Ina Fried, writing for Recode, on Samsung’s recall of the Galaxy Note 7:
Samsung said Friday that it will replace all of the Galaxy Note 7 “phablets” it has sold amid reports that some batteries on the phones have exploded.
In what could be the biggest smartphone recall ever, Samsung said it will replace all devices in the coming weeks. The company said it has confirmed an issue with the battery cells used in the phone and has halted sales globally.
Ouch.
John Mannes, writing at TechCrunch:
The number of passwords and the severity of the hack were not uncovered until today. The passwords were stored using unsalted MD5 hashing. Rather than storing passwords in plaintext, nearly every site that stores critical user information utilizes some form of hashing. Hashing is a method for encrypting data, but some methods are far superior to others.
These are some really bad password practices and if you have an account at Last.fm, you should go change your password. Also, LeakedSource is a good resource to see if your information has shown up in any of these information database dumps over the past few years. You can search by your email address.
Josh Constine, writing at TechCrunch:
People only post the highlights of their life on Instagram, so today the app adds its own version of “Stories” to poach goofy, off-the-cuff, everyday content from Snapchat. It works exactly like Snapchat Stories, allowing you to post 24-hour ephemeral photo and video slideshows that disappear. But because Instagram Stories appear at the top of the old feed, your followers will inevitably see them without you needing to build a new audience in a different app.
I mean, yeah, it is a clone of Snapchat’s feature, but it is also exactly why I post rarely to Instagram and post stupid things all the time on Snapchat.
Vindu Goel, reporting for The New York Times:
Verizon, seeking to build an array of digital businesses that can compete for users and advertising with Google and Facebook, announced on Monday that it was buying Yahoo’s core internet business for $4.83 billion in cash.
The deal, which was reached over the weekend, unites two titans of the early internet, AOL and Yahoo, under the umbrella of one of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies. Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion last year. Now it will add Yahoo’s consumer services — search, news, finance, sports, video, email and the Tumblr social network — to a portfolio that includes AOL as well as popular sites like The Huffington Post.
Yahoo and AOL, once giants of the industry, now just another part of Verizon. I wonder what Tumblr’s fate will be?
The Set Listener is a pretty cool web-app that lets you enter any Setlist.fm URL into it and it’ll create a Spotify playlist from the songs. Clever.
Read More “The Set Listener Creates Playlists From Set Lists”
James Vincent, writing for The Verge:
A hacker has pleaded guilty for his role in the “Celebgate” breach of 2014. Edward Majerczyk faces up to five years in federal prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Like fellow hacker Ryan Collins, the 28-year-old Majerczyk used a phishing scam to trick celebrities into entering their online credentials into fake ‘security’ sites. Majerczyk then used this information to illegally access more than 300 personal Gmail and iCloud accounts, retrieving private photos and videos from targets including celebrities. No individuals affected by the hack were named in court documents.
Yesterday Katy Perry, the most followed account on Twitter, got hacked. From TechCrunch:
This incident is yet another reminder that despite the platform’s security measures, no one’s Twitter account is safe—especially if they are a celebrity. Other high-profile Twitters that have been hacked include Justin Bieber, Lea Michele, and Britney Spears—and even the U.S. Central Command.
This is a good time to also point out that over the past week it looks like emails and passwords to over seven hundred million accounts may have leaked from LinkedIn, Tumblr, and MySpace:
There are some really interesting patterns emerging here. One is obviously the age; the newest breach of this recent spate is still more than 3 years old. This data has been lying dormant (or at least out of public sight) for long periods of time.
The other is the size and these 4 breaches are all in the top 5 largest ones HIBP has ever seen. That’s out of 109 breaches to date, too. Not only that, but these 4 incidents account for two thirds of all the data in the system, or least they will once MySpace turns up.
This is a good time to remind you to choose secure, long, and unique passwords for all your online accounts. I use, and recommend, 1Password.
