Plenty of you have seen—and indeed signed— the App Makers’ Privacy Pledge on GitHub. If you haven’t, but after reading it are interested, see the instructions in the project README. It’s great to see so many app makers taking an interest in this issue, and the main goal of the pledge is to raise awareness [...]
Dave Winer said the way is open for a non-ad-supported tech sector: The tech industry has been absorbed by the ad industry, and vice versa. However, there is, imho, still room for a tech industry that is not merged with the ad industry. In fact, if we want to have a tech industry at all, [...]
I’ve talked before about not being a dick when it comes to dealing with private data and personally-identifying information. It seems events have conspired to make it worth diving into some more detail. Only collect data you need to collect (and have asked for) There’s plenty of information on the iPhone ripe for the taking, [...]
I have previously written on the economics of software insecurity, and I quote a couple of paragraphs from that post below: One option that is not fully explored in the book, but which I believe could be worth exploring, is this: development of critical infrastructure software could be taken away from the free market. Now [...]
Well, that was fun. For nearly a year I’ve been running Fuzzy Aliens, a consultancy for app developers to help get security and privacy requirements correct, reducing the burden on the users. This came after a year of doing the same as a contractor, and a longer period of helping out via conference talks, a [...]
You’ll remember that recently I reviewed Windows Phone 7 Mango from the perspective of an iOS guy, and actually came back pretty impressed with it. You’ll also remember that through my company, Fuzzy Aliens Ltd, I offer app security services to mobile app developers. So far, that basically means iOS developers: in addition to being [...]
This post summarises my opinions of Windows Phone 7 from the Microsoft Tech Day I went to yesterday. There’s a new version of Windows Phone 7 (codenamed Mango) due out in the Autumn, but at the Tech Day the descriptions of the new features were mainly the sorts of things you see in the Microsoft [...]
One thing that occasionally becomes interesting about working in security is that doing security and managing business have a great deal of overlap. This makes a lot of sense: a business wants to be profitable, and profit is a reward conferred by the market for taking on some risk. But too much risk can expose [...]
I was asked by attendees at my VTM talk on test-driven development a small collection of questions on a similar theme, which I’ll summarise here. How do I do TDD when my boss doesn’t want me to? What do I do when my boss wants me to ship untested prototype code? Can you give me [...]
There was a question on programmers.stackexchange.com about whether to put your Stack Overflow reputation in your CV. I don’t, and answered as much: there’s no point in writing for its own sake, unless you want to be a writer. If you want to be a programmer, then you should be a good programmer and any [...]
