From the monthly archives:

May 2010

Why you shouldn’t delete your Facebook data — even if you delete it

by Jay Garmon on May 20, 2010 in Backups
Deactivating my Facebook Account

Image by mark_am_kramer via Flickr The trendy new meme among the internet intelligentsia is that it’s time to delete your Facebook account. Granted, Facebook doesn’t make it easy to do so, but conventional wisdom now holds that it’s better to go through the ordeal of deletion than leave your data in Facebook’s nefarious hands. Unfortunately, [...]

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The problem with Facebook’s Open Graph isn’t privacy, it’s security

by Jay Garmon on May 17, 2010 in facebook
Image representing Yelp as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase We wrote not long ago about how Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol would be super-tempting to hackers. Well, right on cue, Techcrunch reported a security hole on Yelp that exposed users’ Facebook data. Yes, the screw-up was on Yelp’s side, but it was still Facebook users’ data that was compromised. The underlying risk [...]

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Why Backupify abandoned PHP for Ruby on Rails

by Jay Garmon on May 12, 2010 in About Backupify
Ruby on Rails

Image via Wikipedia Careful Backupify observers may have noticed that we haven’t rolled out any new features for a while. That’s because we’ve reached that inevitable period in a software start-up growth when we have to convert our prototype app into a real, live, grown-up app that we can efficiently improve and scale.  Put more [...]

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When help systems fail, everything fails

by Jay Garmon on May 10, 2010 in Data Loss Examples
Gmail down - 502 server error

Image by Remko van Dokkum via Flickr Chris Brogan is one of the more tech-savvy micro-celebrities out there, so it’s both appropriate and terrifying that he found a glaring bug in Google’s account recovery system. Google reserves the right to suspend any account for “perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific [...]

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Your Webmail is safe from employer snooping — maybe

by Jay Garmon on May 06, 2010 in Gmail
Australia

Image by publik16 via Flickr It’s a pretty well established point of law that you don’t own your employee e-mail account, your employer does. Thus anything included in your employee e-mail account is fair game for human resources or your employer’s lawyers — you have no defensible expectation of privacy on corporate systems. But what [...]

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