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Yay, open source! Anyone interested in the DROID X source code? If you are, the files are posted on Motorola’s developer site. The code weighs in at a hefty 280 MB and was actually released several days ago on July 28th. If you’re ready to get down and dirty with lines and lines of code, let the custom ROM creation begin!
[Via Droid-Life]
Written by Andrew Munchbach on July 30th, 2010 with no comments.
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With more than 200 deals since 2005, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham knows how to size up a young team of entrepreneurs. However, he didn’t get it right from day one.
On Friday, we got a chance to talk to Graham after his morning panel with SV Angel’s Ron Conway. He discussed how his strategy has evolved over the past five years and why the balance of power is shifting in Silicon Valley. See videos ahead.
Written by Evelyn Rusli on July 30th, 2010 with no comments.
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Social engineering is the (morally vague) art of tricking someone out of their company’s technical secrets just by talking to them. It often involves deceit and relies on the fact that the weakest link in any computer security system is a human.
At the annual Defcon event, held in Las Vegas this week, attendees, mostly professionals in the computer-security business, engage in several contests. A new this one year involves launching social engineering “attacks,” where contestants must obtain the answers to questions about a company’s security defenses. People working at big companies such as Google and Apple failed to realize they were being social engineered by con artists.
(See our roundup of all Black Hat and Defcon stories).
This year, about 20 Defcon attendees in Las Vegas participated in the contest, which stirred a lot of controversy. The organizers of the conference were three security experts who know how to do social engineering: Chris Hadnagy, (pictured top right) operations manager for Offensive Security; Mati Aharoni (pictured middle), trainer of Offensive Security, and Jim O’Gorman (pictured left) of Continuum Worldwide. They created the site www.social-engineer.org for the contest, which occurred for the first time this year at Defcon and runs through Saturday.
The contest has proved so alarming to the targeted corporations that some called on the help of the FBI, which quizzed the organizers on why they were doing the contest.
“We wanted to start a social engineering program because we believe in security through education,” Hadnagy said at a press conference at Defcon.
The participants were instructing to engage in passive information gathering to find out some sensitive information, such as where its dumpsters are located. (Dumpster diving is a common practice by hackers who want to find documents with company secrets on them). By looking things up on the Web, the participants tried to track down company details, such as what kind of Web browser the employees used and what version of Adobe PDFs they were using. (The answers to these questions can be used to launch cyberattacks against the companies.)
Tipped off by the announcement of the contest, the FBI met with the organizers ahead of time, and the organizers enlisted the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil-liberties advocacy group, to represent them. In that meeting the Justice Department voiced its concerns about whether any laws would be broken in the contest. The EFF offered legal advice about how to structure the contest; for instance, participants were not allowed to impersonate law enforcement officers during phone calls, as that is a crime.
In almost every case, company representatives gave up secrets they should not have. The companies targeted included Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, BP, Shell,Google, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Ford. The contestants were given “flag points” as rewards for each answer they pulled from employees.
Contestants cold-called employees to get the information. In three cases, company employees did not give any details over the phone. But the contestants, posing as journalists or customers, still got data from every company. One contestant managed to get an answer out of his target company in just 22 minutes. The contestant used tricks, such as preying upon emotions, by saying that they had to finish the project and get answers that day.
Because of publicity around the case, a number of contestants dropped out. Some said their bosses would fire them if they participated in the Defcon event.
Companies: Apple, BP, Google, microsoft, Offensive Security, Procter & Gamble
Written by Dean Takahashi on July 30th, 2010 with no comments.
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Grammy award winning artist Chamillionaire (a.k.a Hakeem Seriki) has become a regular at tech conferences, perhaps because the hustle and flow culture of the rap business and the hustle and flow culture of the tech business are surprisingly similar. His stories of struggles between artists and music labels are resonant to anyone who’s experienced the relationship intricacies of startups and VCs.
Chamillionare got his first taste of the magic of the Internet in 2004, with the launch of his first website Chamillionaire.com. The community around the site’s message boards exploded unexpectedly, “at the time it was really creative and really cool,” he told Mike Arrington at today’s Social Currency CrunchUp.
Other highlights from the interview include Mike Arrington calling the hip hop artist’s entourage “goofy,” asking, “What kind of rims are cool now?” and ending with the memorable,”You guys know how to manipulate the tech industry to get what you want, but you have the lamest phones …”
In retort, Chamillionaire insisted that he carries around his 3 phones, a Blackberry Curve 8700, an iPhone 3Gs, and a Sidekick XL, for “simplicity” and joked that he checks in as “Mike Arrington” when he stays at hotels. On why he attends tech conferences, “I just want to get a business card from each of you.”
