Yet another Facebook privacy flaw, this one allowing an attacker to change any other user’s privacy settings or profile information.
Facebook said it was “not aware of any cases in which it was used maliciously”, which is weasel-speak for “everyone who used it to change their ex-girlfriend’s interests to ‘being a dirty whore’ was j/k, so no worries.”
Microsoft continues to compete by pursuing excellence in all they do. In this case, the excellence they’re pursuing is in being litigious assholes, but that counts, right?
The more obvious inversion of Square is finally here: Visa announces an iPhone case that turns your phone into a credit card (motto: because forgetting your phone in a cab wasn’t quite tragic enough). More interesting, though: PayPal’s new iPhone app uses the Bump API to fill both roles.
A nice set of graphs showing Microsoft, Apple, and Google financials since 1985. It always blows my mind to see how profitable Microsoft is, given how irrelevant they seem these days.
What business is Wall Street in?, asks Mark Cuban. His previous two posts on the subject are worth the read, as well.
The New York Times reports that BP is using a dispersant that’s more toxic and less effective than other available alternatives, but just happens to be sold by a company with close ties to BP.
Critics say Nalco, a joint partnership with Exxon Chemical that was spun off in the 1990s, boasts oil-industry insiders on its board of directors and among its executives, including an 11-year board member at BP and a top Exxon executive who spent 43 years with the oil giant.
Drill, baby, drill.
Square is here (you pay or get paid with it). Their latest promo video makes me want to both plug a plastic cube into my iPhone and fly to San Francisco for a decent burrito.
Reddit has a nice writeup on their downtime last week. In a way it’s reassuring to hear that they had the same problem we intermittently had up at work when we were working with only three nodes. The difference is that we only had three nodes because we were running tests on salvaged boxes waiting for our real hardware to show up. I wonder why they chose Cassandra for a data set that they thought could fit comfortably on such a small cluster?
A right proper use of scientific funding if I ever saw one: Autonomous Power Slide!
Quentin Tarantino’s favorite shot.
