Gawker was told about the flaw in the method it used to store user passwords to its commenting system more than two years before it was hacked, the Guardian’s Charles Arthur reports.

A Gawker user posted a message on Get Satisfaction and received a promise to “improve it,” though no such improvement ever took place.

Well, we know how that turned out. A hacker group called Gnosis gained entry not only to the commenting system, but also to pretty much everything the Gawker team used to run its collection of sites.

Gawker was hacked. Gawker founder Nick Denton apologized. But the damage wasn’t limited to Gawker and its users.

Soon Twitter and LinkedIn were dealing with hacking attacks on their sites. Then Yahoo and World of Warcraft developer Blizzard forced users to change their passwords. And finally the collateral damage reached all the way to the New York Times.

We also learned that many of the people whose passwords were disclosed used simple ones. Topping the list: “123456.” And we all learned a little about the dangers of using the same password everywhere.

No comment yet from Denton, although I’ll certainly update if I hear back from him.

And in case you didn’t pay enough attention to all this, and why it’s not a good idea to share passwords across multiple sites, here’s a great cartoon from XKCD that illustrates the dangers:

Air Force users who try to view the websites of the New York Times, Britain’s Guardian, Spain’s El Pais, France’s Le Monde or German magazine Der Spiegel instead get a page that says, “ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored,” according to a screen shot reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The notice warns that anyone who accesses unauthorized sites from military computers could be punished.

The Air Force said it had blocked more than 25 websites that contained the documents, originally obtained by the website WikiLeaks and published starting late last month, in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems.

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Guardian Media has one for sale. The British publisher is peddling the “Inside.com” domain name, people familiar with the company tell me. Asking price, I’m told, is something north of $100,000.

If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because you used to dine on big, well-prepared plates of media-covering-media during the first boom, when Inside.com spent a lot of money trying to create an industry insider/outsider publishing business.

That didn’t work, and eventually paidContent’s Rafat Ali, an Inside.com veteran himself, bought up the domain in 2008.

The idea was to use the name as an umbrella for his collection of trade sites, and perhaps to help Ali open up a Hollywood outpost. But that never panned out, and if you head to Inside.com now it will direct you to paidContent.

Ali ended up selling that site and its parent company to Guardian Media in 2008, and left two years later. The British company once had aggressive plans to expand in the U.S., but it’s unclear what it intends to do now. Caroline Little, who was running American operations for the publisher, stepped down earlier this year.

I’ve asked Guardian for comment and will update if it has one.

Don’t ask Eric Schmidt. At least not in public. Someone did that at the Guardian’s tech conference yesterday, and he gave the following non-answer: “That would be a product announcement and I won’t say.”

Okay, then. We’ll add that to the rather thin body of evidence that suggests that the search giant is, in fact, working on something called “Google Me.” The list so far:

• A tweet, now deleted, from Digg CEO Kevin Rose, describing a “rumor” from a “very credible source.”
• A much more confident assertion from former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, who wrote about the project on Quora, his new Q&A start-up.

And that’s it, as far as I know. On one hand, it would be easy enough for Schmidt to bat this one away if it were a complete fabrication; on the other hand, if he got into the habit of denying reports about Google (GOOG) projects under development, he’d never get anything done.

Meanwhile, if you’re trying to assess Google’s chances at building a plausible social network, I think it’s fair to look at Orkut, its original attempt (big in Brazil!), and Google Buzz, its weird and unwieldy Twitter response. But I wouldn’t count Google Wave against them–best I can tell, that non-starter of a messaging product was truly a lab experiment conducted by a handful of engineers. If there really are a “are a large number of people” working on Google Me, as D’Angelo maintains, this could be interesting.

Don’t ask Eric Schmidt. At least not in public. Someone did that at the Guardian’s tech conference yesterday, and he gave the following non-answer: “That would be a product announcement and I won’t say.”

Okay, then. We’ll add that to the rather thin body of evidence that suggests that the search giant is, in fact, working on something called “Google Me.” The list so far:

• A tweet, now deleted, from Digg CEO Kevin Rose, describing a “rumor” from a “very credible source.”
• A much more confident assertion from former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, who wrote about the project on Quora, his new Q&A start-up.

And that’s it, as far as I know. On one hand, it would be easy enough for Schmidt to bat this one away if it were a complete fabrication; on the other hand, if he got into the habit of denying reports about Google (GOOG) projects under development, he’d never get anything done.

Meanwhile, if you’re trying to assess Google’s chances at building a plausible social network, I think it’s fair to look at Orkut, its original attempt (big in Brazil!), and Google Buzz, its weird and unwieldy Twitter response. But I wouldn’t count Google Wave against them–best I can tell, that non-starter of a messaging product was truly a lab experiment conducted by a handful of engineers. If there really are a “are a large number of people” working on Google Me, as D’Angelo maintains, this could be interesting.

The Facebook CEO did say there is “almost a guarantee” that the company will double its user base from 500 million to one billion, which is pretty heady stuff, but also pretty hazy stuff. (We already know that Facebook is really big.)

And Zuckerberg again danced around the question of Facebook’s eventual IPO. But unless he flat-out declares that the company will never go public, there’s almost no reason to ask him about it: Facebook is quite clearly headed for an IPO, one day.

