Zynga Hacked: Guy gets £50,000 from virtual money
Ashley Mitchell, an IT professional from Paignton, Devon, England was recently charged with hacking Zynga's Facebook poker game. He admitted accessing Zynga's computers and putting 400 billion credits into fake facebook accounts, which he was then selling for real money. I think Zynga is trying to have its cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, they do not put vigorous security controls in place because it's just a game and it's play money. On the other hand, they want to cry foul and make analogies between virtual currency and real currency when someone bypasses their weak security and starts making money.
Portrait of a Failed Security Dashboard
The Department of Homeland Security announced that it was discontinuing its color-coded security advisory system today. In the software security world we often try to have big dashboards with red, yellow, and green indicating important things about our software. This is a great example of where such dashboards fail.
iPhone OS 4.2 SMS tones are terrible
I understand that people like different kinds of tones for their SMS alerts. But the most recent batch of 17 new alerts (see the IOS announcement) are all obnoxious. That is, every one of them goes on for a good 3-8 seconds and they're all pretty musical. I guess this must fit what the public wants. But it isn't what I want. I would really love to just have a simple beep, or something low-key and discreet. The existing "glass" (which is just a 'ding ding' lasting about 2 seconds) is what I use for this.
I'm not surprised that they didn't release 17 simple, discreet tones. I'm surprised they didn't release 1. Just 1 out of 17 seems reasonable. Or 1 out of 18. Yes, I could jailbreak the phone and put my own tones in and all that. But I want to play by the rules.
To be fair, I think AirPlay and AirPrint are awesome ideas. I can't wait to try them. But the message tones are completely unimportant.
Touching my junk, privacy and all that
There has been a lot of backlash against the advanced imaging technology, and a lot of ink spilled both in favor and against, including an article suggesting that the technology might be unconstitutional. Given how invasive both the pictures and the pat-downs are, my favorite comment came from my wife who remarked "Security theatre now has an R rating."
Language for non-native speakers
When we need formal announcements, particularly in the US, we seem to feel compelled to use idiotic, artificial speech. Nobody would ever say, one person to another, the kinds of things that you hear announced in airports, train stations, etc.