The page was working fine at around 5:30 PT, but a couple of hours earlier, reports surfaced on Twitter about Justin Bieber’s YouTube channel, Kidrauhl, appeared to be hacked, sending fans running to Twitter:

someone hacked justin's account (kidrauhl) on youtube omg—
nadia (@fredoswifey) March 08, 2013

Kidrauhl was hacked on YouTube. I'm praying nothing gets deleted. That's where the memories are and where his journey started—
Smile Justin (@ForOurKidrauhl) March 09, 2013

NOW SOMEONE HACKED JUSTIN'S YOUTUBE?? If they delete any videos….. I'm doing to scream.—
smile justin∞ (@ShakeItForMeJDB) March 08, 2013

Other YouTube channels might have been hacked, too, according to some tweets:

Can't believe most of the big YouTube channels have been hacked :O—
T-Dawg (@Tahmidhasnat) March 08, 2013

We’ve sent an inquiry to Google and will update this post as soon as we hear back.

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The Facebook blog post is here, and details all the hacks, which make for fun reading. But what I thought was especially worthwhile was that in at least two cases the hacks resulted in a real product that was later rolled out to users, such as the new full screen photo view or the improved events calendar. Others like putting hot servers in mineral oil to dissipate heat or building a light-up dash board using an Arduino board and a connection to Facebook’s spam monitoring service are already in use elsewhere, but could still benefit the company down the line.

Facebook’s map of where football fans live.

I don’t know what percent of Facebook’s hack projects result in real-world improvements to its product or to the backend infrastructure, but in this batch four out of the top eight fell into that category, which seems to indicate that the hacker way Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg preaches is still in effect. And I especially liked how three of the projects dealt with data visualization, with two of those taking the visualizations into the real world: one by printing a 3-D globe that showed Facebook usage in the world using three different topographical details and the aforementioned light-up message board for visualizing spam alerts.

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Chief among them is the added focus companies are putting on preventing their networks from the types of attacks that have befallen seemingly everyone in the past year. On Tuesday, for example, news broke of an AntiSec hacker gaining millions of Apple UDID numbers by hacking an FBI agent’s laptop (although the FBI has denied that story). Tenable Founder and CEO Ron Gula says his company can help prevent this type of attack from happening.

The key to everything is Nessus, a product for scanning networks for vulnerabilities that could leave them open to attack. And while it performs traditional analysis such as malware detection and compliance audits (as well as less traditional ones such as scanning networks for sensitive content), Gula and his new investors are very excited about Nessus’s ability to give companies a real picture of what mobile devices are on their networks.

“People say BYOD,” Gula said, “but it’s really connect your own device to the network.” And, of course, networks have expanded in the world of mobile access and cloud services, so it’s not just a matter of knowing who’s on the LAN, but also who’s accessing your Exchange server from a Starbucks halfway across the country.

Nessus lets users figure out how many mobile devices are accessing their network, as well as device information such as serial number, timestamp of the last connection, whether the phone has been jailbroken and what operating system versions they’re running. This type information can be particularly helpful, Gula said, because identifying, for example, a phone that hasn’t been updated in three years means identifying a possible avenue of attack via a vulnerability that has been patched in subsequent releases.

According to Accel partner Ping Li and vice president John Locke, their firm is also high on Tenable because of the volume of data the company generates. Tenable’s flagship customer is the entire U.S. Department of Defense, for which the company provides continuous monitoring of the agency’s network, but it also has more than a million other users ranging from Amazon to Dropbox to Walmart. The obvious benefit of this large user base is that Tenable has a broad community from which to learn about potential threats in the wild, but Gula said the company is also working on research detailing how different industries compare when it comes to security practices.

As for why Tenable finally decided to take money from Accel (“We’ve been stalking these guys for a long time trying to convince them to let us invest,” Locke joked), it all comes down to growth. Already, the company has grown revenue by 550 percent over the past four years and has doubled its staff to nearly 200 employees in the past year. Gula said the money will help his company make sure its growing list of customers all get the attention and products they need, which means even more employees and a broader global presence.

