It’s tempting to blame the victim. In May, a twentysomething French hacker broke into several Twitter employees’ e-mail accounts and stole a trove of meeting notes, strategy documents, and other confidential scribbles. The hacker eventually gave the stash to TechCrunch, which has since published notes from meetings in which Twitter execs discussed their very lofty goals.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In 1993, a tech consultant named Peter de Jager wrote an article for Computerworld with the headline “Doomsday 2000.” When the clock struck midnight on 1/1/00, he wrote, many of our computers would lose track of the date, and very bad things would happen as a result.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Here’s a little story to show just how thoroughly Google’s (GOOG) long-awaited chatting tool, called Google Wave, can kill your mood to chat: The other day, I was “waving” with Zach Frechette, the editor of GOOD magazine. Naturally, we were talking about the new site’s merits and flaws. As we went back and forth, I had a tiny epiphany.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

You might argue that Sony (SNE) was visionary. In the fall of 2006, it introduced the first eBook with an E Ink screen–long before Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle rolled out with the same technology. The Sony Reader also connected users to an online store, solving a problem that had long bedeviled the e-book market–how do you get books onto your new device?

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Every year, the market-research firm Millward Brown conducts a survey to determine the economic worth of the world’s brands–in other words, to put a dollar value on the many corporate logos that dominate our lives. Lately the firm’s results have been stuck on repeat: Google (GOOG) has claimed the top spot for the past three years.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Twitter went down last week, and the world got very quiet. People didn’t know what do with themselves; they wanted to tweet the news that Twitter was down, but that was out of the question. Entire overheard conversations went unremarked upon, and mini-reviews of recent episodes of “True Blood” withered on the vine.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Back in March, I asked people to quit whining about Facebook’s redesign. It wasn’t that I liked the radical changes the site had made–they were unquestionably terrible. In the past, Facebook would roll all of your friends’ recently added photos, notes, and status updates into a few new posts a day; now the site shows you an ever-changing “stream” of activity, with new stuff from everyone in your network popping up as it happens.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Is Google (GOOG) too powerful? The Justice Department’s Christine Varney thinks so.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“Look at this fucking hipster” was a universally recognized gibe before it became a Web site. Anyone who’s ever taken a stroll with a friend down Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn or accidentally veered into San Francisco’s Mission District on a Saturday afternoon has had occasion to whisper these words. Look at this fucking hipster with the 1985 New England Patriots Super Bowl T-shirt and forearm tattoo of Ralph Nader.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Lately I’ve been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

To find a Web page you wanted in the pre-Google (GOOG) era, you often had to guess at its address. Was General Motors generalmotors.com, general-motors.com, or gm.com? This led to all kinds of trouble—a speculative bubble in domain names, huge legal battles over valuable addresses, and unseemly attempts to benefit from the confusion.
Read the rest of this post on the original site

Later this week, Kyle Wiens will travel to an undisclosed European country, stand in line for hours to buy Apple’s new iPhone, and then find a comfortable, well-lighted place to take the phone apart. Wiens, the co-founder of a site called iFixIt, does this sort of thing for a living.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

I didn’t go to Apple’s (AAPL) Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday expecting a revolutionary new iPhone. That’s a good thing, because I didn’t see one.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Last month, I became an obsessive air-traffic controller. The culprit: a terrific game for the iPhone called Flight Control. The premise is simple: You’re faced with a crush of planes, and it’s your job to guide each one to its respective runway. The gameplay, though, is irresistibly difficult. A few minutes in, the planes start to show up at an alarming rate, and you scramble to keep them from crashing into one another.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Since March, I’ve been using Google (GOOG) Voice, the search company’s fantastic Web app that gives you a single number to connect all your phones and lets you make rules about who can call which phone when. Voice is packed with many other amazing tricks, but there’s one feature that I’ve come to value above all: The software transcribes voice mail messages into text.

Read the rest of this post on the original site