Shoe retailer Zappos is facing a national class action suit one day after it warned customers that its servers had been hacked.
On Monday, the Amazon-owned shoe company sent a mass email stating that 24 million customer accounts had been breached. The incident resulted in hackers obtaining names, phone numbers, emails, encrypted passwords and the last four numbers of customer credit cards.
Amazon announced today that Kindle devices, and the Kindle Fire in particular, continue to fly out of the warehouse in dizzying numbers.
"For the third week in a row, customers are purchasing well over 1 million Kindle devices per week, and Kindle Fire remains the #1 bestselling, most gifted, and most wished for product across the millions of items available on Amazon.com since its introduction 11 weeks ago," the company said.
A hacker named Steven has posted a video of Ice Cream Sandwich running on the Kindle Fire, along with more information in the XDA Developers forums. The hack is incomplete, lacking support for audio, Wi-Fi, the accelerometer and the light sensor. Also, transitions look a bit choppy, but it's a start.
The hacker plans to start an open source project for Ice Cream Sandwich on the Kindle Fire, and will post his code to it. This was only a matter of time, considering the Android 4.0 code is open source.
Users who receive an email claiming their Amazon account is about to expire should think twice before clicking on any attachments.
That's because the message may have been sent from a cybercriminal, researchers at anti-virus firm Sophos have warned.
Attackers have been widely spamming messages – purportedly sent from Amazon – claiming users' accounts are about to be deactivated. The messages, of course, were not actually sent from Amazon and, in fact, aim to trick users into revealing their personal data.
A summary of Nielsen Norman Group's tests said the Kindle Fire "offers a disappointingly poor user experience," and cites the size of the screen as the main culprit.
Then the group adds this caveat: "This was a small study, with only four users, but qualitative studies often generate deeper insights than bigger, more metrics-focused quantitative studies." The link to the findings first appeared on Daring Fireball.
Highlights of Nielsen Norman Group findings:
The Tor Project is tapping Amazon's EC2 cloud service to make it easier for volunteers to donate bandwidth to the anonymity network.
Developers with the project have released preconfigured Tor Cloud images that volunteers can use to quickly deploy bridges that allow users to access the service. The new system is designed to take some of the pain out running such Tor relays by reducing the work and cost of deploying and running the underlying hardware and software.
Security researchers have unearthed a flaw in Amazon Web Services that created a possible mechanism for hackers to take over control of cloud-based systems and run administrative tasks.
The flaw, which affected Amazon's EC2 cloud and has already been plugged, could have been abused to start and stop virtual machines or create new images in an EC2 virtual environment, for example. The root cause of the security weakness stemmed from poor cryptographic practices.
Amazon and Microsoft lost some of their hosted services after a power utility was struck by lightning in Ireland.
Perhaps one particularly important web site operator had been ticked off by his service, or maybe there are just too many metal rods pointing out of facilities over there, we can't say, but what we can say is that the hammer of Thor hit the premises and it took them down.
Criminals for the past several weeks have been exploiting Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud offering to spread SpyEye malware.
Amazon S3, a paid web service that enables users to store data or files in the cloud, has been heavily abused this month, according to Kaspersky Lab malware analyst Jorge Mieres.
