The title of strangest WTF story of my morning is Plentyoffish CEO Markus Frind recounting how his online dating site got hacked, he and his wife were harassed and someone clumsily attempted to extort his company in the aftermath of the events. If that is in fact what happened …

First up, Frind points out that the site has indeed been hacked last week in a “well planned and sophisticated attack”.

Apparently, POF users’ email addresses, usernames and passwords were downloaded, although Frind does not say how many. Plentyoffish has already reset the passwords for all users and claims to have plugged the security hole that allowed the hackers to enter.

An official statement will apparently be published tomorrow, but Frind’s personal, sleep-deprived recount of what happened – “what it feels like to be hacked /extorted and the intense pressure and stress you are put under” – is well worth a read – for starters.

According to Frind, an Argentinian hacker named Chris Russo – who recently hacked The Pirate Bay – broke into Plentyoffish after two days of sleuthing, under his real name.

Then, this happened (still, according to Frind):

At midnight Miami time my wife gets a call from Chris Russo that plentyoffish has been hacked into and that Russians have taken over his computer and are trying to kill him, and his life is in extreme danger and they are currently downloading plentyoffish’s database. Chris is trying to create a sense of panic.

I listened in the background and I closed the breach if indeed there was one while my wife was on the phone and then I immediately ordered an investigation. Over the next 24 hours we got a lot of voice mails from Chris Russo frantically wanting to talk to us.

It gets much more complicated (and confusing) but you can read Frind’s blog post for more details on his side of the story.

Meanwhile, Russo, who describes himself as a bona fide security researcher, says he and his team only discovered a security vulnerability in the online dating site, that hackers were already exploiting the hole, and that he merely reported it to Frind and co in good faith.

Russo says the hole exposed usernames, addresses, phone numbers, real names, email addresses, passwords in plain text and PayPal accounts of more than 28 million users. According to Russo, he simply tried to make an arrangement with Plentyoffish to analyze the security issues in return for compensation.

Frind says Russo and his team were attempting to extort him:

They then say we should find a way to work together as they are a security company. In exchange for complete access to all of our source code and SQL servers they can make sure we aren’t attacked again. Now they want us to Sign NDA’s Contracts etc.

They also claim they know the locations of where the Russians dumped our data and they can delete it.

They then start talking about money because they need to incorporate a company that can deal with companies outside of Argentina and that will cost $15,000. They also needed to know if they were going to make over $100k/year or 500k/year as that would require different registrations…

Russo alleges that Frind is the one that went ballistic and threatened to “destroy his life” and making sure “no one is ever going to hire him for anything again” (see email).

Frind concludes his blog post by publishing pictures of the two persons who tried to extort him (Russo and his business partner “Luca”) and acknowledges that he went on a counter-offensive, threatening to sue both men and even emailing Russo’s mother.

Russo is actively posting comments on the blog post in response to Frind’s allegations, if you’re interested in watching the back and forth some more.

We’re awaiting the company’s official statement on the security breach. Accusations abound, but if personal data from Plentyoffish users was really as vulnerable to malicious attacks as Russo claims, then that’s what everyone should be focusing on first and foremost.

Update: more reading material: PlentyofFish.com Hacked, Blames Messenger

(Thanks to Miguel Hernandez for the tip)

Back in November, Reuters published an article titled “Twitter co-founder hopes to create news network” where Biz Stone mulled over the idea that Twitter could create a social news firehose based on verticals. While the erroneous headline ended up being debunked by Twitter, some hypothesized that this could work if news organizations were given access to all tweets on a given topic as well as the power to curate the stream.

Back then my colleague MG Siegler said there was clearly something to this idea. MG is right (sigh) namely because it is already happening. Humans are functioning as defacto news aggregators using the publication tools already available. This, while not a novel idea, really hit home in the past two weeks with the two subsequent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. What I and you probably noticed was that interested people we followed took it upon themselves to become individual nodes of information, using the tools they had to serve as their own news networks.

