Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve arrived at another Friday evening, which means that the weekend lies ahead. Today, as many of you probably already know, was the one-year anniversary of the passing of Steve Jobs. Apple paid tribute to Jobs in a new video released today, and it was announced that three modified MacBook Pros will be auctioned off in memory of Jobs. On the lighter side of things, Lenovo is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ThinkPad with a look back through time, and Samsung’s profits for Q3 2013 managed to break company records (not an easy thing to do, considering how popular Samsung is).

The LG Nexus G has been tipped for a reveal later this month, and it looks like problems with component yields might mean that we’re headed for iPad Mini shortages (assuming the rumored tablet actually exists, of course). The Kindle Paperwhite has officially been jailbroken, and Rovio was spotted teasing a new Star Wars–Angry Birds tie-in earlier today, leaving us to wonder what’s in the pipeline. Sprint might be looking to rain on T-Mobile’s MetroPCS parade, and Anonymous is at it again, this time bringing down government sites in Sweden in the name of The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Wii U pre-orders are hard to find these days, but provided you’ve got the cash to burn, you can pick one up on eBay. iPhone cases were popping up left and right today, like this Loop Mummy case for the iPhone 4/4S and these Moshi cases for the iPhone 5. Xi3 has gone to Kickstarter to fund its new X3A and X7A modular computers, and one analyst is saying that HP’s stock should be worth negative $2. Ubisoft gave us a brand new ZombiU development diary, and we heard that increased iPhone 5 quality demands led to a strike at a Foxconn factory in China today.

New algorithms may eventually lead to cell phones that charge twice as fast, while NASA explained why Curiosity is collecting dirt from the surface of Mars. Motorola has managed to fight off Microsoft in a patent dispute over in Germany, while astronomers say they’ve discovered a new star circling a black hole at the center of our galaxy. Pokemon Black and White 2 launch in the US this Sunday (are you ready to be the best?) and we found out today that New Zealand authorities may have been spying on Kim Dotcom much earlier than they’ve admitted.

Finally tonight, we have quite a few original articles to share with you. Don Reisinger asks if Bill Gates will be remembered in the same way as Steve Jobs when he’s gone, Chris Burns explains why the iPad Mini will be free when it launches and what the iPad Mini needs to fix when it comes to Apple tablets, and Chris Davies has a review of the Synology DS213air NAS. That does it for tonight’s evening wrap-up – we hope you have a fun weekend!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: October 5, 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

GoDaddy recently underwent a crash which also took down millions of sites hosted by it. An Anonymous member, AnonymousOwn3r, claimed that he was responsible for the crash and that he accomplished it through a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. He also said that he launched the attack in his individual capacity, not representing Anonymous.

GoDaddy was quick to respond to this, stating that it was aware of the problem and was working actively to resolve it. The company was able to restore the services within 24 hours and stated that no customer data was compromised during the entire fiasco. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: GoDaddy restores service after hacking incident, GoDaddy Attacked, Millions Of Sites Down,

Today is not a good for those working behind the scenes at GoDaddy. TechCruch is reporting that an Anonymous member has brought GoDaddy down and, by extension, has brought down many of the sites GoDaddy hosts. Apparently, the attack was carried out by someone going by the name of “AnonymousOwn3r” on Twitter, and he says that he worked alone in bringing the website hosting service down.

Of course, this is causing a headache for more than just the folks at GoDaddy, as many business owners are seeing their sites go down as a result of the attack as well. Since the attack makes a number GoDaddy’s DNS servers inaccessible, many site owners who were using GoDaddy’s DNS service were affected by this breach. Customers are also saying that the company’s email and phone services are down as well.

GoDaddy itself has had to deal with a number of angry customers this afternoon, and at the time of this writing, the hosting service is still down for many. GoDaddy seems to be making progress, with one of its most recent tweets claiming that service has returned for some customers. With tens of millions of sites down, however, GoDaddy has its work cut out for it.

What’s interesting is that AnonymousOwn3r did this whole thing by himself. He hasn’t really given a reason for his attack on GoDaddy, saying in a tweet that the breach was meant to test GoDaddy’s “cyber security,” among other reasons that he can’t talk about now. A lot of GoDaddy customers are understandably calling him out on Twitter, so let’s just hope that the company can get everything back to normal soon. Stay tuned, as we’ll have more details for you as this story develops.

Anonymous attack brings down tons of GoDaddy sites is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

By now, many of you probably know about last week’s AntiSec hack. The group claimed to have stolen 12 million Apple UDIDs – 1 million of which were posted to Pastebin – from the computer of an FBI agent. At the time, the FBI said that it didn’t have any involvement in the hack, and that AntiSec had made the whole story up. While that seemed like just an FBI attempt to distance itself from the breach, it turns out that the FBI was telling the truth – at least when it comes to whether or not the information was stolen from an FBI computer.

NBC News has reported on the real victim of the breach: publishing company BlueToad, which operates out of Florida. CEO Paul DeHart says that the information Anonymous shared last week was stolen from BlueToad’s servers two weeks ago, and that the company came to this conclusion by comparing the stolen information to its own collection of UDIDs. The result? 98% of the data matched up, which leads DeHart to believe that the data originally came from his company’s servers.

“That’s 100 percent confidence level, it’s our data,” DeHart said. “As soon as we found out we were involved and victimized, we approached the appropriate law enforcement officials, and we began to take steps to come forward, clear the record and take responsibility for this.” BlueToad has since posted a statement about the breach to its blog, apologizing about the information getting loose. DeHart didn’t give much more information about the breach, saying that an investigation is still ongoing.

It sounds like BlueToad has quite a few UDIDs in its database, too – though you probably don’t recognize the name, the company provides app building services for 6,000 other publishers. This realization seems to mesh well with statements made by both the FBI and Apple last week. When the data was leaked, the FBI claimed that it didn’t come from any of its computers and Apple insisted that it wasn’t sharing UDIDs with the organization. As a publisher, on the other hand, BlueToad would have access to those UDIDs, though DeHart admits that the stolen information could have made it onto FBI computers in the time since the breach.

Still, even if that information was taken from an FBI computer, it seems that it didn’t originate there. The good news is that BlueToad, at the request of Apple earlier this year, stopped storing UDIDs, and updated its apps so they would stop collecting the information. Stay tuned for more on this rather strange story, as more information will likely develop in the coming days.

Leaked Apple IDs didn’t come from FBI after all is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Jake Davis—perhaps better known as Topiary, mastermind behind crazy Internet assaults during the summer of 2011—is out on bail with one obvious condition: no Internet. Now, 12 months after his heyday, he’s decided to reflect on his experience, and his new Internet-free life, and wrote about it in the Guardian. More »