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In IT industry, there have been lots of excellent products such as iPhone smart mobile and Intel Centrino laptop. However, like each coin has two sides, there're also some lousy products which is recognized not recoverable failure. But they did leave their marks in history. For instance the Nokia game phone which was trying to compete with Sony & Nintendo in game industry but finally failed. Such failure told us we must fix user problems and fulfill their requirements other than just any advanced concepts. Following are the most epically bad tech product rated by ZNET.

SimCity (2013)

SimCity 5 is probably the most unsuccessful game. Gamers weren't even able to log in half the time. Those who were part of the lucky few could barely do anything when in game-play mode. In some cases, large amounts of their created cities were lost, according to user reports. Maxis team even have to aplogize to gamers.

The Apple Newton MessagePad (1983)

The first PDA, this landmark technology flopped because it was TOO ahead of its time. Add in a $700 price tag,  a less-than-perfect handwriting feature that got lampooned in a Doonesbury cartoon, and you got, as Wired wrote, "a prophetic failure."

Sony Betamax Player (1975)

Launched a year after JVC released the revolutionary VHS player, the Betamax was technically superior. However, it lost to VHS because it a) cost more, and b) had tapes that lasted only one hour, as opposed to the 3 hours of VHS.

HTC First "Facebook Phone" (2013)

Blasted even before its launch as a failure, users decidedly disliked the "Facebook phone." The facebook home user experience is bad, and the most important thing is you can also install Facebook Home from other Android phone. When AT&T did a price reduction "sale" from $99 to $0.99, still not many people willing to buy.

Hewlett Packard TouchPad (2011)

HP's attempt to compete with the iPad failed soon after it launched. The result for the company was a huge revenue loss. Time reported that Hewlett Packard, "wrote off $885 million in assets and incurred an additional $755 million in costs to wind down its webOS operations."

Laserdisc (1978)

High-capacity storage discs, these disco-colored dinner plates were a) enormous, b) easy to break and c) very expensive. So, Laserdisc went the way of history, marked, as ZDNET  commented in an earlier article, as a flop.

Microsoft Bob for Windows (1995)

It was supposed to be a user-friendly interface for Windows. What it ended up being was a major failure for Microsoft, scrapped a mere year after launching. Why? As Bill Gates wrote, "Unfortunately, the software demanded more performance than typical computer hardware could deliver at the time, and there wasn't an adequately large market. Bob died."

Windows Vista (2007)

The replacement for Windows XP was launched in January of 2007, and immediately triggered an avalanche of complaints about bugs. A mere four months later, Microsoft scrapped the system.

Toshiba's HD DVD (2006)

No doubt about it: The DVD war was definitely won by Sony's Blu-ray disc. Reputedly, Toshiba's investment in the losing product cost it over $1 billion.

Twitter #Music App (2013)

The #Music app had reached top list in App Store. Why did this music discovery app fail? The main point is Twitter strategy fault and has no clear development plan. Development leader also left after the app put on store. Twitter finally dropped this App.

The original Xbox 360 and the red ring of death

Microsoft released Xbox 360 at the end of 2005 and it came out endless problems with up to 68% repairing rate. This problem in the original Xbox 360 caused Microsoft to extend the warranty to three years, and also cost more than $1 billion to fix.

Mobile ESPN (2006)

A phone that carried exclusive ESPN content and video, it was, according to Business Insider, "one of the biggest flame-outs of mobile virtual network operators."

The product launched in January only to be shut down eight months later as its $400 price tag proved too steep for even the most obsessive sports fanatic.

Healthcare.gov launch (2013)

The rollout of the Obamacare website was, in short, a disaster. The site was announced to be invested over 800 million USD with over 0.5 billion codes. No one was able to use the site in the initial launch, and its massive failure resulted in Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius's resignation. Eventually, the government called in tech giants such as Google to help fix its disaster of a website.

Samsung smartwatches in 2014

Well, no one bought them. That, plus lackluster mobile sales combined to drive Samsung's profits down a whopping 60 percent in 2014.

Amazon's Fire phone

Remember last year, when Amazon tried to launch a phone? Remember how it totally crashed and burned?

Just how bad of a failure was it? Business Insider reported Amazon had to take a $170 million charge on all those phones people didn't buy.

Originally post available on this Znet page by Lisa Bernier.

Information on nearly 14 million users of 000webhost, a Lithuanian web hosting service, was spilled earlier this year when a hacker exploited an old version of the company’s website and gained access to the backend.

13.5 million customer usernames, plaintext passwords, email addresses, IP addresses, and names were exposed as part of the breach, according to a Facebook post from the company Thursday morning.

000webhost first disclosed the breach Wednesday morning in a preceding Facebook post but was hazy with details, claiming that at some point a hacker leveraged an exploit on an old PHP version of the company’s site and uploaded some files.

“Although the whole database has been compromised, we are mostly concerned about the leaked client information,” the company wrote, adding that since it discovered the issue, its reset user passwords, and is cautioning any users who used the same password on another service to change it.

The company claims its launched an investigation into the breach, but fails to give a timeline, or mention whether its involved law enforcement.

Paradoxically, 000webhost claims its customers’ sites will stay online during the ensuing investigation, but also says that it has temporarily disabled most of its systems while it sorts through issues.

“In an effort to protect our users we have temporarily blocked all access to systems affected by this security flaw. We will re-enable access to affected systems after an investigation and once all security issues have been resolved,” the post reads.

The company is stressing that sister companies Hosting24 and Hostinger, both which appear to be based in Cyprus, are not affected by the breach.

Troy Hunt, Microsoft’s MVP for Developer Security, who also runs the site Have I Been Pwned? learned of the breach late last week after a reader messaged him, and decided to do some research of his own into the hack.

After poking around the site a bit, Hunt discovered the site was storing users’ passwords in plaintext and by looking at the leaked database was also able to verify the email addresses and corresponding information was legitimate.

While 000webhost says it discovered the issue on Tuesday, Hunt claims he tried to contact the company about the breach a week ago, on October 22. One person even contacted him and told him the database was likely dumped back in March, nearly seven months ago.

Comments from 000webhost CEO Arnas Stuopelis

Our user's sites will stay online and will be fully functional during this investigation. We will fully cooperate with law enforcement authorities. At the same time our internal investigation has been started. We advise our customers to change their passwords and use different passwords for other services.
Our other services such as Hosting24 and Hostinger are not affected by this security flaw and are fully secure and operational.

Originally posted by Chris Brook on https://threatpost.com/web-hosting-service-000webhost-hacked-information-of-13-million-leaked/115200/