The online mini-blog service known as Twitter has been making headlines lately, both good and bad. Its I-can-blog-anywhere ease of use coupled with the fact that you can’t post more than 140 characters per message make for a combination that has left me dumbfounded. Seriously, people.
So I’ve decided to compile an incomplete list of how this service has managed to help its users actually shed IQ points.
First, there was the infamous case of Dave Prager, who decided to Tweet about an intruder in his apartment, as it was happening. I’m all about sharing, but you should really be on the phone with the police during a break in.
Then there is the case of Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer, whose relationship was allegedly torn apart by Mayer’s constant Twittering. According to a source close to Aniston, Mayer would ignore Jen’s phone calls, emails, and text messages in favor of keeping his Twitter account up to date.
Finally, we have the Twitter marriage proposal. I’ve decided to omit the link I was going to post, because I do feel that a proposal is a very personal expression, and I’m not going to mess with that. However, I really hope the lameness of this one doesn’t need explanation.
I’ve always been curious about Twitter, and I’m not negative on the service as a whole. I do think there are some people out there who really need to evaluate how they approach their personal lives, however. Sending a message to an online service should not be our natural reaction to danger, our impulse in the stead of a relationship, or our method for solidifying a life together.
I mean, come on! Get out into the world and live a life!
Not too long ago, Twitter was hit with what would become known as the “Mikeyy” worm, a malicious little bit of code that exposed holes in Twitter security. Those holes have been patched, and life goes on at Twitter, but it has inspired some important discussion about web security.
As a very well written article at ReadWriteWeb.com points out, there are two different ways to address security when designing a web application: Input Filtering and Output Escaping. While a discussion of the pros and cons of the two schemes in definite worth having, that’s not where I want to go. I want to focus on the base of the issue, and that is security as a habit.
I recently was given the task of developing a web application for tracking discounts given to customers by the sales staff where I work. This application was to be simple for the sales staff to use, collect specific information, and load it into a database. We have a Windows 2003 Server that is available for me to use as an application platform, and I’ve got MySQL installed on it.
I was given about a day and a half to get something working. That’s a pretty compressed timeframe by almost anybody’s standards. So I put on my headphones and got to work.
Security was the least of my concerns. I was interested only in getting something functional, from my boss’s standpoint, and roughly stable. Needless to say I cut corners. I now have a load of work to go back and do, because validation is non-existent, and I did absolutely no output escaping.
The moral of my story is this: making security a habit instead of an afterthought would probably have saved me what will most likely become days of work. Throwing a project together with no concept of security automatically breeds an insecure system. More than that, however, it creates a situation where you’re chasing security holes, possible for years, instead of standing sure that you are secure from the beginning.
So all you web developers out there, heed my warning. No matter what security scheme you decide to live by, make sure that you are consistent in your approach. Do it all the time, every time, and you’ll be running some of the most secure code on the Internet.
I understand that I might be just a little behind in this rant, but I feel, because of recent experiences, that I have a right to go off a little bit. And I also feel that anyone who has had a similar experience will agree with me. Working with Microsoft on licensing issues is a gigantic pain in the ass.
Recently, I was working with a coworker on his personal computer. He was complaining that his computer was shutting down, acting strangely, and had started emitting an odd odor. After a little digging around inside the computer’s case, I figured out that the odor was ozone, and the machine had fried it’s motherboard. This being an older Compaq computer, the motherboard was no long available from the manufacturer as a new part, and rather than buy my coworker a pull from a “working” computer from eBay, I decided to find him a new motherboard that would support his current CPU and peripherals.
That was a mistake.
I had never had to deal with Microsoft’s Activation software before. I got the new motherboard into the computer, connected everything, and turned the power on. Everything was looking great until I tried to log the machine on. It looked as if it were going to get to the desktop, and then it opened the Activation dialog box, just as you would expect from a brand new computer. However, when I tried to actually activate Windows, it returned a message saying Windows had already been activated, and returned me to the login screen. No matter which of the four available users I tried to log in, it sent me to the Activation dialog, just to be returned to the login screen.
I then tried calling Microsoft in an attempt to fix the situation. Well, first of all, I found out that they aren’t very free with their phone numbers. I searched high and low on their website, only to be directed in a circular fashion all over the site. I then tried Google, and found around 7 different phone numbers, all of which were incorrect. I finally found a site that listed 1-888-571-2048 as the activation hotline. I spoke with a machine first, which hung up on me three times before I figured out that # would get me to a human being. This human being then connected me to Microsoft’s customer support hotline (1-800-936-5700) who then connected me to HP’s customer support line when he found out that I’d swapped motherboards. At that point I hung up, knowing that HP wouldn’t re-activate a computer that no longer had their motherboard in it.
I understand that Microsoft is trying to protect its interests by making it more difficult to pirate copies of their operating system from one hard drive to another. I know that they have had problems with users “ghosting” images from one machine to another, bypassing registration. I know that companies have a right to make money off of their hard work. I just don’t understand why they can’t work a little more closely with users who just want to get their computers working again.
And to think that this used to be something people just DID.
It stinks that honesty is now something special. It should be normal, but we're all so concerned about looking good, or at the very least not looking bad, that we focus more on ways to pass the blame than we do ways to fix the problem. It's become a race to see who is least wrong, not most skilled, hardest working, or most productive.
It is a sad state of affairs.
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