that way they don't have to worry about change management," he wrote. He's probably right.

9. Hillary Clinton slams videoconferencing technology

In the future, mealtimes will consist of a few vitamin tablets, robots will attend to our every need and the leisure time will be almost limitless. We'll also resort to videoconferencing when we want to make contact with another human being – so much more environmentally friendly, with much less risk of contracting a common cold or Ebola from real human contact.

However, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, perhaps showing her age, eschewed such a utopian ideal in her address to the Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference this week.

"When I was secretary of state, internet freedom, the opportunity to speak out; to associate with others, was a core value in line with freedom of speech, which is what western democracies have tried to protect. Individuals, especially those with activist, dissident opinions, were increasingly the target of governments.

"We spent time trying to keep the internet open, and it's an ongoing struggle. The US and western democracies are in a struggle with more oppressive regimes who want more control over the internet to do things like shut it down at will. It's going to be an ongoing debate, and I hope our side wins," said Clinton.

We now know, of course, that they also spent time trying to crack internet security and in all kinds of nefarious surveillance activities that would get ordinary Joes banged up from here until the end of time. But, hey, she's a politician and she'll soon be seeking election to high office...

8. Microsoft sheds light on Windows 10, discusses Salesforce partnership

Normally when a company has a high-profile product release, it keeps quiet until the big reveal. But with Windows 10, Microsoft can't reveal enough, soon enough, it seems. At Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference Tony Prophet, corporate vice president of Windows marketing at Microsoft, explained that the company intends to go "ecosystem agnostic".

Prophet said the company intended to trial a new process for creating an operating system with Windows 10 by releasing its "technical preview" – an early build available to download and test from Microsoft – which users will try out and feed back their thoughts to the company.

The hope is that Microsoft will avoid the kind of flustercuck that Windows 8 turned into, when it ignored all sensible advice and released the worst-received operating system since, well, Windows Vista six years earlier.

7. Seven million Dropbox user account details stolen, claim hackers

So, hackers stole seven million Drobox user account details, did they? Well, they say they did and to kick off published a few hundred of the credentials in PasteBin – and solicited donations to reveal more. "We will keep releasing more to the public as donations come in, show your support," the anonymous PasteBin post said.

However, Dropbox denies that it has been hacked and claims that the credentials were stolen from elsewhere. "These usernames and passwords were unfortunately stolen from other services and used in attempts to log into Dropbox accounts," claimed the company.

At the time of writing, the affair seems to have died down, so either the attackers haven't had their palms crossed with sufficient silver to make it worth their while publishing more, they've had a better offer to keep it all private – or maybe they were over-egging the pudding, so speak?

6. Google: 18,000 UK requests under "right to be forgotten"

Once upon a time, search engines really were human-curated recommendations or lists of other websites, a bit like the Yellow Pages. OK, for some (younger) people that analogy doesn't help. But with judgements such as the EU's so-called "right to be forgotten", increasing amounts of interference are being called for in the way that search engines work. Strictly speaking, the right to be forgotten is no such thing: it's more a right to demand that certain information is not returned when someone conducts a web search.

And as a result of the May 2014 European Court of Justice judgement, Google has been inundated with requests to de-link its search engine from information that people – who remain nameless – don't want you to see. According to Google, it's already had just under 150,000 separate requests, with 18,000 from the UK. And it's not uncommon to see that warning underneath a web search informing users that certain links have been withheld from the results of their search query.

Time to download Tor, perhaps, whenever conducting even the most innocuous of web searches and see what non-Europeans are allowed to see on the internet.

5. Can Salesforce.com take on SAP, Oracle and IBM in cloud-based analytics?

The vendor argy-bargy over cloud has been quite the spectator sport. After ignoring it for so long, all the major software vendors now claim to be cloud friendly, regardless of whether or not they really are. That means that their solutions need to be examined all the more closely before signing on the dotted line. When it comes to analytics, all the major software vendors claim to offer cloud-friendly systems, but when their claims are examined more closely, some of them simply do not withstand analysis.

