Twitter hacked -- change your password now!

Today the people at Twitter officially announced that over 250,000 accounts were hacked, following a short but odd outage on the site yesterday (coincidentally alongside another outage at Amazon). They say this was their first "real" hack, as opposed to previous attacks that were somewhat simpler. Of the recent hack, the staff remarked it was actually a considerably "sophisticated" attack.

Unfortunately, this means that many of Twitter's userbase are now in the hands of the hackers, who may use or sell the information to their own ends. So what can you do? Well, the answer is simple, and Twitter staff was quick to suggest it: change your password, whether or not you received the e-mail notification sent out to potential targets. It's just good practice.

Here's a copy of the e-mail sent out from Twitter about the hacking:

Newegg brings on the smackdown with the "Shopping Cart" lawsuit

If you have ever shopped online, then you have almost certainly come across the shopping cart widget. Items can be added to the virtual cart to save for purchase at a later time, perhaps to give you more time to shop. Once you have your entire purchase ready, a quick click to the "check out" button will complete the order.

While the shopping cart is pretty much ubiquitous on the Internet, one "company" claims that it owns the rights to the virtual cart's use. Soverain Software is a sham business existing to suck money out of other, more successful businesses through patent lawsuits. Soverain had produced the two patents 5,715,314 and 5,909,492 (and, on occasion, a third: 7,272,639) to prove their case against such defendants as Amazon and The Gap, and more recently: Newegg.