stewart

LAS VEGAS--A Russian group is doing check counterfeiting in the U.S. using malware, botnets, virtual private networks, and money mules recruited online, according to research expected to be revealed at the Black Hat hacker conference here on Wednesday.

The SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit investigated the bizarre operation over three months and is now working with law enforcement to find out who is responsible for the scam, which is believed to have netted as much as $9 million from fake checks in the last year.

SecureWorks researchers uncovered the complicated operation in April when it discovered a unique variant of … Read more

NEW YORK--Legendary businesswoman Martha Stewart wanted to post to her Twitter account from a panel discussion onstage on Wednesday, and she couldn't. A particularly nasty edition of one of Twitter's notorious service outages got in the way.

Stewart, along with Huffington Post founder and new-media figurehead Arianna Huffington, was participating in an onstage interview conducted by veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher at the "Digital Content NewFront," an annual event conducted by ad agency Digitas as part of Internet Week New York. Swisher commented on the fact that Stewart was toying with the iPad she was holding … Read more

I understand there's been something of a kerfuffle over a lost iPhone prototype that might even have been a stolen iPhone prototype. Or not.

However, I could not decide whether this was news until America's foremost newscaster, Jon Stewart, offered an opinion on this pressing matter of state.

On Wednesday, Stewart declared that this was, indeed, a topic worthy of comment. On his Comedy Central show, Intelligent America's barometer seemed somewhat disturbed at the plight of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen.

Moreover, he seemed concerned that Apple, once the underdog, had become something of an overbearing hound. The … Read more

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.--The iconic environmentalist Stewart Brand has come around to the notion that the Earth can't solve its own problems any more.

Brand, the original publisher and editor of the "Whole Earth Catalog" in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is an ecologist and Internet pioneer who founded the online community The Well. When it comes to dealing with global warming, he thinks environmentalists need to push for things that many of them now oppose.

Specifically, he's an advocate of bio-engineered plants, nuclear power at large scale, and geoengineering, or ways to manipulate the … Read more

Today's show title is a little deceptive, and we should be clear that Alison Rosen's mother does not make an appearance on this episode, but Alison's all we need anyway because she's the future of television! We're excited to have her back after a long hiatus, and she updates us on everything going on in her life, including ALISON ROSEN IS YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND, a new weekly interactive show on Ustream that features guests like Michael Showalter and Andrew W.K., in addition to an upcoming segment where Alison will explore the world of online dating. Be sure to add her on Twitter to stay updated.

We're also super excited to show you guys a clip of Natali Del Conte on last night's episode of "The Daily Show"! In a segment called "Tech-Talch," Jon reports on Chatroulette, aka our new favorite Web site, and shows a clip of Natali shielding her eyes as she gives a demo and inevitably stumbles upon a a dude having too much fun. Alison has the common sense to stay off the Web site, even for professional research, so we try to offer her some suggestions on how to make ChatRoulette more fun if you're a girl.

What would you do for five bucks? Twitter posts on a new site called Fiverr attempt to answer that question, and a lot of people are offering compelling services for five bones. If you can scrounge together some cash, you can turn into a dead jedi, get your fortune read, and even get a private wake-up call! Ooooh, invasive!

Many thanks to Alison for joining us this morning; we always have a lot of fun with her, and you should too! Head over to AlisonRosen.com, read her blog, write her a poem, download her iPhone app, and look for her again soon on The 404!

Last May, I began a series of behind-the-scenes meetings with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield about Tiny Speck, the company he and three partners had just started and the game they were working on.

That game, which they announced on Tuesday is called Glitch, has been in the works since last March and much has changed about it in the interim--the artistic styles, the back story, the core game mechanic and the size of the team building it.

Glitch is a social online game that takes place in the imaginations of 11 ancient giants and tasks players with essentially growing an … Read more

On Tuesday, as reported first by CNET, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's start-up Tiny Speck announced its new online social game, Glitch.

As described on Glitch.com, "It's called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the 'glitch'--a grave danger of disemprobablization. This results in a time-traveling effort at saving the future, going back into the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and … Read more

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to live inside the imaginations of a group of ancient giants, get ready to play Glitch.

A new game that went into alpha testing on Tuesday, as reported exclusively by CNET, Glitch (see related behind-the-scenes feature about its development) is a puzzle-heavy, Web-based social MMO built around sending players billions of years into the past to develop the optimistic future that today seems increasingly unlikely.

"The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants," said Stewart Butterfield, the president of Glitch developer Tiny Speck, … Read more

Last July, TechCrunch ran an item about Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's recent tweet that his new company was hiring.

"Maybe I make a terrible boss, but at least I know it," he tweeted. "Work with me." And based on that tiny little missive, his until-then unknown start-up Tiny Speck was flooded with job applicants hoping they join Butterfield as he and his partners made a second attempt at catching lightning in the Web 2.0 bottle.

Of course, no one knew at that point what Tiny Speck was up to, beyond the fact that the … Read more