Sony hacked again. Should go open source

Sky reports that Sony got hacked and lost some of its customers data:

Sony has once again been targeted by a group of hackers who claim they gained access to details of one million customers.

By now, I think it is obvious that Sony’s security issues are architectural.  It is not a matter of firewall misconfiguration or missed out input validation check.  That would have been closed and forgotten months ago.  Repeated attacks and extensive downtimes of PlayStation Network indicate that the problems are much deeper and much harder to find and fix.

I think the best option for them now is to go open source.  If they open the protocols they use and server software they have – plenty of people will jump on it and create alternative servers and networks.  All that will be needed after that is a firmware update that would allow gamers to connect to those alternative networks.

Pagoda Box – scalable platform for your PHP application

I got my hands on a private beta of Pagoda Box.  It is a platform that you can deploy your PHP applications to.   I gave it a brief look around and I have to say it’s pretty sweet.

Right after you register and get access to your dashboard, you can add applications.  Applications are cloned from GitHub repositories.  Both public and private repositories are supported.  Once you add an application, you can access it at http://your-app-name.pagodabox.com. If you’d rather have your own domain – you can assign it to your application from the dashboard and all that will remain to be done is adding an A-record in your DNS zone.  Super easy!

There is more to it, even at this beta stage.  Pagoda Box supports a number of PHP frameworks, including all major ones – CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Lithium, Symfony, Zend, and more.  You can also optionally have a MySQL database for your application.  They even help you out with outgoing email.

On top of that, you have control as to how many instances of the application you want (the more you have, the more requests you can serve at the same time, and the more you’ll have to pay).  There are statistics of your application performance, requests, and a few other parameters (I’m sure those will grow together with the project).

I’ll admit, I am too used to hosting my projects on my own servers to take immediate advantage of Pagoda Box.  But I am now seriously considering which projects I can move out of my server and into this platform.  It just makes things so much easier.  Deploying and re-deploying works wonders for any GitHub commit of your project.  Initial resources that one usually needs to try an idea out are free of charge.  If the idea picks up, the prices are more than reasonable (and comparable to other hosting solutions).

Out of those things that I consider necessary, I haven’t see any mentioning of files (uploaded via application, for example), support for build systems (such as Phing), and some sort of common library of frequently used code (PEAR modules, for example).  But I’m sure that either I simply didn’t look for these hard enough, or they will be added in the future.

If you are a PHP developer or involved with PHP source on GitHub in any other way, I suggest you try it out.  You can request a private beta invite directly from Pagoda Box website.  Or, if you prefer, I can send you one (I have about 10 of them left for now).  Also watch the demonstration screencasts,  and read through other platform features.

Day in brief

Biggest-ever road safety campaign in Cyprus

Cyprus Mail reports:

CYPRUS yesterday launched what was described as the biggest road safety campaign in the eastern Mediterranean involving the printing of over a million leaflets aimed at locals and tourists.The leaflets in several languages explaining the island’s traffic codes, will be placed in planes, ships, rental cars, hotels and tourist resortsThere will also be televised spots on planes and ships, offering tourists some useful information on Cyprus’ traffic network – such as, the allowable alcohol limits, speed limits and legal obligation to wear seatbelts; for front seat as well as backseat passengers. The campaign is called Grand Road Safety Project 001.

While I applaud the effort and the breadth of this campaign, I think there is a single issue that, if addressed, will significantly increase the road safety on this island – driving license exam.  Reading through a twenty-something pages of “How to pass a driving license exam” and spending as little as 12 hours on the public roads with instructor should not be enough to get the driving license.  There are so many everyday situations that aren’t even mentioned in the book – no surprise people have no clue how drive when it comes to it.

Google push for modern browsers

Here is a quote from this Google blog post:

[…]soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.
As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

All I have to say to this is: Bravo Google!  Enough is enough!

As pretty much anyone with a computer science degree, I was a big supporter of backward compatibility at the beginning of my career.  Backward compatibility just comes naturally.  Each and every textbook, boss, and mailing list opponent tells you to care about each and every user out there.  Often, with a complete disregard for your own costs.  Completely forgetting that backward compatibility is extremely expensive.

There has also been a huge change in software development since my college times.  The change is called the Web.  Backward compatibility was more important in the old days, when software was installed on a computer and when it had to be distributed via such inefficient ways as compact disks.  Since then, software development had largely moved into the Web.  Updates can be pushed out to users several times a day and they require no effort on the client side.  That has to count for something.  All that is asked in return is that your web browser is of a reasonably recent version.  And not even that it is of any particular brand – you can chose from a few options, and you can have the choice no matter what kind of computer or operating system you use.

To those scared of the updates and what such changes can bring to them, consider other example, which exist in open source software.  Fedora Linux distribution, supports less than two releases back.  Painful?  Maybe.  But it’s a desktop oriented software collection, with a very painless upgrade process (albeit a few examples, such as a recent Fedora 15).  What is the result?  Most of Fedora users are upgraded to the latest or so version. Compare that with a huge chunk of enterprises running Windows XP, which is a 10 year old operating system, and you can see the difference.

Most modern browsers provide automatic upgrade functionality, which makes user life so much easier that there is really no reason not to upgrade.  The only argument for older browsers that I’ve heard to now is support of legacy applications that only work in specific versions of specific browsers.  And you know what, I have no problem with getting rid of those.  The world will be a better place.  It’s been years since we have web standards, browsers that support them, and plenty of tools that assist in development and migration.  If you haven’t moved your application in all these years, chances are you’ll never will.  In which case, you deserve all the troubles that you are about to get.  The world shouldn’t hold its breath waiting for you to upgrade.

Heck, when even Microsoft is jumping out of its pants for people to upgrade MSIE 6 to something newer, you know there is a problem.  And solving it once and for all (rolling release version support) is an excellent approach.  I hope more people will follow this example.

P.S.: Please excuse the lack of links.  The things I mentioned have been discussed many times all around the web and I do see them as obvious truth. Those of you who need references, shouldn’t have any troubles finding some.  If you do – let me know.