Google+ gets Facebook-like app Sign-In, promises ‘simplicity and security’
Google announced on Tuesday that users of its social network, Google+, are now able to sign in to third party apps using their Google+ credentials.
Similar functionality has existed in rival social network Facebook for years, and Google+ finds itself once again playing catch-up, fledgling venture that it is.
Google's touting a number of improvements over Facebook's app sign-in functionality, without specifically calling its rival out by name.
But when Google's director of product management for Google+, Seth Sternberg, promised not to let apps "spray updates" all over the place in a Tuesday Google Blog post, we all knew who he was referring to. Read more...
Who owns that Twitter account?
Noah Kravitz built up quite a following at PhoneDog, a mobile-phone news and reviews website. By late 2010 his @PhoneDog_Noah Twitter account had amassed more than 17,000 followers. That was all well and good, until Kravitz resigned and went to work for a competitor.
Kravitz took his followers with him, changing the name on his account to @noahkravitz. And that's when PhoneDog, which was unwilling to let 17,000 fans go that easily, filed a lawsuit against him.
The question of who owns an employee's social networking account when it's used for work-related posts is a legal grey area, as more companies are discovering when they wind up in court trying to keep readers, business contacts and other social connections within the fold. Read more...
Dropbox blames employee account breach for spam attack
Dropbox said Tuesday one of its employee's accounts was compromised, leading to a raft of spam last month that irritated users of the cloud-storage service.
A stolen password was used to access the employee's account, which contained "a project document with user email addresses," Dropbox engineer Aditya Agarwal wrote on the company's blog.
"We believe this improper access is what led to the spam," Agarwal wrote. "We're sorry about this, and have put additional controls in place to help make sure it doesn't happen again."
The company also found that usernames and passwords that had been stolen from other websites were used to access "a small number of Dropbox accounts," Agarwal wrote. Hackers commonly try username and password combinations from breaches on other web services in hopes people use the same combination, a common security problem. Read more...
Hacker claims break-in of Mitt Romney’s Hotmail account
A hacker yesterday claimed to have broken into a personal email account linked to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney by answering "secret" password-reset questions.
Gawker first reported the break-in after the anonymous intruder made the claim via -- ironically -- email. The hacker also said the password used for mittromney@hotmail.com was the same that secured a Dropbox account associated with Romney.
However, the hacker had not provided evidence of the hack, such as screenshots of the account's inbox or messages, and Gawker, fearing legal repercussions, did not access either the Hotmail or Dropbox accounts with the password provided by the intruder. Read more...
Kids TV networks take a hit as youngsters fall in love with Netflix
Do you have a Netflix account? It seems like answering "no" to that question puts you in a smaller and smaller group by the day, and according to some new statistics, kids are quickly jumping on the bandwagon, too. Analytics firm Bernstein Research used TiVo viewing data to compare the TV habits of families with Netflix to those without, and found that in homes with Netflix programming available, childrens' TV networks took a major hit. Read more...
The hidden danger of Windows 8 Microsoft Accounts
If you've been using the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, no doubt you've toyed with the idea of using a "Microsoft Account" log-in -- most commonly a Hotmail or Windows Live email address. But have you stopped to consider what happens if your Hotmail account gets hijacked?
I'm not concerned about computers connected to the domain. I'm worried about the mobile folks, the ones who work off the grid. They face an interesting challenge in Windows 8.
Windows 8 stacks the deck, trying to convince people to log on with an email address. Microsoft has rebranded many old accounts -- Windows Live ID, Hotmail ID, Zune, and Xbox Live IDs
-- into a shiny new "Microsoft Account." Read more...
Pope to debut personal Twitter account
Pope Benedict XVI will once again make Holy See history with the imminent launch of his own Twitter account, and will also be sending a tweet a day during the 40 days of Lent through another account, according to reports from the Vatican.
Through Father Claudio Maria Celli, the head of the Vatican's pontifical council for social communications, The Guardian reports that the 85-year-old Pope Benedict XVI will have his own Twitter account. Though he may not always write the tweets, he will approve each one.
The report quoted Father Celli saying, "The tweet can be reformulated, redistributed, relaunched and disseminated ... In this sense it is like the gospel, a small mustard seed that once scattered grows into bushes where birds can rest." Read more...
OS X Lion bugs let hackers view, change local user passwords
The latest version of OS X Lion allows any user to easily change the password of any local account, due to permissions oversights on Apple's part. The news comes less than a month after another Lion vulnerability that let users bypass LDAP without a password gained notoriety.
Originally reported by Defence in Depth blogger Patrick Dunstan, the root of the newly discovered problem in Mac OS X 10.7 is tied to the user-specific shadow files used in modern OS X platforms. These files are essentially hash databases and contain, among other things, the user's encrypted passwords. Ideally, they should be accessible only via high-privilege accounts. Read more...
Anonymous supporters claim NBC News Twitter hack
Hackers calling themselves the Script Kiddies took control of the NBC News Twitter account on Friday afternoon and used it to send out a series of hoax Twitter messages claiming there was a repeat terrorist attack on New York's Ground Zero.
The Script Kiddies had control of the account, which has more than 120,000 followers, for about 10 minutes before it was suspended. During that time they sent three messages stating that hijackers had crashed two airplanes on the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "This is not a joke, Ground Zero has just been attacked. We're attempting to get reporters on the scene. #groundzeroattacked." said one of the messages.
Then, a minute later, perhaps sensing that the jig was up, they wrote. "NBCNEWS hacked by The Script Kiddies. Follow them at @s_kiddies!" Read more...