Facebook has removed 25 job listings from its careers pages. It looks to have made hires in technical recruiting as well finding a Director of Financial Operations.

Listings removed from Facebook’s careers page:

• Community Manager (Menlo Park)
• Partner Engineer, Gaming (London)
• Director, Financial Operations (Menlo Park)
• Financial Analyst, FP&A – HR (Menlo Park)
• Trust & Safety Manager, EMEA (London)
• People Operations (HR) Partner Lead (Menlo Park)
• People Services Organization (PSO) Ops Program Coordinator – Contractor (Austin)
• Recruiting Events Program Manager (Contract) (Dublin)
• Sourcer, Diversity – NYC (New York)
• Technical Recruiter – Contract (Menlo Park)
• Technical Sourcer – Contract (Menlo Park)
• University Recruiter – Contractor (Menlo Park)
• Research Manager, Growth and Analytics (Menlo Park)
• UX Research Tools Engineer (Menlo Park)
• Editorial Specialist, Global Business Marketing – Contract (Menlo Park)
• Designer, Business Marketing (Menlo Park)
• Partner Solutions Engineer (Menlo Park)
• Media Solutions, Italian (Dublin)
• Report System Developer, User Operations (Menlo Park)
• Agency Development Lead (New York)
• Client Partner, Mobile (Chicago)
• Client Partner, Auto (Detroit)
• Client Partner, CPG (Chicago)
• Analyst, Media Analytics (Hyderabad)
• Manager, Media Analytics (Hyderabad)

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

It’s had to have been an interesting week for the people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The non-profit has been beating the drum about the importance of digital rights, privacy, and metadata for decades now. And in recent years, one of the EFF’s causes has been to shed more light on the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and specifically its use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to essentially spy on the telecommunications and web activity of millions of innocent Americans under the guise of keeping them safe.

Now those issues have come to the forefront of the mainstream’s consciousness, with a series of revelations this week that the NSA has reportedly been secretly working together with major tech companies to give the government access huge amounts of private user data through a classified project called PRISM.

So it was a massive pleasure to have Peter Eckersley, the EFF’s Technology Projects Director, in TechCrunch TV’s San Francisco studio yesterday afternoon to speak about all that’s going on. It was a relatively long conversation, but I think it could have gone on much longer and continued to be fascinating — Eckersley is an expert on this subject and clearly passionate about the cause, and there were lots of bases to cover.

What’s interesting is that I spoke to Eckersley just one hour before the New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller reported that the technology companies named in the leaked PRISM slides were indeed complicit with the NSA’s data mining, contrary to their cleverly worded public denials. As you’ll see above, he expected that was exactly the case — that the tech companies involved in PRISM have been issuing clever “deniable denials” about what is going on, rather than telling the full truth. The reason they’re doing so, Eckersley said (and the NYT reported), is FISA.

We discussed the history of FISA, how the EFF is fighting for more transparency (and why it matters), why this news of companies like Facebook and Google working with the NSA is a surprising disappointment even to the folks at the EFF, what people who care about their privacy should do now, and much more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There have been plenty of juicy (and unsettling) PRISM details making the rounds these past few days, and unsurprisingly the Office of the Director of National Intelligence doesn’t think the NSA’s surveillance practices have been cast in the most accurate light. In an effort to help do away with some pervasive misconceptions, the ODNI has issued a statement explaining why it thinks people are blowing this out of proportion.

“The surveillance activities published in The Guardian and The Washington Post are lawful and conducted under authorities widely known and discussed, and fully debated and authorized by Congress,” Director James R. Clapper pointed out in a widely emailed missive. “Their purpose is to obtain foreign intelligence information, including information necessary to thwart terrorist and cyber attacks against the United States and its allies.”

Some of the arguments that ODNI throws out there will sound pretty familiar. It states that PRISM can’t be used to “intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person” (which President Obama pointed out the other day), and that the U.S. government can’t just collect information all willy-nilly — it needs judicial approval and oversight from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.

Perhaps most importantly, the ODNI says that PRISM isn’t “a data mining program,” which dovetails nicely with reports from a slew of publicly outed tech companies, including Google, Apple, Yahoo, PalTalk and (TechCrunch owner) AOL, that say they don’t give the NSA (or any body of the U.S. government) direct access to their servers. Still, the prevailing sentiment in certain privacy-sensitive corners of the web is that these companies are basically arguing over semantics: They may not be giving the NSA direct access, but it’s become clear that the information is winding up in the hands of those intelligence agencies anyway, and that has raised more than a few people’s hackles.

