Welcome back from the President's Day weekend! Hopefully everyone managed to grab a few deals during the shopping holiday (at least for those of us in the U.S.), but now it's time to get back to business. Today we've got a recap of all the stuff you may have missed from the last three days, so dig in and get caught up so you're not left wondering what your friends are talking about...
The Washington Post is reporting that Burger King's Twitter account is back online Tuesday morning after being hacked a day earlier. The attackers redecorated the account to make it appear the fast food chain had been taken over by rival McDonald's, posting roughly 55 messages, including a number of obscene messages during the hour or so they had control of it. Burger King managed to get the account pulled at Twitter's end, but returned later that night. The company has since issued a statement apologizing to its "loyal fans and followers" for the social media snafu.
Speaking of Twitter, many Posterous users were worried when the microblogging service acquired their favorite social network -- and with good reason. Late Friday, The Official Posterous Space made the announcement that the abandoned service is finally closing up shop on April 30, including the website and mobile apps. The blog post offers some steps for backing up an existing account, also noting that plug-ins are available to port a Posterous blog over to WordPress or Squarespace as well. The move comes nearly a year after the Twitter acquisition, which many pundits predicted at the time would be the end of Posterous.
BGR is reporting that retailer Best Buy has made its holiday price matching counteroffensive a permanent thing, effective March 3. The company's Low Price Guarantee was an initiative launched to combat "showrooming," an increasing problem for brick-and-mortar retailers where customers browse the store, then head to e-tailers like Amazon to buy cheaper. Best Buy's website and stores will now price match all local competitors as well as 19 major online competitors in all product categories and "on nearly all in-stock products," but only when a customer requests it. Kudos to Best Buy for making this a permanent fixture, but here's hoping this doesn't accelerate its race to extinction in the process...
Now here's an interesting turn of events: File sharing behemoth The Pirate Bay kicked off their week by filing a police report in Finland against that country's Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) watchdogs -- the very same group who continues to try to bring down the popular torrent website. "The reason is that CIAPC have copied files from which The Pirate Bay is built, to produce a fraudulent parody site," the blog post noted, comparing the organization to "an ugly high school bully without friends." It will be interesting to see if the police report produces any results, but in the meantime the popular target for Hollywood and the music business will certainly have some fun with it.
Although Apple has done a lot to restore full functionality to Final Cut Pro X over the year and a half, the video editing software still has a few gaping holes, such as the ability to create subtitles with precision and ease. FxFactory partner SUGARfx is ready to change all of that, introducing a new $49 plug-in called Subtitles on Monday. Also compatible with the older Final Cut Pro 7 as well as Adobe Premiere Pro 6.0.2, Motion 3, 4 or 5 and Adobe After Effects CS3 and higher, Subtitles tackles numerous languages and fonts with the ability to import from several subtitle formats. Drag and drop the filter onto a movie, select the format to use and the helpful on-screen controls will handle the rest. As usual for FxFactory, there's a free trial version available for download to give it a spin before buying, and the SUGARfx website also features video tutorials to get started quickly.
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(Image courtesy of The Washington Post)
