Hey everyone,

I’m excited to announce that today we opened up the newest version of our Digg platform. We’ve been working hard on this next evolution of Digg (what we’ve been calling “v4”) and everyone here is really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the changes we’ve made.

This redesign is a major revision of our platform – front end to back end – this is just phase one of what will be an on-going, iterative process, involving lots of input from all of you. We’ll be pushing out features on a regular basis and tweaking often.

Our goal has always been for Digg to be a place where people can discover and share content and conversations from anywhere on the web. With Digg v4, we are introducing a few things that will make discovering and discussing news a lot better.

Here’s a bit of what you can expect on the new Digg:

Walkthrough the new Digg with Kevin Rose from Digg Videos on Vimeo.

• Speed – the new Digg is faster in every way: submitting articles, loading pages, and Digging content.
• Personalization – we put a lot of thought into how people consume news and wanted to make it easy to view content from the friends, publishers, and influencers you care about. Once you start following your friends, and sources you trust, we’ll build a custom news homepage for you called “My News”. Customizing Digg will enable you to see your friend’s recent Digg or Comment, as well as the latest article submitted by a publisher.
• Friends & sharing – the new Digg is all about making it easy to see the stories your friends are Digging and commenting on, and to share interesting stories with them. You’ll notice activity from the profiles you’re following highlighted in stories, on comment pages, and even on their profile page as you navigate the site. Attach your blog or RSS feed to your profile and send your followers content as you create it.

What you know and love about Digg today is now represented in the ‘Top News’ section of the site – here you can still find content discovered by the global Digg community. Now we’ve just made it easier to share that content with your friends and see what they’re recommending.

That’s it for now, stay tuned for some more feature announcements soon!

Thanks, Kevin

Now that you’ve seen how proud Kevin Rose is of the “New Digg” lets take a look at it.

And after you skip that screen, you're presented with even more ways to follow people.

Upon logging in, you're presented with an almost identical in appearance to Twitter prompt to follow users. Talk about original.

Most of the time the site is completely unusable, showing you errors more often than content.

Because the new Digg has been so derailed from its original concept, they need to teach users how to use the site all over again.

More "Internal errors" arise as you try to post comments.

Apparently you need an invite to join Digg now? That's the impression I got when I saw the "5 invites left!" towards the top of the page. Limited invites for a free service anyone can signup for?

Even more errors...

If you're lucky enough to even get the page to load, you still run into the risk of style sheets completely missing from the page.

Want to leave them feedback via the "Give us feedback" link? You can't.

Don't try to search either, because that too is broken.

Download Video: MP4 | OGG | WebM

Lets take a look at the BlackBerry Torch next to the HTC EVO and the iPhone 4. Category winners are declared with a green background. I was unable to locate some of the data to completely fill out the table. Unknown values are marked with a series of question marks. If you’re able to fill out any missing data, leave a comment!

As a generally happy Apple customer, I bought two 2G iPhones on the first day they hit the market (one for myself and one for my romantic partner at the time). When the 3G came out, I bought that model too. 

The first iPhone captivated the world because the interface was so well done, so snappy, so interactive; it was like nothing before it. Of course it was, it was an Apple product. That, right there, is why I buy Apple products. And I didn’t even mind that it was missing “copy and paste,” MMS, ringtones, etc — because I knew Apple would eventually get to these through software updates. And eventually they did. Unfortunately they kept coming out with new phones. With faster processors. And they wrote all their software updates for these phones, with little attention to deprecated models. I don’t really use third party software on my phones, I honestly don’t even use ringtones. I just use my phone for SMS, web, maps, and occasionally as an actual phone, so the 3G model was more than I ever needed. 

Except over time, it’s fulfilled my needs less and less. And it’s not because my needs have grown. It’s not because I’ve installed a bunch of laggy software. It’s because Apple’s firmware has become bloated, with respect to the processing power of the 3G iPhone. I just installed iOS 4 two weeks ago, and at this point, I’d be happy to roll back to the first firmware I ever had, just to have that original speed again; forget about the copy and paste, I don’t need it that badly. 

So, tongue firmly in cheek, I decided to compare my phone to the first iPhone commercial that Apple ran. That commercial lasted twenty-eight seconds. How long will my phone take for the same tasks?

I’ve never seen any other phone do this.

While they do have some good points, most of them are garbage. Here’s why:

Macs might spoil your fun.

