Author: Jamie Welch, Senior Editor

TwitPub invents paid Twitter accounts

Posted by | Apr 15, 2009 | |

This was bound to happen: Someone has invented a paid access scheme for Twitter. TwitPub is a marketplace where Twitterers can sell access to their updates, by registering their protected accounts with the service. Other Twitter users sign up and pay for access to these accounts on the TwitPub marketplace. TwitPub takes 20% of the subscription revenues for itself and gives 80% to its publishers. TwitPub works by gating access to protected Twitter accounts. Once a user pays for access to a Twitter stream, the system sends the author of it an e-mail advising him or her to allow that user to see the updates. (In the future the e-mail loop should be removed.) Setting up a Twitter account for gated access, in TwitPub (Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET) Authors set their own subscription prices, but the floor is $0.99 a month, which is too high. Another snag: Although author payments are sent to Paypal accounts (handy), subscribers must pay by credit card via WorldPay, a payment processing system relatively unknown in the United States. I wanted to test TwitPub, but I wouldn’t even pay for my own updates since I had to hand over my credit card to this processor that I’d never heard of. But the real question is: Is this for real? Can it possibly work? The logic of the founders is not without merit. I am sure...

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Psystar still defying Apple

Posted by | Apr 15, 2009 | |

One year ago, an otherwise sleepy April in the Apple universe was turned upside down by a tiny company from Southern Florida, kicking off a real-world Clone War between Apple and Psystar. Today, the essential question regarding Psystar is unchanged: does the company have the right to sell computers with Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard preinstalled, as it has been doing since April 14, 2008? Psystar set off shock waves through the Apple world that week, as an army of journalists, bloggers, fanboys, and detractors set off on a manic search for anything and everything related to the company and its desktops. Psystar emerged a year ago as a small independent system builder, the likes of which can be found in any medium-size town in the U.S. What provoked the interest and ire of the Mac community was Psystar’s decision to ship so-called “white box” systems with Mac OS preinstalled alongside systems with Windows Vista and Linux, in defiance of Apple’s licensing policies for that operating system. Psystar recently updated its flagship product, the Open Computer, and CEO Rudy Pedraza promises that more products are yet to come. In an interview, Pedraza acknowledged that the past year has been quite a challenge, but he’s glad that at least so far, Psystar has been able to provide an alternative to Apple. “(Our customers) are people who would otherwise be unable...

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Social Community Up In Arms Over Amazon Glitch

Posted by | Apr 14, 2009 | |

Policy change, personal agenda or a computer glitch? Over the weekend there has been much speculation over why gay and lesbian content previously being listed in the both the best seller and search algorithms would suddenly become blacklisted? Pushing aside everyone’s personal thoughts and opinions on the matter, there remains the questions as to the actual root cause of the change. According to this article, it is allegedly a matter of human error. Yes, that is right, the great “Amazon Fail” as it is being called, is said to merely a matter of one Amazon employee mislabeling gay and lesbian content as “adult” in nature. As for whether or not this is what actually happened, this not for me to say. But based on my own experiences with working with databases, I can see the rational of how something like this might have happened when one is not paying close attention. via Social Community Up In Arms Over Amazon Glitch ~ Web...

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Worms Were Crawling Everywhere on Twitter This Weekend

Posted by | Apr 12, 2009 | |

Wily Weekend Worms On a weekend normally reserved for bunnies, a worm took center stage. A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program sometimes introduced by folks with malicious intent to do some harm to a network. Please note that no passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information was compromised as part of these attacks. The worm introduced to Twitter this weekend was similar to the famous Samy worm which spread across the popular MySpace social-networking site a while back. At that time, MySpace filed a lawsuit against the virus creator which resulted in a felony charge and sentencing. Twitter takes security very seriously and we will be following up on all fronts. What Went Down? At about 2AM on Saturday, four accounts were created that began spreading a worm on Twitter. From 7:30AM until 11AM PST, our security team worked on eliminating the vectors that could identify this worm. At that time, about 90 accounts were compromised. We identified and secured these accounts. Later in the afternoon, a second wave of the worm hit Twitter and this time it was much more intense. We got back to work and the situation was contained. About 100 accounts were compromised. Again, we identified and secured the accounts. We also identified and deleted malicious content that could work to further spread the worm. On Sunday morning, we had another bout of...

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Have You Ever Used a Virtual Web Computer?

Posted by | Apr 11, 2009 | , |

Have you ever wanted to have a computer that you can access anywhere, is stored externally, and won’t cost you a thing?  Than you should check out g.ho.st.  G.ho.st offers every person in the world a free Virtual Computer (VC). G.ho.st is simply pronounced “ghost”, an acronym of Global hosted operating system (written G.ho.st with two dots because a URL (web address) must have dots!). The G.ho.st Virtual Computer includes almost everything you would have in a physical computer – a desktop, file storage (like a disk drive) and applications (apps).But unlike a physical computer, your Virtual Computer (VC) is “hosted” in a professional data center somewhere in the Internet “cloud” and is accessible as a web page in any browser. You can run the entire G.ho.st VC from any Internet browser without the need to install any software or “sync” files. Just enter your username and password, and continue using your VC from exactly the state you last left it in.  G.ho.st is revolutionizing personal computing by delivering to you a free Virtual Computer – personal computing in a web page, free of charge. For the first time in history, G.ho.st frees you from being tied to any one physical device – and frees you from the worries of installing software, backing up, and other administration. Freedom – Your entire computing environment is available and accessible from any computer...

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