A group of researchers at the University of Toronto discovered a massive computer spy ring last week. The researchers reported that at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries have been affected by the system, which they call "GhostNet," over a period of less than two years.

The U of T research project was prompted by a request from the office of the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile from Tibet since 1959. According to the report, GhostNet hails for the most part from China-based computers, but the Chinese government has dismissed any associations with the spy network. Media outlets are keeping the Chinese government close to the story, however, due to the rift between China and the Dalai Lama, but they're not the only ones. According to a Reuters article, two Britons who worked on the research are planning to release a separate report in which "they do fault China and [warn] that...

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Eric Jacobson discussed an interesting question from Roshni Prince in "Dealing With Smarty Pants Tester." The issue is how to deal with a tester who wants make code changes to fix bugs after finding them.

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I'm excited to be invited as a guest blogger on StickyMinds.com. The "Software Alchemy" title matches the "Software Alchemist" title I use on my business card, and it often elicits comments when I hand it out. I think that the state of software development hasn't progressed beyond alchemy yet....

Social networking, social media, and Web 2.0 aren't just buzzwords. The ideas and services they represent are ingrained now in our everyday lives, and the software they use can, of course, be just as buggy--and dangerous--as less social software

Last year, security testing expert Paco Hope posted a great video to the Web Security Testing Cookbook page on Facebook about "Cheating in Word Twist," a very popular Facebook Game made by Zynga. Paco notes that he didn't make the video to knock Zynga, which he says makes good games, but rather to show that "the mistakes that you're going to see that they fall prey to are representative of the industry at large."

And that's just a game. What happens when a social networking site itself--on which many users don't just play games, but also store personal photos, videos, and identifying information--has bugs or other security issues?

The workers at Google Labs--some of those same clever folks who brought us Gmail Goggles last year--have developed an Undo button for reluctant Gmail users. It doesn't actually take back any emails that you've already sent, but, once activated, it gives you a second chance to rethink that missive by holding your email for five seconds before sending it along the series of tubes to its recipient.

This is helpful for the casual emailer, of course, because who hasn't noticed a wayward grammatical error or contextual mistake just as an email disappears into the not-as-mythical-as-we'd-hope Plane of Unrecalling? But there's also a possibility that Google sees this as another ace up its sleeve in the ongoing game of How to Take Enterprise Business From Microsoft. In the article "Google Offers Gmail 'Undo Send' Feature,"...

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Also, be sure to check out the STAREAST blog...

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In a toponymic twist, the residents of Watertown, NY are currently under a boil water advisory after the water tank that provides an area of the town with potable water went empty. According to a breaking news report by Watertown Daily Times, the water tank's pump failed and the computer that is meant to alert the city ... didn't.

Over the weekend, Google first sent out an email and then posted to its Google Docs Blog regarding a Google Docs issue that had allowed some of its users to inadvertently make documents visible to others. According to Google's blog post, the bug only affected documents and presentations, not spreadsheets, and only shared the documents with other people with whom the user had previously shared documents.

"For this small percentage of documents, the bug (now fixed) occurred when the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and then changed the sharing permissions," the blog states.

Google identified documents it suspected had been infected, disabled sharing for those documents, and contacted the affected users.

But not everyone is quick to accept Google's easy fix for the "small percentage of documents" affected. Over...

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