@bencnn
benwedeman

In subway yesterday young man takes marker and crosses out "Hosni Mubarak Station" on map. Everyone applauded. #Jan25 #Egypt

January 30, 2011 8:29 am via webRetweetReply

As we struggled to make sense of local conditions, volunteer news conduits who made an effort of curating information gained attention as go-to sources for #Egypt news. Coverage like CNN’s Ben Wedeman’s became more important than that of any mainstream publication’s with the possible exception of vanguard Al Jazeera. In essence these people went beyond citizen journalism and became their own publications.

The Egyptian news nodes/amplifiers included but are not limited to @arabist, @nolanjazeera, @evanchill, @sandmonkey ,@ianinegypt, @ioerror, @acarvin, @ethanz @Brian_Whit, @danny_at_cpj, @SultanAlQassemi, @monaeltahawy, and @litfreak. On site in Egypt, Director of Google Ideas @JaredCohen actually dictated his tweets over the phone this week, reverting back to a decades-old means of communication in order to push through information to a more modern one.

Silicon Valley angel investor Shervin Pishevar took it upon himself to tweet out so much information related to #Egypt that he actually started an off-Twitter movement (OPENMESH) focusing on creating an easily applicable system of open mesh routers in order to prevent a similar internet blackout from happening again. The case of Pishevar becoming his own publishing platform was so acute that YouTube Product Mangager Hunter Walk labelled him the Shervin News Network. Pishevar ended up tweeting so much he went over the rate limit set  by Twitter.

@JaredCohen
Jared Cohen

Calling in my tweets via landline which is only current means of communication #Jan25 #Egypt

January 28, 2011 10:57 am via webRetweetReply

The ‘”You” News Network’ isn’t just found on Twitter. On YouTube user “Wael Abbas” is calling himself the “The first Egyptian digital video channel” and posting on the ground coverage including cars being set fire to in the streets. User “Justimage” posted Egyptian protest videos from Tahrir Square just 11 hours ago, an impressive feat given the general communication breakdown. Facebook Pages are serving as the locus of anti-Mubarek protest news. Independent niche bloggers like Arabist were the first to report the total Internet black out. After its Cairo office was shut down over the weekend Al Jazeera urged Egyptians to “send blog posts, eyewitness accounts and videos to expand coverage of the uprising against President Hosni Mubarak” to supplement coverage.

There are plenty of non-revolution type examples as well, whether it was Blake Housnell dissecting individual WikiLeaks over Twitter or Christine Lu debunking the WSJ’s Tiger Mom story on Quora or the people who liveblog #American Idol or the #SAGawards or WikiLeaks itself.

Hunter Walk added in an email “It’s clear we’ve reached the tipping point where news self-assembles via emergent hubs such as Shervin. Platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are both the medium and the message — they are broadcasting platforms but they also shape the news itself: short-bursts of info in realtime, video broadcast direct from the streets available to the entire world.”

Over at GigaOm, Mathew Ingram argued that the movement of serving as your own channel for news was independent of one brand “In the end, the real weapon is the power of networked communication itself. In previous revolutions it was the fax, or the pamphlet, or the cellphone — now it is SMS and Twitter and Facebook. Obviously none of these things cause revolutions, but to ignore or downplay their growing importance is also a mistake.”

Indeed, much like the routers of Pishevar’s OPENMESH, we all now serve in one way or another as routers for information. In a world where 88% of the press is still not entirely free, the ability to self-publish and distribute is a enormous and beautiful thing. Just wait until Egypt gets back online.

Here’s an interview with Pishevar, below.

Image: Time

Facebook is today launching ‘Places Deals’ in the UK and Europe. Facebook users will be able to get discounts and special deals in shops, cafes and restaurants by checking in on Facebook Places on their smartphone.

We’re live broadcasting the press conference above.

The Telegraph broke an early story on this this morning.

