Was Dropbox Really Hacked?

Dropbox suffered a major outage over the weekend.

In one of the more bizarre recent incidents, after the service went down on Friday evening a group of hackers claimed to have infiltrated the service and compromised its servers.

However, on the Dropbox blog, Dropbox VP of engineering Ardita Ardwarl told users that hackers were not to blame.

Ardwari said, “On Friday evening we began a routine server upgrade. Unfortunately, a bug installed this upgrade on several active servers, which brought down the entire service. Your files were always safe, and despite some reports, no hacking or DDOS attack was involved.”

The fault occurred when a bug in an upgrade script caused an operating system upgrade to be triggered on several live machines, rendering them inoperative. Although the fault was rectified in three hours, the knock-on effects led to problems that lasted through the weekend for some users.

Dropbox has assured users that there are no further problems and that all users should now be back online. It said that at no point were files in danger, adding that the affected machines didn’t host any user data. In other words, the “hackers” weren’t hackers at all, but attention seeking trolls.

Dropbox claims to have over 200 million users, many of which it has acquired through strategic partnerships with device manufacturers offering free storage with purchases.

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The company is looking forward to an initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market, so the timing of such a major outage could not be worse. Dropbox, which includes Bono and The Edge from U2 amongst its investors, has recently enhanced its business offering to appeal to enterprise clients, and such a loss of uptime could affect its ability to attract customers.

Are Transparent Semiconductors Next?

Scientist have emerged from their smoke filled labs with transparent thin-film organic semiconductors that could become the foundation for cheap, high-performance displays. Two university research teams have worked together to produce the world’s fastest thin-film organic transistors, proving that this experimental technology has the potential to achieve the performance needed for high-resolution television screens and similar electronic devices.

According to the latest issue of Nature Communications, engineers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and Stanford University show how they created thin-film organic transistors that could operate more than five times faster than previous examples of this experimental technology.

Research teams led by Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, and Jinsong Huang, assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering at UNL used their new process to make organic thin-film transistors with electronic characteristics comparable to those found in expensive, curved-screen television displays based on a form of silicon technology.

At the moment the high tech method is to drop a special solution, containing carbon-rich molecules and a complementary plastic, onto a spinning platter made of glass. The spinning action deposits a thin coating of the materials over the platter. The boffins worked out that if they spun the platter faster and coated a tiny portion of the spinning surface, equivalent to the size of a postage stamp they could put a denser concentration of the organic molecules into a more regular alignment. The result was a great improvement in carrier mobility, which measures how quickly electrical charges travel through the transistor.

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Tesla Updates Charging Software

Tesla Motors Inc is making changes to prevent overheating of its charging systems, including giving customers upgraded wall adapters and providing charging-software upgrades, the electric-car company said on Friday.

The moves come after a November garage fire involving a Model S in Irvine, California, which the Orange County Fire Authority said may have been caused by a Tesla charging system or by a connection at the electricity panel on the wall of the garage.

At the time, Tesla disagreed with the fire officials’ findings, denying that the charging electronics were related to the fire. A Tesla spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a question on Friday about whether the upgrades were related to the Irvine fire.

In a Friday press release, Tesla said that its goal was to prevent excessive heating of the adapters used to charge its cars. A variety of factors ranging from corrosion to inappropriate wiring of electrical outlets can cause overheating, the company said.

A December tweak to its charging software tackles the issue through reducing charging by 25 percent if the charging system detects fluctuations in power entering the vehicle, Tesla said.

“Tesla believes that this software update fully addresses any potential risks,” the release said. But as a precaution, it said it would make available an improved wall adapter with a thermal fuse for affected customers, staring in a few weeks.

Separately, three road fires in Model S sedans caused Tesla’s stock to fall sharply in October.

The fires occurred in Washington state, Tennessee and Mexico. In the U.S. incidents, Model S sedans caught fire after running over road debris. In Mexico, a Model S caught fire after striking a concrete wall.

On Friday, Tesla’s stock fell 1.23 percent to $145.72, up from levels under $120 in late November but down from its high of $194.50 in late September.

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OpenSuse Hacked

The openSUSE Forums were hijacked today by a Pakistani hacker who goes by handle H4x0r HuSsY. Apparently the hacker exploited the vulnerability in vBulletin 4.2.1 software which SUSE uses to host the forum. The problem is that the hack revealed that the openSUSE Forums were based on proprietary forum software.

The openSUSE team has denied that the users’ passwords were compromised by the hack.

“The credentials for your openSUSE login are not saved in our application databases as we use a single-sign-on system (Access Manager from NetIQ) for all our services. This is a completely separate system and it has not been compromised by this crack,” the team said.

What the cracker reported as compromised passwords where indeed random automatically set strings that are in no way connected to your the passwords.

While it was good that none of the user data was compromised open sourcers are scratching their collective heads and wondering if the attack would have happened if the outfit had been eating its own dogfood and used some nice open source technologies.

