Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook is testing chat presence dots in the News Feed. These dots show the chat status of your friends, clicking on it will open up a message thread. This is presumably being done to provide a boost to Facebook’s online messaging service. The testing is only being conducted on desktop at this stage, chat dots have been rolled out to a limited number of users. It is a very convenient way of letting people know which of their friends are available to chat, but one can’t say for sure whether Facebook would roll this out for over 1 billion of its users.

The messaging niche is quite saturated as it is. There are popular cross platform solutions such as Kik, Viber and WhatsApp, platform limited solutions like BBM and iMessage. The green chat dots would serve as another reminder for users to see which of their friends are online, and would hopefully keep users tied to Facebook’s messaging service. Dots will be displayed beside status updates in the News Feed. It is not known as of now when Facebook intends to make these chat dots live across the network for all users.

[Image via CNET]

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: McAfee Patented Technology Will Detect And Block All Pirated Content, Twitter Reportedly Testing Two Factor Authentication,

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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Apple’s iMessage may be the playground for Anonymous to spread DDoS attacks, which coincidentally I was the victim of a few nights ago, but it seems the ability for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to eavesdrop on communications through its service has been posing quite the challenge for the organization.

According to a DEA intelligence note obtained by CNET, Apple’s iMessage service has made it “impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices.” iMessage’s encryption methods were discovered while the DEA’s San Jose division were preparing a request to perform surveillance. Apple’s encryption made it difficult for agents’ ability to obtain the complete history of a person’s messages since it became apparent not all messages were being captured by carriers, such as Verizon who supplied the requested data to the organization. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: DDoS Attackers Using iMessage With No Relief In Sight, ITC rules that Apple did not violate Motorola’s patent, remands case back to judge,

Denial of Service, or DDoS, attacks have been used for decades now, but they’ve become more popular in recent years that were aimed at popular software companies, video game networks, and a number of government agencies to name a few. Up until now, these DDoS attacks have been aimed at organizations, but now they seem to be aimed at individuals.

A DDoS attacker has taken aim at Apple’s iMessage program as a way of completely messing with an individual. iMessages can be sent to either a person’s iOS device or Apple computer as long as the attacker knows the person’s email address or phone number associated with the account. The string of characters are sent at such a high rate that it forces iMessages to crash, which makes it nearly impossible to use the service while the attacks are ongoing.

Unfortunately, there’s currently no way of blocking an iMessage user nor is there a setting to change the frequency the user receives messages. At this point in time, the only solution would be to not use iMessage, although we’re sure a number of you probably won’t find that as an acceptable option. Hopefully Apple catches wind of this method of DDoS attacks and will issue something to block it.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: ITC rules that Apple did not violate Motorola’s patent, remands case back to judge, Messages to be exclusive to OS X Mountain Lion,

Apple’s talking finances right now, and dropping some pretty crazy factoids: not only are there 250 million iCloud users, they’re sending two billion messages per day. Billion. Now if only the damn thing worked well. More »