Very bad news. (Photo: Digital Trends)

Snapchat is supposed to be a safe space. A place where you can freely sext in peace without fearing repercussions from your significant others or family. Now that peace-of-mind has been thoroughly destroyed by a Utah security firm who say they have figured out a way to extract the allegedly dissolved pictures from Android phones.

Richard Hickman, a digital forensics examiner, discovered that the popular app installs a folder called "RECEIVED_IMAGES_SNAPS," where the pictures--you guessed it--are stored. Similar to a magical cloak, the app affixes an extension called ".NOMEDIA" to the pictures, which can take hours to find depending on how much data is on your phone. He cracked the code of making the pictures viewable by altering the extension.

Mr. Hickman told KSL-TV that the snaps were easier to find than the pictures taken directly from the phone:

"Then it's most likely put into unallocated space, where here it's actually allocated," Hickman said. "It's not that it's deleted — it just isn't mapped anymore. It says okay, that spot where that picture was stored is now available to be overwritten. That's what would happen with a regular camera."

He wants to further ruin your life--he’s working on a way to trace the sender’s information and developing the same recovery capability for iPhones. Also, Mr. Hickman has figured out a way to monetize (are you listening, Snapchat?) this terrible skill by charging people between $300 to $500 to extract the photos.

All of this makes us want to go back to good, old-fashioned sex.

Not us. (Photo: Naked Security)

Welcome to the big leagues, Snapchat! This week the photo-sharing app experienced a startup Bar Mitzvah, of sorts, when it was inundated with its first major spam attack.

Unsuspecting users received an explicit snap from someone calling herself named “Honey.Crush9,” inviting them to a sexy Skype conversation. Anyone foolish enough to take the bait ended up with—surprise, surprise!—malware. 

Naked Security reports that the spammers exploited a little-known loophole on Snapchat’s app that allows anyone to send you pictures—even if you haven’t added them to your authorized friends list. Here's how you fix it:

According to Snapchat's FAQ, you can change this setting. It tells users to tap the camera icon as if you are going to take a picture, then, tap the square button on the bottom right corner of the screen. Select "Settings", go to "Who can send me snaps...", and select "My Friends" instead of "Everyone."

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, fresh off bragging about the app’s explosive growth, apologized for the debacle on the company's blog. Acknowledging that spammers "totally suck," Mr. Spiegel wrote that the engineering team quickly halted the problem from spreading further by stopping new accounts from being created.

Poor Mr. Spiegel—guess a few nudes sneak onto his app, after all.

Oh hello.

There are now 150 million Snapchats sent every day. Very few of them are sent by people older than 30. [Business Insider]

Facebook is testing ads in your Graph Search, but so far they're not based on your searches. (So you won't get an eHarmony ad when you search "ex-girlfriends who I still love.") [TechCrunch]

The founder of the Silk Road--who goes by the name "Dread Pirate Roberts"--isn't too worried about Bitcoin booms and busts. “Bitcoin’s foundation, its algorithms and network, don’t change with the exchange rate." [Forbes]

The New York Times won a Pulitzer for investigating Apple's business practices. [Pulitzer]

Meanwhile, Funny or Die has released iSteve, its very own movie about Steve Jobs. [Funny or Die]

Saddest sentence ever. (Photo: Hashgram)

Welp, guess we’ve been using Snapchat all wrong. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel spoke this morning at AllThingsD's Dive Into Mobile conference, where he that argued his creation “isn’t a great a tool for sexting” and stated that the future of apps should be ephemeral.

Mr. Spiegel said more than 150 million pictures are uploaded every day to Snapchat by people aged 13 to 25. Although he noted that "some" of its users are probably naked, usage dips after 11 p.m., when he assumes when sexts are sent. (We hope by that time people already have sealed the deal).

Snapchat recently locked down $14 million in funding last February and is currently embroiled in a lawsuit that reeks of plot from The Social Network. It's also recently been the target of photo spam, which speaks to its popularity. Mr. Spiegel posted to the Snapchat blog this morning apologizing for the issue, which had users receiving unwanted pictures from users they hadn't friended.

Of course the app's success is rooted in the dissolving of embarrassing images, which lends it a decidedly anti-Instagram quality. (Nobody needs to permanently save that drunk photo you took last night.) Mr. Spiegel is such a fan of the ephemeral nature of your n00dz and funny faces that he believes it should be the future. According to Mashable:

The notion, said Siegel, of online versus offline is changing. “What we’ve seen change is now that it’s always online," said Siegel, adding "We believe the default should be ephemerality. In this world, deletion is the default.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Spiegel hinted that he's working on a way to monetize all those blurry photos of your cleavage. ”I like ads,” he told conference attendees. "We’ve been playing around with some prototypes.”

