Frank Bitterlich

Thank you, “Visa Customer Service”. You will always have my “cooperation in this folder”.

By reading one press release after another from various players in the IT industry (none of which, amazingly, contained the word “sorry”) about different kinds of stupid blunders unexpected features, I got the distinct feeling that we seriously need to regulate the corporate PR departments a bit more.

Here`s my first suggestion…:

Terms that should be banned from press releases and advertising by the IT industry…:

1. “limited number”

   As used in: “Only a limited number of customers have been affected by the problem…”

   My suggestion: Replace limited with finite. Closer to the truth, but still implying that at least one customer didn`t have his OS completely destroyed by a careless blunder in the product.

2. “up to”

   As in “… bandwidth of up to 16 Gbit/s…”

   Suggestion: replace “up to xxx” with “you will never see xxx, but we will bill you for that anyway.”

3. “committed to”

   As in, “… we are committed to continuously improving the security of our products…”

   Suggestion: Replace “committed to xxx” with “we couldn`t care less about xxx, but we would never be caught saying that in a press release.”

If you want to participate in this kind of bullshit bingo a bit, here`s some suggested reading:

• McAfee false alert snares innocent JavaScript files, The Register
• CA auto-immune update trashes systems, The Register
• AVG slaps Trojan label on Adobe Flash, The Register
• TomTom admits Satnav device is infected with virus, DaniWeb

Any more suggestions? Feel free to post a comment…

… well, at least one of them

Nick Cubrilovic of TechCrunch wrote a very detailed and interesting analysis of the recent stealing of sensitive documents from Twitter by a hacker nicknamed Croll.

From The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack:

Like other successful attacks, Hacker Croll used the same combination of patience, sheer determination and somewhat elementary methods to gain access to a frightening number of accounts and services related to Twitter and Twitter employees. The list of services affected either directly, or indirectly, are some of the most popular web applications and services in use today - Gmail, Google Apps, GoDaddy, MobileMe, AT&T, Amazon, Hotmail, Paypal and iTunes.

The most interesting aspect of this story, to me, is how weaknesses of the different services used in this attack complimented one another and ultimately made this “hack” possible in the first place.

A great read, even for non-techies.