Twitter account of Fox News got hacked : Disturbing tweets saying obama was shot dead

This was the Screenshot of a tweet that suddenly appeared on Fox News twitter account.

An official Twitter account belonging to the political team at Fox News has been compromised and fallen into the hands of hackers who have posted false stories claiming that Barack Obama has been assassinated.

The messages were posted at approximately 2am local time, and were quickly retweeted across the network.

Messages posted to the @FoxNewsPolitics account included:

BREAKING NEWS: President @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much. It's a sad 4th for #america. #obamadead RIP

and

We wish @joebiden the best of luck as our new President of the United States. In such a time of madness, there's light at the end of tunnel

The rogue tweets seem to have begun after a message was posted on the FoxNewsPolitics account saying "Just regained full access to our Twitter and email. Happy 4th".

That message implies that whoever hacked into the account compromised the email address of the person who administers the FoxNewsPolitics account, giving an unknown third-party the ability to post tweets at will.

At the time of writing the false announcements are still present on the FoxNewsPolitics Twitter page - the July 4th Independence Day holiday may mean that no-one at Fox has been able to log into the account to remove the tweets.

A Twitter account calling itself "TheScriptKiddie" has claimed responsibility for the attack, but has since been suspended.

The Fox media empire appears to have drawn a lot of fire from hackers in recent months. In May, hackers stole details of employees usernames and passwords and defaced Twitter and LinkedIn pages.

Previously, the personal information of more than 250,000 people was stolenfrom Fox's The X Factor show.

Although some may be amused by the latest hack, users can clearly be put at risk if an account is exploited by somebody with malicious intentions (they could link to a website containing malware, as we recently saw with the recent breach of Simon Pegg's account for instance).

The employees of Fox responsible for the administration of the company's social media accounts might be wise to refresh their knowledge of password security and check that their computers have not been compromised with spyware.

Google+ first privacy flaw

Infant Google+ has a pretty privacy flaw already. 

As the FT's Tim Bradshaw pointed out, despite the fact that you have private "Circles" like family and friends who only can see your content, anyone can "reshare" that content with their own "circles." That content can potentially then be reshared with anyone. Sort of like retweets on Twitter, content originally meant for private consumption could end up going viral. 

Since the FT pointed out, Google implemented an interesting fix. Here's what we saw when we tried to reshare this image

Facebook Through Skype will launch Video Chat feature

Facebook to launch Hangout like feature with the help of Skype

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently promised that on July 6, Facebook would "launch something awesome" that the company's Seattle team developed. On Friday, Facebook distributed official invitations for a special event at its Paolo Alto headquarters on July 6.

Facebook's got something up its sleeve. But what?

TechCrunch claims to have an inside scoop that the social network has partnered with Skype to develop a video chat service, according to "a source with knowledge of the partnership."

Writes TechCrunch,

The product has been built on Skype and will include a desktop component. It’s not clear to me whether that means it will just work if a user has Skype already installed on the computer, or if additional software will need to be downloaded even if the user already uses Skype. But it’s clear that there’s very deep integration between the products, and from the user’s perspective, the product will be an in browser experience.

Google's newly launched social network (Google+) features a video chat feature (called Hangouts) that lets users chat one-on-one or in groups of up to 10.PCWorld predicts that the feature could grow into "serious competition" for Skype. Facebook currently does not offer a video chat feature.

The popular gaming company Zynga files for $1 billon IPO

[DealBook]:Zynga,  social network game developer behind hits such as Farmville — and the owner of other smash titles such as Words with Friends on Android and iPhone — has filed for an initial public offering (IPO), The New York Times reported on Friday. It currently has a $20 billion valuation and has plans to offer 10% of its shares; Morgan Stanley will work on the deal. Mark Pincus, the company’s CEO, expects that Zynga can earn $1 billion through the IPO. Unlike some other recent tech IPOs, which have caused many to claim the industry is in the midst of a “tech bubble,” Zynga has had solid earnings through its business model, which typically relies on in-app purchases for in-game currency. The firm reportedly recorded a profit of $90.6 million in 2011 on revenues of nearly $600 million. Zynga currently remains the top-dog when it comes to gaming on Facebook — it has 272.5 million active users across its biggest titles such as Cityville and Farmville.
Read:[DealBook]

