Shane's Blog

How long have you been waiting for new iMacs or Mac Pros? What about the Cinema Display? How about free iPhone 4 cases? For Apple to acknowledge the sad, sad performance of iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G? We covered all of that and more this last week.

Twitter is in the midst of rolling out a new feature called “Suggestions for You” that offers up personalized recommendations of users that you might want to follow on the microblogging service. You’ll find the new feature under the “Find People” link in the header of Twitter.com.

According to Twitter, “the suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow.” The company also notes that you’ll start to see recommendations when looking at other users’ profiles. It will also be making the feature available to developers so the functionality can be included in third-party apps.

The root-kit tool was released to “to persuade manufacturers to fix a bug that lets hackers read a victim’s email and text messages,” according to report by Reuters. 

“It wasn’t difficult to build,” said Nicholas Percoco, who leads Spider Labs. Working with a colleague, Percoco said it took about two weeks to develop the tool, which allows nefarious users to take control of the device and steal email and text messages. 

Percoco distributed the root kit on DVDs at the Defcon conference, which is a meeting of around 10,000 security experts who can attend anonymously. Reuters noted that “law enforcement posts undercover agents in the [Defcon] audience to spot criminals and government officials recruit workers to fight computer crimes and for the Department of Defense.”

NBC says “30 Rock” is going live this fall.

The network said Friday a live episode of the comedy will air Oct. 14 and will be performed twice so that both East and West Coast viewers get to see it that way.

NBC executives told the Television Critics Association that “30 Rock” executive producers Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels were approached about a live episode and were up for the challenge. Fey, the show’s star and creator, is familiar with live TV from her “Saturday Night Live” days. Michaels created and produces the show.

NBC has aired other live episodes, but this will be the first for the Emmy-winning “30 Rock,” which is produced in New York.

Mike Masnick, on OpenAppMkt:

Overall, this fascinates me for two reasons. First, it’s good to get more people realizing that HTML is already pretty damn good at creating app-style experiences, without having to create special compiled code and, second, it’s a really clever way to totally route around Apple as a gatekeeper (without requiring a jailbreak), and is a reminder that even on “closed” systems, openness will often find a way.

OpenAppMkt is indeed clever, and it is a good way to get more people to see the potential in HTML5 as a mobile development platform. But it’s not “routing around” anything. iOS’s support for mobile web apps — totally open, no gatekeeping — is by design. This isn’t a loophole around the App Store. It’s a fully supported software platform.

Now in production: the final film in Gary Hustwit’s documentary trilogy on design, following Helvetica and Objectified:

Urbanized looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design, featuring some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers. Over half the world’s population now lives in an urban area, and 75% will call a city home by 2050.

Wired’s defense dude, Noah Schachtman, has a fascinating story about Google and the CIA being joint investors in a web monitoring firm. Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, have injected sums (less than $10 million each) into Recorded Future, a company that goes through “tens of thousands” of websites and looks for related actions and conversations between, for example, Twitter accounts, blogs and websites, and analyzes them in order to spot events and trends as early on as possible.

Describing its analytics as “the ultimate tool for open-source intelligence,” Recorded Future markets itself towards corporations and brands, but it’s also got one very large foot in the counter-terrorism field—which is what makes it so attractive to In-Q-Tel. The firm’s CEO is an ex Swedish Army Ranger who holds a PhD in Computer Science, and he says that what sets Recorded Future apart from other analytics firms is “you can actually predict the curve, in many cases.”