Did you forget your hardware-based password and now you’re locked out? If it’s an IBM ThinkPad you may be in luck but it involves a bit more than just removing the backup battery. SoDoItYourself has an article detailing the retrieval of password data from an EEPROM.
The process is a fun one. Disassemble your laptop. Build a serial interface and solder it to the EEPROM chip where the password is stored. Connect this interface to a second computer and use it to dump the data into a file. Download a special program to decipher the dump file and dig…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Sheryl Sandberg is speaking today at 11:00 AM EDT. We’ve embedded the stream of the keynote live below. We’re expecting Sheryl to announce “Brand Lift” the company’s new partnership with Nielsen to measure the effectiveness of various advertising campaigns. We actually have some screenshots of Brand Lift in action that we’ll be updating this post with shortly. In the meantime you can watch the stream live below.

[11:06 AM EDT] – We’re still waiting for Sheryl to come on stage. The stream just temporarily posted a shot of the stage however we’re still on stand by.
[11:13] – We’re still…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

A new Facebook Connect application has spread quickly around the Facebook social graph by tagging all of a user’s friends who have the same zodiac sign. This is the latest in a series of new photo tagging applications which have been spreading like wildfire across the site. The Facebook platform lets users easily tag their friends but by prompting users for unrestricted posting and unrestricted photo upload permissions, the application is able to spread like crazy. It leads me to wonder whether Facebook will begin cracking down on these types of apps.

The way Facebook’s new permissions system is that…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

This week was another busy one for Facebook who made a number of large announcements on Thursday. Facebook has been pretty consistent with rolling out relatively significant updates and announcements on a weekly basis over the past month. With Facebook beyond 275 million users, based on our internal numbers, Facebook continues the march toward 300 million. Hopefully Facebook continues pushing out weekly news stories so our job of chronicling the company’s activities can stay exciting!

Facebook for Android Launches
As we expected, Facebook for Android officially launched on Tuesday afternoon around the time of Facebook’s mobile press event. Initial reviews…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Today Facebook will be hosting the fbFund REV demo day to showcase the 25 companies that participated in the first incubator program run in partnership with Facebook and Founder’s Fund. Dave McClure was the primary organizer of this year’s program but Facebook is clearly pumped up about this year’s companies and the new format. Last week I had a chance to speak with Cat Lee of the Platform Product Marketing team to discuss what will be taking place later today.

All of the developers that were part of this year’s program will be showing off their evolved products tomorrow and…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

This evening, Facebook began fully promoting the new Twitter syncing tool via the top of Facebook Pages and are encouraging page admins to sync with Twitter. With millions of page administrators (which still appear to be a fraction of all users), this new tool promotion will also serve as a significant promotion for Twitter in general. At this point the service is well known but by launching the product internally and making people say “Why’d they do that?”, Facebook is in essence using Twitter to keep their own company honest.

All along Mark Zuckerberg has been clear about his decision…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Earlier yesterday while stumbling across an article on the CNN Money site, I noticed that the comments were now exclusively powered through Facebook Connect. While there are no signs that this will become a broader trend for all of CNN, this is definitely a major move for one of the worlds largest global news organizations. One interesting thing to note is that this is for articles that previously didn’t have an embedded commenting feature.

While CNN’s blogs are not currently powered by Facebook Connect, it’s a big shift for any section of CNN to add commenting to news articles which…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Today NBC Universal announced the implementation of Facebook Connect across multiple sites including USANetwork.com, AccessHollywood.com, iVillage.com, Syfy.com, Oxygen.com, and NBCSports.com. So what’s the bigger picture here? Well Facebook just won another large media partner to help them become the center of our digital identities. Whether you are reading content about celebrities, or sharing information about women’s issues on iVillage.com, you’ll be able to share content and sync up your accounts.

Let’s Get Together And Share!
Sharing is caring and that’s why you can now share content directly from NBC’s various web properties. I’m still trying to figure out how these…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]