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Best of Today (7/19)

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Are you listening, Steve Jobs? « BirdAbroad. UPDATE #2: Click here for updates on the fake Apple store, with video footage. UPDATE #1: To address the main issue that people have been getting all bent out of shape about: the stores I photographed do not appear to be authorized Apple sellers . The problem with following people on Google Plus and some suggestions for improvements. « Cejest. Google+ is the social backbone. Google Spending Millions to Find the Next Google - NYTimes.com (Build 20110713171652) Peter DaSilva for The New York Times David Krane, speaking, and Bill Maris, right, in blue, of Google Ventures.

Google Spending Millions to Find the Next Google - NYTimes.com (Build 20110713171652)

They were meeting with members of LawPivot, a start-up. Google Ventures says it has invested as much money in the first half of this year as in all of last. In the hottest market for technology start-up companies in over a decade, the Silicon Valley behemoth is playing venture capitalist in a rush to discover the next Facebook or Zynga.

Other pedigreed tech companies are doing the same, as dollars coming from corporations approach levels last seen in the dot-com bubble era of 2000. How LulzSec hacked the Sun's website. The Sun's website was hacked by LulzSec The LulzSec attack on News International's systems to redirect readers from the Sun to a fake story, and to try to get at its internal email store, appears to have been two-pronged.

How LulzSec hacked the Sun's website

Some of the more skilled hackers, including some from the hacker collective Anonymous, had been probing it in detail for about two weeks before the hack. One was to break into its email archive; the other was to hack and "deface" the site itself, by putting up a fake story – the same method LulzSec originally came to attention by doing when it hacked the PBS site to claim that Tupac Shakur was not dead.

However as far back as 2009 a weakness was found in the "Contact us" form of the Sun's site that meant that it could be used to attack the database holding emails for the system. Some former News International employees' names and mobile phone numbers have been given out on Twitter by people affiliated to the hacker collective Anonymous. Are AAA games too long? - News at GameSpot. Who Was There: The session was made up of a five-person panel of designers and story writers: Charles Cecil, famous for his work on Broken Sword; Adrian Hon, chief creative officer of story developer Six to Start; Alexis Kennedy, chief narrative officer at Fail Better games; Patrick O'Luanaigh, CEO of indie developer nDreams; and writer David Varela.

Are AAA games too long? - News at GameSpot

Reddit Co-Founder Charged with Data Theft. Frustrated judge pushes Google digital book deal. Meet Proust, a social network that digs deeper. Nowadays, a lot of information can be found online.

Meet Proust, a social network that digs deeper

The starring actress of the 1996 movie “The Craft”? Fairuza Balk (courtesy of IMDB.) Where was Gordon Moore born? San Francisco (thank you, Wikipedia.) Exactly how hot did it get on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on July 7, 2008? 7 days in the cloud: My week with the Samsung Chromebook. When I first agreed to write about a week working with nothing but a Samsung Series 5 Chromebook, I knew I was asking for trouble.

7 days in the cloud: My week with the Samsung Chromebook

Although I already knew and liked its Chrome Web-browser-based Linux operating system, ChromeOS, I also know how I work. You see, on a normal day, I don't work on just any one computer, or even just one operating system. I usually work on at least three systems and one of those is always running Mint Linux, while another is usually running Ubuntu and one keeps flipping its little mind from Windows 7 to XP depending on what I'm doing to Windows that day. Eager to share, but doesn't quite know how: hands on with Spotify (Build 20110713171652) The long-anticipated US release of the music streaming service Spotify finally happened last week.

Eager to share, but doesn't quite know how: hands on with Spotify (Build 20110713171652)

With a free version that gives users access to millions of songs in a highly stable desktop app, Spotify stands to make a solid impact among American music listeners. The subscription versions, however, face stiffer competition from competing services like Rdio and Napster. Americans gazed longingly over at the enormous music catalog Spotify provided to Europeans for nearly two years before its arrival here.

Now that it's finally reached US turf, invites to the free tier of Spotify have become highly sought after and batches of invites have been distributed through different outlets. Using Spotify is pretty straightforward in many ways. The free version of Spotify works well as a desktop replacement for iTunes. Access to music is not a problem for Spotify, as it boasts over 13 million tracks, but discovery is one of its weak points. Spotify's biggest social effort is with Facebook.

Spotify and Our Degraded Music Culture. Spotify, a free streaming music service from Sweden that’s already hugely popular abroad, launched in the U.S. last week, taking a cue from Google and letting invites to the service drip out while word of mouth and good will built.

Spotify and Our Degraded Music Culture

Go on Twitter or any message board and you’re bound to find someone giving away invites—I got mine from Billy Corgan, who’s already crowned Spotify as “the future of music,” his favorite over-used superlative.