TechCrunch
Google Palestine Hacked And Defaced Through A Domain Registry Attack
Google’s primary search domain for Palestine has seemingly been hacked, with the standard Google search interface for the region being replaced by a political message from its hackers.
From the information available so far, it doesn’t appear that Google’s own servers were hacked — instead, it seems that Google’s Palestinian domain was hijacked and redirected to another server altogether. How that was done, exactly, is currently unclear. One current theory is that Google’s top-level domain provider for the region was compromised, allowing hackers to point the domain somewhere else.
“uncle google we say hi from palestine” taunts the defaced page, “to remember you that the country in google map not called israel. its called Palestine”
Google’s Palestine domain launched back in 2009, and drew in its fair share of controversy when the header of the page was changed from “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine” earlier this year.
(Note that we’re intentionally omitting any links to the hacked site in case the defaced site contains any malware. The page attempts to run at least one bit of embedded media. Visiting the defaced site is not recommended.)
Here’s a screenshot of the defaced page as it appeared this morning:
Owlet, A Bootie That Tells You How Your Baby Is Breathing, Hits The Crowdfunding Trail
The lives of new parents are fraught with stress but now the weight of knowing whether or not your wee one is breathing can be lifted. Owlet is a small bootie that the baby wears while sleeping. It signals heartrate and respiration and you can check in on the little shaver via a mobile device. As a parent of three, I remember a few rough moments spent peeking in on the quiet little ones out of fear or curiosity.
The company is asking for pledges of $159 to get an early-bird unit (the price will go up to $199 once they sell out). They are looking for funding of $100,000. They’ve reached $25,000 so far.
The sensor measures heart rate, oxygen levels, breathing, and sends sleep alerts when baby rolls over while asleep. It also takes temperature measurements. It runs on Bluetooth LTE so you can check on your baby when it’s nearby using your smartphone or remotely via an Internet-connected computer.
There are definitely similar tools that you can use but none fit so snugly in a wearable device. While baby bed sensors are nothing new, the fact that this gives a full complement of important information that can help parents and pediatricians both is pretty important.
You can preorder here and they plan on shipping in November.
Facebook Announces Shared Photo Albums To Boost Group Engagement
Facebook is rolling out shared photo albums, as first reported by Mashable. Users can share access to an album with up to 50 contributors, who can each add up to 200 photos.
For those of you who aren’t math whizzes, that means shared albums can be as large as 10,000 photos. Previously, albums were limited to 1,000 total photos and users could only add pictures to their own albums.
This new feature should be good for user engagement in groups of friends and with larger albums. Facebook has done a good job of focusing its browser-based photo section around albums and larger batches of photos, while leaving (Facebook-owned) Instagram to dominate single photos. Users can beautify and share quick snaps in time with their friends via Instagram, but for larger life events (weddings, graduations, even just cool vacations), they can share much larger batches of photos on Facebook.
This is a bit of a blow to apps like Albumatic and Flock, which are also trying to crack group photo albums. But many have tried and failed before in this space, so it’s far from a foregone conclusion that Facebook’s feature will crush these smaller competitors. The feature is also similar to Google+’s Party Mode, in which users can share all of their photos and videos in real time with the guests of an associated event.
Facebook users can share these new group albums with the public, friends of the contributors, or just contributors to the album. The prototype for shared picture albums was reportedly built by a dozen engineers at one of Facebook’s company-wide hackathons.
Facebook has begun rolling out the feature to a small number of users today. It will be available at first only as a desktop option, and will expand to all English users first before the social network rolls it out internationally.
Image via Mashable
Sequoia- And Khosla-Backed Cloud Phone Company RingCentral Files For $100M IPO
RingCentral, a company offering cloud-based phone and communication systems, has filed for an initial public offering of up to $100 million.
Incorporated all the way back in 1999, San Mateo, Calif.-based RingCentral says it saw revenue of $50.2 million in 2010, $78.9 million in 2011, and $114.5 million in 2012. However, it’s also experiencing growing losses, with net losses off $7.3 million, $13.9 million, and $35.4 million respectively.
Among the competitive advantages that RingCentral lists in the filing are its core technology, its mobile-centric approach, and its rapid release cycle. Risk factors, meanwhile, include the aforementioned losses, the reliance on third parties for network connectivity and data centers, and threats to the company’s security or IP.
RingCentral raised about $44 million in equity funding. CEO and founder Vladimir Shmumis remains the largest shareholder, with 19.6 percent of the company’s stock, followed by investors Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures, which have 17.2 percent and 16.7 percent respectively.
In the filing overview, the company writes:
We believe that there is a significant opportunity to leverage the benefits of cloud computing to provide next-generation, cloud-based business communications solutions that address the new realities of workforce mobility, multi-device environments and multi-channel communications, thereby enabling people to communicate the way they do business.
Android Developers Can Now Use Google's Play Store To Distribute Their Free Apps In Iran
Google today announced that Android developers can now make their free apps available in Iran, one of the few countries where app downloads through Google’s store were completely unavailable until now. Paid apps and apps that use in-app billing, Google notes, will still remain unavailable in Iran for the time being.
For developers, this move opens up an interesting new market, though given Iran’s tendency to shut down access to Google’s services, it remains to be seen how long these apps will remain available. Google and Iran, after all, have a pretty tumultuous relationship. Just this June, Google announced that it had uncovered an Iranian spy campaign that, ahead of Iran’s last election, targeted Iranian citizens through phishing emails.
YouTube also remains unavailable in Iran and the country has regularly blocked access to other Google services, including Search and Gmail (though Iranians, it seems, can get around most of these filters by using standard VPN software).
When those services are available in Iran, however, they do tend to be very popular. In 2012 when access to Gmail was cut off, Iranian legislator Hossein Garousi “threatened to summon Telecommunications Minister Reza Taqipour to parliament for questioning if it was not unblocked,” according to Reuters.
We have asked Google to clarify why it decided to change its policy now and will update this post once we hear back from them.
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