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The 404 729: Where Stupid Andy is The 404's Nerd of the Year (podcast)

Kenley is back on The 404 today to announce the winner of our Nerd of the Year contest, and Stupid Andy is the victor!

Stupid Andy is a closet geek, so even though you might mistake him for a regular guy, he's well versed in audio/visual languages which I think puts him in the category of nerd, according to this article comparing the two.

Time has announced its Person of the Year for 2010, and although Justin Bieber, the Chilean miners, and the Tea Party all came close, Mark Zuckerberg clinched the title of the person who Time describes as "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

With Zuckerberg in the cockpit, Facebook has changed the way we communicate and consume news, but we have to question whether the release of "The Social Network" had anything to do with the nomination.

Plenty of Gawker accounts were compromised as a result of last weekend's Gnosis breach, and we learn on today's show that even some of our fellow CNET colleagues were affected by the hack! 

We also take a look at a graph of the top 50 Gawker Media passwords that are now posted online for public consumption. Clearly people just don't care about their commenting passwords on the site, because the first 10 are all lazy keyboard strokes  like "123456," "abc123," and "qwerty." On the stranger side, "monkey," "consumer," "superman," and just the number "0" were all identified as popular passwords.

In the face of disaster, the smart thing to do is adapt and move on, so check out this Lifehacker guide to reassessing your online security measures. The page suggests using a free password manager called LastPass that generates complex passwords for you, stores them on a network, and even audits them to make sure they're not easy to guess.

Narcs around the world have been waiting for a Big Brother app for the iPhone, and now it's here. It's called the PatriotApp, and it deputizes any iPhone user (pending a 99-cent fee) with the ability to report a number of crimes directly to the appropriate governmental agency. It links your iPhone to organizations like the FBI, the EPA, and the CDC so you can report things like government waste, environmental crimes, white-collar crimes, and public health concerns on the fly, but it just seems like a professional tool to snitch on your neighbor. Finally, you can also use the app to post your claims to Twitter and Facebook, so all your friends can be aware of your citizen's arrests.

Remember Daniel, our friend who visited The 404 studio last March? He left us this video voice mail telling us about the current fashion trends blanketing his middle school. Congratulations on your graduation, buddy--be sure to tell all your new high school friends about The 404!

Episode 729 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

LinkedIn disables passwords in wake of Gawker attack

LinkedIn is disabling passwords of users whose e-mail addresses were included in the customer data that was exposed in an attack on the Gawker blog sites.

The professional-networking site is taking this action to prevent any of its customers from having their LinkedIn accounts hijacked in the event that they used the same password that they used on any of the Gawker sites.

"There is no indication that your LinkedIn account has been affected, but since it shares an e-mail with the compromised Gawker accounts, we decided to ensure its safety by asking you to reset its password," … Read more

What you need to know about the Gawker breach (FAQ)

This weekend's breach of Gawker has readers of the blogging empire's Web sites scrambling to see if their e-mail addresses have been publicly exposed, but even people who don't use the site can learn lessons from what happened.

What happened? The Web site and back-end database of Gawker was published on the Pirate Bay Bit Torrent site on Sunday. It included Gawker source code, information about a possible site redesign, instant messages between employees, and about 1.3 million user account passwords, usernames, and e-mail addresses. While they were encrypted using DES (Data Encryption Standard), simple passwords … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 1369: If it Biebs, it leads (podcast)

Twitter's top trending topics of 2010 sadly didn't include #mollyontopgear, but it's kind of a plus that Justin Bieber was only around No. 8. Also today, the 4Chan kids go crazy on Gawker and you know what? Innocent people are being caught in this hacker-gang crossfire, and it's frankly just not all that funny anymore. (If, um, it ever was.) Also, could Verizon make my universal data plan dreams come true? --Molly

Subscribe:  iTunes (MP3) |  iTunes (320x180) |  iTunes (640x360) |  RSS (MP3) |  RSS (320x180) |  RSS (640x360)… Read more

The 404 727: Where we're breaking snowballs (podcast)

It's the last full week of the 404 Podcast before we take off for the holidays, and Mark Licea comes in to help us out with the story rundown that includes the weekend box office with a spoiler-free review of "Black Swan," a "Tron"-inspired hotel room in Sweden, and this weekend's Gawker security breach.

Also, be sure to join us after the break when we open a present from a special listener and introduce a new host on the show!

The online Web publisher Gawker Media is the latest victim of a security compromise that exposed the passwords of over 200,000 users last weekend.

The tech news and gossip site told its readers about the security breach in a blog post that urges all registered users to change their log-ins and passwords, especially if they use the same password for multiple accounts online.

