It was interesting to watch how twitter lit up around midnight. I’d reckon that about 90% of my twitter stream was made up of people’s thoughts on the fact that Steve Jobs has resigned.

It was overwhelmingly positive; There’s the odd mention that people should get some perspective, or leftfield swipes at the fanboys (fanbois?), but generally it was people wanting to thank Steve Jobs for the products that have made a change to their lives.

I understand that many see these tweets as pointless, or out of kilter with worse events going on around the world, but I understand it.

You see, different people have different heroes. Your heroes change throughout your lives; I know a girl who cried when Ayrton Senna was tragically killed, many weeped over Robbie being ejected from Take That; the tears of joy flowed when ‘King Kenny’ returned to Liverpool.

The point is this; we laud individuals because of talent. We build our heroes because of their talent.

– Driving Formula 1 Cars.
– Singing Pop Songs to 50,000 people at a time.
– Scoring goals, then being an even better leader off the pitch.
and even
– Making great products, that for some unknown reason, the owners don’t just like, they love.

So. When Steve Jobs announced his resignation, great software developers, brilliant designers, gadget lovers, techies..us…We felt the need to say thanks.

I’m not gonna apologise for that.

Today I can announce that we’ve added a new member to the team. And with a new team member comes new capabilities.
Jason Connery joins tapadoo where he’s going to have a primary focus on Android App development.

Jason brings a wealth of server side API development experience to the company which will further strengthen our offerings; We all know that Apps are rarely standalone; A server side element is often required; Sometimes our clients have existing APIs, often we build them for them.

When not writing code, Jason is a keen gamer, reader and movie watcher.

Find him on twitter as @jasonconnery. I hope you will join me in wishing Jason all the best.

So PSN had an outage, and it is possible that all credit card details have been compromised. Sony have stated that credit card details, without CVV numbers may have been breached.

I’ve worked on a PCI compliant secure credit card store in the past, so I’ve some experience, and there’s a number of unanswered questions.

In a PCI compliant secure credit card store, you do not store credit card numbers in the clear – you must encrypt them. Encryption is easy (or rather, by standing on the shoulders of giants, it is) – Pretty much any platform offers you robust encryption libraries. The hard part is securing the key(s) used to encrypt/decrypt the data.

In the system I worked on, we used a dedicated hardware security module (HSM). This was a piece of hardware that was military grade – it never allowed the keys to leave the system, and had all sorts of physical tamper-proof capabilities. Basically it worked like this:

1. The user supplies their credit card details
2. The software asks the HSM to encrypt the data on its behalf
3. The encrypted data gets stored
4. When the system needs to use a credit card (i.e. take a payment), it supplies the encrypted data to the HSM and asks it to decrypt it
5. The decrypted data is used to make the payment, and never stored

The security lies in the fact that the keys are secured, and cannot be obtained. If the database is compromised, the data is useless without a key; assuming you’ve used a large enough key, you’ll need a supercomputer to find it by brute force.

Sony have stated that all accounts have been compromised. This suggests a database dump as opposed to some ongoing “trace” to retrieve credit cards in the clear as they are being used. So here’s the questions I have

1. Was a database dump stolen?
2. Were the credit cards in the stolen data encrypted or in the clear?
3. If they were in the clear, why?
4. If they weren’t in the clear, has the key been compromised? If so, how?
5. The same questions apply to users’ passwords

Of course, here’s another possibility:
The credit card data was encrypted and the key wasn’t compromised; Sony did everything right, but are using full disclosure to tell the worst case scenario. After all, a criminal with the resources to breach a major corporation may well have a supercomputer at their disposal.

Answering the above questions could put a lot of minds at rest.

No it isn’t.

If you’re a journalist and you write a prophetic article on the iPad killer you are either looking for attention from trolls, or are dumb.

I wrote about the “iPhone Killer” last year. Nothing has changed, and all the arguments remain the same.

Move along now, nothing to see.

Related: I’d love to have a product that everyone writes is about to be trumped by a new “killer”. Its a sure sign you’re doing it right.