Sarah's dashboard

Does Ping.fm require the use of any special ports? The site is blocked at one of my client's offices, and that office network doesn't generally block websites. Their tech people thought it might be a port problem. Any ideas?

I contacted the developer of a 3rd party website that's asking for twitter usernames and passwords, in a context that seems completely unnecessary. This was his response:

"It's true that it is not absolutely necessary to get the password, but Twitter only allows 70 requests per hour for each user. So I could always use my information to retrieve everyone's friends lists, but after a few people view their friends, my account would not work for an hour. If you know that Twitter has changed their policy please let me know and I will get it changed. "

His tool displays an individual's friends' tweets in a creative way. For what it does, all he should be asking for is a username. Or at least, some kind of openID-style solution for validating the user.

The road to mashups should not be paved with password phishing. Twitter, what should he be doing differently?

I just want to give you a heads up that The Writ has been shut down again due to hacking. Last month we were phishing people in the UK for their bank information. This month, we're soliciting strangers to see who'd be willing to host a nine million dollar transfer from an Egyptian account. You know. The usual.

The problem, unfortunately, is that our system is severely out of date and vulnerable to attacks. We're looking at a few options for moving through the situation, and none of them are very pretty.

One option is to back up all of our data, wipe the site clean, and start from scratch with a more stable system. This plan will require a significant amount of customization and might mean that the workshop is unavailable to the public for up to a month. From a hosting and security standpoint, this is the best solution.

Other options include sticking it out with "more of the same" and trying to buy ourselves time by continuing to put band-aids on the wounds.

It's a lot more complicated than that, and we've got some smart people working on it, but i wanted to open the conversation up to the community so you can ask questions and offer suggestions.