Gmail Goes Bye-Bye
An unknown number of Gmail users–including paying Google Apps customers–were shut out of their mail accounts on Wednesday and Thursday during a 15-hour outage. We use Gmail as our primary e-mail system here at Technologizer World Headquarters, but were not affected. However, I’ve had to deal with lots of (generally brief) outages with Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar in recent months. None of them have been crippling, but they’ve been instructive reminders that even the company on earth that knows more than any other about delivering fast, reliable Internet services to millions of people at one time doesn’t have it all figured out yet.

Read more at: PC World, GigaOm

Narrowing in on Apple Rumors
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has hazarded the guess that Apple will roll out new iPods and MacBooks at a special event in September. It would be more daring to predict that they wouldn’t do that–the company has released new iPods in September for years, and a MacBook overhaul for back-to-school season makes a lot of sense. I’d love to see the iPod Classic replaced with a hard drive-based model with a big touchscreen a la the iPod Touch, and I think there’s a good chance this will happen. On the other hand, I sort of hope there’s no cool new MacBook Pro; I just bought a current-generation model. Sorry, rest of the world–I’d prefer you were deprived of an updated model a bit longer, so my new purchase doesn’t become an insta-antique.

Read more at: AppleInsider

French Hacking Journalists Hack Security Confab, Get the Boot
Three journalists from a French security magazine were allegedy discovered trying to steal usernames and passwords off a press room computer at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, a move that got them banned for life from Black Hat and its sister conference, DefCon. The kerfuffle happened a year after Dateline NBC reporter Michelle Madigan was famously discovered trying to shoot hidden-camera coverage at DefCon 2007 and chased right out of the show. ther journalists, one hopes, will now figure out that these conferences are the worst possible places to get sneaky–but I still think that any outrage about such shenanigans on the part of conference organizers or attendees is a tad odd given all the discussion of hacking, cracking, and subterfuge that goes on at the shows.

Mozilla Does Unified Messaging
The Mozilla folks have released a prototype of Snowl, a Firefox add-in that’s designed to merge e-mail, RSS feeds, discussion forum messages, and updates from services like Twitter into one inbox. It sounds interesting, but when Mozilla says “prototype” it means “prototype”: This first version works only with RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter, and, as TechCrunch notes, carries the scary notice that it’s a “primitive implementation with many bugs, and subsequent versions will include changes that break functionality and delete all your messages, making you start over from scratch.”

Read more at: TechCrunch, WebWare

This Application Will Self-Destruct in Five Seconds
Lotsa discussion on the blogosphere about iPhone forensics expert Jonathan Zdiarski’s discovery of code in the iPhone 2.0 software that suggests it’s possible that Apple has implemented a system for shutting off rogue applications (or ones it just plain doesn’t like) remotely. If so, it would confirm what Steve Jobs more or less said to be true back when the iPhone SDK was introduced. The Infinite Loop blog post I link to below at Ars Technica is a good, sober look at the news, pointing out that it’s tough to tell exactly what Zdiarski has found, and what it does or doesn’t do.

Read more at: Infinite Loop