It is claimed that thousands of people who entered competitions on the The Sun’s official website have been contacted by the newspaper to warn them that their personal information may have been stolen. Apparently the data was copied from The Sun’s database when their site was hacked into on 19th July of this year. Some information has been found already posted online, including applications for the “Miss Scotland” competition. The Sun has said in a statement that the matter has been reported to the police and the Information Commissioner.

Unfortunately for The Sun, there is very little they can do to rescue this situation. Once details have been removed and copied, it can change hands very quickly, so apart from issuing an apology to those affected, their hands will be tied, even though they say they are working with the authorities to resolve the matter. They [The Sun] have said they will be contacting all customers affected.

Data stolen appears to be information including names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses and phone numbers. Although no financial data has been stolen (apparently), the information taken could be used in attempts at identity theft. With unscrupulous people looking at ways to capture this kind of information in bulk, the database is sure to attract the attention of many criminals online.

It has been suggested that a sample of the data stolen has already been posted on Pastebin, which is a popular document sharing website. Once there, it will be in the public forum where it may be copied to many other sites. Fortunately there has been no suggestion that the entire database has been posted yet. No doubt The Sun, and its publisher, News Group, will be watching with baited breath to see if the database crops up anywhere. They will of course be hoping the damage can be limited to only a small section of data.

It appears that the data was stolen at the same time The Sun’s website was hacked into and defaced in July. Hacktivist group “Lulz” has been linked to the attack, when Lulz Security (LulzSec) claimed responsibility for it. At the time it appeared that the damage was limited to vandalism, but now it’s possible the situation could be much worse. In July, Lulz posted a bogus story on The Sun’s site claiming that Rupert Murdoch had died. At the same time, those using the site to enter competitions were redirected to another bogus site that was capturing user information.

It is thought that the data stolen from the site could go back as far as two years, and that will leave users of The Sun’s website wondering why their personal information was being stored for so long.

Users who want to create their own newspapers need a free account, that they can create either with a Facebook or Twitter account. Those accounts are just used for verification and will not be used to create the Twitter newspaper.

Once the account has been created users can click on the Create a newspaper link in the top header to create their first Twitter newspaper.

twitter newspaper

Here they can create the newspaper based on the posts of a Twitter user and followers, a Twitter tag or a Twitter list. The newspaper is limited to one tag, list or user, and every registered user can create a total of 10 newspapers.

The next step depends on the popularity of the selection. New tags, users or lists that have not been processed by the service yet need to be created first, which can take up to 24 hours before they are populated.

Popular tags, like #windows7 for instance are available immediately.

twitter newspaper windows

The newspaper lists Twitter messages, images and links to websites on its page. This concept actually works better than thought, even though there is no language filter to only display languages that the user understands.

Papers are automatically updated by Paper.li with options to configure alerts to receive notifications whenever an update has been processed.

Paper.li offers an interesting concept, that currently falls a bit short because of the non-existing filtering options. It would be helpful if users could create filters for languages, users and tags so that they do not appear in the newspaper. An option to use multiple tags, lists or Twitter usernames would also be helpful.

Users who want to try out Paper.li can visit the project homepage to create their own Twitter newspaper, or read newspapers of other users.

A screen overlay appears asking the visitor to log in or subscribe to read the contents. A subscription for a day costs 1 British Pound, a week’s access 2 pounds. Both subscriptions provide access rights to The Times and The Sunday Times websites.

This strategy change is surely going to affect the number of visitors to the site, as many will be uneager to pay for news since they have plenty of additional free options to visit.

thetimes paywall

The question is if the remaining visitors are sufficient to break even or make a profit. It is unlikely that they will considering the number of subscribers they need and failures of other services that decided to implement a subscription based model.

Success or failure will depend largely on the contents offered online. Unique contents are the only option to attract users as everything else is readily available on dozens of other news sites throughout the country.

It will be interesting to see how Google and other search engines react on the decision. The Times alone has more than 1 million indexed pages in Google, of which most are now instantly displayed the subscription page and not the contents.

This should mean that all those pages are dropped from the search engines, and that social traffic will be reduced to a minimum as well, since only subscribers can read the contents.

It is likely that The Times would have been able to earn more money with proper advertising than they are able to earn from the paywall. Only time will tell in this case. It is without doubt the case that many newspapers around the world watch closely, likely that many will follow the lead if it proves to be successful. But then again, it is unlikely that it will be a success. Think about it, who will find The Times website once all the references in the SERPS and on other sites are gone? Only those that read it regularly and those who have heard about it.

What’s your take on this? Let us know in the comments.

Sadly the app is not completely free. I usually only look at headlines because I don’t have a huge amount of time, and for that it is perfect. You can click around in the various sections and read excerpts and titles. You can also read the main page articles and the business articles for free. You will need a subscription though to access the full content on the other pages. There is also a feed reader type “Latest News” section, which you can view freel for all the breaking news.

If you’re already a subscriber the whole app is completely free. If you don’t have a Times subscription yet, you can subscribe for $3.5 a week. I think this is a small price to pay for the NYT, especially if you live anywhere off the US coastline. If you enjoy reading newspapers, but you don’t have the time to grab a copy each day, I think the New York Times reader is a great application.

(via Lifehacker)

After setting up an account at Feed Journal you can start adding the RSS feeds that should be included in your personalized newspaper. A maximum number of eight articles per RSS feed can be included in each newspaper that you create. Rather unfortunate is the fact that only the eight latest articles are displayed which means that you can’t create a newspaper with all the interesting articles of the last week because those are not available anymore.

You could however print one daily to cover all articles. Users can change some settings of the newspaper at account setup, namely the format of the newspaper which is by default A4, the number of columns and the margin.

The results are pretty nice but I’m missing some options that would enhance the usability. First, I would like to see a way to add a number of feeds at once. You can only add one feed at a time currently which is not that user friendly if you want to add ten or even fifty feeds. A way to import feeds from an opml would be welcome.

The second option that I would like to see is to be able to pick more articles from a website. The current limit of eight articles does not even come close the the daily amount of articles published at sites like Techcrunch or Lifehacker.

Feed Journal offers a unique promising idea. Blog owners can offer their readers a personalized newspaper, the basic account is free which has however several limits.