‘Places Deals’ launched in the US last November with Macys, Gap and Starbucks.

European partners will be: Starbucks, Yo Sushi, Mazda (Mazda 20% off an MX5), O2, Argos, Debenhams, Alton Towers and Benetton.

Live now in Germany, France, Italy, Spain.

Guy Grimland of Israeli business newspaper TheMarker published two articles (both are in Hebrew) this morning about a rumored relationship between Facebook and Face.com.

The first article claims that Face.com rebuffed an acquisition offer worth ‘tens of millions of dollars’. The second article claims that Face.com is powering Facebook Photos’ facial recognition functionality, which was clearly upgraded in the past few months, albeit, with no indication there was a third party involved.

While the acquisition claim has been swirling around in the local startup community for a couple of months, no numbers have been mentioned. Worthy to note the fact that the company recently raised a $4.3M round of financing, led by Yandex. If the acquisition offer claim is true, both Face.com and its investors clearly believe the future holds a bigger liquidation event than an aqui-hire scenario.

The second rumor, about Face.com powering Facebook’s facial recognition functionality, is more interesting in my opinion and makes more sense for a couple of reasons.

For one, Face.com’s facial recognition algorithms are really quite effective. We wrote about their remarkable quality when the company first launched nearly two years ago. Secondly, from a technology standpoint Face.com’s ability to provide facial recognition economically on a massive scale, has been touted as one of the company’s major IP attributes.

In the case of Facebook, being able to provide such functionality in an economic manner from a computing resource perspective must be seen as a major upside, if not a vital one.

I reached out to Gil Hirsch, Face.com CEO, who declined to comment on both claims.

You know how I know Quora is going to be big? No one can shut up about it.

That includes both people who love it and people who hate it. And that dichotomy is important, because it will keep people talking about it. And that will keep people signing up. And it will keep those that already signed up going back. And that’s important because Quora is a service that takes a bit longer than others to get into.

Anyway, the past couple of weekends have brought some truly great bitchmemes about Quora. Last weekend, it was Vivek Wadhwa who kicked things off on this very blog with his post, Why I Don’t Buy The Quora Hype. That post led to a firestorm of reactions (both positive and negative) in both the comments section and on Twitter. In fact, at one point after the post went up last weekend, I swear my entire tweet feed was devoted to it.

And, of course, there was a huge thread on Quora about it.

And then came the blog posts in reaction to it. Thoughts on personal blogs also quickly jumped over to TechCrunch. God I love bitchmemes.

But this weekend kicked things up another notch. And naturally, it was Robert Scoble who was the catalyst. Scoble wrote a post today entitled, Why I was wrong about Quora as a blogging service … If you haven’t read it yet, you should, if only to get context for Dan Kaplan’s hilarious rebuttal.

Whereas Wadhwa brought up a number of good points in his post, Scoble just seems to be venting by arguing against his own initial argument. If you don’t want to read it, basically, it boils down to: it’s annoying that a moderator buried the answer I took a lot of time crafting.

On one hand, that’s humorous. On the other, it’s also really the heart of the problem here.

Quora is not a blogging platform. Initially, I agreed with some of Scoble’s original thoughts on the matter. But I apparently misinterpreted them to mean that he felt Quora was a part of the next progression of the overall blogging ecosystem. I still think it is. Quora is a great source of information like Twitter and Facebook and blogs themselves. But apparently, Scoble was actually just thinking that Quora was the actual future of blogging. As in, you would and should do it there.

That’s just silly.

To me, Quora is first and foremost about information. It’s about getting it out of peoples’ heads and into a centralized repository that, when mixed with certain social signals, becomes a blooming flower of knowledge. While I do think there is room for opinions on the service (and in many cases, that’s what is specifically being asked for), it’s not for users to go on and on in a highly personal and oddly promotional manner. Which is exactly what Scoble did in his down-voted posting in question (as Kaplan rightly calls out).

Doing that is fine — on your own blog. In fact, it’s perfect for that. But if you put that type of stuff on Quora and expect it to be treated as the most authoritative answer simply because a certain percentage of your 8,000 followers will vote it up, you’re missing the point of Quora. It’s more about the information and less about the person providing the information. That’s simply one of the signals (albeit the most important initial one) to know if the information is any good or not.

Should Scoble’s answer have been hidden? Probably not. And it actually doesn’t look like it is anymore. But because he has so many followers voting up his answer, it does overshadows the others in the thread, which are also good and much more to the point. Perhaps hiding Scoble’s was the way the moderator(s) thought would best ensure that other answers could be seen. Who knows. And really, who cares? Well, besides Scoble, of course.

Again, Quora is not a blogging platform. And it never was. To get angry when you disprove your own misinterpretation is just weird.

The real key here is that everyone can’t stop talking about Quora — no matter the reason. And at a very fundamental level, that means something. Something important. Something that other services that have caught on have shared.

On a much less fundmental level, it means a shitload of press. And press about Quora press. And now even press about press about Quora press. Despite what you’ll read in the comments below (if you dare go down there), it’s the kind of press you can’t buy. It’s the kind that comes about naturally because people are interested in your site. Both people who want to write about it, and people who want to read about it. That is, when they’re not busy using it.

[image: Walt Disney Pictures]

Way back in the 1970s, hardware-hacker hobbyists built kit computers like the Altair 8800 — and in doing so paved the way for the computer revolution that would reshape every facet of modern life. Today the same breed of people are building and selling kit flight controllers for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Just sayin’.

Drones are far from new: the US military has been using them heavily for over a decade. (What else did the US military pioneer, back in the 1970s? Oh, right. The Internet.) UAV tech has long since metastasized around the world. India’s private sector builds UAVs for both military and scientific purposes; Lebanon’s de facto government Hezbollah has used Iranian-built drones for years; earlier this month, QinetiQ’s solar-powered Zephyr set a world record by flying for 2 weeks nonstop; and, of course, the French-built, iPhone-controlled AR.Parrot has brought UAVs to the masses. All awesome, and all innovating fast. At this rate this may well become the Decade of Drones.

Which makes me more than a little uneasy.

Because when I put on my criminal hat—which I’ve been known to do for a living—I immediately start thinking of kit-built UAVs packed with Semtex and targeted via GPS. Voila, poor man’s cruise missiles, available to any hardware hacker with a grudge; all s/he  needs is their target’s address. Fortunately, the powers that be have not fostered entire generations of experienced explosives experts with angry political grievances, right? Oh. Oops. Well, at least it’s not like engineers seem disproportionately likely to become terrorists… oh, wait.

Then there’s the smuggling problem. Colombian and Mexican drug cartels already use homemade submarines and build air-conditioned railway tunnels. You can bet they’ll be jumping on the drone train sooner rather than later. UAVs and USVs (unmanned submersible vehicles) are the ultimate mules; they’ll go anywhere, they’re reusable, and if and when they’re caught, you know they won’t cut a deal. How can you track a drone built from off-the-shelf parts, flown in from parts unknown, back to its sender? Easy: you can’t.

What makes drones dangerous is that, unlike most technologies, they can and will decouple criminals from their crimes. That makes them big trouble waiting to happen. The first extra-military drone assassination—and I’ll go on record now and predict one within the next five years—will doubtless trigger a cacophonous symphony of handwringing, tooth-gnashing, and the passing of lots of stupid and restrictive laws, but it will already be much too late. The twin genies of aeronautical engineering and microcontroller design are long out of their respective bottles.

Tomorrow’s UAVs will make today’s look like the Wright Brothers’ biplanes, and the only way to track and fight them will be with yet more drones. Hello, panopticon. Goodbye, privacy. Granted, I’m verging on science fiction here, but it’s science fiction that doesn’t seem all that evitable. The drone economy will soon be even bigger business than it already is … but I can’t shake the sense that it will ultimately be bad news for us all. Ponder that the next time you take your Parrot for a spin.

