It’s understandable when a Twitter account or other social media profile is hacked when a current employee gets their computer or cloud service hacked. It’s unforgivable when the accounts are taken over because a  former employee gets hacked. Gizmodo learned that lesson the hard way when their account was taken over by “foul-mouthed hackers” as reported by Mike Isaac at AllThingsD: The technology site Gizmodo’s Twitter account was taken over on Friday evening for a brief period from approximately 5:15 to 5:30 PT. The hijackers appear to be part of a hacking group named “Clan Vv3,” and…

If there’s a textbook definition of karma, it might be Gizmodo Editorial Director Brian Lam leaving his phone in a bar or restaurant, and someone finding it and holding it hostage, demanding cash in exchange for the safe return of the phone. Well, that didn’t happen here. But it’s pretty close. Brian Lam was foolish enough to send a tweet on Friday saying he left his phone at lunch and a woman was kind enough to hand the phone in. As we all remember, Gizmodo paid a huge amount of money for a “lost” iPhone 4 prototype left in a bar by an Apple employee. Lam’s Twitter account is now protected, but John Gruber…

Every once in a while, the tech world undergoes something like a defining moment. The Apple-Gizmodo saga was one of those. It has been chatted about so much online that to try and recap the entire kerfuffle would be pointless. Yet, at the same time, less attention has been paid to that always-difficult question of ‘what it all means’. After all, what happened was that the mentality one of the biggest tech blogs around ran smack into the mindset of one of the biggest tech companies. On Gizmodo’s side were the ideals of journalism; on Apple’s the notions of law and order and corporate secrecy. For weeks…

The big story continues to be Gizmodo’s iPhone 4 revelations, and a police raid in which editor, Jason Chen’s computers were seized and his house searched. At issue here could be the rights of journalists to report the story they have in their hands, as corporate America continues its attempt to define bloggers as not being journalists, while offering recognition as journalists only to those writers who are connected to big name corporate media brands. California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team seized four computers and two servers from the editor’s house. They did so using a…

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The legality of Gizmodo’s iPhone Prototype scoop may at last catch up with them as police begin investigating the theft. The issue has been debated back and forth all week on the web, with some commenters saying the prototype was straight up stolen, and others saying Gizmodo acted inside the letter of the law. The iPhone 4G prototype was “found” in a bar in Santa Clara, then sold by an unknown party to Gizmodo for a $5000 fee. California’s laws on property loss regarding this matter seems less than clear, but it is clear that whoever found the phone could have done more to return it to its rightful owner….