Technology

A group loosely connected to the hacker collective Anonymous says it took control of the Fox News Politics Twitter account to claim that President Obama had been assassinated while campaigning in Iowa.

The Fox News Politics account — @foxnewspolitics — was used to put out a number of fake tweets saying that President Obama had been shot in the head and died, and that vice-president Joe Biden had been installed in his place. The tweets went out at around 2am Pacific time (5am EST, 10am BST). Obama is in fact thought to be in Washington at the White House, where his schedule shows he is due to give a speech in the Rose Garden at 6.30pm — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Now Twitter is trying to encourage us all to be Stelters, with the company publishing guidelines designed to help journalists — traditional, new media, professional, citizen — or any other kind yet to be coined — to use the platform effectively. As Twitter itself explains: We want to make our tools easier to use so you can focus on your job: finding sources, verifying facts, publishing stories, promoting your work and yourself — and doing all of it faster and faster all the time.

Twitter for Newsrooms, which went live last week at media.twitter.com/newsrooms, is split into four main categories, starting with Report, which shows how to use Twitter’s advanced search functions and includes case studies on how reporters have used it to find and verify sources for stories — via redwolf.newsvine.com

KeyRemap4MacBook is an awesome utility for keyboard customization for Mac OS X

Two professors from the University of Illinois; one specializing in materials science, the other in electrical engineering, have combined their talents to take the idea of printing circuits onto non-standard materials one step further by developing a conductive ink that can be used in a traditional rollerball ink pen to draw circuits by hand onto paper and other porous materials. In their paper published in Advanced Materials, team leads Jennifer Lewis, Jennifer Bernhard and colleagues describe how they were able to make a type of ink from silver nanoparticles that would remain a liquid while in the pen, but would dry like regular ink once applied. The pen could was then used to draw a functioning LCD display and an antenna — via redwolf.newsvine.com

In the late 1990s Robert Soloway made $20,000 a day as a spammer. He drove fancy cars. He wore Armani clothes. He was, by all accounts, one of the most successful spammers on the planet. But if he were starting out today, he’d find some other line of work.

In 2011, spamming just won’t pay the bills. It’s not something financially feasible for anyone to even consider, said Soloway, who was released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Oregon a few months ago, after serving almost four in prison for spamming — via redwolf.newsvine.com

In a potentially game-changing development, IBM researchers have announced a new memory technology that could soon replace flash-based memory in everything from consumer devices to cruise missiles. Non-volatile phase-change memory (PCM) can store multiple data bits per cell over extended periods in a form that is cheaper, faster and more durable.

IBM is calling the technology a paradigm shift for enterprise and storage systems within the next five years — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A sophisticated botnet called TDL-4 has infected more than 4.5 million Windows-based PCs worldwide, according to Kaspersky Labs. TDL-4, a TDSS variant, uses encryption and has avoided detection. Kaspersky’s Sergey Golovanov said the creators of TDL-4 are trying to build an indestructible botnet that can survive having its control shut down — via redwolf.newsvine.com

As I wrote yesterday, News Corp was on the verge of selling the incredibly shrinking social networking site Myspace for anywhere between $20 million and $35 million, with two bidders vying for the deal.

Well, we have a winner, and it’s Golden Gate Capital.

Meanwhile, the other bidding finalist, Specific Media, has purchased Myspace for $35 million, proving that Rupert Murdoch still knows how to drive a hard bargain! — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google on Tuesday unveiled Swiffy, a free tool for developers to convert some Flash files (.SWFs) into HTML5 code. The upshot? It’s now easier than ever to get Flash content visible on platforms that don’t support Adobe’s Flash Player — like the iPhone and iPad — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Since we began in 2007, the Data Liberation Front has been focused on one thing: making it easier for you to take your data in and out of Google. Our first step was to make it easier to get your data out of our products, one product at a time. While we’ve made great progress on this front, we’ve been on the lookout for even better ways to let you take your data out of Google.

Today we’re pleased to announce the Data Liberation Front’s first revolutionary product: Google Takeout — via redwolf.newsvine.com

In 2009, Satoshi Nakomoto (possibly a real person, possibly a pseudonym for one or more hackers) invented Bitcoin, the first peer-to-peer currency. Bitcoin, which works along the same lines as the Bittorrent network you might use to download movies and music, isn’t the first online currency. Linden Dollars, the unit of exchange in Second Life, are widely traded and regulated by game’s maker, Linden Lab. Nakomoto’s innovation was using math-heavy cryptography techniques to create a medium of exchange that doesn’t require a central authority or physical tangibility (like gold) to deter counterfeiters and regulate the money supply.

Each time bitcoins change hands, so does a transaction history encoded in a string of characters. This hash value or digest can be decoded by anyone with sufficient computer power and time to devote to the effort. When bitcoins are exchanged, a digest is broadcast to the network of users, a participant does the work of decoding the transaction history, and other users quickly confirm their history is accurate. (The decoders earn a 50-bitcoin bounty for their work.) This happens about once every 10 minutes. Everyone who holds the currency agrees on who owns what, which ensures people can’t copy-and-paste their way to millions or defraud other users without the whole network agreeing that it happened.

In other words, Bitcoin isn’t just a currency, it’s a massive experiment in group trust. It’s also a hint of the financial system to come and, ultimately, a scam — via redwolf.newsvine.com

After ANZ Bank concluded a trial of contactless, phone-based Near Field Communication (NFC) payments in April, the bank has revealed it won’t be pursuing the technology in its current form — via redwolf.newsvine.com