Excellent commentary by Jeremiah on some obvious flaws that often do not get the kind attention they should from product management. In other words, some product managers may not care that the system they are promoting is hackable and will sour as users figure out the game is flawed. They will not care because they are blinkered by short-term objectives such as getting page view numbers up or meeting expectations on the street. Am I being too cynical?
Most of the time we can’t find these issues by scanning, we have to find them by hand, or from customer support when they receive hundreds of calls from pissed-off users because they can’t improve their chess rank. There is more to this hack.
There are literally thousands of people (or more) with an amazing about of free time to do the most mundane tasks for the most inane rewards.
Ah, culture. One person’s inane task is another person’s treasure. I’ll trade you my chess rank for those pretty and shiny metal disks…
EDITED TO ADD (28 Dec 2006): Reuters has posted a story about another group using technology to cheat at chess:
Sharma was finally caught at a recent tournament when officials discovered that he had stitched a Bluetooth device in a cloth cap which he always pulled over his ears.
One of the most amazing things about Craig is his penchant for taking the time to notice things simple yet sublime. He used to write about and take photos of birds. I miss that (it was like virtual bird watching), but I did notice his recent photo of a sunrise over San Francisco.
Anyone else notice that his next post just so happens to be about the Sunlight Foundation? Could it have been…foreshadowing? I have to say the image was a bit shadowy.
Maybe I just haven’t spent enough time in Japan, but this part of a story about raising tuna caught (pun not intended) me by surprise:
This is clearly a labour of love, but how will he feel when the time comes to send his fish to the market to be slaughtered for the first time?
“It will be like sending my daughters off to get married,” he says with a grin. “Joy and sadness.” But will he be eating them? “Definitely!”
Eating your daughters after they are married? I think something must be missing in that translation. Although it does make me wonder why people are often so intent on eating things that are raised in far away places, often saying the further the better the taste, but they do not want their children marrying anyone from outside a small radius…strange analogy, I know, but the BBC started it.
This site has some useful information about how sulfur is regulated quite differently for different foods, although the risks may be the same:
Sulfites are not allowed on red meat. Sodium bisulfite does such a good job of color fixing, that sulfited ground beef can be rotten and you can’t tell by looking at it. For this reason, the FDA has an absolute prohibition against sulfites in meat. However, the rule doesn’t apply to other ingredients that may be mixed into the meat. For instance, sausage may legally contain corn syrup, molasses, or wine.
SharkFish is another story. Sulfites are a preservative for fish. Theoretically, sulfited fish must carry a warning somewhere near the fish display, but I’ve never seen one.
The author goes on to describe how he has tried to find sulfur in various foods but often suspected the wrong thing, or had a hard time tracing the source(s) of his allergic reactions.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995