Young American woman flies over to Jerusalem to meet some friends, see the sights, live the life. Overzealous airport security officers ask her a bunch of questions, take issue with her answers, and a few well-placed bullets later she is allowed entry into the country with a somewhat altered MacBook in tow. So what can we all learn from this incident? Firstly, back up all the data you consider important; B, Israeli policemen don’t mess about; and 3, distressed laptops look gorgeous no matter how they got there — just look at the way the glass trackpad has wrinkled up from the force of the bullet penetrating near it, it’s a borderline work of art. The young lady in question has been promised compensation, but we’re hearing she’s not the only one to experience the wrath of Israel’s finest. Flickr link below will lead you to fallout pictures from a separate incident, and we’ve got a couple more close-ups of the ravaged MacBook after the break.
[Thanks, Itai N.]
Zoho Reports, the web-based productivity suite’s business and data intelligence tool, is ripping off the beta tag and officially launching today with a new pricing model and set of features. Zoho Reports, which was formerly known as Zoho DB, provides developers and database administrators with better ways to manage, digest and understand their data. It’s similar in theory to Microsoft Access but that the application is online.
Zoho Reports can upload data from a variety of sources including Excel and HTML files. And Zoho Reports works with hosted and behind-the-firewall business applications and databases from Oracle, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and MS Access databases. Users can interact with Reports via a drag and drop interface, with the application featuring in-depth collaborative tools that let users develop reports together and share reports with each other. Zoho also promises security of all reports.
Earlier today news spread that social application site RockYou had suffered a data breached that resulted in the exposure of over 32 Million user accounts. To compound the severity of the security breach, it was found that RockYou are storing all user account data in plain text in their database, exposing all that information to attackers. RockYou have yet to inform users of the breach, and their blog is eerily silent – but the details of the security breach are going from bad to worse.
The first issue is that RockYou attempted to downplay the entire incident, first by covering it up by not notifying users and then downplaying it in an official statement as being an issue that only affected ‘older’ applications. The hacker responsible for the initial breach published a small portion of the dataset he had retrieved and was able to show that not only did he have access to their entire database, but also passwords were stored in the clear. This matter now appears worse than originally suspected as the dataset also contains a table where RockYou have stored user credentials for social networks and other partner sites.
It’s no secret that most people use the same password over and over again for most of the services they sign up for. While it’s obviously
For any small business, there’s no question that efficient internal communication is key. That’s doubly true in today’s world, where many companies have team members scattered around the world. There are communication platforms out there that look to tackle this, but many of them are either time consuming to setup or aren’t really designed for your ‘everyman’ small business or organization. Enter HipChat, a startup that wants to be the communication platform that any business or organization can get up and running in a matter of minutes. The service launches today in private beta, and the first 100 people to enter “TECHCRUNCH” as their invite code will be able to start their own company networks (you only need one code to invite your entire company).
HipChat offers an Adobe AIR client (compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux) that lets you chat with your entire team at once, or hold more private discussions with select team members. It offers support for quick attachment sharing, notifications when you receive a message, and a searchable web archive for past messages. And perhaps most important: it’s very easy to get up and running, even for the most casual users. You don’t need your own company Email address, and the signup process takes all of three minutes.
A big win for Google’s cloud-based communication and collaboration suite: the company has announced that the City of Los Angeles has equipped 34,000 employees with Google Apps.
According to Google’s blog post, the city – which is replacing its Novell GroupWise system – had evaluated 14 e-mail technology providers for a revamp of the city government’s communication and collaboration platform, and ended up picking Google Apps. The deal, which included partnership with CSC, has a three-year base period and two one-year options.
Day two of Le Web and I’m hard at work: perched on the edge of a gigantic bed in the speakers’ lounge, having an important meeting with my friend Andy. Our agenda: trying to come up with amusing ways to fuck with Daniel Ek of Spotify.
Ek (pronounced “Eek” – he’s Swedish) recently became our favourite comedy target after we heard a Spotify employee telling a girl that he sometimes acts as Ek’s (”Eek’s”) bodyguard at important gatherings.
Mozilla and Google share a common enemy: Microsoft. They also share a lot of money (Google invests millions of dollars in Mozilla and is responsible for most of its revenue). And it would seem that ideologically they share the same belief that the web is the platform of the future. All of this has blunted a lot of the talk that Google’s Chrome browser was competing with Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But with the launch of extensions for Chrome it’s pretty hard to deny it at this point.
Perhaps Firefox’s biggest selling point is that it has an expansive library of extensions that work with the browser. Even as Firefox gets beaten in performance tests, and people complain about its bloat, the extensions are always the thing that users go back to as the reason that they can’t switch. But now Chrome has those too. Sure, not as many yet, but they’re coming ? fast.
One of the biggest complaints about Twitter’s new Retweet feature is that people don’t like that it appears to inject random tweets into their tweet stream. Of course, those aren’t random tweets, they are tweets that are being retweeted by someone they actually follow. But for the past few days, Twitter has actually been placing random tweets in many users tweet streams, and because of the Retweet issue, some might not even be noticing it.
Since recovering from its last bit of downtime a few days ago, reports of random tweets showing up in users stream have been popping up all over Twitter. I actually noticed the problem a couple of times over the past few days myself. Today, Twitter has acknowledged the issue and says it’s working on a fix. It also points to this page for more information about it. What’s funny is that the page first and foremost asks you to make sure the tweet you’re seeing is not actually a new-style retweet (not an issue) and that it is just a random tweet showing up in your timeline (an issue). Quite a few users still seem confused about what the difference is, and it’s hard to blame them. And 10 pages worth of comments with specific examples suggest this issue is pretty widespread.
I have always really liked iCam [iTunes link]. It will certainly be on my ‘best iPhone apps of the year’ list. Now it’s been updated to automatically record video when it detects motion, and it allows you to play it back on your iPhone.
This was a much requested feature, and in my testing it worked like a champ. iCam can use almost any webcam to monitor a location. I use my built-in camera on my MacBook Pro, and a Linksys wireless webcam to monitor my pet bird. I can set either camera to send an alert if they detect motion, and now, with the new feature, the software takes a very quick succession of stills (several images per second) that I can view right from my iPhone wherever I may be. You just hit the play button and you can see what or who set off the recording.