I read at Innovations this article: Web 2.0 Security Fears Deserve Attention, about the potential harm can cause API’s to create a new harms in terms of spam and getting information of users and their friends.

But surely spam on Social sites is nothing new, I recently received a Philippine Scam on a books site based on the Nigerian Scam, even with their lowest rate of hit they are also harmful.

But in fact what is most harmful to process that social information and send emails / messages faking your friends ID, that kind of spam gets a great hit rate (about 72% versus 16% of not social spam), this is concluded on the article: Social Phising (pre-print paper), also the article points to several interesting results, among them Denial of the attack has been successful, this make phising very effective because of few reports which can be prosecuted.

I Agree on Innovations article (which also pinpoints the article of Social Phising) that the only prevention is not legal enforcement (which can help to prosecute) or close social sites but education about the problem.

Programming Grads meet skill gap in the real world

This long article of eweek.com tells about what every developer feels once he graduated, in my case I was lucky since I was developing for a time in the school in other projects larger than school projects. I totally agree with the article in this part:

Scherlis said the onslaught of open source technology has been a big benefit to students, as they are able to bet access to source code more easily and get students up and familiar with technology they are bound to see after graduation.

Byron Sebastian, CEO of SourceLabs, in Seattle, said many less experienced developers can learn necessary workplace skills by actively working on open-source projects in their free time.

Enrolling into an open source project (or checking and altering the code for testing purposes) will help you a lot to get skills in programming.

I read this article in the Interactions Magazine of this month, you can check from here:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1273971

The main point in this article is the lack of usability on most linux programs (including distros), without doubt there have been several advantages on good presentation of programs (”eye candy“) like Beryl, but unfortunately some of these changes are only eye candy and doesn’t provides more usability than other solutions.

I think one of the problems which lead to this was the lack of a high level language for developing in Linux, now Mono is available to fast developing but we have really few Mono applications compared with C developed applications (with UI code mixed with normal code).

A good option for UI developing is (in theorical aspect) is XUL because it’s similar to Glade, in XUL you can add Javascript to handle windows and events (and other things like file handling), the problem is the lack of good examples/tutorials for desktop applications (not web developing which I think is now outdated with AJAX and Javascript pure solutions) and the constant use of C++ to develop applications.