Mashable co-editor Ben Parr appeared on G4’s “Attack of the Show” today to discuss the Gawker hacks and give his opinion on the impact this could have. Many people have gone about their business today after reading the news, not particularly caring one way or the other about the security breach. Many of us laughed a bit over our morning coffee, of course.

What the majority of people failed to realize, though, is how far-reaching this could potentially be. Hundreds of thousands of username/password combinations are now in the hands of hackers. How many of those people are you willing to wager use that same combo on other sites, such as Nick Denton himself does for Twitter, Facebook and Gmail? Out of those people, how many actually changed their passwords today to lock down their various accounts?

Sadly, not many people are listening. Approximately twenty-four hours ago, Twitter was taken over for a while by many MANY thousands of Tweets talking about Acai berry juice or some such nonsense. At first, people assumed that there was a worm spreading quickly through the popular social networking site. Later research revealed the scary truth: the compromised Twitter accounts were people whose Gawker accounts had been hacked. Someone simply used the information to prove yet another point. This one was made on Twitter. Will the next one be made on Facebook?

Change your passwords, people.

Ben Parr Talks Gawker Hack on G4

The iPad officially became available for pre-order earlier today. A group of particularly prudent Apple fans from the APPL Sanity Board at Investor Village decided to put together a spreadsheet of order numbers, times that orders were placed and contents of those order. After six hours of tracking the data, the group reported that nearly 90,000 orders had been placed for the iPad. This does not count multiple orders (a single consumer can order two at a time), nor ship-to-store orders, for which no payment is required. In reality, the number of iPads ordered today is likely well over 100,000!!

According to Victor Castroll from the Valcent Financial Group and AAPL Sanity, “$54 million in revenue in a quarter of a day is a great opening. Looks like contrary to much speculation about who would actually want one of these, like the iPhone, people are voting with their wallets. Considering these are just pre-orders for a product still three weeks out, iPad is home run.”

Whether or not you think you want an iPad, a whole lot of people out there have already decided! What are your thoughts? Are you planning to get an iPad, or did you pre-order one today?

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I ran into Ben from Mashable recently, and asked him for his thoughts on Google Wave. Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.

Ben says that Google Wave is a “very, very interesting project”, and that it could be the next big form of communication. His favorite feature is Windows – style editing. Say you have a group of friends and want to plan a party. Instead of sending a bajillion emails back and forth, you can just edit the original email in the bottom “pane”. You can edit messages at any point, and see everyone’s conversation at once. It’s a completely new way to communicate, and more effective.

With Gmail and Exchange… it’s just different. For attachments, you would have to click, add the attachment, download the attachment… blah! With Google Wave, you simply drag and drop whatever you need to share among the group. You can embed your own Wave into things like YouTube, your blog, and more. It can replace a normal commenting system! There’s even an iPhone App being released along with Wave.

Google Wave is open-source, so you can build anything you want with it. Create desktop apps, web apps, an Adobe Air app… or make it work for your Exchange account (like I rely on!). This is definitely going to be something to watch unfold, and sounds like it’s going to be an absolutely amazing service.

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What is Google Wave?