Money and Finance
- Inside Dropbox’s Quest To Bury The Hard Drive
If you haven’t tried Dropbox yet but would like to, my referral link (for free extra storage) is HERE. Thanks. Drew Houston, the 30-year-old CEO and cofounder of Dropbox, is supposed to be having his Steve Jobs moment. In an auditorium packed with elite...
- Forget The Living Room: Amazon Is Fighting For Your Whole Damn House
Found via Abnormal Returns. Some of the world’s largest technology companies are eyeing your entertainment center. Google has its Google TV platform and has dabbled in its own hardware, albeit with disastrous results. Apple can’t organize an event...
- Amazon Is Going To Do To Enterprise Cloud Companies Exactly What It Did To Book Stores
“I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books,” said Carl Eschenbach, the chief operating officer of VMWare, at the company’s recent annual confab with its partners and resellers. VMWare competes with...
- Active In Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing
Within a few years, Amazon.com’s creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing...
- Jeff Bezos Owns The Web In More Ways Than You Think - By Steven Levy
“What I’m about to show you,” Jeff Bezos says, “is the culmination of the many things we’ve been doing for 15 years.” The CEO of Amazon.com, in regulation blue oxford shirt and jeans, is sitting in a conference room at his company’s spiffy...
Money and Finance
How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.
In many ways, this was all my fault. My accounts were daisy-chained together. Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter. Had I used two-factor authentication for my Google account, it’s possible that none of this would have happened, because their ultimate goal was always to take over my Twitter account and wreak havoc. Lulz.
Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.
Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.
But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.
- Inside Dropbox’s Quest To Bury The Hard Drive
If you haven’t tried Dropbox yet but would like to, my referral link (for free extra storage) is HERE. Thanks. Drew Houston, the 30-year-old CEO and cofounder of Dropbox, is supposed to be having his Steve Jobs moment. In an auditorium packed with elite...
- Forget The Living Room: Amazon Is Fighting For Your Whole Damn House
Found via Abnormal Returns. Some of the world’s largest technology companies are eyeing your entertainment center. Google has its Google TV platform and has dabbled in its own hardware, albeit with disastrous results. Apple can’t organize an event...
- Amazon Is Going To Do To Enterprise Cloud Companies Exactly What It Did To Book Stores
“I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books,” said Carl Eschenbach, the chief operating officer of VMWare, at the company’s recent annual confab with its partners and resellers. VMWare competes with...
- Active In Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing
Within a few years, Amazon.com’s creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing...
- Jeff Bezos Owns The Web In More Ways Than You Think - By Steven Levy
“What I’m about to show you,” Jeff Bezos says, “is the culmination of the many things we’ve been doing for 15 years.” The CEO of Amazon.com, in regulation blue oxford shirt and jeans, is sitting in a conference room at his company’s spiffy...