Hear that? It's the sound of Virgin Mobile's marketing team feverishly scrambling to develop ideas for Snapchat native advertising.

$30 million buys a lot of shirts with whimsical patterns. (Photo: Wikipedia)

As if recently released prisoners didn't have enough trouble readjusting to life on the outside, now they have to learn all sorts of new digital skills, too. [WNYC]

Spotify is reportedly launching its own video streaming service, with plans for original content. [Business Insider]

Yahoo just bought the news app Summly for a reported $30 million, making its 17-year-old creator a very, very wealthy young man. Try not to spend it all in one place, kid! [AllThingsD]

China's getting its very own Snapchat clone. [Tech in Asia]

Speaking of China: Tencent's QQ (the largest IM service in China, with 780 million MAU) has just released a version designed for Facebook. It comes with built-in chat translation features. [QQ]

(Photo: Blogspot)

Looks like hardware may finally be getting its chance in the sun at SXSW. [New York Times]

TechCrunch spoke to sources who were in the same fraternity with Reggie Brown and Evan Spiegel at Stanford and they corroborated the notion that Mr. Brown came up with the original idea for Snapchat. Winklevii'd. [TechCrunch]

Hey FYI, all those "free gift cards!" texts you were getting were actually spam (just in case you've never used a cell phone before). Luckily, the FTC is cracking down on 29 scam artists sending them out. [The Next Web]

Anita Sarkeesian, who became the target of trolls after daring to speak about women in video games, debuted her first episode of "Tropes vs. Women." [The Daily Dot]

Pandora's fourth quarter results were better than expected, but its CEO is still stepping down. [AllThingsD]

(Photo: Lawsuit)

Litigation is the newest symbol that your startup has made it, as we're sure Mark Zuckerberg can attest. Now that Snapchat, the "sexting" app that allows users to send photos that disappear after 10 seconds, is all grown up with a fresh $13.5  million raise, it has its very own lawsuit. Betabeat has obtained a copy (embedded below), and it's pretty juicy.

South Carolina-based Frank Reginald Brown IV attended Stanford with Snapchat cofounders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy. The lawsuit claims that Mr. Brown came up with the idea for Snapchat, then approached Mr. Spiegel, who lived in the same dorm, about creating the app. Mr. Spiegel allegedly informed Mr. Brown that he had a "million dollar idea" on his hands, and the duo entered a verbal agreement to work on it together. They began looking for a coder, and came upon Mr. Murphy, a friend of Mr. Spiegel's. Mr. Brown became CMO, Mr. Murphy CTO and Mr. Spiegel CEO.

The trio began working on Snapchat, which the lawsuit says Mr. Brown named "Picaboo." The app actually received some press while it was called Picaboo, and Mr. Brown worked to build a social media presence for it while he served as CMO.

The lawsuit also contends that Mr. Brown designed the ghost logo, which Snapchat still uses, and helped with the UI. During the summer of 2011, they worked from Mr. Spiegel's father's home in Los Angeles.

A photo published with the lawsuit shows the trio smiling in front of a cake with the Snapchat ghost logo on it, which was allegedly taken while they were celebrating Mr. Murphy's birthday and the original launch of Picaboo in the iTunes store in 2011.

Then: the betrayal.

The suit alleges that in mid-August 2011, following a heated conversation about the future of Picaboo, Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy began to lock Mr. Brown out of access to the application, changing the passwords for various Picaboo accounts and refusing to return his calls. They froze him out of the business, and shortly thereafter changed the name of the application to Snapchat.

Snapchat provided TechCrunch with the following statement:

We are aware of the allegations, believe them to be utterly devoid of merit, and will vigorously defend ourselves against this frivolous suit. It would be inappropriate to comment further on this pending legal matter.

While the arguments made in the lawsuit are pretty convincing, it's hard to know who here is telling the truth--and if Mr. Brown is entitled to any sort of damages even if he is.

Sorry dude. Sounds like you may have been Winklevii'd.

Frank Reginald Brown vs. Snapchat by

(Photo: Digital Trends)

This is just your regularly scheduled friendly reminder that every free service you love will eventually by deluged with ads. Today, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel stopped by CNBC, an appearance that no doubt means many teens across America will soon be receiving a flurry of unwanted messages from their parents.

Guess what Mr. Spiegel is, like, totally psyched about these days? Advertising. Aren't you excited about advertising? Everybody loves advertising:

"There's a couple of things we are really excited about right now. There are a lot of businesses experimenting with SnapChat," Spiegel said. "What I'm really excited about is this really awesome new ad format we've been experimenting with. We think it's really engaging. We think when ads are done right, they can be informative and delightful and we are really excited about that."

