Friday, June 17, 2011

LulzSec Releases Over 62.000 Hacked Passwords

Hacker group LulzSec published the accounts of over 62,000 emails and passwords for free for download.

Mikko H. Hypponen from F-secure believes that the emails and passwords were from a database kept by website Writerspace.com, according to the Hacker News.

Gizmodo took the database and has made a script for users to input their email address to check it against the release from LulzSec. Unless you were a member of Writerspace, you're probably not affected, but this is a good way to confirm.


Thursday, June 16, 2011

Citigroup Hack Hit 360,000 Credit Cards

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - JANUARY 18:  A sign is dis...Citigroup's said that about one percent of customers had been affected, implying that around 200,000 had been affected.

Citigroup released a letter to its customers implying that around 360,083 card accounts had been affected.

Citigroup now says it's replaced the cards of about 217,000 customers.

It seems California was the hardest-hit state, with about 80,000 affected accounts.

Citigroup has reiterated that the information taken won't allow hackers to access funds directly.

The Spaceship Office of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs presented plans for an office building that is completely circular in shape.

Jobs himself characterized the building concept as looking a bit like a spaceship.

The building will be quite expensive to make due to its lack of flat surfaces.

The outside windows will require large sheets of curved glass, which aren't even common at Apple Stores.










Thursday, June 9, 2011

iOS 5 Jailbroken

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBaseiOS 5 just came out yesterday and only to developers but that did not stop super jailbreak MuscleNerd of the iPhone Dev team from successfully jailbraking it.


The jailbreak proof comes via MuscleNerd on Twitter who posted two images of an iPod touch 4G running a jailbroken version of the new iOS.

The first shows the Cydia store installed, the second shows root access has been gained.
MuscleNerd forms part of the iPhone Dev Team who are well-known for performing jailbreaks on Apple’s iOS versions. T

his latest jailbreak required the use of Geohot’s Limera1n exploit and unfortunately is tethered, meaning each reboot of your device requires connection to a PC in order to retain the jailbroken state.

The good news is that this method will work on the final version of iOS, so you can jailbreak the day iOS 5 is released this Fall.

Thanks to the work of lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iPhone jailbreaking is exempt from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The same statute has been invoked in several high-stakes jailbreaking lawsuits involving Sony's PlayStation game console, which enjoys no such exemption.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Twitter Launch a Photo-Sharing Service

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...Twitter announced to the world that Twitter was going to be rolling out its very own photo-sharing service over the next few weeks.
Twitter photos won’t be competing with Facebook albums because it’s organized around conversations and is relevant in the moment. Videos, however, will still be hosted by third parties.

Twitter is also putting the “smack-down” on third-party client for photo-sharing services. The company has already acquired Tweetie and re-released it as the official Twitter client on OS X. Recently, it was announced that Twitter had acquired Tweet Deck.

Twitter, developed in March of ’06 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year, has gained popularity in leaps and bounds since its launch. In July of 2007 it had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter.
In only a year, this number grew to 100 million posts per quarter and now, with an estimated user base of over 200 million people worldwide, users of Twitter purportedly issue around a billion tweets every six days.

The company reports 13 billion API requests coming in every single day. Despite being censored in Iran, China, Egypt and South Korea, Twitter continues to see rapid growth and it is generally felt that this is due to the company’s commitment to keeping up with their user base and constantly striving to improve the service and its relevance to the user community.

How the world will use the internet in 2015

Image representing Cisco as depicted in CrunchBaseCisco, one the world's biggest maker of networking gear predicts that in 2015

Internet traffic will quadruple and reach 80.5 exabytes per month (80 exabytes would fill 20 billion DVDs.

That year, for the first time, Asia will generate more traffic (24.1 exabytes per month) than North America (22.3 exabytes per month)—although Amercia still beats China (6.9 versus 5.6 exabytes per month).

Yet if traffic figures are divided by population, a somewhat different (and more meaningful) picture emerges: South Korea is and will be the world's most data-hungry country in Cisco's sample.

Even Canada and France (and, by 2015, Britain) will consume more gigabytes per month per person than America. As for China, it drops down the list and will be overtaken by Brazil, but remains way ahead of India.


Thursday, June 2, 2011

Chinese Gmail Attack Targets 'Senior' U.S. Officials

Image representing Gmail as depicted in CrunchBaseGoogle revealed the suspected source of a hacking attack on Gmail accounts: users originating in China.

Eric Grosse, engineering director on the Google Security Team, said in a blog post Wednesday that specific user account credentials were targeted.

Targets included government officials from the U.S. and "several Asian countries" as well as political activists, journalists, and military personnel, Google said.

"The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users' e-mails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples' forwarding and delegation settings,"

"It's important to stress that our internal systems have not been affected--these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself. But we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online," Grosse continued.

Google says it's notified those with affected accounts and has also secured the accounts. The company is encouraging users to add extra layers of security including designing more complex passwords, turning on two-step account verification, and only going through the company's secured "https://www.google.com" domain when logging on from a Web browser.

Google's blog post notes that "internal systems have not been affected—these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself."

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Flight Schedules on Google Search

Image representing Google Search as depicted i... If someone were to tell you that Google just launched flight travel search results without using data it culled from ITA Software, you'd probably think it a joke.
You'd be wrong.

Google has added the ability to obtain flight schedule information for all airports directly on Google search results page.

Although, you’ll still need them to book your tickets, but for a quick search for available flights, you no longer have to open another website.

To quickly find out which airlines serve a specific route and when they fly, simply type “flights from "your city" to "destination city" ”.





So Google's flight search move is clearly aimed at planting a seed for the summer vacation rush, which yields millions of searches and ads to pair with them. And that's Google's play here.


How To Stop People From Adding You To Facebook Groups

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...How can you stop people from adding you to Facebook Groups automatically?
The answer is, you cannot.
The only option you have is to leave the group and contact the friend to let them know that you do not want to be part of the group.
If you get re-added, your only option is to leave again and / or remove the friend who has added you from the friend list.

Here is how you leave groups.

Click on Groups on your Facebook profile page.

The groups link is located near the top right corner of the page.

There you see a list of all groups that you are a member of. To leave a group, hover your mouse cursor over the group. A blue x is displayed next to the group. Click on the x to leave the group.



You will get a remove group membership confirmation prompt. Select Remove if you are sure and want to leave the selected group on Facebook.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Google Cooling Entire Data Center With Seawater

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...In 2009 Google purchased a former building of a paper mill in Finland. Since then, the search giant has been hard at work designing a water cooling solution that would take the seawater into the data center and then channel it back out with minimal environment impact.


Any PC building enthusiast will know the merits of water-cooling.

Check out the video that Google made on its new location: