Another week has passed and quite a few
things have happened in the tech industry. Fortunately, for those people who
were living under a rock these past few days, here’s our weekly roundup of the latest
and freshest news in the tech world.
In this week’s episode of Tech Tuesdays on
TFL, we’ll be talking about another security breach in two social networks, a
very promising gaming console that aims to bring back affordable games to the
TV, an upcoming event to launch a new set of graphics card and a new
information network on TV.
So, if you’re all set, let’s get the ball
rollin’ shall we?
HACKED
Hackers are on a roll these past few weeks
as they launch an assault to several social networks including Linkedin and
Last.fm. Last week, two other networks join the list of hacker victims.
First up is social network Formspring when
they announced that their site was a victim of a security breach that
compromised more than 420,000 user accounts. In response to this security
breach, Formspring immediately disabled all users passwords and asked all of
its members to reset their passwords.
According to the site’s initial findings,
someone had broken into one of their development servers and was able to
extract account information from a production database. Since their statement
last week, Formspring has since fixed and upgraded its encryption to prevent
future problems.
Another network that suffered a leak last
week was Yahoo’s Yahoo! Voices. According to the American internet company, the
stolen user names and passwords came from an older file from the Yahoo!
contributor network, which it acquired when it bought Associated Content.
And to make it worse, since Yahoo! Voices
allows users to sign in using non-Yahoo accounts, other usernames and passwords
from Gmail, MSN, Hotmail, Comcast and AOL have also been compromised. On a
statement made by Yahoo, the company apologizes to all the affected users and
said that they are already fixing the vulnerability that caused the data to be
leaked.
CONSOLE
OUYA (pronounced as OOO-YAH) is an
Android-based gaming console that hopes to revolutionize the world of computer
games by bringing the openness of the mobile games market to your television
sets.
According to OUYA’s CEO and founder Julie
Uhrman, OUYA will be an instrument to help small game developers to break into
the rather competitive and closed market for console games.
The OUYA console, according to its creators
will retail for about $99 and will sport 8GB of build in memory, a USB port and
SD card slot for memory expansion, a Tegra 3 processor and 1GB of RAM. It will
also have its very own controller which features two normal analog sticks,
eight buttons, a D-pad and a touch pad in case the game you’re playing requires
gestures.
The game console will also be hacker
friendly. Game developers will be able to run any Android app on the console
and opening the unit up will not voide the warranty. And since the SDK will be
included with the console, game developers won’t have a hard time creating
games for the machine.
But in order for this dream to be realized,
the company needs at least $950,000 which they asked on Kickstarter.
Fortunately, the prototype console has received an incredible amount of
positive reception. The company has now received more than $2.4 Million on
Kickstarter and has garnered support from several independent game
developers
LAUNCH
On local news, the Philippine wing of the
American graphics card manufacturer Nvidia will be launching its new line of
graphics card this week. The event will be held at SM North EDSA on July 21,
2012 from 2-6pm and will feature the world’s fastest graphics card, the GeForce
GTx690.
TV5 has once again upped the game in the
local TV network wars with the release of WIN
(Weather information network). With New
Zealand-based Metra Weather, WIN
will be broadcasting weather information such as projected storm tracks, wind
direction, rain volume, water conditions, regional and provincial weather, and
seven-day forecasts as well as other information related to weather. These,
together with an advanced computer-based weather visualization system make the
station’s weather forecasts ahead of its competitors and are even recognized by
PAGASA.
And there you have it. Another week filled
with news and features about gadgets and technology. Tune in again next week
for your weekly dose of updates from the tech world. Til next week guys!
