Photo: NASA

Who Doesn't Want To Meet A Real-Life Astronaut? We've already covered the upcoming 2013 International Space Apps Challenge, the NASA-sponsored space app development challenge, but the event just got even better with the announcement that U.S. astronaut Ron Garan will be in attendance as NASA's official ambassador. Attendees will have the chance to meet Mr. Garan, who has nearly 100,000 followers on Twitter (@Astro_Ron), at the NASA Hackathon Kickoff Party at Alley NYC (500 7th Avenue), this Friday at 7 PM. Trips to space not guaranteed.

SocialSign.In Hopes To Solve Everyone's Wi-Fi Problems At Work SocialSign.in announced the public launch of its social network-powered Wi-Fi platform today at the DEMO Mobile 2013 conference. SocialSign.in allows workers at a company to link their social media presence such as their Facebook with their company's Wi-Fi, giving them easy online access at all of their company's locations with a simple uniform password and ID. SocialSign.in also helps companies track user data and patterns, and can be used across all Internet-connecting devices. Now hopefully we can all clean out our desks filled with those sticky notes for Wi-Fi passwords.

New Blog Totally Steals Our Name In a move to simplify several blogs into a single hub, The Wall Street Journal announced the creation of their new leading financial and business blog, Moneybeat. Some of the blogs being integrated into Moneybeat include MarketBeat, The Source, Overheard and all of the paper's Deal Journals. MoneyBeat will be run by former Deal Journal and MarketBeat editor Stephen Grocer, and will be "a one-stop shop for everybody interested in finance and markets, no matter where they are around the world,” WSJ Managing Edito Gerard Baker said in a press release.

Fresh Cash for NYC Cloud Company Booker, the cloud-based communication and marketing system for SMBs and other enterprises announced yesterday a new $27.5 million Series B investment, led by Bain Capital Ventures. Other investors include Booker's Series A supporters Revolution Ventures, Grotech Ventures, TDF Ventures, and Vital Financial. Booker said in a press release that the new funding will be used to increase the product's reach and advertisement capabilities in online marketing. Maybe they can use the money to help fix all those "targeted" Facebook ads.

Alloy Acquires DBG Online distributor and marketing company Alloy Digital, which we've previously featured, announced today that it has acquired digital video advertiser Digital Broadcasting Group. The deal is meant to help combine Alloy's distribution network with DBG’s large video syndications.

NYT and BBC Host Perfectly Timed Social Media Summit The New York Times and the BBC College of Journalism will be hosting a Social Media Summit this Saturday to address the current state of social media and its use by journalists in investigating and reporting stories, and social media distribution company Mahaya will be on site to cover the event. Mahaya, which provides real-time summarization, ranking, and display of stories that appear on social media, is one of three companies currently participating in The Times's new timeSpace initiative to bring entrepreneurs to the NYT headquarters to refine and grow their businesses. Wonder if they're going to bring up this little 'ol Boston Marathon Suspect Twitter mess?

Food Delivery Anonymity Now Possible With Bitcoins Boston-based online food delivering service Foodler announced today that they will become the first online food ordering service to accept Bitcoins as payment for delivery and takeout. Foodler users will now be able to connect their Bitcoin wallet with their Foodler account, which will allow them to buy 'Foodlerbucks', the company's online currency, with their Bitcoins. These "Foodlerbucks" are then used to pay for deliveries. The company, which also has an iPhone app, can be used in 48 states across the U.S. Because who doesn't want to pay for a cheeseburger with the world's most volatile currency?

Ziggeo Completes Beta Ziggeo, the online video network which allows you to privately screen videos of candidates for jobs and roommates, testimonials, and more, has announced that it has completed its beta testing and is now available for public use. Users can choose from a free plan for 20 second videos, a personal plan for up to 2 minute videos and a pro one for up to 10 minute videos.

According to the statement, Facebook was victimized by the same zero-day Java vulnerability that has affected other companies. Although Facebook is framing it as a "sophisticated attack," AllThingsD wonders whether the malware found on employee's laptops was related into a recent hack on Twitter. 

In the statement, the company said it "found no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised."

Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack. This attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised. The compromised website hosted an exploit which then allowed malware to be installed on these employee laptops. The laptops were fully-patched and running up-to-date anti-virus software. As soon as we discovered the presence of the malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement, and began a significant investigation that continues to this day.

Srs cyber bsns. (Photo: Wikimedia)

With cyber attacks whistling by at an ever-increasing clip, it's not surprising that the Obama administration is hard at work nailing down how to respond. The policies will remain hush-hush once they're finalized, but the New York Times (which previously connected the president to the deployment of Stuxnet) has one juicy tidbit: A classified legal review has found that the president has "broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad."

That'll sound familiar to anyone who hasn't entirely repressed the memory of the Bush administration! (Mr. President, a very agitated Colin Powell is on line two. Something about enriched uranium and the U.N.?)

Now, this does not mean that President Obama will be launching the cyber nukes to prevent "routine" attacks, like when some hacktivists wants to DDOS your online banking provider. That's the province of Homeland Security and the F.B.I., because your inability to check your balance? Not actually an imminent national security threat.

But when someone launches an infrastructure-crippling attack on the power grid, for example (it's always the power grid!), it becomes a military concern. In that instance, the president has the authority to act preemptively should he see fit.

However, as rationales go, it's not totally airtight:

Pre-emption in the context of cyberwar raises a potentially bigger quandary, because a country hit by a pre-emptive cyberstrike could easily claim that it was innocent, undermining the justification for the attack. “It would be very hard to provide evidence to the world that you hit some deadly dangerous computer code,” one senior official said.