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T Mobile Sees Growth

T-Mobile US has reported a fourth-quarter boost in customer growth and offered to pay customers to ditch rival service providers, escalating already intense competition in the U.S. wireless market.

The company, the No. 4 U.S. mobile operator, promised payments of up to $350 per line to consumers who break their contract with any of its bigger rivals and switch to T-Mobile.

The offer came just days after AT&T Inc promised a $200 credit to T-Mobile customers who switch. While AT&T also offered up to $250 for switching customers who trade in their phone, T-Mobile said it would pay up to $300 for trade-ins.

The companies have been targeting each other because they use the same network technology, making it easy for consumers to bring their phone when they switch, but some on Wall Street are concerned they will cause an industry-wide price war.

T-Mobile said it hoped that whole families as well as individuals would switch to its service in response to the new cash offer, which is aimed at covering early contract termination fees typically charged by wireless operators.

John Legere, the outspoken chief executive of T-Mobile, said he hoped the offer would end the “industry scam” of family plans, which tie entire families into long-term contracts.

Legere joked that AT&T’s recent offer would actually play to T-Mobile’s advantage because it would allow AT&T customers to try a different service with less financial risk than before.

“If it doesn’t work they’ll pay you to come back,” Legere said in announcing the offer at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

T-Mobile, which is 67 percent owned by Deutsche Telekom, managed to turn the corner on four years of customers losses in 2013 by criticizing its rivals and promoting its service plans as being more flexible and consumer friendly.

It said it added 1.645 million net customers in the fourth quarter, up from 1.023 million in the quarter before, marking its third quarter of customer growth for 2013.

The fourth-quarter additions included 869,000 valuable post-paid customers, which was up 13 percent from the third quarter, according to the company.

It said customer defections, known in the industry as churn, stayed at third-quarter levels of 1.7 percent and compared with 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012.

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Microsoft Buys Parature

Microsoft Corp said that they it will acquire cloud-based software maker Parature Inc, which assists businesses in managing help desks and provide other customer support services.

Parature’s software helps businesses provide automated customer service, manage online discussion boards and forums, and conduct online surveys.

The company’s customers include Ask.com, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, International Business Machines Corp and Saba Software Inc.

Microsoft did not disclose the terms of the deal.

The acquisition will boost Microsoft’s Dynamics unit, which makes business software and counts Mattress Firm Holding Corp, Pandora Media Inc and Nissan Motor Co as customers.

Cloud computing, a broad term referring to the delivery of services via the Internet from remote data centers, is a favorite with businesses because it is faster to implement and has lower upfront costs than traditional software.

Oracle Corp said in December that it would buy web-based marketing software maker Responsys Inc for about $1.39 billion to bolster its cloud computing offerings.

Salesforce.com Inc, the biggest maker of online sales management tools, said in June that it would pay $2.5 billion for marketing software maker ExactTarget, which helps companies reach customers on social networks through mobile devices.

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Yahoo Spreading Malware?

Some advertisements on Yahoo Inc’s European websites last week spread malicious software, Yahoo said on Sunday, potentially infecting the computers of thousands of users.

Last Friday, Fox-IT, a Delft, Netherlands-based computer security firm, wrote in a blog that attackers had inserted malicious ads served by ads.yahoo.com.

In a recently released statement, a Yahoo spokesman, said: “On Friday, January 3 on our European sites, we served some advertisements that did not meet our editorial guidelines, specifically they spread malware.” Yahoo said it promptly removed the bad ads, and that users of Mac computers and mobile devices were not affected.

Malware is software used to disrupt a computer’s operations, gather sensitive information, or gain access to private computer systems.

Fox-IT estimated that on Friday, the malware was being delivered to approximately 300,000 users per hour, leading to about 27,000 infections per hour. The countries with the most affected users were Romania, Britain, and France.

“It is unclear which specific group is behind this attack, but the attackers are clearly financially motivated and seem to offer services to other actors,” Fox-IT wrote in the January 3 blog post.

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Mozilla Delays Touch Browser

Mozilla has again delayed the release date for a touch-enabled version of Firefox that will run in Windows 8′s “Modern” user interface (UI), with the new target in mid-March.

Ship estimates for the browser have been fluid, to put it mildly. In August, the open-source developer pegged December 2013 as the target for the “Metro-ized” version of Firefox. In September, Mozilla said it was hoping to bundle Firefox Metro with the Windows edition of Firefox 27, slated for release on Feb. 4.

Metro was the name Microsoft once applied to the radical UI of Windows 8, but the company ditched the moniker in 2012 over a trademark dispute with a German retailer.

The newest information from Mozilla, however, has tapped March 18, when Firefox 28 is to ship, as the projected release of the browser.

Although a preview of Firefox Metro was bundled with the Aurora build of Firefox more than three months ago — and is currently in Aurora for Firefox 28 — it has not yet been promoted to the next channel, Beta, which is the precursor to Release. Mozilla has set a Jan. 31 deadline for deciding whether the touch browser is ready to add to Firefox 28 Beta.

