media

How Oreo's brilliant blackout tweet won the Super Bowl

Anyone watching the Super Bowl this evening saw a great game -- and one of the greatest embarrassments in pro sports history: a power outage that halted play for a full half-hour.

As the eventual champion Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers -- and tens of thousands inside New Orleans' Superdome and millions watching on TV -- waited, Oreo came up with an idea so brilliant and bold that it out and out won the night.

"Power out? No problem," the tweet read, along with a hastily put-together image of an ad showing an Oreo and the … Read more

Twitter: Hacking attacks may have accessed data of 250K users

Twitter said today that it recently detected a series of attempts to hack into user data and that the attackers may have successfully absconded with some users' information.

In a blog post this afternoon, Twitter explained the situation and the steps it has taken to fight off the hackers.

This week, we detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later. However, our investigation has thus far indicated that the attackers may have had access to limited … Read more

Twitter's valuation said to hit $9.9 billion

Everyone wants to know what Twitter is worth, and while a number of recent reports have pegged the company's valuation as high as $11 billion, or as low as $9 billion, it now seems that the real number is in the middle, at just under $10 billion.

According to Fortune, a new block of early employee shares, currently for sale, price Twitter at a valuation of $9.9 billion. "The shares were secured by a fund affiliated with Gentry Venture Partners, which has been pitching the deal to clients," Fortune wrote. "It would seem the premium … Read more

10 Pinterest tips from a user with 1.2 million followers

Last time I discussed Pinterest in-depth was in March 2012, when I wrote "Six things I learned from six days on Pinterest."

I've since joked that I should have added, "...as the only man on Pinterest," considering how much of the platform is dominated by women.

It turns out there are men having success with the platform, and one of them shared his tips with me.

Robert Anthony is a veteran tech journalist and former PC Magazine writer who now contributes to the New York Daily News, PC World, Black Enterprise, and other publications and … Read more

One video for all with GOM Video Converter

GOM's latest version already supports the expected list of common formats: AVIs, MP4s, WMVs, etc. If you're not sure which format to use, GOM Video Converter includes presets for the current line of popular portable gadgets, consoles and more so that no Sony, Microsoft, Samsung, or Apple device gets left behind.

Installation takes some more input than standard processes, mostly involving user confirmation of installing certain codecs. Personally, we felt that it's odd to ask for such confirmations as codecs don't really take that much space anyways and the odds of a typical user knowing which … Read more

Apple polishes iTunes 11 with an all-new look and lots of new features

An all-new Apple iTunes? No need to tempt us: We'll bite! The look is pure Apple, but the new iTunes 11 is also lighter, sleeker, and faster than the old app. It also comes with many new features and refinements, such as improved iCloud integration that lets you play your iTunes purchases right away on all your devices or pause play on one device and pick it right up on another. New Library Views clean up media collection clutter. Expanded views display album notes in place so you don't have to click back and forth. The new MiniPlayer … Read more

Twitter acquires Crashlytics crash reporting service

Twitter has bought Crashlytics, a startup whose crash reporting tool has been incorporated into a wide variety of iOS apps including Vine, Yelp, Kayak, TaskRabbit, and Waze.

In a blog post today, Crashlytics co-founders Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang announced that the company is "joining the flock," the term often used when people or companies are hired or acquired by Twitter:

We started Crashlytics a little over a year ago to address a huge hole in mobile app development. With hundreds of millions of devices in use around the world, it was impossible for developers to fully test … Read more

Twitter making it harder (sort of) to find porn on Vine

As has been well reported, there's already an endless amount of porn on Vine, Twitter's new video service. But now, the social-networking company appears to be making it a bit harder to find the adults-only content.

According to The Verge, Twitter has blocked a number of porn-related Vine search terms such as "#porn." At the same time, though, it's clear that there are still plenty of ways to find people's 6-second sex tapes. For example, a search for "#nsfw," meaning not safe for work, resulted in no shortage of videos.

And while … Read more

Do Twitter, Google share too much info with gov'ts? (poll)

To "celebrate" Data Privacy Day today, both Google and Twitter issued transparency reports, detailing how often they comply with government requests for information about users. In the United States, Google said it provided some or all requested information 88 percent of the time, while Twitter -- which says it prizes users' privacy -- did so 69 percent of the time.

Those numbers seem shockingly high, but in Twitter's case at least, privacy advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said they didn't blame the social network for complying with the law. And, the EFF added, Twitter's … Read more