A victim of a hacker has written up a long piece regarding Twitter's security processes and how he believes he became a victim. Twitter's password recovery system is reportedly to blame, as it allowed a hacker to use a brute-force style attack on his handle. A brute-force attack tries common passwords as quickly as it can until it finds a match or exhausts a word list.

The issue seems to stem from the fact that Twitter doesn't limit login attempts per account, rather they limit them per IP. What this means is a hacker just needs to use a proxy network or some other way of IP switching and they would be able to brute-force an account indefinitely, or at least until the password was found.

However, why the victim, Daniel Dennis Jones, had chosen to use a simple, common password that could be brute-forced is beyond me. His story makes sense, though, and is why most password recovery systems limit login attempts on a per account basis, or at minimum throw up a CAPTCHA after a few failed attempts at logging into an account.

If you work at Apple, you will be happy to find out that Tim Cook does appreciate you. And to show appreciation for all of your hard work this year, Mr. Cook is offering you three additional paid days off. Most people will be getting these days off the week of Thanksgiving, though retail and some others will have to take them at another time.

In addition to giving these extra days of paid vacation, Cook issued an e-mail thanking employees for their hard work and everything they do. This break is similar to the one that was announced by Cook during last year. Just how much this will boost spirits and affect productivity has yet to be seen, but it must have worked well last year for the company to be doing it again.

The full letter Tim Cook sent out is below:

Maingear has just unleashed their Nomad 17 customizable gaming notebook, which offers a choice of six sleek "custom automotice paint jobs", a Full HD 1080p matte display, multi-touch trackpad with gesture support, and dual speakers with a built-in subwoofer.

Getting to the good stuff, we'll find a third-generationg Intel Core i7 processor running at up to 3.8GHz, options for NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 675M or 680M, Blu-ray drive, up to two 512GB SSDs or dual 750GB 7200RPM drives, and up to 32GB of RAM.

Connectivity isn't left out either, with HDMI, DVI-I, Firewire, Ethernet, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports. Maingear's Nomad 17 starts at $1,700 on the base configuration and will begin shipping on October 14.

Quite the juicy rumor for the weekend, where SemiAccurate are reporting that they've heard that ASUS have made an offer to acquire ASRock's motherboard division. If this were to happen, we're looking at ASUS becoming bigger than they already are, and making a bigger threat for the number two in the market, Gigabyte.

ASRock sit at number three, so a combination of number one and three's forces would be quite significant for the market. If it were to happen, we're be looking at ASUS and Gigabyte, followed by the smaller players like MSI, ECS which don't see anywhere near the same numbers as ASUS, Gigabyte or ASRock, and then there's a few much smaller players, too.

If the deal does go through, there will be downstream effects to many of the other companies and suppliers to these companies - so it would cause quite the stir. But, with Intel talking about making motherboards pretty much redundant, could we see this as a preemptive move from ASUS to take more control of the already tight market?

The Thailand floods were a tragic event, hitting hard drive manufacturers Seagate and Western Digital pretty hard. At the time, hard drive prices went up quite significantly, and are only returning close to pre-flood levels now. How are things business-wise for HDD manufacturers? Well, in a word - great.

Some new numbers from IHS iSuppli have said that the HDD market for PCs has fully recovered, and is set to hit an all-time high. IHS iSuppli expect internal hard drives to smash through 524 million units shipped this year, beating the previous record by 4.3%.

Where is this increased demand coming from? The firm thinks that the boost in shipment numbers is thanks to the impending release of Windows 8, as well as Ultrabooks. While we're close to pre-flood HDD prices, we're still not there yet but IHS iSuppli have said that HDD prices aren't expected to drop below pre-flood levels until, wait for it, 2014. By 2016, if IHS iSuppli's predictions become reality, we're looking at HDD shipments reaching 575.1 million by 2016.

Just over 24 hours ago, I reported that we wouldn't be seeing BlackBerry 10 smartphones until next year - well, next year has come early, thanks to some internal marketing leaks from Research in Motion.

