Yahoo has a big leak, Kickstarter has a big hit
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Yahoo has a big leak, Kickstarter has a big hit
You might want to change your password on your Yahoo account. I mean, you should periodically anyway. But now especially, because hackers were able to grab and post online over 450,000 logins and passwords from Yahoo.
A group claiming responsibility said it wanted to demonstrate how lousy Yahoo’s security was. The data dump also revealed that over 2,200 people used sequential numbers for passwords. Don’t. They’re easy to hack.
Also, hundreds of people used the password ‘password.’
I just…I don’t know what to say anymore.
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Ouya is a video game console that hasn’t been built. Unlike the Xbox or the Wii, anyone will be able to build games for it without paying Microsoft or Nintendo. Ouya will cost $99, and at least part of each game will be free.
Kyle Orland writes about gaming for Ars Technica. He says, “It’s the chance for independent developers to get onto the TV in the living room rather than be trapped on phones or PCs as they have been in the past. From gamer’s point of view, I guess there’s the hope that they’ll see the sorts of games that the big evil companies like Microsoft won’t let onto their systems.”
To fund Ouya, the inventors recently posted the project on the crowdsourcing site Kickstarter.com where people can donate to projects they’d like to see finished. It was a big hit.
The goal for Ouya was $950,000 in 30 days. Well, a million bucks was raised in eight hours. It’s now over $4 million.
Why, out of hundreds of Kickstarter projects, did Ouya become all the rage? Glenn Fleishman is a tech journalist writing a book about Kickstarter.
Glenn Fleishman: Kickstarter is a place where people come to fund things that they want to make happen. And when you look at something like this, an open console, a device that people can program for without the restrictions that are placed upon a lot of the gaming systems out there today, that checks a lot of boxes for a lot of people.
Moe: What do all the hugely successful projects have in common?
Fleishman: There’s a cool factor on a lot of them. You look at where the money’s going; it’s where the audience is. It’s where people already are looking to find something and then this thing materializes and they say, “Look, for a small amount of money, maybe even cheaper than the ultimate street price, we’re going to give you this cool thing and you can be part of making it come into existence.”
Moe: You know, I remember when Kickstarter was largely a platform by which your cousin’s terrible band could record a terrible CD. What shifted that has made this thing so much more big-league than it used to be?
Fleishman: I think there are two things. One is that Kickstarter has a much higher profile, as does crowd funding as a general topic. People are comfortable being a patron for a project. And the second is it’s the result of success. There are now many thousands of completed projects at Kickstarter, some for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars that have come into fruition. And those get written about as well.
Moe: Is it a level playing field, though? I mean, I’m talking about Ouya because so many other people have spent money on Ouya and it’s a legit story, but this may lead to more money going to Ouya and there’s probably a bunch of other projects that can barely get noticed.
Fleishman: Yeah, it’s absolutely the same power law conversion that you have with everything else on the Internet, is that some things get an inordinate amount of attention and the more attention they get, the more attention they get. It sort of squares, goes exponential at the top. And Kickstarter and some of the other crowd funding sites, they support viral marketing. That is, once something becomes popular, they’re there to take in that huge flow of money and people and traffic. Where, if you were building this on your own, you might not build a website that was fully capable of dealing with that.
That’s Glenn Fleishman. His book about Kickstarter is being funded…on Kickstarter.
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