Boot up: Kickstarter hacked, Get Carter's games link, iPhone OLED v LED, and more

Plus what happens when your number is on one particular iPhone?, Windows 7 gets more life, smart meter tampering, and more

Michael Caine in Get Carter: "You're a big man but you're out of shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave yourself." Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Important Kickstarter Security Notice >> The Kickstarter Blog

On Wednesday night, law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter and alerted us that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of our customers' data. Upon learning this, we immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system.
No credit card data of any kind was accessed by hackers. There is no evidence of unauthorized activity of any kind on all but two Kickstarter user accounts.
While no credit card data was accessed, some information about our customers was. Accessed information included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. Actual passwords were not revealed, however it is possible for a malicious person with enough computing power to guess and crack an encrypted password, particularly a weak or obvious one.

Change your Kickstarter password if you have one. Facebook logins not compromised.

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Life Changing Tech >> Ben Bajarin

Rewind to January 2007:

In the moments after the iPhone launched my father was walking around the MacWorld show room when he saw an Apple exec whom he knew. He was able to get a quick demo of the iPhone and even a demonstration that it could make a call. The exec offered to let my dad call someone. He called me on my cell phone. Ironically, I was in a meeting with the Windows Mobile team at CES when he called so I did not answer. When I got out of the meeting I listened to the message and it was my dad saying he called to tell me the iPhone was awesome and he was calling me from one.
Not long after my dad called me this same Apple exec demonstrated the iPhone to a number of national and international TV networks. Guess whose cell phone number was on the screen while he did the demo?

And guess what happened next?

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What the Windows 7 Pro sales lifecycle changes mean to consumers and business buyers >> ZDNet

Ed Bott goes into the details.

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Google still controls your information, despite EU ruling >> The Conversation

Giuseppe Veltri:

Search engines have become part of our daily life, playing the extremely important role of the most common intermediary between the user and information on the web. And yet, their authority and their role in presenting and ranking web pages – and therefore information – remains largely unexplored.
The main issue is what is known as "source distance". Search engine queries produce lists of links that take you to the various websites that match the terms you have entered. The order in which these links is ranked relates to the importance of each webpage is to your query. And that is decided by an algorithm developed by the search engine.
The way in which search engines – and Google in particular – privilege sources and put them on top of their rankings using their own algorithm is the subject of a fascinating debate.

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Not a lot of people know that >> Crying All The Way To The Chip Shop

Lee Caulfield:

I was watching Get Carter the other night and got to wondering what happened to the actress Geraldine Moffat (her in the knickers above) who played the gangster's floozy Glenda.

There's a connection with a game you've heard of. You'll have to read the article.

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Staff were paid €1,200 for each smart meter rigged - first arraignments today >> Times of Malta

Enemalta employees involved in the smart meter tampering racket were charging an average of €1,200 per job in residences and thousands more in commercial establishments, according to sources close to the investigation.
Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi said on Tuesday that as many as 1,000 meters were tampered. They were slowed down to record only 20% of consumption.
Eight Enemalta workers have been suspended and some of them are expected to be taken to court today, while the investigation is continuing.

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"People want a bigger screen iPhone. Are you against that?" >> DisplayBlog

PenTile OLED displays with 1920×1080 equivalent pixel formats are more than good enough for most, but maybe not for Apple, not yet anyway. OLED reliability is also limited relative to LCD, only because the blue doesn't last as long. But soon blue's lifetime to half brightness might be good enough, for Apple too.
But there's one other important consideration. And it depends on how we will be using larger smartphones in the future. RGB-striped OLED consumes more power and less power than LCD, depending on how you use it. If you watch video, which is generally darker than non-video, OLED will consume less power than LCD. The exception might be some computer animated features — such as Frozen — that are bright. If on the other hand you're playing Flappy Bird on your 5.x-inch OLED smartphone the LCD equivalent will consume less.

Seems a good bet that the next iPhone won't use OLED, then.

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Computer storage industry declines in 2013 despite robust growth of SSDs, says IHS >> Digitimes

Combined shipments worldwide for hard disk drives (HDD), solid-state drives (SSD) and optical disc drives (ODD), making up the computer storage market, amounted to 755m units, down from 794m in 2012, said IHS. While SSD shipments were up an outsize 82% to 57m units, both the HDD and ODD segments proved to be a drag. The HDD segment fell 7% to 444.4m units, and the ODD sector did worse with a 12% decline to 253.5m units.
The forecast does not include shipment figures for non-PC-related drives used in sectors such as automotive, industrial, gaming, external storage, video surveillance and set-top box/DVR.

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