And…scene.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Don’t taunt hackers. Gawker went out of their way to taunt 4chan. Hackers will almost always succeed in the end.
Yeah, I hate that. The other thing that gets me is when a site forces you to supply answers to password recovery questions. If I go to the trouble of concocting a ten character password with numbers and symbols and all the rest of it, why would I want to give access to my account to anyone who happened to know what street I grew up on?
From thenextweb.com
Update 2: Worried that Gawker wasn’t quick enough to warn its users of the data breach by email, members of the popular Hacker News website have combined to draft an email warning 200,000 Gawker users about the data breach. If you receive this email, it is one off email that is purely designed to warn you about the breach and get you to change your password.
I love that it takes a concerned 3rd party to notify all those who have potentially been compromised, rather than the site that had the problem. My understanding is that Gawker sat on this news for days, denied it at first, and initially mocked all those that might be affected by it.
“I am not clicking that”. Heh.
Welp, my email was in the list of those compromised. Luckily I changed all my passwords ages ago. Yay!
All my gawker passwords are randomly generated, due to their mechanism for resetting. I didn’t bother changing them. If some random internet dude wants to comment on gizmodo using my name, go for it.
So Gawker is only notifying people, wth a tiny message at the top. And the only people who will see it are those that go everyday. That’s a big screw-you to busy people who don’t visit frequently.
I will not be using their sites anymore. None of them.
No, they’re emailing all their users also. There are legal implications if they don’t notify users that their personally identifying information has been compromised in many states, notably including CA.
It’s a summary of the textfile and gawker’s response, it doesn’t actually explain how they got in. I guess that info just hasn’t been released anywhere.
After this debacle I’m pretty much done with Gawker and all of its sites. I used to think it was just the general commenting populace on those sites that were caustic douchenozzles. Now I see that the editors are the worst of the bunch.
Luckily I just had a throwaway password for commenting, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were arrogant little shits through and through (which is why I’m done with them). “Hubris” was the watchword here, and I’m glad theirs finally bit them in the ass. I just wish it didn’t bite 1.3 million people, too.
Anyway, that said. What are some good io9 and Lifehacker alternatives? Those are the only sites I ever visited with any regularity.
Collider might be a good alt to io9.
IO9 is hilarious. I look forward to seeing if the poor bastard forced to write about each episode of No Ordinary Family hangs himself each week.
Apparently Slate has a little widget to check if your account was compromised.
So according to Slate’s widget, it’s time to change a password… but I cant remember what password I used for gawker’s sites in the first place…
-sigh- time for a 500 meg download
Why not just get one of the Gawker sites to e-mail you your password? Seems easier than picking through the torrent file.
I like SpoofyChop’s link better, but here’s a Google Docs version of the list. Note that you can use the “Show Options” thingy at the top of the list to filter out everything but the MD5 you put there.
I like io9 too. Check their Transformers review:
So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF.
Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world… but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.