Curious, we caught up with the artist after the panel and asked him what exactly he thought the tech community had to offer?
“Everything. Access to people through social networks. We don’t build these social networks, we don’t blog on TechCrunch. People here are like what would a rapper care about TechCrunch for? It’s crazy, it’s about distribution of information. It’s just getting information to people, that’s just what major labels are. They’ve got companies that distribute for us now so it’s like cutting the record labels out – I’m doing you a favor, you’re doing me a favor and I’m getting to where I need to get to. “
On his future plans? “I just want to innovate.” He said, insisting that he couldn’t reveal any more information.
Video of his onstage interview, below:
Written by Alexia Tsotsis on July 30th, 2010 with no comments.
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On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was investigating the sluggish performance of iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G. While Apple is beginning an investigation, a reader over at Neowin was hands on with an iPhone and may have stumbled upon a quick fix. The problem is apparently remedied by turning off all the spotlight search options within Settings->General->Home Button->Spotlight Search. Though this may be a temporary band-aid, it may be enough to hold you over until Apple determines a root cause and issues a fix. If anyone gives it a try, let us know your results in the comments. Read
Written by Kelly Hodgkins on July 30th, 2010 with no comments.
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Earlier this week, I reported about security research Barnaby Jack showing how to hack two different automated teller machines in front of a crowd of hackers and security professionals at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. Now you can see video footage of Jack responding to questions following his demonstration.
(See our roundup of all Black Hat and Defcon stories).
The two videos below show the Q&A session that took place immediately after he hacked two different Windows CE-based ATMs. During the Q&A, an engineer for one of the ATM companies, Triton, got up and offered some answers about his company’s efforts to patch the vulnerabilities that Jack pointed out on stage.
Jack was scheduled to give the talk a year ago, but it was canceled after an ATM vendor objected to his then-employer, Juniper Networks. This year, Jack switched jobs to IOActive. The ease with which he hacked the machines should be a wake-up call for banks.
Jack showed how you could walk up to an ATM, break into it using a common universal key, and then use a universal serial bus (USB) stick to load a rootkit, or hacking software, that could compromise the machine’s security. On stage, he showed how he could run a program that could talk over the machines and get them to display “jackpot!” on the ATM screen and then spit out bills.
People: Barnaby Jack
Written by Dean Takahashi on July 30th, 2010 with no comments.
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Perhaps you’ve heard: social games maker Playdom was acquired by Disney a few days ago for a deal potentially worth north of $750 million. Playdom CEO John Pleasants took the stage today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, to talk a bit about the deal and the future.
Pleasants says that he’s not exactly sure what his title at Disney will be yet, but he thinks he’ll be the General Manager of Playdom. He’s also not sure if Tapulous (another gaming company just acquired by Disney) will be under his department, but he doesn’t think so. And he made sure to clarify that the deal was for $563.2 million plus an earn-out of up to $200 million — so he’s not super super super rich, he’s just super super rich.
But the most interesting thing Pleasants noted was that he recently heard (from his own source, apparently) that half of all users on Facebook now play social games. More impressively, 40% of total usage time on the service is spent on these games. That’s meaningful, of course, because “a huge amount the Internet is on Facebook,” Pleasants stated.
When moderator Michael Arrington asked about changes Facebook has made recently to slow the viral spread of these types of games, Pleasants acknowledged they’ve all taken a hit. But he says they’re working with Facbeook on new ways to drive growth. But he made sure to say they had to do it without spamming.
When talking about what’s next, Pleasants notes that they’ve released two new games in the past week alone. When Mike suggested that most of the games are just a combination of blindly pushing buttons, Pleasants noted that things were evolving, and that games were about to get more social.
The biggest issue going forward though? “The lack of credit cards with children,” Pleasants half-joked.
Written by MG Siegler on July 30th, 2010 with no comments.
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Smart window startup Soladigm announced today its plans to build a factory in Olive Branch, Mississippi. The Khosla Ventures and Sigma Partners backed company makes dynamic glass windows that can be tinted on demand to block excess light and heat.
Founded in 2007, Soladigm had been operating in “stealth mode.” The company employs about 50 people in its Milpitas, California headquarters, and plans to hire about 300 employees over the next few years for the Mississippi plant.
A $40 million loan and another $4 million in incentives from the state influenced Soladigm’s decision to locate operations in Mississippi. Soladigm pledged to invest $130 million by 2016 in its business there in order to receive the state’s full incentive package.
The new Soladigm plant’s proximity to Memphis transportation connections will also help the company quickly ship its glass panels.
According to the company, its tinted windows can eliminate the need for blinds and reduce building heating and cooling costs by up to 25%.
Written by Matylda Czarnecka on July 30th, 2010 with no comments.
