Steam's 35 Million Users' Info Hacked
Valve is the latest game company to have its users' information accessed by hackers. In an IM to Steam users, Valve said, "Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information." The company went on to say, "We don't have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely." Steam has 35 million users who purchase digital copies of PC games.
Fast
Company
Who Really Invented the Computer?
If someone up and asked you “who invented the computer,” how would you respond? Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Al Gore? Or say you’re more historically savvy, might you venture Alan Turing? Perhaps Konrad Zuse? Turing is the guy who, in the 1930s, laid the groundwork for computational science, while Zuse, around the same time, created something called the “Z1,” generally credited as “the first freely programmable computer.” And yet all of the above could prove wrong, depending on what a British research team and millions of dollars turn up over the next decade. The team’s question, as posed by the New York Times: “Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing?” You know, Charles Babbage? Born in 1791, died in 1871? Who attempted to build something called a “Difference Engine” during the first half of the nineteenth-century, a kind of mechanical calculator designed to compute various sets of numbers? Some argue that he, not Turing or Zuse, is the true father of the modern computer. I worked for a company named after the guy back in 1994. You know, Babbages, the mall-based chain that eventually merged with Software Etc. before its parent company went bankrupt, was picked up by Barnes & Noble’s Leonard Riggio, and eventually folded into the existing GameStop chain. I remember our store had a silver plaque on the frontside of the cash-wrap with an etching of Babbages and a brief overview explaining who he was and why the odd-sounding name fit a store that, at the time, sold mostly PC-based products.
Time
LinkedIn Unveils Dashboard for Groups Statistics
LinkedIn has unveiled a new Group Statistics dashboard that allows group admins to drill down into the demographics and growth of their groups. The new dashboard, as CEO Jeff Weiner describes it on Twitter, turns relevant information about each group into an infographic-style display. This information is summarized on a dashboard, but can also be broken down in three areas: “Demographics”, “Growth” and “Activity”. “We’ve designed each infographic view to highlight the most important signals you’ll need to help you understand your group better,” LinkedIn Data Visualization Designer Anita Lillie noted in a post on the LinkedIn blog. Let’s use the Fans of Mashable group as an example. The Dashboard summary shows Mashable with slightly more than 24,000 members, garnering 59 comments last week with 9% of its members located in the New York City area. Diving deeper using the “Demographics” tab, we can see that 4% of the group’s members come from the San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Los Angeles and London. The Group Statistics dashboard also illustrates the group’s growth, displays how many new members the group has gained in the last week and shows a graph of the group’s week-over-week growth. The “Activity” tab highlights how many discussions occurred within the group. It even lets you know how many group members received a promotion or changed jobs.
Mashable
The Big Ideas Inside A New Version Of India's $35 Aakash Tablet
Barely a month has passed since the release of India's "$35" Aakash tablet, but its creators already have its successor--a sleeker, more powerful low-cost tablet--ready to launch. When the Aakash was launched in October, it was greeted with enthusiasm--what potential it holds for a developing market!--followed almost immediately by skepticism --could it possibly work for that cheap? What's the catch? Aakash, or Ubislate 7 as U.K. manufacturer DataWind calls it, has a 7-inch screen, runs Android 2.2. It comes with a USB drive and microSD slots. Suneet Tuli, cofounder and CEO of DataWind, tells Fast Company that DataWind will follow through with their plans to sell the tablet commercially in India, at the price of Rs. 2,999, about $60 ($35 was actually the price the government paid). Eventually, he hopes they'll sell upgraded versions of the tablet in the U.S. and U.K.
Fast
Company
Thailand floods will hurt overall PC shipments
Widespread flooding in Thailand will directly impact PC markets in the first half of next year, with worldwide shipments dropping by up to 20 percent in the first quarter compared to previous projections, IDC said in a research note. Thailand accounts for up to 45 percent of worldwide hard-drive production and the flooding has damaged more than a dozen hard-disk-drive factories, IDC said. Shortage of hard-drive parts could result in PC shipments falling short by 10 percent in the fourth quarter this year compared to previous projections. PC prices may rise as a result of the prolonged and substantial effects of the flooding, said Loren Loverde, vice president at IDC. "We do think that there will be a PC price rise," Loverde said. Hard drives are about 7 percent to 10 percent of the total cost of a PC, which while not substantial, could impact overall PC pricing compared to smaller components. PC makers could offset the higher price by installing lower-capacity hard drives, Loverde said. Solid-state drives are an alternate storage option to hard drives, but have a very small market share.