There are some things you simply can’t do out of the box with a Mac like watch, pause, rewind, and record TV like a DVR.

It’s showtime.

You can’t get a Mac that ships with a Blu-ray player, TV tuner, Memory Stick reader, or built-in 3G wireless. You can with PCs running Windows 7.

I actually had to look this one up myself. But, as Microsoft said, there are no Macs that come with a Blu-ray player, TV tuner, Memory Stick reader, or 3G wireless (unless you count the iPad, which should never be mistaken for a device with any sort of relation to a computer). Anyways, as it turns out, Apple still hasn’t gotten on board with the whole Blu-ray thing yet.

Game on!

Most of the world’s most popular computer games aren’t available for Macs. And Macs can’t connect to an Xbox 360. PCs are ready to play.

This one I’m not too fond of. Lets take a look at the most “popular” games according to usage on wakoopa:

1. World of Warcraft
2. StarCraft II (For the PC)
3. Team Fortress 2
4. StarCraft II (For the Mac)
5. League of Legends
6. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
7. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
8. The Sims 3
9. RuneScape
10. Spider Solitaire

Alright well, that was probably a bad user sample, but it does give a good overview of some very popular games (apparently spider solitaire is pretty popular). StarCraft II was listed twice, but other than that, there is a Mac version of all of those games with the exception of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Recently, Valve opened up Steam to Mac users and ported the Half Life 2 Orange Box to the Mac. Many other developers (mainly indie developers) soon followed.

Now, getting a game that’s about 6 years old isn’t exactly the best thing ever, but it’s a start. Companies like Blizzard have been making Mac versions of their games (all 2 of them) for a while. I think they started with World of Warcraft, but I’ve never owned a Mac so that’s not something I’m going to keep up with.

The amount of games on Steam that are available for the Mac is quite small compared to the enormous library the PC users can choose from. While games are still being ported over, I can only assume it has to do with OpenGL being inferior to DirectX, right?

Also, I can’t help but think that Microsoft is to blame when it comes to Macs not being able to connect to the Xbox 360. Either way, someone is to blame for not supporting the communication between the two devices. On a side note, I have an Xbox 360 and I connected it to my computer for about an hour until I realized how silly it was.

Direct TV connection.

Most Macs can’t hook up to your TV unless you buy a converter dongle. Many PCs running Windows 7 are designed to connect directly to TVs, so you can watch movies and see photos on the big screen.

They say “Most Macs” meaning there are some macs that can hook up to a TV without any extra equipment. What Microsoft fails to tell you is how many different Macs are available for purchase? Probably enough to count on 2 hands. How many different PC models are there to choose from? Probably thousands. So, Microsoft, what percentage of Macs can connect to a TV without any extra equipment compared to PCs? I think that would be a better comparison.

There’s really no standard for updating applications. Linux has done a fairly good job with tools like aptitude, yum, and other package managers. I mean, what’s easier than having a cron job run every night that automatically updates every piece of software on your machine? Some companies, however, try to make the process as convoluted as possible for the user.

The Good

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is by far the best example of a seamless update process I could find. If you haven’t gotten a chance to try Google Chrome out yet, I suggest you do. If you’re using Chrome, chances are you’ve never actually seen Chrome update. Normally, you’ll just launch your web browser to find a new feature or subtle appearance change. On a worst case scenario, Chrome will notify you that it hasn’t gotten a chance to update in a while if you leave Chrome open for a week or so. Other than that, the update process is completely transparent. The average user isn’t going to care about a software update. As long as they can get online, they could care less. Taking a less intrusive approach to software updates by Chrome has made it a perfect update process in my opinion.

Microsoft Products

While Microsoft seems to be going towards a unix-like approach in that they bundle all of their software into Windows Update. One update manager updates Windows, Office, Visual Studio, Security Essentials, and other smaller Microsoft applications. Updates automatically start downloading in the background (with your permission) and will even automatically install themselves on a schedule (once again, with your permission). The only problem is, Microsoft only allows their own applications to be tied into Windows Update. Perhaps one day Microsoft will fully get on board with their update approach and let verified companies distribute their application updates through Windows Update.

One other note, however. If at any time Windows prevents me from shutting down my computer in a timely manner because it has to install 20 updates before it can power off, it would be classified as awful. I never understood while Microsoft thinks you have all the time in the world when shutting down your laptop on-the-go and updates need to be installed. I suppose disabling automatic updates would solve this issue, but that would take away from the transparency of the update process.