Brands are already playing on the service, in fact: Last month, ubiquitous froyo franchise 16 Handles did a promotion where the company's Facebook fans were encouraged to Snapchat the company pictures of their purchases in order to receive a coupon. Hey, anything's worth trying when you're selling frozen yogurt in January.

What Mr. Siegel does not want you doing, however, is Snapchatting anything too sexy:

"SnapChat is not a great way to send inappropriate content because any photo that I send to you can be saved by taking a screenshot or by taking a photo with another camera. So it's not a great way to send inappropriate photos," he said.

"Funny, interesting embarrassing photos" only, kids. Keep it clean.

Via Smile, It Looks Good on You

You'd think after Hurricane Sandy, nothing short of the actual apocalypse could rattle New Yorkers. And yet, if Twitter is any indication, it seems there's a fair bit of panicky flailing happening around the city right now. Well, buck up, because we've assembled a complete Internet preparedness kit featuring everything you might possibly need.

Maybe also buy some batteries, though? 

1. Information Sources: First off, you'll want to follow the Wall Street Journal's Eric Holthaus, who will promptly freak you the fuck out with dispatches like, "If higher end snow totals do materialize for NYC, this blizzard could be among the top five since the Civil War." (We saw that movie and it turns out Abraham Lincoln dies, so no thanks.) For sheer ALL CAPS HYSTERIA, it's hard to beat the Weather Channel's website, which comes with bonus livestream of star weatherman Jim Cantore and his furrowed brow from downtown Boston.

2. Playlist: Well, obviously, you're going to want a soundtrack to the snowstorm. Here is a Songza playlist to get you started.

3. Entertainment: Absolutely no Finding Nemo, which would be like wearing the band t-shirt to the concert. Might we recommend House of Cards? The weather is scheduled to last until sometime Saturday, which means you've got plenty of time to watch the entire show. If that doesn't appeal, might as well finally watch Freaks and Geeks, or the one-two punch of New York Times documentaries, Page One and Bill Cunningham New York. (Don't watch The September Issue, as you'll already be feeling frosty enough.)

Of course, you'll probably get sucked into Say Yes to the Dress, regardless. 

If you're not feeling a 13-hour television marathon, there's the entire Longform archive. Might we recommend everything ever written by Texas Monthly? We're not sure what to tell you if the power goes out. Maybe light some candles and try reading an IRL dead-tree book?

4. Food: Obviously skip Trader Joe's unless you enjoy bread riots, and the Fresh Direct train has already pulled out of the station. That means, at some point in the next 24 hours, you're probably going to want to order Seamless. All we'd say is: Don't be an asshole, and tip more than 20 percent--in cash.

5. Ways to Document the Storm: When someone says "historic blizzard," your first thought should be "pictures!!!" There's even a distinct possibility of thundersnow, the most terrifying and awe-inspiring of meteorological phenomena. Well, good news: Vine isn't just for porn. If you haven't already, it's time to download the app so you can spam your followers with out-of-focus video of flurries. If you don't have an iPhone, however, you're stuck with Instagram and Snapchat. Snow-day sexts!

6. Outdoor Activities: Here's a Reddit thread devoted to places you could possibly sled, if you're into that sort of thing.

6. GIFS! GIFS! GIFS! At some point your mom/cousin/best friend from third grade is going to want to know how you're holding up, which means you'll need more than a simple pic you can send. Let us remind you: No Finding Nemo GIFs. Try these instead:

Sad, cold crow via Denise Maneter

Via my head is gone

7. Internet K-Holes: There's no way to plan a K-hole, really, but we suggest starting with this Wikipedia page of conspiracy theories.

8. Coping strategies: If you've ever seen The Shining, you know that being cooped up inside can put a severe strain on one's relationships. There's Yelp if you suddenly find yourself in the market for a marriage counselor. Also, there's always porn.

9. A digital snuggle buddy: Failing all else, there's always the kitten cam.

(Photo: Blogger)

Is Snapchat representative of a new wave of apps that tout privacy as the defining feature? Fred Wilson thinks so. [A VC]

Google's obsessive drive to quickly index and display as much info as possible on search results pages could diminish Wikipedia's traffic. [Optimize and Prophesize]

Coursera and other startups offering online classes could totally be the future of education...if only they figured out a stable business model. [New York Times]

Marissa Mayer made a Yahoo employee dance to "Gangnam Style" as cruel punishment for not participating in the employee feedback survey. [AllThingsD]

Is Reddit raising a new round at a $400 million valuation? [TechCrunch]