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PlacePop, a company that allows any company to create and maintain virtual loyalty cards, launched its iPhone app today. It also announced fresh funding of $1.4 million from a number of angel investors.
PlacePop wants to replace the clumsy, physical loyalty program cards people carry around in their wallets or forget in their desk drawers. So it’s joining a lot of companies doing the same thing — helping people go virtual with their loyalty cards. It’s not clear whether PlacePop really can differentiate itself in such a crowded market.
The San Francisco company, led by former Friendster CEO Kent Lindstrom, today began offering cards that can be accessed with smartphones — and you can do this from shop or a restaurant while “checking in” at that location. In an effort to differentiate itself, PlacePop says it is giving businesses a lot of control over their campaigns, allowing them to customize the branding and look of their virtual card as well as its functionality.
The funding, first reported by TechCrunch, comes from Affinity Labs founder Chris Michel, Bebo Founder Michael Birch, James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky.
I spoke with Lindstrom, and he said the funding could last for a year, depending on how things go. The company’s full platform will launch in beta within the next two weeks, he said, and the company is working on an Android app to follow the iPhone launch.
Lindstrom said the company is “really focused on making sure [they] have the tool right for small businesses”, and, building on that, PlacePop will be targeting big brands and retailers. Lindstrom said that the company has already been picking up interest from the big retailers and restaurant chains.
Companies: Foursquare, PlacePop
People: Kent Lindstrom
Written by JP Manninen on July 30th, 2010 with no comments.
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Criticising Valleywag in 2010 is something of a pointless exercise, like offering diplomatic counsel to the Ottoman Empire ten years after the Treaty of Lausanne. More pointless still, attacking the site’s titular editor Ryan Tate is like appealing to the guy responsible for writing parking tickets in Constantinople.
I mean, I get that.
And yet despite the irrelevance of Gawker’s saddest sub-domain and the tragic impotence of its editor, the influence of its parent means that when a Valleywag story oozes its way on to the front page of Gawker.com, it’s important to take notice. And to mop it up so that no-one slips.
Here goes then.
Background:
Some time on Tuesday afternoon, Ryan Tate woke up and padded over to his laptop to check his email. Amidst the tips from disgruntled Friendster employees and pep-talk advice mails from Owen Thomas, there was an email from Nick Stern, a photographer who had spent a few days stalking Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The images were so entirely un-newsworthy – photos of Zuckerberg’s modest house, photos of his “unremarkable” tennis shoes, photos of Zuckerberg’s entirely unfamous girlfriend – that no other news organisation wanted them. Could Gawker spare any change?
Pausing just long enough to wipe the resulting sticky goo from his keyboard, Tate hit reply. “Oh God, YES! We’d love them. It’ll be a Gawker exclusive!”
Of course, much of the above is bullshit speculation, but the result is the same: on Wednesday, under a “Gawker Exclusive” banner, and the headline, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Age of Privacy Is Over” Tate published twenty candid photos, clearly identifying Zuckerberg’s home, his girlfriend, his friends and his regular haunts. In “justification”, Tate wrote…
“If it feels a little naughty to take such a close look into Zuckerberg’s life, remember that this is the executive who pushed the private information of Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users progressively further into the public sphere.”
Hmmm, Ryan.
No, not “hmmm”. That other thing.
GO FUCK YOURSELF. I mean, seriously, Ryan, how did you even write those words without slitting your wrists and bleeding out pure shame onto your copy of Pageviews For Dummies? Even if you accept that Facebook’s handling of user privacy was a misstep (which I don’t entirely), to argue that it’s analogous to following someone around with a camera all week and publicising his home address on the Internet just defies belief. Especially when that person is a billionaire who is more of a target than most for the assorted freaks and lunatics who slosh about online.
But of course Tate had no choice but to cling to his “tit for tat” public interest justification. After all, the photos had no inherent news value (“the most interesting thing about Zuckerberg’s life may well be how ordinary it is,” says Tate in his post) and nor is there an obvious “public figure” justification. Facebook is a private company, Zuckerberg (especially compared to other billionaire CEOs) doesn’t court personal publicity outside of the business press – and his girlfriend certainly doesn’t. All the publication of these pictures achieves is a hundred thousand or so page views, at a cost that includes the personal safety of a 26 year old who, despite his modest home and shoes, is worth, let’s not forget, some $4 billion. If I were his girlfriend, or anyone else close to him, I’d be terrified right now.
What Happened Next:
After reading the story, I tweeted to Tate…
More than anything, I wanted to know if he was proud of his work; whether reading it back he thought to himself “yes, I have done a good thing today.” But at worst I wanted him to defend it. In fact he did neither, instead he replied…
Then, as if to underline his point – that the justification for posting the photos was that he’d done it before – he emailed me the links, with the heading “BREAKING! Valleywag runs unauthorized pictures of people’s homes and girlfriends!!!11!”