Steam

Much like Chrome and Windows, Steam updates your games in the background for you when it detects an update is available. Whether it’s a game or an application, the less involved the user is in the update process the better. While that statement is purely an opinion and you may think differently is another story. Feel free to leave a comment as to why you may think otherwise. If every time I go to play a game or run an application it’s fully up-to-date, then the company behind that product is doing it right.

The Bad

Apple Products

Apple has no concept of patching binaries. Apple is the only company that I’ve seen that doesn’t have software updates. Instead, you have to re-download the entire application. Did Apple just fix a crash iTunes? Prepare to download a 100MB “update”. It doesn’t just stop at their applications either. iOS 4.0.1 fixes a “error” in their algorithm for displaying signal bars (yeah right, but that’s a whole other story) which was a very small change. The result? A 400MB download of the entire iOS. Think of it as having to download a 4.7GB ISO every time Windows patches a bug, or adds a new feature. World of Warcraft is about 15GB in size. If Apple made World of Warcraft, you would have to download 15GB of “updates” every time there was a patch for the game.

By now the Apple fans are all saying “so what, I have a fast internet connection, it doesn’t even matter” but what you fail to realize is that some ISP’s limit the amount of data you can transfer in a given month. Comcast is an example, although it sits at a generous 250GB which is more than enough for the average user. However, I’ve heard of ISP’s in Australia that a much lower limit (something in the range of 25GB a month). Because of this, users don’t want to be downloading 400MB updates for their iPhone or 100MB updates for iTunes. In short, Apple really needs to learn how to modify binary files and release updates of what has changed instead of giving the user the entire package again. I don’t see this happening any time soon for iOS updates at least since the entire OS is digitally signed because Apple works harder on trying to lock down the phone (which can be jailbroken with a pdf file) instead of just supplying users with a pleasant experience.

It all started when I went to my modems page to see why my internet connection went out (this time). Upon visiting http://192.168.100.1/ you are presented with this.

Wanting to see what just happened, I tried to look at the modems log. Seeing a button named “Log”, I click it. However, instead of the modems log, I was presented with this.

Feature not enabled? Viewing the modems log is a feature? Well lets see, it looks like I have a Scientific Atlanta modem. No matter, nothing a simple Google search can’t solve. It seems I have to go to http://192.168.100.1/_aslvl.asp to enter in the access password which just happens to be W2402

I click submit, I return to the main page, and I try viewing the log again.

And that’s just over an 18 hour period. In less than 1 day I lost internet access about 10 times. But what does this have to do with network security you might ask? Well, nothing, but it did lead me to my next adventure. Now that I found out what the modems default password was, I decided to take a look at some of the other “disabled” pages. The Status page looked like this:

Oh hey, look, my modem’s internal IP address is there. I wonder… What if I were to try and go to my modems IP address in a web browser, what would I see? Lets try…

Hey, how about that, I can access my modem by using the IP address it uses for Bright House’s internal network.

So I wonder, what if I changed the last digit of the IP address…

I’m presented with the same exact screen, so I try changing it more. Finally, I come across something like this…

You can try accessing the page by clicking here, but you won’t be able to unless you’re on Road Runner’s network.

Factory default username/password is”user”

Really? Thanks! Lets try it out.

And from this point on, you have full access to a strangers modem. In this instance, it was one of those modem/router combos that the cable companies sell to you at an overpriced rate. So far I’ve seen older similar modems, these modem/router combos, and one modem that doubled as a 3 line VoIP box for the cable companies telephone service. For the majority of these, you  can only really view someone else’s modems information which doesn’t really provide you with any personal information.

But, here’s where the security vulnerability lies. The modems that contain a router have a page that will allow you to configure a VPN. If a person with malicious intent sets up their own VPN server, then sets this router to use the VPN server they set up, they will effectively route all network traffic through their own VPN server, which could then be set up to log all network traffic. This includes passwords, instant messages, and even bank account information. The bank account information would require a bit more work, since the information will be encrypted via SSL, but it’s definitely not impossible.

Loans have been opened in his name, as well as cell phone lines with Verizon and AT&T. AT&T reported a $2,390 bill in his name. Do you think he made $13 Million off of this? After all, he does use Lifelock and they do offer $1 Million protection guarantee .

No matter how safe you think you information is, it probably isn’t. I wonder if Todd Davis learned his lesson yet.