Hasta La Gadget!

Snapchat, the popular disappearing-messages service that suffered some big bumps in the road over the last few months, has hired former Google engineer Peter Magnusson, The Wall Street Journal reports. … Continue reading

When it comes to security, this hasn’t been Snapchat’s year. First hackers leaked a massive amount of private user data; then we discovered how dumb easy it is to circumvent Snapchat’s anti-robot feature. Now, cyber security researchers have shown that Snapchat can be used to launch a denial-of-service attack that freezes your smartphone, according to the L.A. Times.

Read more…

Since hackers have poked holes in Snapchat’s relatively lax security, many have had their way with the image sharing service’s APIs, grabbing unread messages and doing things the app doesn’t traditionally let you do. This latest hack, Little Snapper, is far and away the cutest one yet.

UK-based animator and developer Wesley Hill, who goes by the name Hako on Github, has found a way to print photos you receive through Snapchat onto a Berg Little Printer, an Internet-connected mini thermal printer that can be configured to print out updates from various news sources and social networks. In short, Snapchat photos, which are meant to be ephemeral, become permanent.

With Little Snapper, you can capture unread Snapchat images, host the image for 45 seconds to give the Little Printer time to parse, and then print the picture. After you have a black-and-white print-out, Little Snapper deletes the image. According to the description provided by Hill, Little Snapper simply requires your username and password to access your account, and only received, not sent, images are printed.

Hill built Little Snapper as a challenge to himself, and the whole thing took about three weeks to complete. The 18-year-old told TechCrunch that he knew Snapchat’s Snaptcha system was flawed when he was able to get Little Snapper running with no more than an existing account.

“I think it was poorly implemented if you ask me,” said Hill. “The Snaptcha system wasn’t really effective, and people still got through it regardless. Snapchat’s API didn’t change much either, there was little effort involved to get past.”

If you have a Little Printer, a Snapchat addiction, and appreciate the decorating style of Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, head on over to this landing page for the Little Snapper.

Snapchat, the service that lets people send self-destructing photos and videos, has become very popular over the past year and a half. Sure it has seen its fair share of ups and downs, such as the security breach that compromised phone numbers and usernames of more than 4.6 million users, but it has reportedly peaked the interest for two behemoths. Google and Facebook were both reportedly trying to acquire the company, offering as much as $4 billion, both of them were said to have been turned down. As Snapchat continues to grow, it hasn’t said if it has any plans of bringing the service over to desktop computers. If you’ve been wondering about the possibility of being able to use Snapchat on a Mac, then you’re in luck. Snapped is a new app that lets you do just that.

(more…)

Send And Receive Snapchats On Mac With Snapped original content from Ubergizmo.

Over the weekend quite a lot of Snapchat users complained about receiving Snaps, photos and videos, from people that they did not know. The popular service noticed an increase in “Snap Spam” over the weekend and it has taken notice. Snapchat says that it is currently working on resolving this issue. It also apologized for any unwanted Snaps that users might have received over the weekend.

Users might appreciate the fact that the popular startup was quick to apologize this time around. When word broke that Snapchat had been hacked and that usernames and phone numbers were available in the wild, a lot of people expected to hear an apology. It didn’t come for quite a long time, but Snapchat did ultimately say that it was sorry about the hack. It says that the Snap Spam issue doesn’t seem to be related to the hack, but it may be a consequence of its “quickly growing service.” Snapchat tells users that they should adjust their profile settings in order to determine who can send them Snaps in order to prevent spam from entering their feeds. The “Only My Friends,” option will only allow people you have added to send you self-destructing photos and videos.

Snapchat Says Sorry For ‘Snap Spam’ original content from Ubergizmo.