Security problems have been found lurking in many mobile games by a ten-year old hacker. Going by the handle CyFi (not her real name), the hacker presented her findings at the DefCon hacker conference held in Las Vegas. She found that advancing the clock on a tablet or phone can, in many games, opened a loophole that can be exploited.

CyFi discovered the bug after getting bored with the pace of farming games and seeking ways to speed them up. Many farm-based games force players to wait hours before they can harvest a crop grown from virtual seeds. As a result CyFi started fiddling with the clock on her handset to see if she could produce crops more quickly. While many games detect and block clock-based cheating, CyFi found ways round these security measures. Disconnecting a phone from wi-fi and only advancing a clock by small amounts helped to open up the loophole as it forced the game into a state not tested by its creators.

CyFi's discovery has since been verified by independent security researchers. The exploit has been found to work in versions of games for both Apple and Android gadgets. Exactly which games are vulnerable has not been revealed to give their creators time to fix them.

CyFi gave a presentation about her findings at DefCon Kids, the first meeting at the larger DefCon Con hacker conference, aimed at younger people who are interested in tinkering with hardware and software.

 Getting the best from a web project. 

Below are some common scenarios between clients and web developers. Surely, these examples are not exhaustive but are the most common.

Case 1: Web Content

CLIENT says: "Just start the design. I'll give you more content as soon as I can get it" or "Just go through our 1,000 page brochure and see what you can use". The problem with this is that the minute you go this way, you can almost kiss the project goodbye. Once the developer and client don't initially agree on the content, the project is bound to go through many revisions with the client tweaking as he/she likes. "Change this paragraph" or "Remove that, I don't like it". A vicious cycle indeed.

Solution: Sit the client down and stress how important it is to have and agree on full content before you even touch your keyboard. You could even give the client a Content Guide. This is very helpful to the client in the sense that all he/she has to do is fit his content in the format you specify.
Some people strongly feel that content is the developer's job. It is not. It's like asking your architect or construction engineer to furnish your house when he is done building. If a developer must double as designer and content developer or proof reader, clients should be ready to pay for the extra service.

Content Guide: Example, for a site of 4 links (Home, Services, About Us, Contacts), both parties would have agreed on what will go into each page.


Case 2: Project Pricing.

Client expects to pay the same price, be it for a regular 4-page website, a large scale Web application, CMS or Blog

Possible Cause: Client thinks that a website is just about what is displayed on the browser.

Solution: The client should be educated as to what goes on, under the hood. For example, if the site will require a database, let the client know what is involved in creating a database, creating tables, how you have to ensure data security etc. For a blog that requires constant updates daily, weekly etc. Explain to the client that updates are time and resource consuming and will surely cost more than a simple site.

Finally developers, as with all things, patience is key for some clients. So don't rip your hair out if your client doesn't get it the first time.


Case 3: Client down playing the magnitude of the Project.

CLIENT says: "Is it not just to design a website, there isn't much to it." or "Look, I can do it, its just that I have been busy these days".
Oh sure, you can try your hands on surgery too. It's easy to use blades but will your patient wake up after the surgery?

CLIENT says: "There are many web designers all over the place, they will do it for less".
No doubt, but watch out for past work delivered by that developer. A great design takes time, research, creativity and sacrifice. Pay cheap, get cheap.

Developers Note: While negotiation is inevitable, make your client see why you are charging such an amount. This is because when you get good pay, not only will the creativity double, it will also boost your folio which will help you win more projects in future. When you take the job for a price you feel isn't right, then you put it up "anyhow".


Summary:

Developers should be patient with clients and take time to explain what web hosting entails. Besides, you weren't born with the knowledge, you acquired it.

Clients, before you demand for a website, ask yourself "What value will my website bring to it's visitors?". This will vary for many people, ranging from an online presence (Branding), to specific information (like news or entertainment). The possibilities are endless.

A problem arises when a developer is expected to think this. Finding value adding incentives for a website should be the clients's responsibility. This, however, is not to be confused with professional consultation. For instance, if you need a website to highlight the benefits of a product or service, you could consult with a developer on how best to do this. If this is the case, you should be ready to pay for such a service.