Mozilla started work on a Metro edition of Firefox in March 2012. It shipped a rough preview in October 2012, several weeks before Microsoft launched Windows 8. At that time, Mozilla’s schedule said the Firefox app might appear as early as January 2013. In May 2013, however, the company said its developers would complete Firefox for Modern between Oct. 2, 2013, and March 20, 2014, with mid-November the likeliest date.

If Mozilla makes the targeted March 18 release, it will have spent two years crafting the browser, which will have shipped 17 months after the retail debut of Windows 8.

Although Mozilla has said it’s important that it have a Metro-ready browser to remain competitive — and Windows 8′s and Windows 8.1′s user share has climbed above the 10% mark– it’s unclear what percentage of those PC and tablet owners spend serious time in the UI, as opposed to the traditional Windows desktop.

Mozilla is also discussing a name for the browser, which was code named “Firefox Metro” during development and later was saddled with the label “Windows 8-style Firefox.”

One suggestion, forwarded by a Mozilla user experience designer, has been “Firefox Touch,” which got nods of approval from others in a Mozilla planning message forum.

“‘Windows 8-style Firefox’ is too long and already doesn’t make perfect sense with Windows 8.1 released, but will make less sense when Windows 9 comes out,” noted Brian Bondy, a Firefox platform engineer who has led the work on the Metro version. “I like Firefox Touch and I think we should go with that. It’s a product designed above all else for touch.”

Some, however, objected to labeling the browser as “Firefox Touch,” pointing out that that would downplay the Android browser Mozilla maintains, which is also touch-enabled.

“I agree with Jim that it should be simply Firefox, and that differentiation happens at the point of download,” countered Peter Scanlon, Mozilla’s acting chief marketing officer, in another message to the same discussion forum.

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Sony Decides Not To Sell

Japan’s Sony Corp has changed its mind and decided not to sell its lithium-ion battery unit.  Instead Sony has decided to take a chance at turning the business around with a weak yen and growing demand for smart phone batteries.

In addition to a weak yen, which can boost overseas earnings, the battery unit is also seeing increased demand for some of its new products, the Nikkei business daily reported.

For the past two years Sony had been planning to offload the unit, which was a pioneer in making lithium-ion batteries for computers and mobile devices but has struggled recently against cheaper South Korean rivals.

A government turnaround fund tried to broker a sale of the battery business to a Nissan Motor Co Ltd and NEC Corp joint venture earlier this year.

However, talks have stalled and Sony has now told the turnaround fund that it will hold on to the battery unit and develop it as a core business, the Nikkei reported, citing unidentified sources.

Sony, which last year sold its chemical business to the government turnaround fund, is trying to revive the fortunes of its consumer electronics business by focusing on cameras,gaming and mobile devices.

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Reddit ISO Profits

Social news hub Reddit enjoyed a major get when it interviewed Barack Obama last year. The big get for 2013 was reaching 90 million unique visitors a month, according to the company, on par with the likes of eBay. This season, even Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates joined its Secret Santa gift exchange.

Now, the self-dubbed “Front Page of the Internet” is going for a milestone it has been trying to reach since its founding in 2005: profitability.

After years of experimenting with paid subscriptions and display advertising, Reddit, with just 28 employees, has begun pouring resources into building an electronic bazaar.

Company executives say they increasingly believe such a venue is the answer to their long search for reliable revenue, complicated in part by their fans’ mistrust of advertising.

If Reddit Gifts, as the burgeoning bazaar is known, brings sustainable profitability, it would mark a turning point for an outfit that has exerted an outsized and sometimes controversial influence on Internet culture yet languished financially.

Reddit estimates over 250,000 items have been purchased over the holiday, mostly as part of the 50 or so mostly geek-oriented Secret Santa gift exchanges – where zombie- or fantasy-themed presents, say, change hands – that users have created.

Although Reddit won’t disclose details about how much money it has made from Reddit Gifts or its overall financial performance, it takes a 15 to 20 percent cut of every purchase.

Usually priced between $10 and $25, the goods reflect Reddit’s young and geeky user base, from collages of cats in steampunk apparel to coffee mugs branded by Imgur.com, a repository of funny Web pictures, to an entire category dedicated to bacon-related products. More than 250 merchants supply gifts curated and “up-voted” by the community, much as articles and links are elevated on the Reddit site itself.

The gift exchange made headlines this month after Gates signed up and surprised a Reddit user by sending her a travel book and a stuffed cow, symbol of the charity he donated to in her name.

The company, which is hoping to position itself as a bona fide shopping destination year-round, estimates that only 14 percent of its marketplace revenue comes from the Christmas-season gift exchange programs.

Yet those sales alone could put Reddit firmly in the black, said Dan McComas, the head of Reddit Gifts. He added that the company may choose to reinvest funds in e-commerce customer service and infrastructure.

Chief Executive Yishan Wong, a former Facebook executive, said Reddit was “kind of” breaking even and denied that pressure was mounting on his team to turn a profit.

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