Tag: study

Are You Secure?

Gaming

Continuing in my annoyance with and dislike of certain aspects of Facebook gaming (as previously seen in these three posts), a recent case study shows that 24% of social gamers have insecure friending habits.

As I’ve said, the design of many games is to have as many friends as possible.  Lately, I’ve been playing Zombie Wars.  Decent game, I enjoy it, but I’m stuck.  I need 20 people in my colony to move to the next area.  I have 13.  I have sent invites to most, if not all, of my 149 friends, but can’t get another 7 of them to start playing.  The game is dead to me.  I could, however, go to the Zombie Wars fan page and find people who also need more colony members and friend them in order to get moving.

This is where the insecurity comes in.  By default in Facebook, a “friend” has access to everything on your profile, unless you’ve specifically gone in and denied access to a particular piece of info.  You can restrict someone’s access by making a group, denying access to that group, and then adding that person to the group.  This is cumbersome and not obvious.  And if you engage in adding people for the sole purpose of progressing in a game, you are likely to accept a friendship of someone saying, “Hey! Add me for Zombie Wars!” even though you don’t know them.  Those people might not even be real.  They could be a phishing profile, looking to get at your personal data that is hidden behind the “friend barrier” and if you let them in without restriction they’ll get it.

I hope the way Facebook games work evolves.  In the meantime, I hope people start to pay attention to how they use Facebook, because they could be risking more than they know.

Prey

Reviews

There is one thing Michael Crichton has always excelled at, and that is taking a real field of study or research, finding a disturbing way it could be abused, manipulated or get out of control, and then construct a story around it that manages to inform, thrill and scare you all at the same time.

Prey is no different. The subject here is nanotechnology, small molecule sized machines programmed to work together to perform a task. The angle, what happens when the machines are coded with animal behavior logic that is intended to be open-ended and self-optimizing. In other words, the program makes decisions and learns from its mistakes.

The book was a pretty fast read, like most of Crichton’s books, and there is enough technojargon to give the book that science filled feel to it, but it never goes so far as to obscure the story from the read in mumbo jumbo that only learned people in the know would understand.

In short, the book didn’t suck.