Of course, the timing of the statement isn’t exactly ideal. While the ODNI carefully laid out its arguments regarding the need for and efficacy of the PRISM system, The Guardian’s Glen Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill just recently published new information on yet another surreptitious snooping tool: the NSA’s so-called Boundless Informant. If PRISM is the system that harvests all of that ballyhooed metadata about your calls and communiques, Boundless Informant is the system that lets the NSA ascribe that metadata to different countries and drill down accordingly. Don’t expect this rigmarole to end any time soon, folks.

You can read the entire ODNI fact sheet below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Prism already looked like a pretty far-reaching program, but a new report claims the NSA also gave at least one foreign security agency access to this system. According to a report in the Guardian, the NSA provided the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) with access to Prism since at least June 2010.

The U.S. has now acknowledged that Prism exists, though Google, Apple and all of the other companies named in the original leak continue to say that they are not giving the U.S. government “direct access” to their servers, as the leak claims. The U.S.’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper yesterday argued that the program only exists to spy on foreign citizens, but it seems clear that no matter the intentions, the program was far more wide-reaching than this.

The U.K. GCHQ, the report claims, generated 197 intelligence reports from Prism in the first half of 2012. It’s unclear if the organization had full access to Prism. The Guardian’s report suggests that it was “able to receive material from a bespoke part of the programme to suit British interests.”

So far, we haven’t heard about any additional U.S. allies who received access to this data, but if the NSA provided the U.K. with a direct line into Prism and the aim of the program was indeed to spy on foreign citizens, it wouldn’t come as a huge surprise if others had access, too.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Washington Post today reported that Google, Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL (TechCrunch’s parent company) and Yahoo participated in the so-called PRISM program which provided the NSA with what looks like virtually direct access to their servers and their users’ data.

We have now reached out to all of these companies and so far, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple have categorically denied that they are participating. We have not received statements from the other companies yet, but will update this post as we learn more.

These denials are especially odd given that a number of publications, including USA Today, are now citing source that confirm the existence of this program. According to these reports, PRISM is not aimed at U.S. citizens or any person in the United States.

Here is what we got so far:

Facebook

“We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law.”

Google

“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a backdoor for the government to access private user data.”

Apple

Apple gave this the statement to AllThingsD:

“We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.”

Microsoft

“We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it.”

Yahoo

“Yahoo! takes users’ privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.”

Dropbox

“We’ve seen reports that Dropbox might be asked to participate in a government program called PRISM. We are not part of any such program and remain committed to protecting our users’ privacy.”

NSA

The NSA has referred us to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and we are following up with them, too.

We will update this post as we hear from the other companies named in the documents.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Washington Post is reporting a top-secret National Security Administration data-mining program that taps directly into the Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple servers among others. “The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time,” reports the Post.

Details about the highly classified program, Project PRISM, are somewhat vague, but it appears that the NSA allows the Attorney General and Director of National of National Intelligence “to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA.”

“With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s ‘extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services,’” explains The Post.

From there, the NSA mines the data for suspects, then “hops” to their potential contacts, exponentially increasing the number of Americans that the NSA can spy on (by mandate, the NSA is supposed to monitor foreigners).

Most of these companies have now denied these accusations.

We reached out to Facebook for comment and they replied: “We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law.”

In a statement to TechCrunch, Microsoft said: “We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it.”

Yahoo told TechCrunch: “Yahoo! takes users’ privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.”

In a statement, Google said: “Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a backdoor for the government to access private user data.”

And Apple gave a statement to CNBC:

Apple to @CNBC: “We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers..”

—

Brooklyn-based custom-made goods marketplace Makeably launched this past fall as a way to connect buyers with makers and other artisans who can craft unique, one-of-a-kind items ranging from apparel to household goods and more. Today, the company is announcing a slight tweak to that earlier business model, as well as $650,000 in seed funding led by Great Oaks, with participation from 500 Startups and other angel investors.

Founded by ex-Googlers Ryan Hayward and Anastasia Leng, the angel investment included all of Leng’s former managers at Google, the co-founder tells us, as well as other Google and tech industry execs like Google X’s Obi Felten; Feedburner co-founder Steve Olechowski; Senior Director of Product Management at Flurry Rahul Bafna; PM Director of Google Display Advertising Christian Oestlien; Head of Innovation at TalkTalk Max Alexander; Director of Global Marcom for YouTube Anna Bateson; VP of Product Management and Cloud9 Wireless founder Sebastian Tonkin; VP & Head of Product Management, Visa U.K. and Ireland, Brendan Marry; and others.

