puddingebola writes with an excerpt from the New York Times: “The Web site and several Twitter accounts belonging to The Financial Times were hacked on Friday by the Syrian Electronic Army in a continuing campaign that has aimed at an array of media outlets ranging from The Associated Press to the parody site The Onion, according to a claim by the so-called army. The Syrian Electronic Army said it seized control of several F.T. Twitter accounts and amended a number of the site’s blog posts with the headline ‘Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.’ Hackers used their access to the F.T.’s Twitter feed to post messages, including one that said, ‘Syrian Electronic Army Was Here,’ and another that linked to a YouTube video of an execution. Both messages were quickly removed.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It would appear that Facebook Home has just surpassed 500k downloads on Google Play since launching on the platform 
Roku just announced via its blog that it has sold 5 million of its streaming Internet media players since its launch back in 2008. The devices have managed to stream a total of 8 billion pieces of content in that time, impressive for a device that started out as essentially a dedicated Netflix box. Roku recently introduced its third-generation hardware to market with the Roku 3, which went on sale in March.
Twitter acquired the mini-video-taking app Vine last October before it ever launched, sending everyone into a frenzy about the company getting into the video space. In late January, Twitter finally launched the app to much applause. Since then, it’s gone through temporarily being removed from the featured section due to an issue over adult content, to being used in interesting ways by brands and celebrities. Today, it all paid off, as it hit the top of the charts for free apps in the U.S., according to co-founder and Creative Director Rus Yusupov: https://twitter.com/rus/status/321406005076451328 https://twitter.com/bobby/status/321406757983358977 It’s a pretty impressive feat for any app that’s not a game to hit this spot, and it’s also impressive for Twitter to have another presence on the list, in addition to their own core app. Clearly the push from Twitter helped the cause. The top app on the free store gets quite a bit of downloads after it hits the spot, eventually coming back down to earth after a quick explosion. The charts are based on new downloads and trajectory of its current popularity, therefore Twitter’s own app sits at #35, which just means that a lot of people have already downloaded it. Its closest competition in the social sphere? Snapchat. And even then, there are a few games in between the two. The good news for Vine and Twitter is that the service is iOS-only at the moment, which means there is quite a bit more growth for the app to experience, much like Instagram did when it went over to the Android platform. Nearly half of all Instagram users are Android users. The multi-app approach is working for companies, and all you have to do is look at Facebook’s success with Messenger, Instagram and the quick-hit Poke.
After I had been running at night for more than a decade, a relatively under-the-radar service called Nextdoor got me to start running during the day. Almost nobody likes to exercise, and for many, overcoming the motivational hump of putting on your shoes and gym clothes can be trying on even the best of days. One evening late in January I had finally overcome this initial barrier to entry, and was just about to stop blogging to do my usual 30-minute nightly sprint when I got the email. “Woman robbed at gunpoint in Dogpatch, San Francisco” the subject line screamed. Unlike many of the emails I constantly receive, this was highly relevant to me, especially because, upon further inspection, the robbery had happened one block from my house. Until this email, I hadn’t given too much thought to Nextdoor, a service that I signed up for at the Allen & Co conference last summer, where co-founder Nirav Tolia had given a talk about the local social network. The company started out as Fanbase in 2009, and was an attempt to create a user-generated content version of ESPN. Founders Tolia and Sarah Leary decided to pivot around May of 2010, and spent the next four to five months testing out different ideas. Fanbase officially pivoted to Nextdoor in September of 2010, starting out its pilot in Lorelei, a neighborhood in Menlo Park. Now a Facebook for your neighborhood, about half the Fanbase funding ended up carrying over, and Tolia and Leary ended up raising an additional $ 40.2 million for the new Nextdoor product. Initially enthusiastic, I had also invited my neighbors to use the platform, which had resulted in a de facto neighborhood support group (including the services of a pet psychic) when their adventurous cat Kiki went missing. I wrote a post about it for TechCrunch and then sort of forgot about it, rarely logging on to peruse the listings of free stuff and garage sales. Well I was certainly giving the service some thought now: “What if I had been that woman who was robbed?””What if I had ventured out of my house just 15 minutes earlier?” I was still in my gym clothes, after so much effort, and feeling antsy from my day of work. Worse, I was now worried about a random stranger I had only heard about through the Internet, and I still needed a run badly.
Free messaging apps are a dime a dozen these days. There’s everything from Viber, to Skype, to WhatsApp to GroupMe. But while these startups concentrated on smartphone apps, it has been in the emerging markets that messaging over data has made a huge impression, and that has required paying attention to feature phones which use Java apps. We saw 
If you were a fan of the teen detective TV show Veronica Mars, this was an exciting morning — creator Rob Thomas launched 
Though we still haven’t gotten a peek of the LTE-capable Galaxy Note 8.0, it would appear that the 3G version is currently making 
While Foursquare has been concentrating on smartphones for some year now, much of the rest of the world has remained on a feature phone (though that of course is changing). So the opportunity to do location-based services has been limited – though not impossible. It has always been possible to triangulate a phones’ rough location based on the nearest three base stations using. So taking that idea, last year a new startup called 
Messaging startup Viber, which lets users of most smartphone platforms send free texts, calls and messages via its app, is continuing to ramp up its user-base. Speaking at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona today, CEO Talmon Marco announced the startup now has 175 million users. Viber has been around since early 2011 but been growing rapidly in the past 12 months. In December it passed 140 million users, saying it was adding new users at a rate of 400,000 per day. Back in September, it hit 100 million users, after hitting 70 million users in May and 50 million in February. Viber’s app supports iOS, Android, S40, Symbian, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. The messaging space is very fragmented globally, but for some context, Line — a messaging app popular in Japan — passed the 100 million user mark last month. Whatsapp, popular in Europe, is estimated to have around 250 million users. And Skype — the grand-daddy of the space — is thought to have around 800 million users, with some 280 million monthly users as of November last year. “Sometimes services take off because of pure luck… sometimes it’s timing. It’s the soul that you put into this. The proof is in the pudding,” said Marco. Also today, Marco said Viber has signed a partnership with Indonesian carrier Axis to offer reduced price packages for consumers in that market using Viber’s free messaging services. Carriers have an uneasy relationship with so called OTT (over-the-top) players like Viber — accusing them of stealing the value by luring customers away from carrier services but Marco said carriers and OTT players can work together to the benefit of both, arguing that the consumer who signs up for the lower cost Viber package with Axis will end up upgrading to more expensive data services. Billing services could be another area where OTT players could partner with carriers, Marco added. Discussing Viber’s user-base he said the app is now being used by 90 per cent of the population of Monaco — a wealthy city state and tax haven — which he argued shows that it’s not the reduced price that lures consumers to OTT players, it’s the novelty of the services.
Firefox OS, the new, HTML5-friendly mobile OS from 
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