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.
WordTwist’s scoring
My friends got me playing WordTwist on Facebook, and I started playing it in "ladder" mode. That's where you sorta compete against your friends and see if you can get the highest score. Well, one of my friends had a score of 181, which seemed pretty amazing. I'd try and try and get nowhere near it. Of course, I'd frequently only get 12 or 15 words out of 30-odd words. Sometimes I'd have a good round, but it was rare for me to break 100 points in a single round.
Finally I decided I had to cheat and see what the maximum score was. It turns out to be really easy, but I'm not going to reveal it all here and now.