The leaked videos popped up onto Vimeo last night, showing off two BlackBerry 10-based smartphones, but the video was pulled pretty quickly. CrackBerry.com were quick off the mark, where they were able to snap some screenshots of what we will most likely see next year.

RIM's L Series phone, codenamed 'London', has popped up before and looks pretty much the same as Dev Alpha phones that BB10 developers are currently working with. We should expect to see this phone sport a 4-inch display, with a 1280x768 resolution. RIM's N Series phone, codenamed Nevada, sports a smaller touch screen, but includes a physical QWERTY keyboard. This is the first time this smartphone has been shown off, and is just what RIM is capable of.

Google gives and Google takes. Today sees a rarer event of the latter as Google does it's annual fall "spring cleaning." Many of the features that are being discontinued today are ones that I hadn't even heard of, so likely you haven't heard of them either. In the rare chance that you have, we'll give you the information you need.

The majority of today's discontinuations will likely only affect a small portion of the population at large. One of the main "spring cleaning" changes that will affect the most people is the change to storage. Google is combining Picasa and Drive storage into one single pool AND the free 5GB of storage will count towards your paid storage limit.

The rest of the changes are detailed in Google's blog post, which we have replicated here for your convenience:

I'm sure all of our readers know of the patent wars going on between Samsung and Apple. In case you don't, a brief history: Apple sued Samsung saying their patents were being infringed upon by Samsung products. Judge Koh granted a sales ban of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 at the start of the trial. A jury found Samsung guilty to the tune of just over $1 billion. However, they found that the Tab 10.1 didn't infringe on a single patent.

Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is still banned from being sold in the United States. Judge Koh had previously felt that overturning the ban fell out of her jurisdiction as Samsung had appealed to a higher federal court. That court has now ruled that Judge Koh can rule on the sales ban, either reversing it or keeping it in place.

Theoretically, the device should no longer have been banned, or even banned in the first place as the jury found it to not infringe. The sales ban is expected to be lifted as soon as Judge Koh rules on the matter. Samsung was quick to jump onto the court, filing a request to have the ban dissolved:

Google, almost as if to take a shot at Apple, has released more new imagery for their mapping service so that users can "virtually visit more places in high-resolution." Maps now features more high resolution aerial and satellite imagery, as well as a bunch of new 45 degree imagery for places around the world.

As you can see, some of the new 45 degree imagery includes famous places such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, located in Pisa, Italy. The following are all of the cities with new imagery:

United States: Ames, IA; Anderson, IN; Billings, MT; Bloomington, IL; Carmel Valley, CA; Cedar Rapids, IA; Coeur d'Alene, ID; Corvallis, OR; Danville, IL; Dayton, OH; Detroit, MI; Dubuque, IA; Elizabethtown, KY; Enid, OK; Florence, SC; Grand Forks, ND; Great Falls, MT; Gulfport, MS; Hartford, CT; Kankakee, IL; Kenosha, WI; Lafayette, IN; Lancaster, CA; Lansing, MI; Lewiston, ID; Los Banos, CA; Madison, WI; Medford, OR; Michigan City, IN; Olympia, WA; Pocatello, ID; Sheboygan, WI; Sioux City, IA; Sioux Falls, SD; South Bend, IN; Terre Haute, IN; Utica, NY.

Tim Cook has taken a moment to step down from his high horse and issue a letter to Apple customers saying, "We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better." What??? Apple is apologizing for something they did? I thought everything they did was always perfect.

As Cook suggests, the Maps app will get better as more customers use the app as it will help to crowdsource bugs, locations, and some of the other issues that people have experienced with the new mapping app. In his letter, Cook details an interesting statistic: "In just over a week, iOS users with the new Maps have already searched for nearly half a billion locations."

No doubt half of those searches were people looking for mistakes! If you're interested in reading the full-text of the letter, it is below for your enjoyment: