Now Twitter, which has suffered multiple security breaches in the past, has been punctured again. Someone has gotten into the personal Web services accounts of co-founder Evan Williams, his wife and at least one other Twitter employee, and used that access to make off with a pile of confidential company documents. He’s now distributing them on the Web, and TechCrunch promises to publish many of them.

The media ethics colloquy is well underway and will go on for a while (Boomtown’s Kara Swisher is holding her session, appropriately enough, via Twitter). Beyond that, I’m pretty sure Twitter is going to be okay when this dies down.

Based on Williams’s description of the attack (see the bottom of this post), as well as both TechCrunch’s and the hacker’s descriptions of what got pilfered, this looks roughly akin to having your underwear drawer rifled: Embarrassing, but no one’s really going to be surprised about what’s in there.

The hack certainly will be worrisome for people who are using, or thinking about using, any kind of “cloud computing,” whereby work data/documents are stored on servers accessed via the Web. Google (GOOG) in particular is going to get some scrutiny, both because it’s Google and because it appears that a lot of this stuff was stolen after the hacker used Google’s “password recovery” system to root around. UPDATE: Twitter is now going out of its way to say that the attack isn’t Google’s fault, but Twitter’s fault for using passwords that are easy to guess.

Albert Wenger, a partner at Twitter investor Union Square Ventures, says in a post that his shop is currently considering moving its systems to Gmail and Google Docs, but notes the big problem: “The threat of access by a third party increases exponentially with the move to the cloud, because the machines that now contain the documents and the links to those documents (as sent by email) are accessible to the Internet at large.”

But cloud computing isn’t going away, so someone’s going to need to figure out how to make security better, yet still practical. There’s a reason no one follows the standard advice about having a different, impossible-to-remember password for every account you have. Wenger takes a stab at it in post–he suggests something tethered to a mobile phone. But whoever figures it out is going to have a lot of fans.

Williams’s description of the hack, via TechCrunch:

Yes, we did suffer an attack a few weeks ago and are familiar with this list of stuff. This is unrelated to the hack of twitter where someone gained access to user’s accounts. This had nothing to do with the security of twitter.com, and there were no user accounts compromised here.

Some notes:

- He did not actually gain access to my @ev Twitter account (or any Twitter accounts) nor any administrative functions of the site.
- There is also no evidence that he gained access to my email. There was one administrative employee who’s email was compromised, as was my wife’s Gmail account, which is where he got access to some of my credit cards and other information.
- He also successfully targeted a couple other employees personal accounts (Amazon, AT&T, Paypal…)

In general, most of the sensitive information was personal rather than company-related. Obviously, this was highly distressing to myself, my wife, and other Twitter employees who were attacked. It was a good lesson for us that we are being targeted because we work for Twitter. We have taken extra steps to increase our security, but we know we can never be entirely comfortable with what we share via email.

[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

Denton disclosed his new policy, which isn’t really a new policy but a revival of an old policy, in an interview yesterday with Nieman Journalism Lab. He’s tried this a couple of times before: Last year he experimented with paying readers $7.50 for every 1,000 page views they generated via submissions. And in 2007, he offered a bounty of $10,000 for anyone who could land an “unretouched” version of an image that ended up on the cover of a women’s magazine, and paid out for this shot of Faith Hill.

I followed up with Denton this morning and he told me that he hasn’t fleshed out his plans yet–they’re “half-baked” right now–but they’re likely to be of the Faith Hill variety: Payouts to winner of contests, sweepstakes, etc.

Paying for tips, interviews and exclusives is standard practice outside of the U.S. The U.K.’s Daily Telegraph, for instance, paid a source that helped it break the expense account scandal that’s been roiling that country’s Parliament.

But it’s supposed to be verboten for “respectable” American media, though that self-imposed standard has been eroding for some time. It’s increasingly common, for instance, for TV news operations to pay big “licensing fees” to sought-after interview subjects, purportedly for access to family photos and videos.

Paying for tips is also old hat for newspaper tabloids. And TMZ, Time Warner’s (TWX) gossip powerhouse, has made it well-known that it will pay for tips. It’s a very good bet that the Web site has been writing many checks during the past couple weeks of the Michael Jackson frenzy.

Ultimately, Denton says, he’d like emulate the TMZ model. “I’d love to have their reputation–as the place you go if you want to make a buck.” Dream big!

TMZ boss Harvey Levin talks about his pay-per-tip policy in this interview with Kara Swisher:

I think these clips are reasonably good at getting across the notion that regular search engines — that’d be Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) — aren’t as good as they could be. But again, I’ll let you folks handle the ad critique. I remain dubious about the overall strategy, which involves spending up to $100 million to promote a Web service.

Confused? Of course. So was I, when I checked out Hulu’s new “Desktop” app, launched today as part of the video service’s new “Labs” collection of experimental offerings.

Basically, it’s downloadable software that makes it easier than ever to watch Hulu’s shows and clips in the same way that you’d watch TV–on your sofa, remote in hand. But Hulu wants to make sure you don’t actually think it replaces TV.

Note how the company describes it: “A lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer” that will work on Macs and PCs with “standard Windows Media Center or Apple remote controls”–but not with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Media Center machines or Apple’s (AAPL) AppleTV boxes. And it also isn’t designed to work with any other Web-to-TV software or boxes, like Vudu.

To spell this out: I’m writing this post from the “cave” that the All Things Digital team has set up for the D7 conference, and it’s full of gorgeous 22-inch and 30-inch Mac displays that are much nicer than anything that sits in my cramped Brooklyn apartment. Hulu is saying that they’d be A-OK with me watching Tina Fey and crew, via their service, on those monitors. But they don’t want me trying to get that show on an actual television.

Isn’t a screen a screen? Nope. Not to Hulu’s owners: GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, and soon, Disney’s ABC (ABC). To them, it’s important to make the distinction between TV programming, which generates significant ad revenue and/or cable subscription fees, and online video, which generates very little at all. That’s why NBC CEO Jeff Zucker reiterated his opposition to Boxee, the software that makes it easy to move Web video like Hulu to TV sets.

Now all he has to do is convince tech-savvy entertainment consumers to play along. Good luck!

UPDATE: Several readers have suggested to me that Hulu and its owners aren’t as dumb as they seem, and that they do indeed intend to use Desktop eventually, as a Boxee-like product of their own–that is, they will use it to let people watch Hulu on TV. If so, that means that Jeff Zucker wasn’t being honest when he declared that “right now we’re committed to Hulu being an online experience, and that’s where our vision is today, and I think that will continue.”

But for what it’s worth, whenever I’ve talked to anyone at ABC, Fox, NBC or Hulu, all of them have been consistently mindful about not trying to disrupt the existing value chain that supports the cable and broadcast TV business–“the ecosystem” is the euphemism they prefer. So I don’t find Zucker’s comments so far-fetched.

Anyone want to weigh in? If you use your real name you can sound off in the comments below. Or you can drop me a line at  peter@allthingsd.com.

Reached for comment, Facebook spokesperson Brandee Barker offered up the boilerplate no comment: “Facebook is a private company, so as a matter of policy, we don’t typically share details about our financial plans or comment on rumor and speculation.”

But everyone else has been speculating about the value that Facebook and outside investors place on the company, and whether Facebook needs to raise any money at all.

We do know that in 2007, Microsoft (MSFT) beat out Google (GOOG) for the right to invest some $250 million in the Facebook, placing a $15 billion valuation on the company’s preferred stock. Preferred stock is typically more expensive than common stock because it gives owners the ability to recoup their money before other investors. Facebook later raised another $60 million from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing and $10 million or so from the Samwer brothers of Germany.

And various reports have suggested that employees and others who own Facebook common stock have been recently selling it on the private market for prices that value the company in the $4 billion range.

Facebook has repeatedly said that it doesn’t need additional cash to keep going and that it expects to generate $500 million in revenue this year and begin breaking even in 2010. Last year, the company felt flush enough to offer to buy Twitter for $500 million–$100 million of which would have been in cash.