Mark Zuckerberg:"Company going to launch something awesome next week"

Mark Zuckerberg teased reporters on a tour of Facebook's Seattle office today by announcing that the company will "launch something awesome" next week, reportsReuters, which guesses it's in the "mobile or tablet arena." Let the speculation begin:

• BGR: "We suspect it’s going to be the newiPhone photo-sharing service that we saw just last week. ... It’s entirely possible that Zuckerberg will also take the wraps off of his company’s native Facebook iPad app, since it would likely fit well into the photo-sharing ecosystem."

• CNET: "It could be Facebook's long-awaited iPad application. The company currently offers an iPhone app, but iPad owners have so far been forced to use the full site."
• Business Insider: "If we had to guess it would be an iPad app."

HP TouchPad review

It has been exactly 140 days since Hewlett-Packard first unveiled the TouchPad, and I think of it as the first device to emerge from a post-acquisition Palm team that has really been tested over the past few years. To be fair, it will actually be the third webOS device to launch since HP took over Palm, but the the Pre 2 was a leftover from before the deal went through and the Veer never should have been been released. But yes, the Palm team has been through a lot: from botched acquisition talks, to the brink of collapse, to resurrection through Elevation Partners’ investments, to a brilliant new web-based mobile operating system, to the announcement of the phone that would save the business from the brink of collapse, to BGR exclusively reviewing the phone that would save the business from the brink of collapse before any other site on the planet, to the launch of the phone that would save the business from the brink of collapse, to the failure of the phone that would save its business from the brink of collapse, and finally, to HP. Can a company that once lead the industry come back to regain mind share, market share and profit share following a roller coaster ride like that? Hit the break to find out if the TouchPad pushes the company’s mobile business in the right direction or if it is another dud from a company that could be dominating the market.

2015,Dawn of Zettabyte Cisco says

The majority of global Internet traffic (61 percent) will be in some form of video—Internet video-to-PC, Internet video-to-TV, mobile video, et al.The "dawn of the Zettabyte era" will be an unprecedented online milestone that will occur in our lifetime.

 Courtesy of Cisco, a skyscraper infographic about the dawning of the age of the zettabyte.

The what? Each zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes. No? One exabyte = 1,000 petabytes. One petabyte = 1,000 terabytes. One terabyte (you may be starting to feel the ocean floor now) is 1,000 gigabytes. See, you can find your way to the shore now.

Cisco sees the movement towards the exabyte as an inevitable endpoint of the growth in video traffic online. Its analysis suggests that we'll have shifted into the zettabyte age by 2015: by then, it reckons,

Image by Cisco :

Motorola XOOM Honeycomb Tablet : first tablet PC on HoneyComb

World's first Tablet powered by Android 3.0 HoneyComb

Motorola has just outed its first Tablet Pc ever, which is carrying an impressive name, the Motorola XOOM. This slim looking tablet packs with a 10.1 inches capacitive touch screen having a high-resolution of 1280×800 pixels and running on ARM-based dual-core Tegra 2 processor. XOOM is the first tablet to run the Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet-based operating system.

Motorola XOOM is equipped with a 5 Megapixels rear camera with 720p HD video capture and a 2 Megapixels front-side camera for video calling. Motorola XOOM is also having 4G LTE compatibility with external modem attachment and it is having 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and 3G connectivity on Verizon Wireless networks and it gives full 1080p HD support with HDMI-out port and it also having Adobe Flash Player support, accelerometer, gyroscope features and it features Google Maps 5.0 with 3D interaction.

All the 3G XOOMs can be upgradeable to 4G LTE. Bluetooth keyboard and dock accessories will be available for the tablet. Its mobile hotspot capability provides an online connection for up to five other Wi-Fi-enabled devices and ofcourse, a healthy 32GB of onboard storage.

Price & Availability

The Motorola XOOM tablet will launch as a 3G/Wi-Fi-enabled device in first quarter of this year 2011, while 4G connectivity will be made available as an update in Q2. Pricing information has not yet been disclosed. Check out more images and an official promo of Android Honeycomb OS after the break.