Finished by accident on valentines day. Create a heart that is only encoded within the URL. The recipient can guess its content.
If you're interested how it works, be sure to look at the background page.
You could try adding a "Social Lite Deals" page where you put affiliate offers (e.g. stuff with reduced prices from Amazon).
This way you provide some kind of additional value and don't risk offending your user base. Granted it won't be as effective as ads but perhaps it's a good starting point to figure out what your users like and accept.
Using random characters you're lucky you didn't use the first, third, fifth and tenth character as a "descriptive" term. ;)
And a bit on topic even though it's not a blog. How about "The Bug of the Month" of the makers of lint?
http://www.gimpel.com/html/bugs.htm
A bit obscure but definately broadens the pool of error behavior concepts.
Given that the knowledge about correct parts of a password based on known sources (pi, peace and war, song lyrics etc) drastically reduces the amount of possible solutions. But how would an attacker figure out the first part of such a password? What comes to mind are timing attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack
What other possibilities did I miss?
EDIT: I get that having a long streak of my pass in a dictionary would reduce overall security but it's still unclear how a partial match in the dictionary would be detected.
Apart from contract work, there's currently only one. It's called Snippets (http://www.snippets.eu). It replaces the caps lock key with note taking functionality.
Although I wouldn't call it profitable, still trying to figure out how to get traction.
I agree. The arms race of building 'better' copy protections instead of continous improvement of your product won't do you any good.
I think the main key is deciding on the investment. The amount of time put into those things can be expressed in money. So this poses two questions:
1. Would I be willing to pay the given amount to someone else to do it. If not and I still want to do it I should at least admit that this is for personal ambition and not for the product. It's OK everybody likes a challenge.
2. Will it improve my sales? Again the money. What stands to gain from this. How much effort is OK. Perhaps the simple checksum in addition to the common cmp jne check is enough to get a few sales. But that's about it for products with a market where uncracked time is not king. Look somewhere above for the gamasutra article about game releases and the value of time. And I think the time constraint doesn't work for many products.
The idea for one of my projects was to say "if you are able to crack it you can keep it". If someone spent the time and has the ability to do it, it's fine with me. Surely this is no viable solution for most products. But I'm curious how it will work out...
It seems like he still needs to proof that his idea is working. Other scientist say that it seems to be a good idea. So investing in this is a huge risk since even though the concept might actually work it may turn out that there's economical sane way to enter mass production. In addition there's still the doubt of "too good to be true" because it usually is. On one hand it is probably this kind of thinking which makes us pass on great opportunities, on the other it keeps us from sending money to help getting a multi-million dollar transaction through.
Somewhat related also with the funding problem but on a larger scale was this guy
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606#
Judge for yourself if you would invest 1 billion to (prehaps) get a working fusion reactor.
Searching for "github dodgit" did the trick. How come i searched for it? All entries contain an email from a throw away address.
Since if found the file directly by searching for the first entry I figured the file is part of a project and that it would most probably refer to the throw away mail providers.
Does the problem only occur when you're writing code at work?
What I mean is if this is work related, perhaps you want check your mental model of the work and the results expected from you.
For example: I spent too much time considering (most of the times unconsciously) what kind of solution is expected and how people would react to it. This sounds like an odd thing to do but it wasn't like I chose to do this. But it was a conscious decision to get rid of it and regain the initial (for lack of a better word) playfulness. And live with the consequences. Somehow it nests easily in a mind that serious work shouldn't be fun and is all about mindlessly meeting requirements. I find that it is important to not let this happen.
So far the results have been pretty good for me.
In a way this also applies to creating things in your spare time. Many side projects I worked on ended in a dusty archive. Just because I wondered to much about possible problems.
This is my first post here and I would like to add that it's quite interesting how just reading HN slowly changed my approach to actually try and create something.
Thanks.