Archive for April, 2008

Oldgregg from Hacker News reported that a friend found a gaping security hole in Tumblr. He and the friend dutifully reported it to Tumblr, then posted it as either news or a warning to other developers that you should always check, double-check, and re-double-check your app's security.
The hole is a pretty big one. By logging into your own Tumblr account, and then manually appending /admin to your URL, you could access the admin panel for the application. Looking up user [...]

Odds are if you are involved in the tech industry, you've attended a meeting remotely. And odds are, you've done so using the ubiquitous WebEx, owned by Cisco. However, for companies who are bootstrapping, or individuals (like freelancers), WebEx's prices can make it just out of reach. DimDim, which first launched as an alpha back in 2006, may step into that space, but that depends on your point of view.
DimDim has four products: DimDim Free, DimDim Pro, DimDim Enterprise, and [...]

Eric Rice posed an interesting theory last week, asking if social web early adopters have psychological disorders. My initial knee-jerk reaction was to be offended. As someone who's been wanting a plug in my head for accessing the Web since I first read Neuromancer, I thought of early adopters as eager to get to that next step in the technology progression.
Then I re-read the article and took a look at my password file. I now have over 100 user IDs [...]

Our Politics and Social Networking series now includes a mention for revered channel NPR (National Public Radio). NPR has added a social network to its roster that is geared to the political set, called GetMyVote. The site brings the concept of social interaction online to a new level.
NPR has given users a place to upload video, audio and text files that are directed at the candidates. The purpose is to give people a chance to let the politicians know what [...]

Skewz is the latest entry in the political news aggregation space, a sector that is getting way too crowded, even for a U.S. election year.
Skewz is designed to be Digg with a political slant; users can submit stories, and then others can vote on the purported political slew, using the U.S.-centric blue (for very liberal) to red (for very conservative) scale. Based on the ratings for articles, you can also see how a media outlet skews overall.
As Anthony Ha [...]

I was determined to remain out of this weekend's bitchmeme. I'm an old-fashioned kind of girl who comments on the blog where the author knows I said something, reads my feeds offline half the time, and doesn't jump on the latest bandwagon when it comes to "conversation."
However, when the headline crossed my radar saying "Era of blogger’s control is over" I realized that for all this caterwauling, people are missing the point. Robert Scoble is missing the point, but then [...]

In a move possibly designed as an end run around Microsoft’s bid, Yahoo execs have decided to do a test placement of Google ads on the Yahoo family of sites, and to join forces with Time Warner / AOL. A partnership between Yahoo and AOL would give the struggling internet company enough clout to fight off a Microsoft bid, especially if the test of Google ads on its site is successful.
Microsoft isn’t taking the news lying down, however. It [...]

Meet Emad Ibrahim. He's a software architect. He quit his job last month to start his own company.
I found his blog via Hacker News, and started following, mainly because I am fascinated by anyone quitting a job to start a company. I personally can't imagine having the money to live on, much less the courage, to do it.
I figured maybe this time next year there would be an announcement of a demo of something. Possibly an invite-only alpha I could [...]

By now everyone is familiar with the RIAA and their collective belief that everyone online is a thief, stealing music every which way we can. The recording industry has been fighting to prove that even the premise of “making available,” putting music out there to share with no proof it's ever been downloaded, is still a violation of copyright laws, and that all the digital sharing results in nothing but losses for the music industry.
The Web 2.0 music sites beg [...]