After some back and forth over the irrelevant question of whether Tate commissioned the photos himself or whether they landed on his desk as a fait accompli, I got back to the point…
From: Paul Carr
To: Ryan TateYou’re neatly dodging the question though: do you stand by the posting of the photos as news? Are you suggesting a public interest justification for publicizing where a billionaire lives? “We’ve done it before” is not a justification; as any serial killer will tell you.
His answer? An email containing nothing but the contact details of Editor-in-Chief Remy Stern and Founder Nick Denton. The subtext: “I can’t justify my own work; you’ll have to talk to My Two Dads.”
And so I did. I particularly wanted to understand Denton’s take on the misadventures of his underling. For a start, it’s generally accepted that there is only one period in Valleywag’s history that the site was any good, and that was when Denton was running it himself. Also, for all of Valleywag’s prying into the lives of Silicon Valley “celebrities”, Denton held on to at least one basic principle: decreeing that the lives of their non-famous girlfriends, boyfriends, wives and husbands – “civillians” as he called them – should remain off-limits.
So what gives? Has Denton changed his policy or, like in so many other situations, did Tate simply not get the memo?
His reply deserves to be published in full (with his permission, for which I’m grateful).
Hey, Paul –
Thanks for your note.
Facebook is anything but a private company; it has 500m stakeholders. And as Silicon Valley has grown in importance, tech executives have become celebrities. Mark Zuckerberg generates more interest among our readers than most Hollywood stars.
Now you can argue that he doesn’t trade on his celebrity in the same way. But that’s not entirely true. He poses for photos for magazine covers and shows up at conferences. It’s not like he’s a complete recluse.
As for the address… Well, first of all, no, we didn’t publish it. But you can deduce it. And? With online databases such as Nexis Public Records, most people’s addresses are now easily available. You can find all mine there, for instance.
Or here.
I think you’re trapped in a previous era — one in which journalists had special access to information and dispensed it sparingly and “responsibly.” Now there’s much less distinction to the profession: everybody has access to formerly privileged information and anybody can publish it. We’d all better adjust.
Your final point: that even if Zuckerberg was fair game, the girlfriend wasn’t. I have most sympathy for this. But, again, apply the Hollywood model. If an unknown was having an affair with Angelina Jolie, they would no longer be an unknown.
Zuckerberg is the Angelina Jolie of the internet. The media interest in him is undeniable. His lovers, friends and acquaintances — like those of any other celebrity — are caught up in the vortex. He has to make a choice; and they have to make a choice. And none of the choices — retreat from the public eye, abandonment of friendship — are palatable.
Feel free to publish any of this reply.
Regards
Nick
Conclusion:
Reading that note, two things screamed out from the page. One: how conflicted Denton sounds in writing it – speaking of his “sympathy” for my point about Zuckerberg’s girlfriend and acknowledging that the choices that his kind of reporting forces those close to tech “celebrities” to make are “unpalatable”. It can’t be easy to know your editors are doing bad things, but that those bad things are the only way they’ll ever attract page views.
And two: the fact that it was only Denton, and not Tate, who had the wit and intelligence to attempt to justify Gawker’s decision to publish. (In fact, while Denton was accounting for the behaviour of his boy, Tate was publishing a follow up story containing photos of Zuckerberg at an employee’s wedding in India, desperately arguing that his interest in them “underlines Zuckerberg’s growing global celebrity”. Just stop digging, Ryan.)
And it’s for that second reason – his inability to stand by his grubby work – that Ryan Tate, if he has an ounce of pride left in his body, needs to resign. And if he won’t do that – which he won’t, because he hasn’t, and because he knows that the position of village idiot has already been filled – then it’s for that reason that Denton needs to fire him and either go back to running Valleywag himself, or close it down once and for all.
In the meantime, to anyone with a cameraphone or a Flipcam who spots Ryan Tate out and about in the Bay Area: you know what to do. Follow him. Follow him everywhere. Take hundreds of photos. Bug the living shit out of him. Make him understand how unpleasant it is to be followed to your front door by a stranger with a camera.
And once you’re done stalking? Again: you know what to do. Delete the footage. Don’t even think about uploading it anywhere. Yes, there’d be a delicious irony in “Ending Ryan Tate’s Age Of Privacy” because he’s done it to someone else. But, as much as he’d love to feel that his life passes a public interest test, it doesn’t. And just because Ryan Tate has done something hideous and unjustified to someone else, doesn’t mean you should do it to him.
You’re better than that.
Written by Paul Carr on July 30th, 2010 with no comments.
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