I hope everyone had a good weekend and are ready to tackle a new week. I am not aware of any huge events this week in the tech world so maybe we will get a bit of a breather. However, I get the feeling there are a few things that popped up over this past weekend that will drive some dialog this week.
Apple Buys HopStop and Immediately Drops Windows Phone Support (WindowsObserver.com) – Thanks to a tip from Roman DeSilva (@MetroHeads) on Twitter I found out about this late Friday evening. The story I wrote eventually got picked up by Reddit and made it to the top of the Technology and Windows Phone sub-reddits. It also climbed into the top 50 on Reddit’s main page. The Reddit posts generated over 400 comments on who was right or wrong in this evolution of immediately pulling the Windows Phone app from HopStop after Apple’s acquisition of the mass transit mapping company Friday afternoon. Personally, I think they should have given customers some type of warning/grace period. Plus, why is the Android app still up and running if this was a move for Apple to take the data into their own mapping software?
Cosmos Will Get a Sequel Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson (Wired) – This was announced at ComicCon this weekend and will see Neil deGrasse Tyson hosting a sequel to Carl Sagan’s famous 13 part Cosmos series from many years ago. It is nice to see Fox brining a show like this to the airwaves instead of just another mindless reality TV show that seems to dominate these days.
Apple acknowledges developer portal hack (Macworld) – The Apple development portal had been down for a few days before Apple finally acknowledged it was due to a hack into the portal. Members had been getting password reset requests prior to the official news but many thought those were part of the hack.
Hack exposes e-mail addresses, password data for 2 million Ubuntu Forum users (ARS Technica) – A bonus item since it is a significant breach and keeps in line with the last item above. This one is massive with the sheer number impacted and I am not sure what the fall out will be so will be keeping an eye on this throughout the week.
No matter what your plans are stay safe out there and make sure your protecting your data.