The marketplace initially was reminiscent of CustomMade in that it also served as a resource for shoppers looking for custom goods. But today the company is relaunching version 2 of its website, which puts the focus more on what the startup is calling “remixes,” as opposed to the more direct requests for creations.

After the first six weeks of its public debut, Makeably pulled in $10,000 in transactional revenue, Leng says, but when the founders dug into the data they discovered that only around 5 to 10 percent of users were “power creators” — meaning those who came in with very specific ideas of what they wanted, and who generally weren’t constrained by a budget.

However, the other 90 percent were just “remixing” the reference-point products to their liking. “For example, they would see a design for a necklace they really liked and would say, ‘can I have this in gold instead of silver?’ or ‘can you make this as earrings instead of as necklaces?’,” explains Leng. “They were remixing along one or two dimensions instead of creating a one-off every single time.”

To better cater to the majority of the site’s users, a new version of Makeably has been under testing for a couple of weeks which now features items users can “remix” by selecting their own options and adding special requests via a “Make it yours” side panel to the right of the item. Here, buyers can choose from different materials, designs, sizes and other changes, as well as input any other detailed requests into a provided form.

Leng says that during the testing period, signs indicate this “remix” option is working. Bounce rates are down by half, there’s been an increase in visitors contacting buyers, and the average purchase price has gone up from around $20 to $30 to $80 to $100. The site is now on track to hit $100,000 in transactional revenue in the next month or two, she adds.

In addition, maker profiles are being augmented with structured data detailing their skill sets and materials they work with, while also allowing them to showcase photos of works in progress, workspaces or other projects they plan to work on. Buyers can click on “kudos” buttons to give their praise to these individuals, too, and in a few weeks, they’ll have enhanced profiles of their own, which will keep track of those clicks.

The team hopes that, going forward, Makeably can serve to help makers figure out how to expand beyond the creations they’ve already made in a way where they’re not having to predict what consumers want, putting it out there, then finding out that no one wants to buy it, says Leng.

The maker movement, combined with the increasing consumerization of 3D-printing technologies, and the growth of crafty marketplaces like Etsy are all pointing to a future where people will become more accustomed to ordering specialized items or simply becoming more involved in the “manufacturing” process in general. But Makeably is arriving during what’s still the early days of that larger shift, so the question it has is not one of whether the company is on the right long-term path, but rather one of timing.

“That is what keeps me up at night,” Leng admits. “It’s not whether ‘does this idea have legs?’ or ‘will this work?’ It’s ‘will we have enough time and runway to really prove our point?’,” she says. But things are changing fast. When the startup began fundraising efforts in January, investors were skeptical about the idea. Upon her return to San Francisco just three weeks ago, they had changed their tune entirely. “I think for the first time they felt like this is a way to make customization really scalable, and it’s not tied to 3D printing,” she says.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Haiku Deck, the iPad-based presentation tool that aims to be both simpler and more effective than Microsoft’s cumbersome desktop PowerPoint software, today unveiled version 2.1, which adds a number of top-requested features, and which also brings Getty Images to the app. The Getty deal means that users will be able to select from a selection of Getty’s stock imagery, at a special price that covers one-off licensing for use exclusively within the Haiku Deck app.

The Getty deal brings a subset of its massive library into the app, searchable by keyword and concept, which both Haiku Deck founder Adam Tratt and Getty Images Director of Creative Content Andrew Delaney said is a key benefit it can provide users of the app above and beyond the free Creative Commons content that is already offered within the app for finding photos. Delaney explained in an interview that Getty’s curation of its library means big benefits for business users over using the largely uncategorized or inconsistent tagging of Creative Commons pics.

“We’ve known for years that our shop window is an image being reviewed as a thumbnail, and they live or die on that basis,” he said. “When you’re putting a presentation together with Haiku Deck, you want to be able to have real impact. So having access to images that have been carefully curated, and carefully created, and are legally safe to use, is going to make a very big impact.”

Delaney notes that Getty has years of experience tagging images according to how their users search for content – so vague concepts that are hard to embody like “beauty” and “motivation” will actually bring in interesting results, both of the kind a user might be expecting, and adding in some surprising stuff that might not be what a user was looking for, but might actually be better overall for their purposes anyway.

The licensing arrangement with Haiku Deck involves a one-time fee of $1.99 to gain access to photos from Getty (and uses its API), which the buyer can then use in Haiku Deck presentations exclusively. It’s a new licensing model for Getty, and one that Delaney says represents the company’s new approach to the changing nature of online media; in an app-based, mobile-centric world, this kind of licensing, which is more affordable but tied to a specific piece of software, in many ways makes a lot more sense than the older, more expensive model that licenses for broader use.

As for the rest of the updates to Haiku Deck, they make small but key changes to the slide creation process. Other new image features include an image history and image favoriting, to help make it easier for users to come back to what they’ve used in the past. Also new are both public and private notes. The former helps with adding more context to presentations when sharing them with others via the web, and the latter is useful for presenters, since it offers you a glimpse at both the slide being presented and the private presenter notes when you’re outputting your Haiku Deck shows to an external screen and holding your iPad in portrait mode.

The HaikuDeck update is free, but it adds two new premium and one new free theme. And Haiku Deck gains a new source of revenue as it splits the proceeds of the Getty images licensed through the app, though that’s a three-way deal since Apple also takes its standard 30 percent cut on in-app purchases. Still, it’s good to see a solid tool like Haiku Deck expand its revenue options, which should help with continued viability, at the same time as it expands its feature set in useful ways that don’t compromise the simplicity of the app.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

According to Twitter’s status blog and all of Facebook, the service appears to be experiencing site-wide issues including errors on just about every single feature of the site.

So far, I’ve only been able to send and receive DMs without error, however you can still tweet. You just won’t see it. Along with the timeline refresh issue, you aren’t able to view anyone’s profile at the moment, which is a big problem, considering that a lot of traffic comes to the site via these pages popping up in Google search results.

Here’s the page of empty sadness that you’ll see when you click on someone’s beautiful avatar:

These issues have been going on for about fifteen minutes, with Twitter’s engineering staff posting about it seven minutes ago. The issues are also affecting mobile apps, as you’ll get a similar error message when trying to update your timelines. Here’s what the status blog says as of right now:

Some users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter.

Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.

Twitter has actually done quite well with its uptime over the past few years, having very few major events that brings every feature down like this. It is, however, interesting to see the company always say that “some users” are experiencing issues, when it’s quite clear that more than “some” of them are.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for more information, but have yet to hear back. We don’t usually hear about why issues happen, just that they’ve been resolved, so don’t expect anything in-depth.

So Twitter's Director of Platform @rsarver says he's leaving company Friday, Monday it goes down. Don't leave, Ryan.

—
Craig Kanalley (@ckanal) June 03, 2013

UPDATE: It appears that Twitter is bringing all of its features back. Feel free to tweet about how that was the worst 41 minutes or so of your life.

[Unnecessary Disclosure: I'll be moving on to Yahoo! soon]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Another day, another big site hacked. 2013 really just hasn’t been a good year for web security.

This time around, the site writing the email that noone wants to write is Drupal.org, home of the popular content management platform, Drupal. Though no exact number was shared, it appears that nearly one million user accounts are affected.

Also affected are the user accounts of groups.drupal.org, a sub-site meant to help Drupal users establish meetup groups in the real world.

Word of the break-in went out this evening, when Drupal began to email affected users.

In an FAQ about the hack on their site, Drupal says that they currently have no idea who might be behind the attack. So far, it seems like the hackers had access to usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords.

As is par for the course at this point, Drupal has immediately reset the passwords for every user in the system. If you’re one of the million-or-so users on Drupal.org, you’ll need to confirm your email and pick a new password before regaining access.

While you’re at it, you’ll probably want to change your password on any sites where you’ve used a password similar to the one you might’ve used on Drupal.org. While Drupal seems to have done a pretty good job of ensuring that passwords were stored safely (most were both salted and given multiple passes through a hash filter), it’s just good practice. You’d be surprised at how insanely fast password cracking has become.

It’s important to note that this hack affects Drupal.org, the website itself, and is not the result of a vulnerability in Drupal, the CMS. In other words: if you’ve got a Drupal-powered site, don’t freak out. According to Drupal Executive Director Holly Ross, the hackers gained access through an exploit in an unnamed third-party tool that Drupal.org was running on their server.

Also important to note: Drupal says they store no credit card details on their servers, but they’re still making sure there wasn’t any malicious code put in place to quietly intercept’em without them noticing. They’re recommending that anyone who’s made a transaction on Drupal.org keeps an eye on their statements, just in case.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch