Internet, Email | featured news

An anonymous tipster claims to have hacked into Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's private email account. The tipster told Gawker Tuesday that by guessing the answer to a security question — What is your favorite pet?

Rupert Murdoch's Times of London is facing a claim for exemplary damages after admitting hacking into the email of an anonymous police blogger to expose his identity, lawyer Mark Lewis told Reuters on Friday.

Twitter just announced that it has acquired Posterous, the YCombinator-backed blogging and sharing platform that competed early on with Tumblr.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

WikiLeaks says it has begun publishing leaked emails from U.S. intelligence analysis firm Stratfor. The online anti-secrecy group says it's sitting on more than 5 million emails from the Austin, Texas-based Stratfor and that it's putting them out in collaboration with two dozen international media organizations.

To minimize identity theft, the Obama administration is urging Internet companies to agree upon and adopt a standard, reliable identity-verification system that people can use for any website. Each person would choose one company, perhaps their e-mail service provider, to handle credentials for sensitive personal or financial information on other sites.

Did The New York Times just cancel home delivery of its newspaper to everyone, across the nation? An email apparently sent out to the entire user database appeared to suggest that. In fact, the Times even sent the email to people that don't subscribe to the paper -- a total of 8.6 million readers, rather than the 300 it intended to message, the company said.

You heard right. Eighteen months from now Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos—one of the largest information technology companies in the world, plans to have eliminated email as a communication and collaboration medium within his company. “If people want to talk to me, call or send me a text message,” said Breton. “Emails cannot replace the spoken word.”

The U.S. government obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of a WikiLeaks volunteer.

Start-up Posterous, best known for its simple blogging service via email, has revamped the company around a new product called Posterous Spaces, which is designed to help people easily privately share photos and videos with friends or family.

Two researchers who set up doppelganger domains to mimic legitimate domains belonging to Fortune 500 companies say they managed to vacuum up 20 gigabytes of misaddressed e-mail over six months.