Imindi Deletes All of Its Users

Startup Imindi, a "thought engine" that allows users to upload, organize and share their thoughts and ideas has lost all of its users' accounts. All of them. They were unprepared for a spike in traffic brought on by TechCrunch (the popular tech blog), made a few mistakes, and that's all she wrote. Thousands of accounts were reportedly deleted.

On a positive note, Imindi has stepped up, accepted blame, and provided a course of action for its users to start over. They even hinted at some fixes they are currently implementing to prevent this sort of thing in the future. Well done - classy customer support.

Nonetheless, data was lost.

Hat tip to TechCrunch for the originial story.

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Google's Web Site Taken Over

Tech Crunch is reporting that Google has had some problems with hackers taking over it's domain name in several countries.

So far, hackers are reported to have hijacked Google's sites in Morocco, Algeria, and Puerto Rico. Not a lot of damage was done - users were just redirected to sites put up by the hackers. These incidents do, however, point out just how difficult it is to keep hackers at bay. Even a company like Google, with all of its top-shelf talent and resources, can have a rough time now and then.

This is not a dig against Google. In fact, we view these sorts of problems as a fact of life on the internet that can and do plague even the best companies.

Be responsible for your own data. It's a tough world out there.

Google's Bad Day

Google had a bad day today. Some users experienced slowness and lockouts from several of Google's services (including Gmail) today. They explain what happened on their blog.

Outages of services are common these days, but what's interesting about this one is that it hit 14% of their users. If that number applies to Gmail users, for example, that means approximately 12,600,000 users had significant trouble with their email accounts today. Ouch.

Gmail is great. We use it ourselves at BackupMy.Net (the Google Apps version). Thankfully, our service was not interrupted. But we are glad we're using BackupMyMail for our accounts.

New York Times Twitter Account Hacked

Gawker recently pointed out that the New York Times Twitter account was hacked and defaced. It doesn't appear that any serious damage was done, but if someone can post to your account, they can also delete posts.

We're not sure how this happened. It could have been an easy-to-guess password, a security hole in Twitter itself, a malicious employee at the Times (or even at Twitter). But what is clear is that Twitter is being used in more clever and inventive ways every day, and the security of Twitter data will become a bigger issue over time.

Are you using Twitter for anything important? We'd like to know. And if you are, how would you like a free backup?

It's coming...

Google Apps Status Alerts

Although you'd hope this wouldn't be necessary, I applaud Google for publishing the handy Apps Status Dashboard.

With a quick glance you can see which of Google's many services are having outages or other problems.

It sure beats asking your friends, "Hey, is Gmail down for you too?"

On a self-serving side note, take a look at Gmail's status over the past few weeks - it has problems quite a bit more than you might think. Of course, you can always backup your email and stop worrying about it.

Salma Hayek's Email Hacked

Sometimes a common problem isn't noticed until it impacts a celebrity. Such is the case with email security. Salma Hayek, it is reported all across the internet, has had the misfortune of having her email address hijacked. At least to some degree, her personal email messages were copied onto blogs all around the web.

No, we will not be linking to any of that sort of thing.

But I do want to bring it up here because it's something that can happen to anyone, movie star or not. Once someone has access to your email account, can you get it back? What if, as it is reported in Ms. Hayek's case, they somehow gain access to your password, and then change it. How on earth would you get it back? How would you get your messages back? Even if you did get back in, how could you trust that compromised account in the future?

Use a backup - if Ms. Hayek had been a BackupMyMail customer, she could have downloaded a copy of her email account just as it looked the day before it was compromised. BackupMyMail keeps track of when you add and delete messages to your email account, so you can always go back in time and get a snapshot of your email account.

You can sign up here.