MacWorld
RIM lost 1.8m subscribers in past three months in US, says comScore
RIM lost 1.8m subscribers in the US in the three months to September despite its new BlackBerry 7 phones going on sale in the final month, according to new data from comScore's MobiLens survey of smartphone users. The loss represents 10% of its subscriber numbers among consumers in June. The picture emerges from the survey for September, which covered the first month in which RIM's handsets were on sale, the company's share of smartphone handsets sold over the three months in the US fell from 7.9% in June to 7.1%. In absolute terms, the total number of people over 13 owning a smartphone in the US grew by 12% to 87.4m, up from 78.0m at the end of June. That suggests that 9.4m smartphones were sold in the period. But comScore's survey also suggests that RIM's share of the installed smartphone base fell from 23.5% to 18.9%, which means it lost 1.8m subscribers there. The fall comes after a loss of 1m subscribers in the three months to June, and suggests that the company faces a serious challenge stemming its losses in its home markets.
Guardian
Britain ‘will have best broadband in Europe’
Sean Williams, the Group Director of Strategy Policy and Portfolio for BT, said that “We will be top of the major league, certainly if not by 2015 then by very soon after”. Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary charged with improving Britain’s digital infrastructure, has said that the UK will have the best broadband in Europe by 2015, enabling consumers and businesses to transmit large files and stream television, music or movies. Civil servants, however, have subsequently been criticized for producing a set of measurements that do not rigidly define what terms that might mean. Mr Williams told the Westminster eForum event that although the ambitions were “challenging”, the UK’s roadmap, working with Virgin, Fujitsu and others, was likely to achieve the target, if Britain was compared to its peers in terms of geography and other defining characteristics. He added that half of all customers offered super-fast broadband, with speeds above 24mbps, went on to subscribe to the service. He said BT’s business model anticipated a total take-up of super-fast services from just one in five customers. “The only thing holding us back is our capacity,” he said, although he added that planning and road works constraints could be eased to improve broadband roll-out.
The
Telegraph
Modern Warfare 3 reviews: why is this the most hated game on the web?
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has attracted near-universal critical acclaim. It is a slick, well-constructed and generously proportioned instalment in one of the most revered military shooter franchises in history. There is just one problem. Everyone on the internet hates it. Soon after the game's release on Tuesday, savage user reviews began to appear on score aggregation site, Metacritic. A flood of 0/10s outnumbered ecstatic 10s and considered 7s and 8s by a dramatic margin. Currently, for the Xbox 360 version of the title, the average user score for one of the biggest entertainment releases of the year stands at a wretched 3.0. On PC it's 1.7.So what is happening? The first point, of course, is that it's dangerous to think of these outbursts as being in anyway representative of the majority opinion. "On day one or two, you are going to get a vocal minority who take to the forums on Metacritic and use them as a soap box to vent their rage about the series," says Daniel Krupa, a writer at games site, IGN. "Most of the millions of people who bought the game are actually playing it and enjoying it. A similar thing happened with Portal 2 back in April. It's one of the most critically appreciated games of the year, but on the day of release, people were on Metacritic criticising it for lots of reasons. Since then, the rating has risen and there's now parity between the critical and the user scores. I imagine something similar will happen with MW3 over time."
Guardian
IBM Debuts Mobile Security Service For Smartphone And Tablet Use In The Enterprise
As the usage of smartphones increases in business operations, IBM is debuting a new service to help businesses secure mobile devices with access to corporate data. Called the Hosted Mobile Device Security Management service, the new product includes a security application for smartphones and tablets, along with managed services including policy management and user compliance monitoring. IBM says the Device Security Management hosted service helps organizations protect against and monitor data loss and other risks caused by device theft, unauthorized access, malware, spyware, and inappropriate apps. The service allows businesses to configure and monitor employee smartphones and tablets to comply with security policies, secure data in the event that a device is lost or stolen, help to find a lost or stolen device, protect against spyware and viruses, detect and remove malicious and unapproved applications, track user activity, and maintain secure web connections. IBM says it is working with Juniper Networks to provide the protection and device management technology for the service, which will be available for Apple iOS, Google Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile.
TechCrunch
In Defense of Windows
Despite being the world's most popular operating system, Windows gets a lot of flak from Mac users, Linux users, and even self-hating Windows users. It may not be perfect (after all, what is?), but Windows has a lot going for it—enough to win a spot as my main OS after years using both Mac OS X and Linux. Here's why. I'm far from a Windows fanboy. I've used all three major OSes extensively, and I love things about all of them. I'm not here to argue that Windows is "the best" operating system, and my goal isn't to bait non-Windows users. But Windows isn't deserving of much of the hate leveled at it these days. Rather than put down everyone else, here are some of the things that make Windows really great. Windows' biggest advantage is that it's ubiquitous. As the most popular operating system, you have a much bigger selection of apps to choose from, both free and paid—and often they're very good, too. While Mac users have an unusually high quality selection of apps, it's pretty small compared to Windows—for example, when it comes to music players, you're mostly stuck with iTunes, while Windows users can choose between great apps like Winamp, MediaMonkey, foobar2000, and many more. Linux users, unfortunately have some good apps, but are stuck with a lot of sub-par apps in certain categories, not to mention slow development (in some, not all, cases). If you're on Windows, chances are you'll always be able to find at least one program that suits your tastes in any category, and that's a comforting feeling.
Lifehacker
Subscribe