Elance Hit By Security Breach

We’ve just gotten word that development-outsourcing site Elance has suffered a security breach, compromising some user information that included names, addresses, phone numbers, and location (no financial information was taken).

Multiple users have received the following letter:

It has recently come to our attention that certain Elance user information was accessed without authorization, including potentially yours. The data accessed was contact information — specifically name, email address, telephone number, city location and Elance login information. This incident did not involve any credit card, bank account, social security or tax ID numbers.

We have remedied the cause of the breach, and are working with appropriate authorities. In the meantime, please take extra precautions in protecting your Elance account. For example, do not provide your login information on any site that is not http://www.elance.com, and NEVER give out passwords by email, over the telephone or on websites that are not the Elance site.

We sincerely regret any inconvenience or disruption this may cause.

For more details and ongoing information about this, please visit this page in our Trust & Safety center: http://www.elance.com/p/trust/account_security.html

Michael Culver
Vice President
Elance

Elance’s security alert site reveals that the data was taken by hackers who discovered a security hole on the site:

The hackers discovered a security hole on an unprotected page that enabled them to access a data table that contained contact information including name, email address, telephone number, city location, and username, and that contained protected versions of user passwords, in an unreadable format called a one-way hash. Their attack did not access personal financial information such as credit card, bank account, social security or tax ID numbers.

In a bizarre twist Elance’s security site says that some of the stolen user data is now appearing on OutsourcingRoom.com, a competing service. Elance writes that it is working to have the data removed.

This is only the latest in a recent string of security breaches on major web services. It’s obviously nearly impossible to guard against every kind of online threat, but if we’re going to become comfortable having our entire computing experience in the cloud, things need to change.

AMD Launches 3D Media Browser

For whatever reason this week’s launch of the beta version of AMD’s Fusion Media Explorer, the company’s first forray in the social media hub / browser space, isn’t being met with a mountain of buzz. For a 40-year old giant of a tech company that’s mostly known for its micro-processors and related technologies, that’s quite surprising, especially because the product actually appears to be quite cool, if not very innovative these days.

I say appears, because the installation failed on my computer for lack of an AMD processor (I should have known), and I should probably note the application has only been tested for use on Windows and Linux machines. From what I can gather, it most certainly makes me want to test it asap though.

Here’s how AMD pitches the browser (buzzword alert):

The AMD Fusion Media Explorer (FME) is a new 3D Immersive Social Media and Digital Media Browser, built and distributed by AMD. In addition to enabling unique multimedia and social media experiences, FME does a great job of showcasing the power of AMD CPUs and GPUs. This application demonstrates what our platforms are capable of when the software is designed to take full advantage.

AMD Fusion Media Explorer combines a user’s local media items, plus related online content from providers such as, Flickr, YouTube, and Microsoft Live. In addition, FME has Facebook integration which gives our users even more options for posting or interacting with their favorite photos or friends’ photos. All of this is managed by an integrated search engine, that makes it very easy to quickly locate what you are looking for.

So basically, the FME application allows you to view and search for multimedia content like photos, videos, music etc. straight from your hard drive as well as online destinations like Flickr, YouTube and Facebook, and enables you to share them with your friends on a variety of social networking services from within the three-dimensional interface. The scrollable 3D ribbon appears to be a nice touch. For a comprehensive review, check TheInquirer or read the release notes.

The screenshots and video below remind me a lot of the (now dead) Pogo Browser initiative from AT&T, and also of Cooliris, which offers a similar desktop application.

In the blog post announcing the limited beta release of the Fusion Media Explorer, AMD’s Director of Product Marketing Casey Gotcher says that the platform has been specially developed for its Puma and Dragon-based notebook and desktop systems and will be provided free to AMD customers, and in some cases may come pre-installed on select AMD-based systems.

Sassy Lauren, she of the cheap HP?

Lauren AKA the girl from the Windows commercial is really Lauren De Long, a SAG-eligible actor with special skills including cheerleading, stage combat, and ear prompting. Giz and TechFlash tracked her down and she informed them that she is under NDA for her involvement in Microsoft’s laptop taste test. So she wasn’t an average girl picked up off the street, BangBus-style [Editor's Note: DO NOT DO A SEARCH ON THIS], to purchase a laptop for the Redmond marketing department. Who knew?

Hell hath no fury like a fanboi scorned so a number of sites have already offered Ms. De Long a great MacBook in place of the poorly reviewed HP she purchased.

I mean even Ellen Feiss, the stoned switcher girl, had a bit more cred in that she was a real 14-year-old girl who just got a G4 and was called in by Errol Morris and interviewed rather than given a script and then carted around town hunting for a laptop. I understand advertising is mendacity, but Microsoft’s brand is a bit more over the the top than Apple’s, don’t you think?

Also, quick tip for those of you trying to look like “average people:” wear glasses and a scarf. It turns of that burnished LA charm in seconds and makes you look like a mousy SUNY student.

Twitter to seek revenue from businesses

Internet start-up Twitter is taking a much-anticipated first-step in its quest to parlay its popularity into revenue by offering certain customers an expanded range of services.

The company is preparing to offer commercial accounts in which corporations and other types of businesses pay a fee to receive an enhanced version of Twitter, a free service that allows people to send short, 140-character text messages to their network of friends.

“We think there will be opportunities to provide services to commercial entities that help them get even more value out of Twitter. If these services are valuable to companies, we think they may want to pay for them,” Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, said in an e-mail sent to Reuters.

San Francisco, California-based Twitter has enjoyed a surge in popularity since its creation three years ago, despite the fact that the company has yet to make any money. According to Nielsen Online, which measures Internet traffic, Twitter’s Web site had more than 7 million unique visitors in February, compared to 475,000 in February 2008.

Last year, the company turned down a $500 million acquisition offer by social networking powerhouse Facebook. And some observers have speculated that Google Inc might have its eye on Twitter, because of Twitter’s so-called real time search capabilities.

Twitter recently closed a round of venture capital financing pegged at $35 million by media reports, following two earlier funding rounds totaling $20 million.

While Twitter initially planned to begin seeking revenue in 2010, the company recently decided to accelerate the schedule and find ways to monetize its service this year.

On Monday, Microsoft Corp and online marketing firm Federated Media rolled out a special Website dubbed ExecTweets that allows individuals to monitor Twitter messages of business executives.

Stone said Twitter has just hired someone to work on creating commercial products. He would not say when Twitter’s commercial accounts product is set to be introduced, but said it would be sometime in 2009.

“We have lots of time for experimentation with regard to revenue generation, so we’ll probably be trying a few different things this year,” said Stone.

17-inch iMac for $899? Mamma Mia!

This odd Apple Education page seems to suggest a 17-inch iMac for $899. It appears in Apple’s enews but, as you see after jump there are only 20- and 24-inch models available. What a twist!

The educational newsletter this appeared in seems to have been written for March and, considering we’re almost done with March this could have been a false alarm or a real leak.

LinkedIn Makes Groups More Useful

Managing Groups in LinkedIn so far didn’t require a whole lot of management, nor was it very useful to those who created them. While other social networking services have long incorporated ways for group administrators to communicate more efficiently with their members, LinkedIn for whatever obscure reason never even bothered to create a feature that allowed admins to e-mail group members directly for the sake of sharing announcements.

I got an e-mail from LinkedIn just now letting me know that this feature is now finally being added, “in response to overwhelming demand from group managers” (no kidding) and that group managers can now blast out e-mails with announcements and create a discussion topic that members can comment on automatically in the process. As a privacy measure, LinkedIn is removing the ability to download or view member e-mail addresses.

Furthermore, as announced in the e-mail and on the corporate blog, group owners and managers can now create a custom news stream they consider relevant for the group by enabling support for importing custom RSS and Atom feeds. As an aside, check out which blog they’re featuring in the screenshot!

Last but not least, Group managers now have control over whether to enable the jobs discussion capabilities within their group or not, a feature that allows members to discuss job opportunities without cluttering the main conversation. This is of course a big part of what makes LinkedIn so popular, especially in this economic climate.