Earlier tonight, Mike posted a bombshell that must have made super angels shudder. Not content with the grenade he threw into the late-stage investing world with aggressive investments in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, tonight Yuri Milner announced a new partnership with Ron Conway that offers similar you’d-be-crazy-not-to-take-this-deal terms for every Y Combinator company.

But you know who might be even more bummed by the news than the super angels? Sequoia Capital. The top Valley firm led Y Combinator’s last funding, less than one year ago. At $8.5 million, this was a big step up for Y Combinator, dramatically allowing it to expand how many startups it could let into its incubator. And it should have been a big advantage for Sequoia too: A way to see a crop of new deals early in an increasingly competitive investing landscape, where most VCs are being shut out of early rounds by super angels. It seems Milner stole the opportunity right out from under Sequoia.

We haven’t talked to Sequoia, and it’s possible the partners don’t agree that Milner and Conway’s deal is a no-brainer. So far, most Y Combinator exits have been modest, and Sequoia isn’t known for giving sweetheart terms to entrepreneurs. I can’t think of many venture firms who would give a blanket investing offer before even seeing companies. Almost more than any other firm on Sand Hill Road, being a Sequoia Capital company has historically stood for something.

Then again, a few years ago, no Valley firms would invest in late stage Internet companies with the kinds of terms Milner was offering either– that is until Milner started doing it and locking in high paper valuation gains. The deal with Y Combinator isn’t classic venture capital any more than those late stage deals were. But a $6 million flier across 40 vetted companies sounds like a pretty safe way to hedge in a business where the rules have dramatically changed, barriers to entry have dramatically been lowered and money is an easily found commodity. Maybe Sequoia wouldn’t have done the same deal, but if the firm believed in Y Combinator enough to invest a year ago, it can’t be happy about this new arrangement.

Every VC will tell you that good deal flow is the biggest competitive advantage an early stage investor has. Milner may have just bought his way into this game for the low price of $6 million.

Everything just changed in the angel investing world.

Two years ago Yuri Milner, through his investment firm DST, disrupted the traditional Silicon Valley venture capital model when he began investing in the hottest startups – companies like Facebook, Zynga and Groupon – at very high valuations and extremely easy deal terms. He looks brilliant in hindsight, with all of his U.S. investments at significantly higher valuations since he invested.

Most top VC firms have begun emulating DST’s deal structure.

Now he’s partnering (as an individual, not as part of DST) with Ron Conway’s angel fund, SV Angel. And they’re making a bold investment move. This evening they’ve just made a blanket investment offer to every Y Combinator startup in the most recent batch. They’re going to invest in all of them. Every single one. And this is the biggest Y Combinator class to date – some 40 new startups.

The new fund is called Start Fund. SV Angel’s David Lee is managing the fund.

They haven’t even seen most of the startups yet. This is a bet on the quality of Y Combinator startups in general.

All of the new Y Combinator entrepreneurs gathered at Y Combinator headquarters in Mountain View California on Friday evening to hear about the offer, They weren’t told why they were supposed to be there, just that something important was happening. The SV Angel team was there in person. Milner joined from Europe by video conference.

The terms? $150,000 in convertible debt. With no cap and no discount. If you’re an investor you know exactly what that means and you just shuddered a little. Those aren’t terms that most angels can match.

If you’re not an investor, here’s what it means. Yuri and SV Angel just offered to loan each company $150,000. That loan will convert if/when the company raises a proper angel or venture capital round at the same valuation that’s set in that round. Most convertible debt has a valuation ceiling and also gets a discount on conversion. This debt doesn’t.

It’s the most entrepreneur friendly investment that I can think of, short of just handing people money as a gift.

