The Tecker

There seems to be a huge rise in hacks on popular websites recently.

Twitter has gotten hacked not once, not twice, but 33 times! It seems as though the group behind the attacks is called Digital Gangster. Check out the full story here. [Twitter gets hacked] [Digital Gangster is the culprit]

There is still uncertainty about who is behind the MacRumors site hacking though. [MacRumors hacking]

UPDATE: Now Cork'd, a wine finding site seems to be hacked to link to another not-so-family-appropriate site. [Cork'd gets uncorked]

This year the Annual CES show will be a real snooze. Bill Gates won't even attend because last year was his last one, and so Steve Ballmer will have to try to rally up the crowd.

Problem is, everything has already been announced.

• Windows 7 will hit public beta (not the torrent version that's out)
• Windows Mobile will get Flash by March (before iPhone!!!!!111)
• Two Halo games for Xbox 360 (yum)
• Better home networking (heard that one before)

[via Gizmodo and TechCrunch]

Journalspace.com was a place for people to blog and share pictures, etc. However, their database was overwritten and they had no real backup, so their company is toast.

One might ask why they did not have a backup.

Well, they did, sorta. They relied on a RAID configuration to keep their data safe. So if one of the drives failed, they just swapped it out for it's backup drive. However, in Journalspace's case, the drive did not fail, it was overwritten which also means (because the drives are configured in a RAID format) the other one had the copy written over too!

The moral? Don't rely on any one technology to keep your data safe. In this case it was RAID, that didn't turn out the intended results. The technology didn't fail, it did its job by copying the one drive, it just had no way of knowing that it was not supposed too.

So remember people backup your data often on removable formats, and always have a backup kept off site too!

---Info for any Journalspace users---

• You can find out more information what happened. [Journalspace News]

• A blog post about how to attempt to recover your posts and pictures via Google's cache. [Andrew's Blog]
• Journalspace also has a twitter account set up so you can view the updates [jsupgrades@twitter]
• Also the company is planning to release the source code for the site to the open source community

If anything else comes up, we'll keep you posted here at The Tecker!

Wikipedia has completed raising enough money to run through the fiscal year til June 30, 2009.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder has written a thank you letter to the donors [Letter]

But remember, Wikipedia has extraordinary costs required to run it, so please continue to donate to this excellent knowledge resource. [Donate to Wikipedia]

It has been found out that shouting at hard drives while they are reading or writing severely impacts performance. The shouting (which is air waves vibrating) vibrates the disk platter, and so when the disk is working, it has to slow down or repeat the read or write to make sure it completes it with out error. This in turn, of course, negatively impacts disk performance!

So, the moral? When your hard drive is running slow, don't yell at it! It only slows things down, and actually shortens the life of the drive by wearing out the bearing quicker!



[via Engadget]

Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool has found and removed the "AntiVirus 2009" virus from 400,000 computers so far.

[via Slashdot]

Even though Playstation home was a complete flop, and so were PS3's Chritsmas sales, at least Sony has something going for it!

A group of hackers rigged up a cluster of 200 PS3s and used a bug in them to make a fake Certification Authority (CA), which in turn allows them to make their own SSL certificates. This means that you might visit a site you believe to be real and enter your information into it all because some hackers liked to play video games!

Just always check the URL of the site you are on before entering anything, and make sure you never click on any link in an email, always type it into the address bar.

[via ZDNet]