Hacker group LulzSec has announced that after 50 days of hacking companies and organizations, it is finally done. Check out the message from LulzSec below, which was posted on Pastebin. Check out the video as well (embedded below).

LulzSec most recently released a torrent of data from Arizona law enforcement which included hundreds of classified documents including personal emails, names and phone numbers.

Ever since Color launched its photo sharing app, the $41 million startup has been having a rough time. John Biggs and I reviewed it on Fly or Die back in March, when CEO Bill Nguyen joined us to defend the app ( you can watch that episode below, we both gave it a “die”). The company continues to struggle, so we decided to revisit our assessment in the new episode above.

Things don’t seem to be getting much better for the company. Nobody is using the app. Co-founder Peter Pham left, or was fired, according to CEO Bill Nguyen, who also told the New York Times that the company is going back to the drawing board. It might scrap its photo app altogether in favor of, well, something big and vague.

“I’m CEO, Bitch.”

While the story of this title appearing on Mark Zuckerberg’s early Facebook business cards has been around outside the company since at least 2009, when Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires was released, it really exploded into legendary status last year. That’s when the Acadmey Award-winning film, The Social Network (based on Mezrich’s book), launched the phrase into pop culture by having Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker utter it as the exclamation point at the end of a key speech meant to inspire Jesse Einsenberg’s Zuckerberg.

“This time you’re gonna hand them a business card that says, ‘I’m CEO, bitch!’ — that’s what I want for you,” Parker says. Later in the film, Zuckerberg opens a box of business cards that have the title on them.

Over the last few days the TechCrunch tips box has seen a surge in complaints from Facebook developers who have had their applications disabled without warning. Facebook’s developer forum is filled with threads as developers cry foul, saying that Facebook is killing their businesses without warning or just cause. And developers in a thread on Hacker News are reporting similar problems. So what’s going on?

The sudden bans are the result of an automated Facebook bot, which automatically shuts down applications that it deems to be spammy. Obviously neither users nor Facebook want spammy applications on the platform, but there’s one problem: Facebook recently tweaked this bot to be much more aggressive, and it didn’t give developers any warning before it set it loose.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Phil Windley, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — celebrated the news that apps are moving past web sites as the default architecture of the planet. I say celebrate because I think the trend is one that will continue, and even accelerate, as iOS notifications make interoperation between apps more useful. In the process, as @windley notes, notifications and the processes that are triggered, become the focal point of what used to be known as the operating system.

What that means for Windows is cloudy at the moment, pun intended. Though many analysts suggest Windows Phone 7 will gain significant penetration alongside iOS and Android, it will only be possible should important apps drive that adoption. @scobleizer is dubious, and @kevinmarks suggests the locus of power in notification has moved away from OS to Facebook and Twitter. @stevegillmor has his money on @mentions, where social and Web meet in a native wrapper too tasty to ignore.

What’s more impressive than a car that can do over a thousand miles per gallon? One that was designed by school kids.

In the UK, students from regional schools and universities took part in the annual Mileage Marathon Challenge near Leicester, England, each team vying to set new gas mileage efficiency records in a race around a track. Cars were allowed to coast, but had to maintain a minimum speed of 15 miles per hour. Students worked on the vehicle prototypes, many in partnership with design and engineering firms.

There’s a lot of hate out there these days from the press when it comes to the daily deals industry. I’m looking at you, TechCrunch. Sure, Groupon has become the whale in this industry, but that doesn’t mean Groupon constitutes the entire industry. Sure, while Groupon may sometimes structure lousy deals for merchants, it doesn’t mean the entire daily deal business model isn’t sustainable or beneficial for small businesses. When done right, the daily deal can actually be very lucrative for everyone involved: Merchants, customers and the daily deal sites themselves.

So why should you take my word for it? It’s true, I’ve got my biases.  But so many people have quickly elevated themselves to “experts” on this space that it’s hard to filter truth from the noise. My company, KASA Capital, started Crowd Cut in May 2010. We are now a top player in our markets, generating eight figures of profitable revenues. So, when I talk about the daily deal space, I do so with direct experience. I talk to merchants and customers every day. I have numbers to back my claims. I’m a player in this game, not a self-proclaimed expert who sits on the sidelines.

Dear Gene,

I was just reading your most recent Washington Post column: an open letter to a j-school student who wrote to you, at her professor’s behest, asking how you built your “personal brand” in journalism. You sure showed her!

Of course, you’re absolutely right that the desire to build a “personal brand” has encouraged some journalists to eschew good reporting in favor of self-aggrandizing positioning statements calculated to increase their own popularity. Similarly, I share your frustration at how user generated content is taking over from real journalism. No-one hates “users” more than me, Gene.

Still, a couple of points you might have considered before filing your column…

Well actually it was an Instagram of a Foursquare check-in, posted to Twitter …

So I actually haven’t been following news at all today, and when I say news I mean actual news, not tech news which I keep up with like an addiction.  And I so had no idea that a bill to legalize gay marriage was passing through the New York State Senate at the very moment I was writing this post about the Quora redesign.

I was actually pretty surprised when TechCrunch Managing Editor Erick Schonfeld Skyped me with “Look at your Twitter feed.” In a quick game of Internet catch up, I scrolled through my feed.

Quora has just announced a redesign of its Topic Pages and the introduction of Topic Groups, aiming to make information discovery and navigation on the site a little bit easier. The motivation behind these changes is a thrust towards ease of search and content relevancy on Quora, as there is currently a ton of content on the site that people need to figure out how to navigate.

Now instead of a chronological stream on Topics Pages (which you can get to via the tags in questions), users will see Best Questions, Open Questions as well as Featured Questions and Frequently Asked Questions depending on the topic.

If you’re curious about the new generation of touchable e-readers, now’s your chance to pick one up just for being a CrunchGear reader. Kobo has been generous enough to donate one of their new eReader Touch Editions for us to give away, and a few gift cards as well. I like the device: it’s a simple, responsive e-reader that would tempt me if I weren’t a scurrilous, paper-loving Luddite.

So how do you win?

After several years languishing in the backwoods of Google’s server farms, Google Health got its plug pulled today. Why did the ambitious project to record your health record online and help you research your every ailment fail? I asked this to Adam Bosworth, the former Googler who originally created Google Health, a few weeks ago when he was in the TCTV studio to talk about his new health startup Keas.

In a sentence, he said, “It’s not social.” In the video clip above, we talk about why Google Health never seemed to go anywhere. Bosworth says the problem was that “Google didn’t push to see what could they do that people would want. They basically offered a place to store date, but people don’t want a place to store data.”

It’s been an incredibly rough week for Dropbox. On Monday, news broke that a bug in the service’s authentication software effectively made passwords optional for around four hours over the weekend — meaning that you could log into anyone’s account simply by entering their user name.

Given what Dropbox is used for — namely, syncing your most important files between computers — that’s a huge deal. Especially since the service has promoted its security features as one of its selling points. At the time Dropbox said that “much less than 1 percent” of users could have potentially been affected. Now we’ve obtained an email that Dropbox sent out this afternoon to users who were affected by the breach and it’s much more specific.

First, the good news: the scale of the attack affected “fewer than a hundred accounts”. But according to the letter, those accounts were all accessed by a single individual. In other words, these weren’t accidental logins due to typos — someone discovered the hole and actively used it to access files that were not theirs. That’s obviously very alarming.

Foursquare has just closed one of the most secretive rounds of venture capital TechCrunch has seen.

The company is raising $50 million, and all of it will go towards building out the company, no secondary sales here. The valuation had been rumored to be as high as $1 billion, but our sources say it settled out at $550 million pre-money, $600 million post.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz got an earful yesterday at the tail end of the company’s annual shareholder meeting. An angry shareholder, who identified himself as Steve Landry—an advisor to institutional investors with “millions of Yahoo shares”—stood up at the end of what was up until then a surprisingly feel-good affair, given the total underperformance of the stock for the past three years, and asked for her head. We’ve uploaded the audio clip below.

He goes through a list of issue and concerns, calling Yahoo a “debacle” and a “circus.” He starts out by addressing “the elephant in the room”: the search for Bartz’ successor.

Data hosting platform MongoHQ has raised $417K in financing in order to expand their hosting configuration service for developers who use MongoDB for data storage. Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, Start Fund, SV Angel and Lerer Ventures took part in the funding.

First on the MongoDB database hosting scene, MongoHQ is in the same space as MongoLab and differentiates itself by adding enterprise level functionalities, aiming to provide users with the maximum amount of uptime with its new replica set feature, which gives developers the option to create databases across three EC2 boxes in three different availability zones.

Google is shutting down Google Health, which enables you to store and manage all your health information in one place on the Web. Google says the platform simply wasn’t having the ‘broad impact’ necessary to sustain the product.

From Google’s blog post: There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people. That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Google Health service.

We have just announced our Mobile First CrunchUp and 6th Annual Summer Party at August Capital! Tickets for both events are on sale now and are currently going very fast. For today, we are giving away 2 free tickets to our summer party at August Capital. We will have a great mix of startup demos, fun giveaways, drinks and more. The party will be in Menlo Park on the best deck in all of Sand Hill Road on July 29th. You can read more about the details and directions here.

In 2008 Google’s President of the Americas operation Tim Armstrong (now CEO of our parent company AOL) was pushing hard to get some two dozen advertising processes integrated into a single streamlined system. That project was called Project Spaghetti, and YouTube, which had been acquired in 2006, was a particular problem.

The YouTube sales team, led by head of advertising sales Suzie Reider, was apparently less than thrilled with all the pressure Armstrong and Google were putting on them to get advertising products streamlined. They created this video, says the person who gave it to us, to blow off steam internally.

The video is below.

Everyone likes to feel clever. Our brains do all sorts of fun stuff when we do things like complete puzzles or solve riddles; even if the task at hand is somewhat trivial, completing it gives us that shot of serotonin we’re constantly subconsciously striving for.

That’s really the driving idea behind the best-selling iOS/Android game, The Moron Test. Through a series of increasingly difficult but always conceptually simple challenges (like “Crack the egg!” or “Touch the button that isn’t blue!” or “Don’t do anything!”), The Moron Test draws people in — and because everyone always wants to know just how much more clever they are than their friends, the game spreads like wildfire.

After sitting in iOS’ Top 100 Paid apps list for 2 years and finding success on both Android and Windows Phone 7, The Moron Test is about to make the jump out of the mobile world and onto desktops.