Technology News Headlines for July 13 2012 ( Friday )


One Million User IDs Stolen In Android Forums Hack
The Android forums at website Phandroid have been hacked this week, it's being reported. More than a million user IDs have been compromised, which includes information such as email addresses and passwords and other information--although the passwords were hashed, which should be some small degree of protection. The site believes that this was an attempt at garnering email addresses mainly, so that they can later be spammed or targeted in phishing hacks. It's advising all users to reset their passwords, and as in any hack where your email address may have been compromised it makes sense to be extra-vigilent for exploits.

Meanwhile the hack of Yahoo Voices, which earlier this week compromised details of some 400,000 users, seems to extend beyond Yahoo and the list of accounts the hackers released included Gmail, AOL, Hotmail and other login credentials.

Separately, graphics hardware maker Nvidia has also revealed that its user forums have also been recently hacked and that an extensive list of user information was acquired by hackers--again including email addresses and hashed password details.

A Twitter App For Nokia Series 40 Feature Phones
Twitter's been around as an app for smartphones for a while now, but now seems to be making a beeline for cheaper, smaller, feature phones. Nokia and Twitter have announced a partnership which would bring Twitter to the Nokia Store, making it accessible to the Nokia Series 40 family. Nokia's feature phones continue to be popular in certain markets in Asia and Africa. Twitter's other big feature phone partnership came earlier this week, when itannounced a collaboration with Taiwanese chip maker MediaTek to integrate Twitter even deeper into feature phones of all flavors.

London Police To Trial Crowdsourced Crowd Tracker During Olympics
The City of London police plan to use help from the smartphones of thousands to make the Olympics a safer, calmer experience for everyone. The police are testing an app that could help Olympics visitors navigate crowds in the country's capital city, and help authorities monitor crowds and respond speedily to an emergency. The app was built at the London School of Economics, with partners at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and ETH Zurich. It contains emergency information like the location of tube stations, police stations, and a stream from the police Twitter feed. The crowd-tracking information on the app is gatherered by good old crowdsourcing means. When someone downloads the app and agrees to activate location tracking, their infromation is fed anonymously into a central server, showing crowd movements as heat maps. An iOS version has been submitted to the app store, the Telegraph reports, and an Android app is on the way.

Aereo Backer Barry Diller Sees The Service Expanding Country-wide
Barry Diller, jubilant after a New York judge ruled that the Aereo service he is funding is legal, has told Bloomberg that we can expect a countrywide expansion of the service in the coming months. Earlier this year, when Fast Company caught up with the CEO of Aereo Chet Kanojia, he was a little more circumspect about the company’s plans to grow, saying that they were “a bit secret,” but “mostly because they didn’t exist.” Admittedly, at the time, Aereo was being sued by a battalion of big-name media giants for their business model: redistributing the content that they were making, transmitting TV to iPads and iPhones in HD, for a flat monthly free. But then, we suppose, a little courtroom victory can change things.
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