Hasta La Gadget!

If you maintain a blog on Tumblr, it might be a good idea to stay away from the site for the time being. Apparently, hacker group GNAA has taken advantage of a major security hole to publish racist and offensive posts to Tumblr blogs, and visiting infected blogs while logged into Tumblr helps these posts spread. Buzzfeed originally reported on the attack, posting images of the inflammatory posts being published (just a warning: they’re pretty offensive to anyone other than an Internet troll).

Buzzfeed suggests that if you go to Tumblr, only go to your dashboard. By avoiding other Tumblr blogs, you can prevent this exploit from spreading and posting things you probably don’t want to your blog. It seems that this exploit first targeted, of all things, Tumblr’s Brony tag, with the company making a statement on the exploit. Here it is in full:

There is a viral post circulating on Tumblr which begins “Dearest ‘Tumblr’ users”. If you have viewed this post, please log out of all browsers that may be using Tumblr immediately. Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as swiftly as possible. Thank you.

No word on when a fix is scheduled to arrive, but hopefully it’s delivered at some point today. The post themselves are shooting for shock value in a big way, so make no mistake, this definitely isn’t anything you want your visitors to see. It’s possible that this exploit is spread by running a script in the video embed field, so this is a big security problem indeed.

Of course, breaches like this are nothing new, with hackers doing their best to constantly keep us on our toes. Even though there isn’t any evidence that GNAA is accessing accounts to put these posts up, it’s probably still a good idea to change your password. Better safe than sorry, after all. Keep it tuned here at SlashGear and we’ll keep you posted any new developments with this breach.

Tumblr blogs hacked to display racist, offensive posts is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Just as Facebook did a while back, Tumblr, too, has decided to rebuild its iOS application from the ground up. Inside this new version (3.2), daily users of the blogging service will find a completely redesigned Dashboard, which displays larger pictures and offers faster overall speeds when loading posts. In addition, Tumblr’s also added “spiffy” notification previews to its iOS application, allowing folks to see when other users reply, like or reblog their posts — oh, and better yet, GIFs now automatically play on the all-new Dashboard. The new Tumblr app’s now live on Cupertino’s App Store — all you have to do is either hit the source link below or snag it directly via your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software

Tumblr for iOS goes native: now with redesigned Dashboard, improved notifications and more originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Popular blogging platform Tumblr is still not up after suffering from an outage right before half past eight earlier this Friday morning, where initial whispers of Tumblr being down and out were going around the Internet then, followed by official announcements and feeds as you can see above. In fact, Tumblr acknowledged the issues surrounding their website over Twitter, saying, “We’re experiencing slow loading or intermittent errors on certain pages and are working quickly to restore performance.” Right before 10 a.m. ET, they did send an update, “Tumblr is experiencing network problems following an issue with one of our uplink providers. We will return to full service shortly.”

Alas, things did not seem to go as planned as approximately 60 plus minutes later, issues plaguing Tumblr seemed to have gotten worse – or at least status quo remained, and Tumblr users were not too pleased with the delay in getting the service back up. I guess if you happen to host around 77 million blogs with a 36th ranking as the most popular website in the world, any problems affecting the uptime of your site definitely needs some looking into to make sure it does not happen again in the future.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Tumblr launches new hub for original creative work, Tumblr for iOS gets revamped with new layout and other nifty features,

Tumblr will be covering tomorrow’s presidential debate in the best way possible—by live-GIFfing it. And suddenly, the election became almost tolerable. More »

Just like Instagram, Tumblr has lost its API privileges to scrape your Twitter followers so that it can suggest people you should follow on its own site. Maybe this matters because it signals a larger trend, but if that trend is just pruning away parasitic little features like this one, should we even care? I’m not sure I do. [TheNextWeb] More »