News & Entertainment
This page is dedicated to the most popular and latest news & Entertainment. Join the discussion and read upon the latest information out there!!
Unichat
Russian Website Hacks thousands of webcams
The public is being warned about a website containing thousands of live feeds to baby monitors, stand-alone webcams and CCTV systems.
Smaller numbers of feeds are also identified as being available from developing economies including Nicaragua, Pakistan, Kenya, Paraguay and Zimbabwe.
Some of the feeds showed a static image but did not otherwise appk what's going on in the shop, what's going on at home, how's the baby."
Information Commissioner warns: "You can't rely on preset passwords"
If the site was actually trying to alert people to the security breach - as it claims - then "now we all know and please will they take it down," he added.
When asked about a feed that appeared to show a child in its bedroom, Mr Graham said: "It is spooky. But after all, it is the responsibility of the parents to set a proper password if you want remote access."
He said he would work with the Russian authorities and others to have the website shut down, adding that such a site would be illegal in the UK.
Those whose webcams and baby monitors had been breached cannot be contacted due to the Data Protection Act and the Computer Misuse Act, said the commissioner.
The ICO acknowledged that some parts of the press might now identify the site, driving traffic to it.
"The bigger risk for ourselves is that people continue to use unsecure passwords," an ICO spokesman added.
UNICHAT
One Direction and Katy Perry big winners at American Music Awards
One Direction have topped the winners list at the American Music Awards, taking home a total of three prizes.
They were named artists of the year and also took home album of the year and favourite pop/rock album.
"This has been a real perfect day... America feels like a second home to us," said Liam Payne.
Katy Perry, who did not appear at the ceremony in Los Angeles, also won three awards, including one for best single for Dark Horse featuring Juicy J
College startup succes story
Garrett Camp sold StumbleUpon for a reported $75 million a year after graduation.
In 2007, Garrett Camp pulled off an entrepreneurial accomplishment of a lifetime: He sold his college startup--StumbleUpon, a discovery engine that finds the best content on the web for each unique user--to eBay for reportedly $75 million, a mere year after graduation.
But Camp's entrepreneurial spirit shone even brighter in April 2009 when, unsatisfied with the results of the sale, he bought the company back. Since then, he has restored the energy of a college startup to what had become a corporate entity, tripled StumbleUpon's revenue and grown its user base 118 percent, to 10 million.
It's a story every college startup thinking--or dreaming--of selling should study. It began when Camp was a grad student at University of Calgary in 2002, writing a thesis on information discovery. While researching how to help people search the internet, he and his friend Geoff Smith began tossing around ideas for creating an easy way to find interesting websites.
"Our idea was to make it like channel surfing on TV," says Camp, now 31. "You just click a button and it shows you something based on your interests."
Their website initially offered users a basic way to "stumble" through websites that they might like. But as interest in StumbleUpon grew, so did their ideas for making the recommendation engine more accurate: They harnessed the power of crowdsourcing, allowing people to "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" pages they saw, and they used those ratings to create recommendations for other users with similar interests.
"We offer this kind of serendipitous discovery experience," Camp says. "You end up finding cool stuff you'd never even thought to search for."
After graduating in 2006, Camp moved to San Francisco and raised angel funding from Google board member Ram Shriram, Half.com founder Josh Kopelman and several Silicon Valley investors. A few months later, several companies showed interest in acquiring StumbleUpon.
The speed was entirely unexpected, Camp says, "and when we finally decided to accept one of the offers, it became a big transition to go from an independent company to part of a much larger one."
What's his exit strategy with StumbleUpon next time around? "For the next year, I'm not even really thinking about it," he says. "We're just focused on expanding our lead in the personalized content discovery space. If we execute well against our plan, there will be plenty of options."
UNICHAT
