Thinking Before Acting

Thinking Before Acting

Thank God that whole spyware controversy is behind us. Fingers and toes? More like arms and legs.

Within 2 days after I first posted the initial version of 20/20 2.2, I started to receive registrations with the amount set to 0,00. Hmmm, I new there would eventually be attempts to crack the registration code, but 2 days after?!? I immediately got down to work, dusting off my hacking tools so I could "jam" the guy/gal up. After a little research on the IP and email address sent along with the registration, I was able to isolate the offending machine to a country/location that contains some of the finest crackers. Their machine was connected permanently to the Internet via a cable modem (that was expected). Obtaining their identity was going to be easy :).

Before I was able to thoroughly "investigate", the Radiate problem came up, so I had to put my new friend on hold until the more urgent problem was dealt with. Three days went by before the Radiate problem was fixed. During those three days, I received at least 3 registrations a day with the amount set to 0,00. On the fourth day, I received an email from a nice lady from Italy saying "When I register, the price says 0,00...". Obviously she wasn't cracking. After researching the problem thoroughly with her help, it turned out there was a bug in the registration logic. It was my fault! When the registration logic was assigning the amount it retrieved, non English locales were considering the decimal point invalid and therefore setting the amount to 0,00 during the assignment. Now, I'm applying that old saying; "don't believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see". My apologies to the person who's machine I knocked on. Your computer is pretty tight, but you already new that...

Finally, I must say good bye to my business partner and long time friend Dave McKinney. He left our little company to take part in a new Internet start up (http://www.2alertme.com). I wish him the best of luck. Now where did I put those other hats...