Tunisia lifts overnight curfew

Tunisian riot police face protesters in the centre of Tunis The curfew had been imposed amid increased unrest since President Ben Ali was ousted in January

Authorities in Tunisia have lifted an overnight curfew imposed on the capital, Tunis, 10 days ago.

Tunisia’s interior ministry said the curfew had been lifted following an improvement in the security situation.

The curfew was introduced after four days of protests calling for the resignation of the government.

Meanwhile, three people, including a military officer, were killed in clashes west of the capital, reports say.

Tunisian TV cited an interior ministry report as saying that special army and police units had engaged three “armed terrorists” in a gun battle in Rouhia, some 200km (125 miles) west of Tunis.

Two of the gunmen were killed while the third managed to escape, the statement said. As well as the fatally wounded officer, two soldiers “survived with bullet wounds”, it added.

Correspondents say Tunis’s curfew – which had run every evening until 0500 (0600 GMT) – had hit businesses in the capital.

The interior ministry said it was no longer necessary as stability had improved thanks to 10 days of arrests and overnight raids.

Some 1,400 people have been detained and 300 charged with dangerous crimes since 7 May, Reuters news agency reported.

The Tunisian police used tear gas and batons to disperse hundreds of anti-government demonstrators in Tunis earlier this month.

The authorities said allies of ousted President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali were fomenting unrest.

Some of the recent protests were organised by supporters of former Interior Minister Farhat Rajhi, who has become a vocal figure in the pro-democracy movement.

The movement is angered by the slowness of democratic reform, and continued poor working conditions, in a country where the unemployment level stands at around 14%.

Mr Ben Ali stepped down amid January protests against his authoritarian rule and the country’s poor living standards.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Iphone-story Book For Children

A very simple iPhone – Story for kids below 10 years.

It is an application that contains the following features:
I) The story constains a few charpters
II) User able to select the chapter that he want
III) The story start after the user has selected option available
IV) User has a choice to flip the screen to speed upthe story
v) The story is with grafic design and voice with music

Flyers Design

Need two 8,5 x 11 boot sides flyers for two products to promote offline, flyers will be full color, products are from Clickbank.

Flyers needs to take same pictures, drawings text o the product sales page, and within the text it needs to include my web page.

I need to be able to modify text if needed, needs to be done in Photoshop or GIMP2, text will be in Spanish. Deliverable also in pdf ready to print.

If work is ok, more projects will be hire soon from selected designers, if have samples to review let me know.

Local News Website

We would like to have a website built for us that is like a newspaper/magazine. We want it to be completely ready to go to where all we have to do is copy a story onto the page into boxes that are already set up for us. We do not want to have to write code, or figure out how to set up the website. We need it to be very easy to change the stories and information as we do not have time to spend hours trying to figure it out.
We want the website to have tabs across the top with the following menus & sub menus:
Home – we would like to be able to have a couple of stories posted on this page
Shop Local – with a local business directory
Community – with a calendar of events and Press Releases
Classifieds – we want people to send us their classified ads and we want to be able to just approve them and have them show up under this link
Celebrations – with links for Anniversaries, Birthdays, Birth Announcements, Engagements, Special Announcements, Weddings and again we want people to be able to fill out a form with the info and a picture and we just approve it and it shows up on the appropriate page.
About Us – a page where we can write an article about our business and have a picture
Contact Us – we need a box to pop up where visitors can type in their email addresses and ask us a question, or send us a story.
We would like the website to have 3 columns. One on each side for ads or widgets and one in the middle for the stories.
Again, we have never built a website and do not have a lot of computer knowledge so we need this to be as easy as possible for us yet look very professional

Security Breach: Here’s How Expired Domains Expose You To Embarrassment (And Theft)

As if you’re not scared enough of the Internet (and its potential to ravage your personal information), something comes along to make you even more paranoid. Just ask PlayStation users, or those that were on the receiving end of Firesheep’s eavesdropping. Today’s vulnerability du jour? Expired domains. The technical veterans among us are likely already familiar with this, but it seems that letting a domain name expire, especially those tied to other online accounts, exposes your personal information and makes you vulnerable to potential identity theft.

Today, British developer and hacker Ben Reyes wrote a post describing how he was able to use an expired domain to access to another person’s Gmail, Google calendar, contacts, and more, which then, in turn, allowed him to access further web accounts, like Amazon.

It started when Reyes recently attempted to link a newly registered domain to Google Apps. The Google Apps page immediately responded to the request, saying that the domain had already been registered. Thank you, try again. This was because the previous owner of the domain name had left it tied to Google Apps. So Reyes went through the domain reclamation process, proved he was the new owner, and shabang, he was granted access.

Once he signed in, the fun started. Google apps gave him a choice of two administrator accounts, so he chose one at random, picked a new password, and signed in. He then found himself gazing at the entire email history, calendars, and contacts owned by someone he didn’t know. If Reyes had been harboring malicious intentions, he presumably could have used this information to launch an attack on the person as well as the organizations the person had patronized.

He was able to quickly discover that the person in question was the owner of an Amazon Web Services account, so he sent Amazon a password reset request, changed the password, and was quickly granted access. Considering Amazon and most other online services simply require an email address to reclaim an account, you can see the potential for some serious identity theft here. Not only that, but with access to AWS, Reyes could easily recover the person’s name, address, and the last 4 digits of their credit card. Yikes.

Again, someone with a greater facility with the dark side could easily use the information above to squirm their way into the person’s PayPal account to steal further financial information, not to mention files and personal information stored on Dropbox and Facebook.

Reyes of course alerted the owner of the AWS account he had accessed, making them aware of their vulnerability — and to his blog post, which he had subsequently published on Hacker News. In fact, it turns out that the person in question is the senior lead at a well-funded and fairly well-known startup. So, if this can happen to someone with technical know-how, it can happen to anybody.

Reyes has also contacted Google to make them aware of the security loophole. Google has not yet given concrete word as to whether or not they’ve fixed the problem, but this just illuminates the larger issue at hand here, which is that he could have easily accessed the person’s Amazon account using a wildcard email address. Meaning that it’s pretty easy to steal your personal information through an expired domain linked to Google Apps.

According to Stuckdomains, there are more than 33 million expired domains on the Web. I think many of us have let a domain name or two expire, but clearly doing so with other accounts still attached to it poses a huge security risk. Even if an expired domain isn’t attached to Google Apps, one could still use, say, an Amazon account to gather personal info.

But Google Apps obviously provides an easier way for someone to discover what accounts are already tied to the domain. And this goes for the non-technical as well. You don’t have to be a hacker. Many of us legitimately tie domains to Google Apps and could experience the same.

Reyes and I agreed that this may cause VCs and investors (not to mention people across the board) to rush back to those forgotten domains to re-register — for the sake of preventing their email addresses from being leaked to eager young startups. (God forbid.) And more.

After all, a few users in the post’s comment section on Hacker News said that they’d already written scripts to scan all newly expired domain names to check to see if they’re connected with Google Apps. Megamark16 chimed in, saying, “It took me about 10 minutes to write a python script that grabs a list of recently expired domains and checks each domain to see if it’s a valid Google Apps domain. This is a pretty serious issue, if indeed it’s still possible to take ownership of accounts as the article suggests”.

From what we can tell, and from what Reyes has learned from Google, the problem still remains. “It’s scary to think with this information at hand, black hat hackers could potentially dig up a user’s personal information through their old domains. Programmers online are already discussing automated ways to find domains with information goldmines attached to them. This information can prevent people from getting caught with their pants down”.

So, pull your pants up, and monitor those expired domains. If you don’t, you may find yourself sponsoring an anonymous hacker’s paid vacation to Tahiti. Just ask Reyes, who is likely now spending time on his new Kindle, thanks to those friends he’s made through Google Apps.

We’ll update as we learn more. Here’s the link to Reyes’ post, too, for reference.


Cool! Google Places Now Allows You To Import Foursquare Data …Via RSS, So No One Will

When I first saw the ReadWriteWeb headline: Google Places Now Imports Your Foursquare Check-Ins, I was surprised. Wow, that’s interesting, and could be huge, I thought. Then I wondered why neither Foursquare nor Google was touting this?Again, could be big for both! Then I read the not-so-fine print.

Oh. RSS. Meh.

Turns out, Google is touting this, quietly. On their Google Places blog (one of Google’s 100 or so blogs), they have a post today entitled: Better access to your content is, well, better. Buried in this post, towards the bottom, you’ll see the note that you can now import other feeds of location information into Places. Writes Google:

To do that, just find the URL of a public GeoRSS/Atom feed that contains place information you care about. This could be anything from a feed of your Foursquare check-ins to a My Map you may have created years ago.

In other words, no one is actually going to do this.

You have to go to a special Foursquare page, copy the RSS feed link, go back to Google Places, paste it there, and wait as they import your items. “It’s really easy!,” Marshall Kirkpatrick writes. I’m actually not sure they could have made this less intuitive. If you’re going to make this option, at least make a simple tool for it.

Still, it is a nice option to have for the 13 of you that will use it. As a longtime Foursquare user, I have a long history of check-ins dating back more than two years (and longer if you count the Dodgeball check-ins they allowed you to import way back when as well). And Google notes that they sync those locations up with the corresponding venues in Google Places (or they do their “best” to).

Trying it out, the results seem to sync up well. But I can’t get it to go beyond my ten most recent Foursquare check-ins. So much for my entire Foursquare history.

Again, this is actually a good idea, I just wish it wasn’t such a shoddy implementation on the front-end. My guess is that’s because Foursquare has no idea about this. (And, to be fair, Google says you can do this with any location feed.) After all, there’s a war going on for location data. And Google and Foursquare are sort of like ex-roommates who had a falling out way back when.


Exclusive: Gilt Taste Is Cooking Up An iPad App That Will Let You Swipe Without Touching

Earlier today, Gilt launched the latest addition to its group-buying sites with Gilt Taste—a very pricey online purveyor of produce, meats, fish, cheese, and other “artisinal” foods. While it’s easy to get distracted by the jaw-dropping prices ($50 steaks anyone?), the part I find interesting is that Gilt Taste is also an online magazine.

Mouth-watering food photography helps to move the merchandise. The entire design of the site started with what it should look like first on a tablet and then worked backwards to the tiled view on the Web. In fact, a companion iPad app is in the works. When you are cooking in the kitchen, a propped-up iPad would be perfect for reading recipes, except that you wouldn’t want to touch it with wet or greasy hands. So instead of swiping, Gilt is prototyping a way to use the camera to create “motion-activated recipes.” You would swipe your hands through the air in front of the screen instead of touching it to go through step-by-step recipes, which could include video and more photography.

The editorial side of the site is overseen by advisor Ruth Reichl, who was the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine for ten years and before that was the food critic for the New York Times. Mixed in with the articles on how to cook broccoli and chicken with ramps, is also an in-depth story by Barry Estabrook on the impact natural gas fracking could have on the food supply.

“It is very important to me that we create a new kind of magazine here that is not advertising-based,” Reichl tells me. Foodies love to read about food, learn about food, and related issues. Content brings buyers. There is a chinese wall between the online market and the editorial, just like there is between advertising and editorial at a traditional publication. But this is the direction that lifestyle publishing—from fashion to food—is going (see also, Thrillist or Refinery29)

Reichl comes from the print establishment, but she is already liberated by working online. “This wasn’t even conceived of six months ago,” she says. “In print, there is no way you could do this in six months. We have 8 people. You’d have 50 at a magazine.” And some of those are engineers who like to build things like that iPad app. It also costs a lot less than launching a splashy new magazine, which can easily run $50 million to $100 million. In contrast, Gilt chairman Susan Lyne says the launch of Gilt Taste “is a few million dollars. It is nowhere close to what it would cost to launch a magazine.”

And what of those expensive food items and departure from Gilt’s discount model? Well, there will be weekly specials, but Gilt Taste is not supposed to replace your grocery shopping It is for special occasions, and for foodies who want access to the same farms and culinary sources that the best chefs in the world go to. Also, Lyne knows there is demand for fancy foods because she tested it out on the main Gilt site where flash sales of food items “really flew.” It makes sense. Food is a perishable item, even more so than fashion. But the team at Gilt felt that shoppers needed more context, and in fact, editorial to attract them, educate them and keep them coming back.

Personally, I can’t wait to try out some of those “motion-activated recipes.”