Max Beatty

Ever since Gawker got hacked this week­end, every­one has been giv­ing out their two cents about secur­ing pass­words. The prac­tice of using pass­words has always been inse­cure, but it’s still the most com­mon way to authen­ti­cate. Users con­tinue to make the sim­plest pass­words they can while com­put­ers con­tinue to become faster mak­ing crack­ing eas­ier. I’ll […]

Every­one has been in an uproar about pri­vacy since Facebook’s new pri­vacy changes. This hap­pens every time Face­book changes any­thing. Close to half a bil­lion peo­ple have stuck around through all the changes. The irony of it all is that now devel­op­ers are releas­ing tools that uti­lize Facebook’s new privacy-ignoring fea­tures to help users “reclaim” […]

In my last post, I exposed a few flaws in the Groupon sys­tem that allow you to reuse Groupons end­lessly until they are expired. After Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon, took the time to com­ment, I now feel oblig­ated to write this follow-up. The prob­lem — how can busi­nesses ver­ify the valid­ity of a Groupon […]

Last week con­cluded my first three months at my first job out of col­lege. Accen­ture has been great! I’ve learned a lot, met a lot of great peo­ple, and am excited about the career ahead of me.

After Jim Bum­gard­ner’s blog post Mon­day con­fess­ing to cheat­ing on Foursquare and sub­se­quent LA Times cov­er­age, I think Foursquare will be address­ing their service’s secu­rity imme­di­ately. For those of you who don’t know, Foursquare is a loca­tion based social net­work that incor­po­rates gam­ing ele­ments. Bum­gard­ner used Foursquare’s 3 month old API to become mayor the […]