TechBlog

In 2009, naked photographs of American baseball star Grady Sizemore circulated on the internet after being stolen from the email account of his then girlfriend, Playboy Playmate Brittany Binger. A total of 15 photos were circulated – some showing Sizemore posing in his bathroom mirror wearing a suit, but others that showed him nude or only partially clothed. In one of the pictures, still easily available on the web, the Cleveland Indians’ star is using a coffee mug to protect his err.. modesty. ...

This is amazing news indeed. Its has been feature talk with many of clients and colleagues all long for many years. Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well. ...

CNet: The latest security fiasco on Facebook’s application platform may involve business pages rather than personal accounts: Sendible, a company that makes software for businesses to manage accounts and presences on various social-media services, looked like it was hit by a virus or hacker on Tuesday afternoon: TechCrunch pointed out that Sendible-managed brand pages on Facebook appeared to be posting malicious links. Now Sendible’s claiming it wasn’t their fault. “Just to clarify, Sendible was not hacked,” the company posted to its Twitter account. “One of our users has discovered a major flaw in Facebook’s security.” Sendible’s Twitter account then quoted the user in question, who said, “i wanted to post only on a few Facebook walls as a fan – and for some reason, posted as the page Owner. weird,” and Sendible added “This appears to be a bug in Facebook’s API as the posts should have been displayed as the user profile and not the page owner.” ...

Oh look, Microsoft is late to the party again? They are finally launching full-session SSL encryption to Hotmail a mere 2 years after Google did the same thing for Gmail. It looks like the release of FireSheep really has had an impact on web-application vendors due to the amount of mainstream media coverage it got and the sheer number of downloads. At least they are doing something and I hope more vendors follow and give users an option to force full-session HTTPS connections for all web properties. ...

Google has given all of its employees $1,000 cash “holiday bonuses” and 2011 salary increases of at least 10%, a loyal reader tells us. The 10% company-wide raise will take effect on January 1, 2011. In addition, Google will also give each employee an additional raise equivalent to 1X the employee’s target bonus for the year. And employees will be eligible for additional “merit increases” based on their individual performance. ...

Sophos Labs: Two weeks ago, an automatic session-hijacking plugin was released for Firefox. It was named Firesheep, and it’s been downloaded over 600,000 times so far. The decision to release Firesheep publicly is a controversial one. On the good side, it’s reminded people that some of their common web surfing habits are dangerously insecure. Many websites use HTTPS (secure HTTP) for login, which protects your password. But they revert to insecure HTTP for the rest of the session. After you have logged in, security relies on the browser sending a session cookie – a secret authentication token – in every request. ...

Reuters: Google Inc will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users’ information, highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants. Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users’ email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users’ information. ...

With the expanding amounts of storage available on cell phones, mp3 players, digital cameras, and gaming devices it’s no surprise that malware is increasingly being transmitted over USB. avast! Software is reporting that out of 700,000 attacks reported by its Community IQ system in October, one in eight were exchanged over USB connections. “Cyber-criminals are taking advantage of people’s natural inclination to share with their friends and the growing memory capacity of USB devices,” says avast! virus analyst Jan Sirmer. ...

Last quarter was the first time ever that US pay-for TV subscription rates declined, and in Q3 2010, cable lost over 518,300 subscribers in total, according to GigaOm. Four of the five biggest cable companies lost customers: Comcast had more than half of the losses at 275,000, Time Warner took a 155,000 subscriber hit, Charter Communications lost 63,800, and Cablevision waved goodbye to 24,500 customers. The third largest cable provider, Cox Communications, is privately held and therefore doesn’t have to announce its subscriber numbers publicly. The number is thus likely even bigger if we could include Cox plus all the smaller cable companies. ...

Just 5 years after founding Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is worth more than Apple’s iconic chief Steve Jobs. This year, Zuckerberg, 26, added $4.9 billion to his fortune–vaulting to #35 on the Forbes 400 with an estimated fortune of $6.9 billion. Why the jump? Recent private equity investments in Facebook valued the firm at around $23 billion–more than triple its 2009 value of $7 billion. Illiquid private shares in secondary markets point to an even richer valuation. ...