Boot up: Facebook buys e-book publisher, largest-ever state cyberattacks uncovered, and more

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Plus why Amazon's app store has a big problem (and a mini revolt) on its hands, and zero-day vulnerabilities found in many Wordpress themes

A quick burst of 7 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Amazon App Store: Rotten To The Core >> Shifty Jelly's blog of mystery

This is a big problem for Amazon: "Amazon's biggest feature by far, has been their Free App Of The Day promotion. Publicly their terms say that they pay developers 20% of the asking price of an app, even when they give it away free. To both consumers and naive developers alike, this seems like a big chance to make something rare in the Android world: real money. But here's the dirty secret Amazon don't want you to know, they don't pay developers a single cent."

Biggest-ever series of cyber attacks uncovered, U.N. hit >> Reuters

"Security experts have discovered the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the networks of 72 organizations including the United Nations, governments and companies around the world."

McAfee said there was just one state behind all of the attacks, but declined to point the finger. A security researcher apparently briefed on the study said that the evidence points to China. Over to you, China.

Why Did Facebook Buy an e-Book Publisher? >> NYTimes.com

The most plausible theory is, as ever, that it's more about the talent behind the product than the product itself.

We've been acquired by Facebook >> Push Pop Press

"Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it's going to be a great home for Push Pop Press."

Zero-day vulnerability in many Wordpress themes >> Mark Maunder

"The Exec summary: An image resizing utility called timthumb.php is widely used by many WordPress themes. Google shows over 39 million results for the script name. If your WordPress theme is bundled with an unmodified timthumb.php as many commercial and free themes are, then you should immediately either remove it or edit it and set the $allowedSites array to be empty."

Internet Explorer users have lower IQ says study >> BBC News

"The results suggested that Internet Explorer surfers had an average IQ in the low eighties. Chrome, Firefox and Safari rated over 100, while minority browsers Opera and Camino had an "exceptionally higher" score of over 120.
"AptiQuant stressed that using IE doesn't mean you have low intelligence. "What it really says is that if you have a low IQ then there are high chances that you use Internet Explorer," said AptiQuant CEO Leonard Howard."

No, don't ask him to explain it again.

Bing's battle with Google: how long is "long term"? >> Search Engine Land

Points out that Microsoft's protestations that it's into Bing for the long term (a good thing, since it really started in 2005; all that's happened since then has been two rebrandings) don't mean much if you don't define "success" or quite when you have entered the "long term".

You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious

Josh Halliday

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Charles Arthur 03 Aug, 2011

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/aug/03/1
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