The Tenable investment is also the latest in a series of investments Accel is making in established companies staring down potentially huge growth. In January, it led a $52.5 million round in veteran backup and software-recovery company Code42; in May, along with Sequoia Capital, Accel helped infuse decade-old marketing research company Qualtrics with $70 million.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user kentoh.

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But an app idea developed this weekend at Dwolla and Etsy’s first eCommerce Hack Day in New York offers a compelling solution. Miss Nev (as in “never miss a package,” not “Miss Nevada”), the winning hack of the weekend, wants to recruit local business to receive packages for neighboring residents and in return get more store traffic, agreements to make minimum purchases, or payments.

For now, the Miss Nev app, which was created in 24 hours, only includes two businesses and a barebones website. (The team tried for NeverMiss.com but the URL was taken.) But the developers — students who have been learning to program at venture collaboration group The Hatchery for just seven weeks — say they plan to build it out and raise money to turn it into a real service.

“The idea came about because there’s this store where I live that takes packages for people in the neighborhood for goodwill,” said Regina Chen, one of the five team members. “It’s a wine store, so whenever people pick up a bottle of wine they would pick up packages. So I thought, huh, that’s a pretty good business model.”

The app is definitely in its most nascent stages and needs to be fleshed out quite a bit, but I still think it addresses a growing need and would love to see it (or something like it) become a real service. We have more ways than ever before to order products straight to our doors. But making sure we can actually sign for the packages is a headache for many of us.

Over the past several months, Amazon has been slowly rolling out a locker system that turns local 7-Elevens and grocery stores into pick-up stations for customers who can’t be home to receive their shipments. The program first drew headlines last fall and, according to Amazon’s website, has expanded to Seattle, New York, the Washington, DC area and London. Last week, TechCrunch reported that it has added Silicon Valley as well.

The Miss Nev concept is similar but would work for shipments from any e-commerce company and could give local merchants new opportunities for developing relationships with nearby residents. The group acknowledged that liability could be an issue, but said a ratings system (similar to eBay’s or Airbnb’s) could help give users a way of gauging reliability. Another concern could be ensuring that merchants don’t receive more packages than they can actually fit in their space, but the Miss Nev team said testing a solution is in their plans.

Of the team members, only Mike De’Shazer, the class’s teacher, builds apps for a living (with product development and consulting firm 140 Ventures). Chen works in product development, David Ho has a background in finance, Karla Colon is a former lawyer, Costas Kollias is a designer and Jared Mermey works in business development. Other members of the Hatchery Dev Shop class, including an actor and a geneticist, contributed to the hack over the course of the weekend, and De’Shazer attributes their success to the diversity of the team.

“Everyone here has a completely different background that they brought into this app, unlike most apps which are built by engineers or business development teams,” he said. “We were able to think more like the customer and that led to us coming up with a more viable product and better user experience.”

The eCommerce Hack Day, which took place at the co-working space The Alley, included about 225 participants who made 37 hacks. The judges, who included Union Square Ventures managing Albert Wenger, Softbank Capital principal Nikhil Kalghatgi and others, gave the team behind MissNev the $6,000 top prize, but also recognized ShopPapaya (a price trends analytics tool) and Dollarly (an app developed by Voyurl founder Adam Leibsohn), which won second and third place prizes, respectively.

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Recently, two articles appeared on TechRadar documenting various command line tweaks for various apps and functions of Mac OS X. While I didn’t find anything new there, it’s nice to have two articles that summarize a bunch instead of tracking them down one by one across countless bookmarks.

To be honest, most command line tweaks don’t appeal to me. For example, I’d sooner go back to running DOS than go back to using Safari’s “standard” tabs; I love the tabs on top. Still, it’s nice to know I could make the change if I felt so inclined.

What’s surprising to me is that some of the tweaks I do like are incredibly simple — for example, the command that turns on stack highlighting even when using the mouse (No. eight in the first article above). Obviously, having the cursor over an item tells me which one will be activated if I click, and yet I like the highlight as a further indicator.

I also like the one to remove the arrows from iTunes’ interface (No. seven in the second article). Again, this is a little thing, yet I value it in a manner that’s completely out of proportion to the actual change it makes. Put simply, I hate those arrows.

Meanwhile, there’s a tweak for Safari I really like that’s not in either article. It’s one that forces a click to open in a new tab (instead of a window). You can find that one here. Though documented for Safari 3.1, I use it for the Safari 4 beta with no issues.

I’m curious what you think. Which tweaks do you really like? Do you have any to add, and do they seem like major or minor changes to you?

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The normal method to search a site is to use the “site:”  parameter in a search engine query. Searching for “Twitter site:webworkerdaily.com” in Google will return all of the pages on WebWorkerDaily that discuss Twitter, for example. I use this type of search all the time, but it does require a little typing.

Search Site gives you a couple of ways to simplify the process. Firstly, it adds a green magnifying glass button to your regular Firefox search bar, which searched the site you’re currently on when you click it.

Search Site button added to Firefox search bar

Search Site also adds a “Search Site for selection” option to your context menu. You can highlight a word on a page, right-click and search the site you’re currently on.

Search Site context menu option

Both options return results from whichever search engine is currently selected in your search bar.

Although Search Site is an experimental add-on (meaning it hasn’t been tested by Mozilla yet), it’s working well on my machine and is compatible with Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5 beta 4.

What Firefox extensions do you use to streamline your browsing experience?

(via Ghacks)

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- Sort all the YouTube links you’ve received in Gmail using Xoopit (but you have to sign up for an invite code).
- Subscribe to download YouTube channels/feeds in Miro (here’s Miro’s and Google Operating System’s tips on getting feeds for all sorts of things on YouTube) and other places like your TV or your iPod.
- Download the audio track from a video with VidtoMP3.

Read the full post for more.

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I rebooted my Macbook Pro about four days ago, and lo, to my surprise, the icon for my boot drive had vanished. I was, too say the least, slightly perturbed. (To the right, the culprit.)

I tried all the quick-fix things – changed what showed in Finder, tried to get it back through Finder – it was gone there too – and finally, I sucked it up and called Apple. Three calls to Apple – and two instances of being hung up on – a clean install of Leopard, and multitudinous Google searches later, I had found two things: a lot of other people were having these issues, all starting about the same time as mine, and, more importantly, a solution.

So first, the solution, and then the explanation of what it is, what it does, and what that means for all of us Mac users.

To get your startup drive back, you need to run two Terminal commands. One of them requires that you have an Administrator password. I’d generally try to give you a solution that didn’t require Terminal, given some peoples’ squishiness about that, but I can’t find another frontend to this. (There’s an Applescript running around, but it doesn’t work, really.)

First, run xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment /***

In this case the *** signifies the name of your missing drive, as this command will work for any drive. If you want your startup drive, all you need is the slash.

Next, run sudo chflags nohidden /*** Same deal with the asterisks, though in this case, another important modification is that it doesn’t need to be run as sudo unless you’re running it on your root drive.

Log out and/or restart, and your icon should be back to stay.

Now, what that all means. As it turns out, the culprit in all this is a simple metadata flag, the hidden flag. This is the same flag that hides the .DS_store files and other things that you’d rather not see floating about your operating system all the time. The problem, in this case, is a change in how Leopard handles that flag, and metadata in general.

Leopard marks a very interesting shift in how Apple’s chosen to deal with the increasing amounts of complicated metadata that we’re all generating. In past years, this has been stored in .DS_store files, for the most part. Tiger added the xattr function family and API’s to play with some, and some people, namely Marquis Logan and John Siracusa, then wrote up some nice little tools that made this accessible to all of us.

In Leopard, there is now a native command for this. There are four flags to the xattr command, at least so far as I’ve been able to tell. (There is no man page for this, but -h works.) They are -l, -p, -w, and -d, and all of them are written out as xattr -flag file [file path]. -L lists the names of all extended attributes on the file. -P, used with -l, prints them. -W is written out as xattr -w attribute_name attribute_value file [file path], and changes the chosen value to whatever you specify. -D, the important one for the above command, simply deletes all extended attributes. The first command, then, deletes all the extended attributes on the given file. The com.apple.metadata.kMDItemFinderComment contains, among other things, the flags for drives in Finder.

The second command, the chflags command, resets the hidden flag on the given file. Two different methods of getting at two different types of metadata, in essence. The second command is found in a couple of places if you google this, but it by itself doesn’t keep the job done. Without the xattr command, the hidden flag resets every time Finder does.

Now, how this happens? I don’t know. I’m working on that – but I suspect that Apple may be too. And in the meantime, I’ve already found some neat things people are doing with it now. Anyone for a way to kill that annoying ‘this program has been downloaded from the internet’ message?

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However, many of us would also like ways to change the frequency of its backups. By default, Time machine runs once an hour, saving a daily backup at the end of the day and a weekly backup at the end of the week. This behavior continues until the drive it was pointed to is full, at which point it begins to delete the oldest backups. Almost immediately, people wanted a way to change the frequency – even if, like me, half the reason was the annoyance of those bright-blue, flashy LED’s on the external hard drive as it spins up every hour in the middle of the night.

An earlier hint at Mac OSX Hints had users editing a .plist file to change the frequency of backups. This hack consisted of editing com.apple.backupd-auto.plist, specifically the following lines:

StartInterval
3600

A change to that integer value – which is in seconds, by the way – and Time Machine would theoretically back up on your schedule, not Apple’s. However, that seems to cause more problems than it solved, in my experience. Specifically, now Time Machine backs up whenever it likes. (It seems to be about once a day, give or take an hour or so, not once every three hours, as I set it to be.) Upon inspection, it appears that the file’s permissions are broken. Repairing permissions in Disk Utility hangs, and attempting to manually do so, even on a duplicate, causes Finder to crash.
…Let’s just say that method is Not Recommended, then.

Alternatively, there is now this – Time Machine Scheduler.  Time Machine Scheduler does not meddle with the .plist files – it simply runs its own daemon to create a backup.  It can be set for any length of time between 1 and 12 hours, as well as optionally running a backup upon loading.  You have the option of either installing Scheduler and its daemon, in which case you do not need to open TMS, or simply running it from the .app when you want to make a backup. It is also fully compatible with existing Time Machine backups – the preference pane will show that Time Machine is off, but it reads the TMS-created backup and date of last backup without trouble.

There is also the option to mount and unmount the Time Machine backup drive automatically, although I have not tested this.  (I have a partitioned drive, and the other partitions are in frequent use, so I don’t bother.)

This method works very well for me, at a reliable three hours.  It takes the same amount of time to run backups, as well as to load and unload the normal Time Machine interface, and, thank heavens, it actually does it every three hours.  Why Apple didn’t include the option to change the backup frequency all along boggles me.

I will note that a third way to do this is to use Lingon to edit the plist files.  I have not tried it, but I thought I would mention it, for  those who might be interested.  How about you?  Have you tried Lingon?  Time Machine Scheduler?  Did the original .plisthack work for you?

(Time Machine Scheduler and Lingon are both free utilities, available at the links above.)

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Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed.

They specifically mention the “unlocking” programs which leads us to believe they are only referring to the hacks that unlock your phone and not the hacks for things like ringtones.

Could this just be a scare tactic? Or could Apple be making some changes to the iPhone software that actually will cause the iPhone to be irreparable if it finds hacks were used? Both of those options seem a bit bullish, but Apple hasn’t exactly played nice the past few weeks.

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