Clients, if you disagree, ask yourself this question (not just as a web designer, but as someone in a profession): who would you take more seriously?

(a) Somebody who has no clue about what he wants? (which leads to project creep, longer hours, unnecessary changes, exploitation, and delayed payment)

(b) Somebody who knows exactly what he wants? (proper objectives, shorter work, minor changes, and in the event you can't work on it, would refer him to someone else).

You will agree that in the long run, you'll prefare to work with (b).

Extracted with permission from ebook by Web Jade Solutions

 The More Friends You Have, The More Facebook Stresses You Out. 

Edinburgh Napier University found a significant minority of users suffered "considerable Facebook-related anxiety". However, they only received very modest rewards. More than one in 10 said Facebook made them feel anxious and more than three in 10 said they felt guilty about rejecting friend requests.

The study found that 12% of the students questioned said they disliked receiving friend requests, while almost two thirds (63%) said they delayed replying to friend requests.

The university's Dr Kathy Charles, who led the study, said: "The results threw up a number of paradoxes.

"For instance, although there is great pressure to be on Facebook there is also considerable ambivalence amongst users about its benefits. "And we found it was actually those with the most contacts, those who had invested the most time in the site, who were the ones most likely to be stressed."

Dr Charles said this could be because of the pressure users feel to come up with updates about their life for a large number of people. She said: "It's like being a mini news channel about yourself. The more people you have the more you feel there is an audience there.

"You are almost a mini celebrity and the bigger the audience the more pressure you feel to produce something about yourself." Dr Charles added that an "overwhelming majority" of respondents reported that the best thing about Facebook was "keeping in touch" but many people said they were anxious about withdrawing from the site for fear of missing important social information or offending contacts.

"Like gambling, Facebook keeps users in a neurotic limbo, not knowing whether they should hang on in there just in case they miss out on something good," she said. The survey also found that other causes of tension included purging unwanted contacts, the pressure to be inventive and entertaining, and having to use appropriate etiquette for different types of "friends".

The researchers quizzed about 200 students on their use of the site, which now has more than 500 million users worldwide. They used focus groups, an online survey of 175 people and one-to-one interviews to collect the data.

 Global storage is estimated at 295 exabytes. 

A STUDY published in Science Journal has divined that the amount of data stored across the globe totals up to 295 exabytes.
The study was reported by the BBC, which estimated that this amount of data compares, roughly, to some 1.2 billion average size hard drives.

This data includes information found on PCs, hard drives and SD cards, of course, but in total takes in some 25 different sources, including DVDs, paper adverts, credit card chips and books, it added. We don't know if it also counted old punch cards and floppy disks, but it might have.

"If we were to take all that information and store it in books, we could cover the entire area of the US or China in 3 layers of books," Dr Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California told the BBC news website. We don't know whether he really plans to cover China in that many books, but it is good to know that he could if he really wanted to.

So, we know that this data could be used to litter China, and could be held on 1.2 billion hard drives, but how else can we imagine what 295 billion gigabytes looks like? Up steps the BBC again, which helpfully added that if it were all stored on CDs the pile would reach beyond the moon. That's a very handy visual image, should you be trying to explain the amount to CD or DVD pirates.

Much of the increase is down to what the researchers called a digital revolution, which has seen digital information grow so that it makes up 94 per cent of all saved content.

"There have been other revolutions before," Dr Hilbert told the BBC. "The car changed society completely, or electricity. Every 40, 50 or 60 years something grows faster than anything else, and right now it's information."


 Know your Data Sizes. 

kilobyte (kB) = 10³  bytes
megabyte (MB) = 10⁶  bytes
gigabyte (GB) = 10⁹  bytes
terabyte (TB) = 10¹²  bytes
petabyte (PB) = 10¹⁵  bytes
exabyte (EB) = 10¹⁸  bytes
zettabyte (ZB) = 10²¹  bytes
yottabyte (YB) = 10²⁴  bytes