Zuckerberg’s summation of Facebook’s global hegemony is worth pondering for a minute, though:

Facebook’s global domination is almost complete, he said. “We are down to just four countries where we aren’t the leading social network.”

Zuckerberg added that in Russia Facebook had just 1 million users, the kind of numbers that saw AOL sell off Bebo and ITV relinquish Friends Reunited. But in Facebook’s case, growth is “doubling every six months”, according to Zuckerberg, and Japan and Korea have similar user bases.

He said that Facebook can tell when an explosive growth “tipping point” is about to be reached by who is “friending” who. When Facebook first launches in a country, nearly all the friend connections are with foreign Facebook users.

“We know that a country has tipped when local-to-local connections outnumber local to foreign,” he added. “It is a long-term thing [and with regard to the four left to tip] we are probably not going to win in six months, not in a year [but] things look promising in three to five years out.”

Meanwhile, if you want a really deep dive with Zuckerberg, check out Inside Facebook’s recent Q&A.

Evidently that’s as true today as it was 12 years ago, because Apple (AAPL) has won a bundle of AdWeek’s “Best of the Decade” awards. The advertising trade mag named Apple “Brand of the Decade,” its “Get a Mac” ads ”Campaign of the Decade,” its iPod “Product of the Decade,” its iPod silhouettes ads “Out-of-Home Ad of the Decade” and CEO Steve Jobs “Marketer of the Decade.”

“Though the brand almost petered out in the ’90s, last year consumers told Interbrand that Apple was the thing they couldn’t live without and the one they found most inspiring,” AdWeek explains. “Why? Perhaps it’s Apple’s vaguely antiauthoritarian stance (epitomized in its iconic ’1984′ ad). A true-in-practice focus on relentlessly improving its products also helps. But maybe it comes down to this: Most brands are run by committee, but this one is the embodiment of a living, breathing person. Steve Jobs is Apple in the way that Richard Branson is Virgin. Of course it helps when you’re a brilliant marketer who happens to be the CEO.”

Apple, it’s worth noting, also came close to winning “Digital Company of the Decade,” but was bested by Google (GOOG), which was named “Media Company of the Decade” as well.

That’s one conclusion you can draw from a new survey showing that people who own Apple (AAPL) handsets are more willing to pay for stuff than the average Internet surfer.

It’s a U.K. survey, conducted by the Olswang media law firm, but my hunch is that you’d see similar results in the U.S. And given that consumers look much less likely to pay for stuff than publishers and distributors would like, it’s worth chewing on. Guardian:

The survey showed that 58% of people would pay to access online a film just released in cinemas, 52% would pay for access to a film that will not be on DVD for at least two months and 40% would pay to access a film which is already on DVD or pay-TV. Looking at solely iPhone users, however, those figures jump to 73%, 67% and 54% respectively….

News content, however, remains a tough online sell. The survey asked how willing consumers would be to buy a newspaper article or column which could be read on a computer or portable device such as a phone or e-reader. Only 19% of respondents expressed any willingness to pay–though that did increase to 30% among iPhone users.

I’ve repeatedly been skeptical that consumers will pay for something solely because it’s on a mobile device–this is the key idea behind the magazine industry’s digital plans–but I do think there are some cases where this might work.

My own anecdotal confirmation: My household just dropped $6 for three Pixar shorts for an iPhone 3G in a desperate attempt to provide some electronic babysitting/soothing. This, despite the fact that everything we bought is also available for free on YouTube. When you need the stuff, you can’t be dependent on a wireless connection.

Here’s one of the clips we spent $1.99 on:

Bloggers and Twitter users, led by Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger, expressed indignation about a court injunction that called into question the British newspaper’s right to report on a parliamentary debate.

The catalyst was an order filed against the Guardian on Sept. 11 by Carter-Ruck, the London-based law firm representing Trafigura Ltd., an oil-and-gas firm alleged to be responsible for dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.

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Last week, BoomTown had a delightful lunch with sharp-witted Brit Paul Carr, part of our meet-the-blogger series in which this column endeavors to introduce you to the Web’s more lively voices.

Actually, I mostly just wanted to meet Carr, whose work always cracks me up, such as when he cleverly dissed the lack of wireless access at LeWeb, a conference in Paris last year, in his column in the Guardian: “That’s right–LeWeb was entirely without the web. Which I suppose makes it simply ‘Le.’”

Or, more recently, again writing in the Guardian about how a “meeting with the Irish Tánaiste leads to a stolen bottle of Guinness and a lesson in handling the truth” online.

Wrote Carr, quite sensibly about trouble that technology allegedly creates:

“More seriously, though, every time a scandal emerges involving the technology–be it McBride’s email or American teenagers ‘sexting’ naked photos to each other, we hear the same crap from journalists–that the web, and email and mobile phones are making everyone behave in scandalous ways they never did before…The only difference between the way humans have been behaving badly for years, and how they behave badly in the internet age is the fact that now there’s always someone else watching.”

Carr just settled in San Francisco, after a stint on the road constantly working on a new book on being a digital nomad. His previous book was titled: “Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore,” about his comically failed attempts to become an Internet billionaire.

Here’s our video interview, about all that and more: