By Gilbert Falso :: 6:33 PM
The dust has settled from the great iPhone 5 announcement from earlier today, and now, as Apple fans everywhere ready themselves to purchase the latest and greatest technology, thoughts turn to the new connectors and cables for the iPhone 5.
Gone is the old style 30-pin connector, that had powered iPhones and all iDevices, in fact, since 2003. A 9-year run is a long time for a hardware connector cord like this, and Apple has certainly simplified things by moving to the smaller, more streamlined “Lightning” connector, with the added bonus that it can be plugged in either way!
But what to do about all the old-style cords you’ve got laying around, and the docks and other things you connect your iPhone to? Never fear, Apple has a solution for your problem, but beware, it’s a pricey one.
An adapter to connect your old iPhone to the new lightning cable will set you back $29 in the Apple Store – add $10 to that price if you want the adapter with an 8-inch cable attached to it. Lightning plug cables themselves are still priced at the same point as the old style cables, $19.
Below is the standalone adapter, the $29 model:
By Paul Thomson :: 8:50 AM
Today’s the big day that Apple fanboys (and girls) have been waiting for – the Apple iPhone 5 announcement. Of course we’ll be manning the Twitter streams.
Here’s the skinny on how this will roll:
The iPhone 5 event and announcement will kick off at 10:00 AM Pacific time. Apple has reserved the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and will be hosting everything there.
Apple has already cut off access to the Apple Store on its website this morning. This is a standard move for the company on an announcement day such as today, and access will likely be restored sometime during or immediately after Apple’s presentation.
What we are expecting to hear from Apple today:
- A new iPhone, the iPhone 5 will be announced
- Early rumors point to a taller phone, perhaps thinner than the iPhone 4S
- iOS 6, a new version of the mobile operating system, will launch along with the phone
- 4G / LTE support
- Extended battery life
- Price point at, or just slightly higher than the iPhone 4S, when it was released
By Cynthia Herbert :: 12:29 PM
When GoDaddy, the domain registrar and web hosting provider, failed yesterday, initial reports, including our own, pointed to a claim by loosely-organized hacker group Anonymous.
Now that things are back up and running at the Arizona-based company, GoDaddy is shifting the blame to themselves, claiming that a series network errors within their own systems created a bug that corrupted their router data tables.
There is no outside corroboration of GoDaddy’s claim, and the fact that they mention router tables leaves the door open for discussion for one of the rumors floating around yesterday, that they were the victim of a highly calculated SQL injection attack. An SQL injection attack is a technique often used to attack databases through their website front-end.  This is done by including portions of SQL statements in a web form field that results in the website passing a newly formed SQL command to the database. At this point, the hacker can manipulate the database on their own.
There is, of course, no information one way or the other, but with an outage this large and a claim of responsibility from an outside group, law enforcement will likely be called in to investigate.
In a statement to their customers, GoDaddy’s interim CEO Scott Wagner said,
“Yesterday, GoDaddy.com and many of our customers experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT.
The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack†and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.
At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.
Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it.
We take our business and our customers’ businesses very seriously. We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience.â€
By Gilbert Falso :: 8:09 AM
GutCheck, an online research and polling firm, released findings yesterday which indicate that the decision to “like†a brand on Facebook is influenced less by friends than by the potential to get something in exchange for a “like.â€
The data was collected during online community discussions with participants in both the “boomer” and “millennial” age groups. The study provides a snapshot of the “why†behind liking a brand on Facebook, and behavior around brands that people are passionate about.
Key findings which were gathered during the study, include:
1.   Incentives to “like†a brand have become commodities and don’t drive true brand interest. Just over half of the boomers surveyed – 52% – indicated they are driven to “like†a brand in exchange for an offer, compared with 42% of millennials.
2.   Users are overdosing on likes. With so many people driven to “like†a brand by an offer, it’s no surprise that 63% of millennials and 60% of boomers can’t remember all of the brands they gave the thumbs up to.
3.   Likes don’t necessarily reflect brands people are truly passionate about. Only 16% of millennials and 36% of boomers said that they “liked†all of their favorite brands on Facebook.
4.   While friends aren’t a primary reason to “like†a brand on Facebook, they are the most important source for information about a brand that someone is truly passionate about. 68% of millennials and 52% of boomers said that information from their friends about brands is where they go for opinions that matter.
A full report on the findings can be downloaded at http://gutcheckit.com/socialmedia.
How many brands do boomers “Like” on Facebook vs. millenials
By Tyler C. Forbes :: 12:16 AM
The venerable New Yorker magazine, well known for its cartoons, along with commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, and satire, found itself temporarily banned from Facebook today, after a cartoon was posted on its Facebook page that the social network considered “obscene.”
The cartoon, which pictured a naked man and woman underneath a tree, ran afoul of Facebook’s guidelines and community standards on nudity and sex. Facebook suspended the magazine’s page for a short period of time – the cartoon was redrawn, and re-posted once the page was restored.
The New Yorker, not an outlet to take things like this lightly, explained their side of the story in an article they call. “Nipplegate.”