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Microsoft's SwiftKey Suspends Sync After Keyboard Leaks Strangers' Contact Details (zdnet.com)
Swiftkey has suspended its cloud-sync service and switched off email address predictions amid reports of Microsoft-owned keyboard app delivering suggestions for strangers' email addresses and phone numbers. ZDNet reports: The move followed reports a week ago that the app was offering up email addresses to people they've never met. According to The Telegraph, one user claimed to have been contacted by a stranger and told that their brand-new phone had suggested two of the user's email addresses, as well as contact phone numbers. Reports of the bug also cite some users receiving predictions in languages they'd never used previously. "I logged into SwiftKey with Google+ and now, I'm getting someone else's German predictions with only English (UK) pack installed. I have never typed German in my entire life," one Reddit user reported last week. SwiftKey on Friday suggested the leaked contact details are due to a glitch in this sync service, which normally backs up what the app learns about a user to SwiftKey servers and then syncs that data to the user's other devices.Microsoft acquired SwiftKey app earlier this year for an estimated sum of $250 million.
It has to be said again and again...(sigh)
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Microsoft paid a quarter of a billion dollars for that?
W.C. Fields was right.
The scary part is that I had both the cloud sharing and the custom dictionary disabled, and yet I got suggestions too. It should have been impossible to receive these suggestions even if there was a bug in either or both sides, which tells me the "disable" option isn't really disabling anything. Looks like it's time to find a new keyboard... (and yes, I'm actually serious)
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."