4. How Reed.co.uk does IT without an IT department

For some, the very idea that a company of any size or substance could do without an IT department is preposterous. Yet the story of how Reed.co.uk did away with Reed Group's central IT function to shift to cloud services, augmented by a robust development team, caught many people's attention. Lumped with a set of out-of-date services from central IT, Reed.co.uk director of technology James Ridley decided to implement Chromeboxes and Chromebooks in preference to Windows, and to use Google Apps instead of Lotus Notes, as part of an "agile lean transformation strategy".

Not everyone was impressed. One commenter on the story suggested that it would not be cost-effective: "Complete devolution usually results in duplication, lack of integration and standards, single-points of failure, lack of learning from previous experience, etc. The benefits listed in their approach can probably be achieved cheaper and better with a well-managed small central IT function," he wrote.

3. Liam Maxwell: 'We need to reset our relationship with technology'

Liam Maxwell, the UK government chief technology officer, might find himself out of a job next May, depending on who is elected in the general election, and how well disposed any new government might be towards the approach that the coalition took to public sector IT.

However, given the cost-cutting initiatives that Maxwell has helped initiate or been a part of – such as G-Cloud – he won't be begging for 10 pence for a cup of tea down at Charing Cross arches, regardless of who wins.

What Maxwell has to say, not just about government IT, but IT in general, is therefore widely listened to, and his keynote speech at IT Expo was therefore packed – everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.

Since 2010, he said, tortuous procurement processes had been tidied up, the big IT consultancies told to buck up, and a lot less has been spent on IT – Iain Duncan Smith's department notwithstanding.

"No more big IT. There is no more space for large outsourced IT programmes. We want to give people the right tools for government. We want departments to choose the devices they want, with services delivered through the cloud using a browser. Give them the tools they want to work with rather than providing these monolithic tools they have to use. That's government as a platform.

"We want to deliver things that aren't just cheaper, but better."

Terrific. Hopefully, Maxwell can carry on in that vein after 2015, regardless of who wins next May's inverse-beauty contest.

2. Like Jennifer Lawrence's naked photo leak, the Snappening is another example of why we shouldn't trust cloud services

When it comes down to it, large chunks of very private, personal information is kept safe and sound behind just a simple password – like "password" or "hellomum". It is little surprise, therefore, that more of this information is being leaked – and if you're a celebrity, it might be wise to either be a bit more picky over where your private, personal information is kept, or to make sure your passwords are fiendishly difficult to crack.

Which is no excuse for the "fappening", the "Snappening" or any other onanistically named security breaches. "I think this is a reminder to all of us that we're too trusting with our data," said Lawrence Jones, CEO and founder of internet hosting firm UKFast. And not just trusting with our data, but also the apps we can use with cloud and other services – which is the place from which the latest hack involving Snapchat emanated.

1. Women! Your "super power" is to not ask for a raise, says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Number one this week – by quite a distance – is one just for the laydeez: a special request from the CEO of smooth, Microsoft's very own Satya Nadella.

Yes, when Nadella tied himself up in knots speaking at, of all places, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing – a conference with a title that means it could only be in the US – Phoenix, Arizona, to be precise.

Responding to a question on how to close the "gender pay gap", Nadella advised women working in IT to "have faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along".

Which is absurd advice for anyone.

Yet when the Microsoft director (no less) who was compering suggested that women should do their homework on salaries, and very definitely ask for pay rises in line with their male counterparts, Nadella couldn't help but keep digging energetically into the hole he had created.

Keeping schtum about pay could be seen as an "additional 'super power' that, quite frankly, women who don't ask for a raise, have". He suggested not asking would be "good karma" that would "come back".

And crowned his afternoon by saying: "Because somebody is gonna know 'that's the kind of person I want to trust, that's the kind of person I want to really give additional responsibility to'."

Utter nonsense.

However, the Microsoft CEO can comfort himself that this is one contest in which he comprehensively trounced Apple: the most popular story on Computing this week.