geekosystem

Strange news is trickling out of the SXSW conference, where Reuters blogger Felix Salmon says "a little bird told him" that cable news powerhouse CNN is going buy the Internet and technology website Mashable. The cost of the rumored acquisition is $200 million, and Salmon says could be announced as early as Tuesday.

This past weekend, Gawker Media was dealt a damaging blow when a group that calls itself Gnosis successfully hacked into Gawker's servers and thereafter released a torrent which contained Gawker's source code and a database containing 1.3 million Gawker commenters' usernames, e-mail addresses, and passwords, about a fifth of which Gnosis decrypted. Considering that many people use the same password for multiple web services, this is bad news; this morning, Twitter said that a wave of acai-related spam had been traced to accounts with emails hit by the Gawker leak. Gnosis also gained access to Gawker's content management system, publishing a taunting post with a link to the torrent on Pirate Bay. (Both the Gawker post and that particular Pirate Bay torrent have since been removed, although the data is out there now.) In the wake of the attack, Gawker has promised to "[bring] in an independent security firm to improve security across our entire infrastructure. Additionally, we will continue to work with independent auditors to ensure we maintain a reliable level of security, as well as the processes necessary to ensure we maintain a safe environment for our commenters." However, the attack has alarmed many of its readers, and should be alarming to most people who have transmitted their personal information over the Web. Perhaps even more alarming than the user database hack is the source code leak: Gawker is built on a proprietary, closed-source framework, which its proprietor Nick Denton says 'underpins his entire empire to this day.' Blogger Felix Salmon writes that Gawker Media is in the process of trying to transform into a technology company; this is a hard thing to do when your source code is thoroughly compromised. Geekosystem got in touch with members of Gnosis and discussed what the attacks meant for Gawker Media, web publishers, and everyone who shares unsecured information on the Internet:

Scott Dadich, Design Director for Wired and Jeremy Clark, Experience Designer for Adobe, previewed a demo of Wired's future plans for an iPad version of the Conde Nast title. Judging by the response on Twitter, the demo created bit of a stir, primarily it seems for showing what the future of magazines could look like. Video of the demonstration after the jump: