[John] wanted to take a pong clock and put it in a wristwatch form factor. Take an afternoon and pour over his detailed build logs. This multi-year project is done with meticulous cleanliness that makes us jealous. He’s milled the case and buttons himself, achieving a professional look that equals or surpasses the quality of some commercially available “gaming” watches. The project centers around an OLED display driven by a TI MSP430F2013 processor. Don’t miss the video after the break covering prototyping, PCB work, case milling, and the watch in action. Currently, this is the third generation of development…

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Tomorrow afternoon Facebook will make a special announcement at Ad Week NYC and they’ve been promoting the announcement heavily via the Facebook Marketing solutions page. Apparently the live stream will be posted on the page and while no details have been provided regarding the announcement, it sounds as though a new advertising product will be launched or upgrades to the existing ones will be rolled out.

Last week I posted screenshots of the new Facebook ad manager which was being tested out with some advertisers so perhaps the company will be announcing the new service for everybody. Or perhaps we’ll…

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SecurityTube is a site which has recently caught our attention. The site has quite a variety of videos from various sources related to security and hacking. Videos range from DEFCON talks, to documentaries, step by step how tos, and even proof of concept vulnerability videos. It’s certainly a great resource for anyone looking for something a bit more involved then a plain text writeup, and offers a way for you to catch those hacker conference talks you missed. Many of the videos come with a bit of a background information as well, so it’s far more informative then your…

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Last week we wrote about Facebook’s new tagging functionality but as of this afternoon the feature finally went live. While the functionality is no different than initially described, many users are finding that this transforms the overall user experience. There are also many objects on Facebook which still can’t be tagged with applications and pages such as photos. You also can’t include tags within Facebook messages but I’d expect more robust tagging functionality to be added over the coming weeks and months.

So does this new functionality eliminate the need for Twitter? No, but it most definitely helps users to…

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This afternoon Twitter announced that geolocation data would now be added to users’ tweets. It’s something that Facebook has actually been discussing for some time off and on but adding such a feature to all feed stories isn’t the easiest process. In the meantime Facebook is still trying to adjust their platform to provide greater access to information. It’s essentially the “out opening” of Twitter, a similar strategy that Google attempted, starting with OpenSocial.

Interestingly enough, the model appears to be working for Facebook. The latest data from comScore suggests that Twitter’s growth took a break for July and the…

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This afternoon Facebook is announcing an extended set of features for developers including a new Inbox API and Notification API. The first announcement is a big one: “The Inbox API allows you to access your users’ messages, once they grant your application the new read_mailbox extended permission.” That means we could soon see a ton of new applications built around managing users’ Facebook inboxes. The one downside of this new feature is that applications cannot currently send messages.

What’s Being Added?
As part of the new inbox, attachments can be created using the same model used for developing publisher attachments…

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Facebook made a significant announcement this afternoon regarding updates to their stream API. The two most significant updates is that publishing information to the stream will now be much simpler for third-party websites and developers can now access Page streams without an active session. Over the past couple months I’ve been writing about the expansion of Facebook Pages to become true community platforms and these updates further support this shift.

The most significant update that developers will find to be extremely valuable is that accessing stream.get for Facebook Pages no longer requires an active session. That means desktop applications like…

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On the eve of the Black Hat security conference, malicious hackers posted a 29,000-line file detailing embarrassing attacks that took complete control of servers and websites run by several high-profile security researchers, including Dan Kaminsky and Kevin Mitnick.
The file posted on security mailing lists claimed to have obtained more than four years’ worth of data from Kaminsky, and as proof, it offered a smattering of emails, instant messages, and other communications that laid out sensitive research work and intimate personal conversations. It also revealed multiple passwords Kaminsky used and back-end configurations for Kaminsky’s website (doxpara.com), which was yanked offline…