A group of hackers called Gnosis took credit for the hack and has made all 200,000 passwords available for download on The Pirate Bay. Their motivations are still unclear, but Gawker may have brought the attack on itself after a blog posted last week mocking the group's hacking skills.

Gawker says it's in the process of improving security to prevent further breaches, but who knows how long that will take. And in other very serious hacking news, be sure to change your e-mail passwords if you subscribed to the McDonalds e-mail list, because that got hacked, too.

U.K. designers Ben Rousseau and Ian Douglas-Jones of Extreme Design are the masterminds behind a "Tron"-inspired hotel room made entirely out of ice and snow.

Located in Jukkasjaviri, Sweden, the hotel rooms look like they're cut directly from the movie, replete with lighting technology built right into the ice to recreate the laser motifs. Rousseau and Douglas-Jones are both "massive fans" of the "Tron" movies, and drew much of their inspiration from the 3D update's unique nightclub scene involving Daft Punk, who also scored the film.

Go see "Black Swan" as soon as you can. The ballet-themed thriller is directed by Daren Aronofsky, who also masterminded "Pi," "Requiem for a Dream," and "The Wrestler," and stars Natalie Portman as a dancer slowly losing her mind from the pressures of her company and a lead role in an updated version of "Swan Lake." This episode is spoiler free, so check out the trailer and see it for yourself!

We're in the process of recording several holiday episodes that will air while we're on vacation, but we need your help for ideas! Shoot us an e-mail at the404(at)cnet(dot)com with your favorite 404 episodes from 2010 and any questions for the hosts.

They can be personal or work-related, or anything else you'd like to know about me, Jeff, or Wilson! We'll send our thanks on the air if we choose your question, but be sure to either write "Favorite 404 episode from 2010" or "Question for The 404" in the subject line to make sure it gets read. Thanks!

Episode 727 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Gawker wrestles with reader data breach, hacking

Gawker.com has apparently been the victim of a pair of security compromises this weekend, one of which put reader's data at risk.

The news, pop culture, and gossip site informed readers today in a blog post that its database of 1.5 million reader-commenting accounts had been compromised and urged its users to change their passwords:

Our user databases appear to have been compromised. The passwords were encrypted. But simple ones may be vulnerable to a brute-force attack. You should change your Gawker password and on any other sites on which you've used the same passwords.

We'… Read more

Gawker shakes up blog format, sales department

Web publisher Gawker Media plans to drastically change the way users interact with its network of sites with a redesign launching next year that lets users jump through stories and interactive advertising akin to using an RSS reader.

The new design was unveiled earlier today by Gawker founder Nick Denton as being the "most significant change in the Gawker model since the launch of Gizmodo and Gawker in 2002," and something that "represents some convergence of blog, magazine and television."

What that means to end users is that they'll be able to cycle through news … Read more

Gawker yanks Palin excerpt after court order

AllThingsD

Hope you've sated your curiosity about Sarah Palin's upcoming book: Gawker Media, which published unauthorized excerpts of the book on Thursday, has pulled them off the Web following a federal court order.

The ruling comes following a lawsuit filed Friday by Palin's publisher HarperCollins. AP:

A federal judge on Saturday ordered Gawker Media to pull leaked pages of Sarah Palin's forthcoming book "America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag" from its blog.

The injunction prohibits Gawker from "continuing to distribute, publish or otherwise transmit pages from the book" pending a … Read more

Palin's publisher sues Gawker over book excerpt

AllThingsD

Want to read parts of Sarah Palin's biography before it's officially released? Head over to Gawker, which has been displaying excerpts from the book since Thursday.

That's despite the fact that Palin's publisher, HarperCollins, filed a lawsuit yesterday against Gawker Media, citing copyright infringement. The post in question is still up there for anyone to read. Palin's new book, "America By Heart," will be officially released Tuesday.

I'm not sure what legal case HarperCollins can make here. Prepublication book leaks are exceedingly common, and happen most often because news organizations simply buy the books, … Read more

New site uses Twitter to track down celebs

File this under Web sites that are sure to anger George Clooney.

Much like Gawker Stalker, the upcoming JustSpotted.com wants to offer users information on the real-time whereabouts of 7,000 celebrities. The difference is JustSpotted, which is scheduled to launch Tuesday, will harness the power of Twitter to help hunt down stars, according to a report in The Hollywood Reporter.

JustSpotted executives have struck some kind of partnership with Twitter that enables them to get access to Twitter posts from people who spot stars in public, the trade magazine reported.

"Proprietary technology uses 'natural-language' filters to figure … Read more