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Source:Mashable!

I’m surprised it even took this long for this to happen. Developers have swarmed so fast to write the coolest iPhone application that privacy and security concerns were probably not a high priority.

Gizmodo reports that an RPG game called Aurora Feint has been delisted from the Apple store for bad security practices. The offense? The game takes your entire contact list and sends it unencrypted to their servers. The developers claim that their intents have been noble:

When we discovered that the Apple SDK allowed us to look through your contact list we thought it would be a great idea to automatically show you which friends are playing the game. Why automatically? Well, everyone always complains about the keyboard on the iPhone and how annoying it is to type on it. So we thought, “Hey, why don’t we make this feature REALLY easy to use – no typing!” And such, the community feature was born. Some people have said that it would have been ok if we had a better notice explaining what was going on. I agree! We weren’t trying to be sneaky about how this worked. It was just overlooked. No one we showed it to even asked a question about it – nor did we. It just simply never came up as a potential issue when we beta tested the game with early users.

So, no one thought that taking your entire contact list, and sending it unencrypted to their servers is a privacy/security problem? Luckily, Apple obviously has a team that looks for omissions such as these. Unfortunately, this incident strengthens the argument that Apple needs to have strict control over iPhone apps, and I prefer to have a choice on the matter - even if it means I can kiss my security and privacy goodbye.

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Source:Mashable!

Spanish speakers who are using LinkedIn will be happy to know that this business social network now supports two languages: English and Spanish. You can choose the language from the drop down menu at the upper right hand side on the homepage.

This move is on par to what other social networks (with more funding) have been doing for some time; Facebook, for example, is also available in Spanish, while MySpace is available in several languages.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:LinkedIn Launches MobileXing Acquires eConozco, Prepares for Spanish InvasionFacebook Launches in SpanishLinkedIn Launches Corporate BlogLinkedIn Introduces “LinkedIn Store”Plaxo Adds LinkedIn to SyncLinkedIn Outlines Strategy for Upcoming Platform

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 3:33 am and is filed under social networking, myspace, facebook, web 2.0, LinkedIn, spanish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.