Glad to know diplomacy in the age of cyberwar hasn't changed that much: It's still mostly just throwing up one's hands and shouting "wasn't me!"

(Photo: Shutterstock)

These days, newspapers will seemingly stop at nothing to boost their bottom line. Those Weekender ads are notoriously obnoxious, and we're getting awfully tired of deleting the identification key at the end of a New York Times URL to get around the paywall. But the Wall Street Journal has finally devised a marketing scheme that we can get behind: instituting free wifi throughout our fine city (oh, and in San Francisco).

According to PaidContent, the Journal plans to blanket 70 percent of Manhattan, as well as a chunk of three other boroughs and two neighborhoods in San Francisco, with thousands of free Wifi hotspots. The paper hopes that by providing free Internet to the city's always-on citizens, they'll increase brand recognition and hopefully nab more subscriptions.

PaidContent also notes:

The paper will also garner valuable customer data since non-subscribers must register to access the WiFi. Existing subscribers can simply log-in using their accounts; this too promises to deliver a trove of marketing data about the places that Journal readers frequent.

The Wifi will reportedly be available "through September." Afterwards, you'll probably be stuck fighting for a seat at Starbucks again.

So it goes.

Paul Graham, YCombinator overlord. (flickr.com/jolieodell)

In the world of startup accelerators, TechStars and Y Combinator are arguably top dogs. Each receives thousands of eager applicants every year, and only accepts an elite percentage of companies into their inner circles. But of course, with the success of the TechStars/Y Combinator models comes a slew of copycat accelerators that may lack the credentials and experience to actually help their applicants.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

...As accelerators proliferate, critics question whether some of the programs—particularly newer ones outside tech hubs like Silicon Valley, Boston and New York—have enough access to the right mentors and investors to boost an entrepreneur's chances of success.

Of course, that in no way means that programs other than Y Combinator or TechStars aren't viable options for enterprising startuppers. The Journal elaborates on some ideal qualities to look for when considering a potential accelerator:

• The program should boast "seasoned mentors" on its roster. Don't pay to join a program run by people with little-to-no experience. You may as well go it alone and save that 10 percent stake for a more trustworthy investor.
• A worthwhile accelerator won't demand more than a 10 percent stake in your company. TechStars and Y Combinator, for example, each take a 6 percent equity stake.
• The best programs will have healthy track records of graduating several successful companies, not just one or two acquisitions that only allow them to break even.
• Programs in cities with easy access to talented entrepreneurs--like San Francisco, New York, Boulder and Chicago--are typically those with the highest rate of success.

Of course, even armed with this knowledge, startup vets are well-acquainted with disappointment. Adds the Journal: "Just 0.1% of firms that are less than five years old receive seed or early-stage funding from venture-capital firms, according to Kauffman Foundation researchers."

"Next up, the moon!" (flykidcosta.blogspot.com)

In college, this reporter once took a "new media" class where the professor let loose a terrifying edict: As homework, we would not be allowed to use any Google products for the entire week. That meant no Google search, no Gmail, no Gcal... nothing.

The experiment was supposed to teach us just how reliant we were upon one company for many of a college student's basic needs, like learning, communicating and organizing.

It was not the darkest hour of this reporter's life, but it was a very, very dark one.

Never talented at 'unplugging,' this reporter pitched a fit. When the professor refused to relent, she gave it a try. She replaced Google search with Bing (lol), she texted instead of emailed.

Still, she did not last 12 hours.

It appears that we are not alone in our pathetic reliance on the GOOG. The Onion published a hilarious segment on News Blitz entitled, "Google Shuts Down Gmail For Two Hours To Show Its Immense Power," and it hit a little close to home. (We've embedded the video below--skip to the :38 mark for the Gmail segment.)

Google Shuts Down Gmail For Two Hours To Show Its Immense Power

Even major news organizations like the Wall Street Journal are not immune to Google's charms. Today, the paper has been relentlessly mocked for falling victim to a PR trap.

Aided by Google's PR team, they came to the conclusion that Google Search was getting an entire overhaul--except that almost everything the Wall Street Journal reported is already part of the search engine's functionality.

As Danny Sullivan argues at Search Engine Land, Google already offers "web search, providing more direct answers and gaining 'semantic' smarts to understand more about what words mean."

It appears the Wall Street Journal may have been duped by a PR stunt reframing everything old as new.

We can't really blame them, though. Occasionally we still shoot up in the middle of the night, sweaty and shaken, having dreamt about those 12 hours we tried to live sans GOOG.

The Wall Street Journal announced its own whistleblower websites, Safehouse, this morning. The new service has its own severs separate from WSJ.com, occurs through encrypted connections and will keep data on computers connected to the public web for as little time as possible.

A couple of quick notes that rolled in after the announcements. The fine print says that if you simply submit documents, Dow Jones, "does not make any representations regarding confidentiality."

If the leaker does choose the more secure route, they shouldn't expect to hide behind the WSJ when the going gets rough. "Except when we have a separately negotiated confidentiality agreement pursuant to the "Request Confidentiality" Section above, we reserve the right to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities or to a requesting third party, without notice, in order to comply with any applicable laws and/or requests under legal process, to operate our systems properly, to protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies, and to safeguard the interests of others."

It's interesting to see a traditional journalistic outlet trying to adopt the strategy that worked so well for Wikileaks. But so much of that sites success was about reputation and trust. Debuting a service with a glut of legalese that makes it clear info will be flipped to authorities when an investigation goes down will not produce any Bradley Manning style leaks.

On a more technical level, Alexis Madrigal points out that hackers have found fault with Safehouse's Adobe Flash upload and inadequate encryption.