Each startup can choose to take the investment or not. If all 40 of the startups accept the loan then a total of $6 million will have been invested. And Milner/SV Angel say they intend to offer this for each Y Combinator startup in the future, too. That means Y Combinator entrepreneurs will not only get the $15k – $20k from Y Combinator during the first few months of their project, but they can look forward to another $150,000 a few months later. That’s usually enough to complete development and launch a product.

This is a huge win for Y Combinator, and cofounder Paul Graham seemed very pleased when we spoke by telephone this morning. He also says it’s a smart investment strategy. If only a couple of the startups have a large liquidity event it’s likely to be a good investment for Milner and SV Angel, he noted. “This is a hits driven business,” he said.

This also spreads incredible goodwill throughout the young entrepreneur community.

This also puts Y Combinator further ahead of competing early stage incubators/investors. Entrepreneurs now know they’ll be offered easy terms on $150,000 in capital just for being part of Y Combinator. That’s an incredible marketing advantage.

This is not such a big win for other angel investors, who are still struggling with business models and rising valuations. They tend to mob Y Combinator startups generally. And now they’ve got to deal with startups that don’t need cash as desperately, and who already have Milner and SV Angel as investors. That’s two more steps behind than they were before.

SV Angel says that this is a separate process from their normal investing. They’ll invest additional sums in some of the Y Combinator startups just as they always have. They’ve already invested in two from this batch so far, says David Lee, and it’s extremely early in the process.

Blekko, the search engine that is fighting the good fight against web spam with human editors, is joining biggies Google and Bing in the mobile search arena today with an Android and iPhone application double whammy. Says Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta, “In a world where people want the most relevant answers on the go, mobile search is becoming increasingly more significant.”

The app has a sparse interface which allows you to view search results whether or not you are logged in with your Blekko account. With the exception of Facebook integration, the app pretty much runs the gamut of features found on Blekko itself, most notably the ability to search by /slashtag or curated topic. Results are sorted by most relevant and by date.

The app also offers suggested slashtags for each search at the top when you scroll down on a search. For Blekko power users, an interface with the buried treasure features of “Mark as Spam””View SEO info””Add to Slashtags” and “Open in Safari” can be accessed by clicking on the arrow next to each individual result in your search and then clicking on box/arrow icon the bottom right corner to reveal further options (see the image on the right, above).

Blekko, which boasts more than 100,000 slashtags created after its launch in November, has raised $24 million from VC superstars like Ron Conway, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier and Marc Andreessen and most recently actual superstars like Ashton Kutcher.

As of today the app is free in the App Store and Android Market.

Ever wish Angry Birds had more poop in it? Well look no further than the App Store today, as Apps Genius has launched Angry Turds. As a monkey in Angry Turds, you get to battle evil island explorers who have stolen your monkey babies with various projectile weapons.

The concept is similar to Angry Birds as your objective is to throw stuff but the stuff here goes beyond rocks to coconuts, turds, banana bombs and grand poop-bas (I am so glad I never spent any money getting a journalism degree).

Angry Birds addicts will be happy to discover that the touch action of throwing objects is exactly the same as in Angry Birds except there’s no slingshot. The weapons themselves each have varying properties in terms of force and levels of destruction per throw.

What’s even more amazing than the fact that someone made this is that the App Store thinks that the word “turds” needs censorship (as in “Angry T*rds for iPhone”) but the word “poop” is as clean as the Pope himself.

For example:

“There is only one way to stop them, throw some t**ds! With your arsenal of t**ds, coconuts, poop bombs and bananas”

On why he chose this specific name and concept, Apps Genius CEO Adam Kotkin told us “People are into the whole poop thing. When you speak with a 12 year old you realize that they know more than the rest of us … It’s fun to throw poop around. Poop sells.”

Angry Turds is available in both free and $0.99 paid versions, with 10 levels and 30 levels respectively, in case you need to step your turd game up. You can download the app here.