One of the more interesting stories in the journalism space over the past week has been the revelation that billionaire Peter Thiel has been secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. I think, not surprisingly, I agree most with John Gruber’s take:
It’s free speech on both sides. Thiel was free to secretly back (and apparently strategically steer) Hogan’s case against Gawker. But Gawker founder Nick Denton was free to air his suspicion that Hogan had a billionaire Silicon Valley backer, and Forbes was free to out Thiel as said backer. And now commentators who are appalled are free to express their outrage at Thiel, perhaps embarrassing him and making it less likely that he or others of similar super-wealth will do this in the future.
You’re free to do stupid shit under the banner of free speech, and I’m free to say so.
Steven Levy, writing for Blackchannel, on the new device from Pebble called the “Pebble Core.” It’s basically a little keychain sized device that can stream music from Spotify.
Today, Pebble is launching Kickstarter campaigns for three products. Only two of them are smart watches. It’s the third product that will garner the most attention. It’s a Pebble that’s not a watch. It is optimized for a single task: taking a run. It’s a white plastic and black rubber block, a little thicker than a mahjong tile, with an orange clasp that grasps a keyring. It plays music, has GPS and other sensors that can track activity, and a 3G cellular modem that allows it to work even if your phone isn’t on you.
Google has announced their own little device that lives in your home and you speak to and it does things for you, kind of like the Amazon Echo. From, The Verge:
It’s not portable, but the benefit of always being plugged in is that Google can make a more powerful speaker. Quieroz says that it “really fills the room” and that it will have “strong bass and clear highs.” That’s important, because one of the main use cases Google is foreseeing here is listening to music. The Echo isn’t great at that.
I like the idea of these devices being around and helping me with conversions while cooking, or checking basketball scores, or hopefully one day being able to control more home automation — I’m not convinced on them being great music listening devices yet.1
I’ll reserve judgement until I can hear one in person. I do think this is potentially a great podcast speaker.↩
Josh Constine, writing for TechCrunch, looks at a new digital guitar where can basically press a button to play a chord:
You can also freestyle, playing whatever you want. Rock band Muse’s lead singer Matt Bellamy is an investor, and he told me he uses it to write songs since it’s so easy to recreate what’s in his head without fumbling to find where to put his fingers. The guitar automatically records your last 30 minutes of playing so if you discover the perfect riff, you won’t forget it.
Josh Constine, writing for TechCrunch, on Lady Gaga’s startup, Backplane, selling its assets:
Founded in 2011, Backplane raised a Series A of $12.1 million in 2012 from the top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Sequoia, Google Ventures, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Greylock, Menlo Ventures, Formation 8 and Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures all poured money in at around a $40 million valuation. That was despite basically just being a fan site for Lady Gaga with hopes of launching social networks for brands. It eventually raised $5 million more.
The last few weeks have been just a tad stressful. Needless to say my sleep schedule has taken a massive punch in the balls. Over the past few days I’ve been using this app, Thunderspace 5K, at night as almost a white noise machine. It’s been a revelation. It might be growing up in Oregon, and having spent many a night falling asleep to the sound of rain on the wood deck outside the window of my youth, but this app has replaced podcasts when I finally find my way to bed.
Cade Metz, writing for Wired, tells the inside story of WhatsApp turning on end-to-end encryption.
More than a billion people trade messages, make phone calls, send photos, and swap videos using the service. This means that only Facebook itself runs a larger self-contained communications network. And today, the enigmatic founders of WhatsApp, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, together with a high-minded coder and cryptographer who goes by the pseudonym Moxie Marlinspike, revealed that the company has added end-to-end encryption to every form of communication on its service.
Boston Dynamics have released a new video of their robot, Atlas, which can walk on two legs, open doors, stack boxes, and handle being pushed around by dudes with sticks. I had two thoughts while watching this: First, “oh great, like the robots aren’t going to remember this one day.” And two, that maybe I’d been watching too much Humans, because I felt this ping of empathy for what I know is a machine.