Vine, recently bought by Twitter for $30 million, is a new app that allows users to create six-second video clips and share them on social media websites.Twitter execs — believing Vine will play a critical role in helping them develop their own video hosting system — have committed considerable resources to making this happen.
So imagine everyone’s surprise when this happened: “You’re only supposed to be able to upload a six-second clip to Vine—but somehow yesterday sixteen-year-old Will Smidlein managed to bypass that rule and post the whole of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up.’” The author continues, “It didn’t go down so well with Vine engineers, who very quickly sent him a direct message on Twitter asking him to take down the post, in which he explained ‘I think I broke Vine.’”
If you’re wondering why a 16-year-old would post this annoying, late 80’s classic, then welcome to the time-honored internet tradition of rickrolling. It’s no secret that kids enjoy playing pranks. But, instead of ordering a dozen pizzas to a stranger’s house—which is definitely annoying—now teenagers are reverse engineering complex code to post silly music videos. This seems harmless until you consider the amount of time and money invested in developing and launching new technologies.
I’ll say it again: Protect your data.
Sogolytics offers Application Programming Interface integration with other websites and blogs. While APIs increase functionality and efficiency by automating many common processes, they can be vulnerable to cyber-attacks. But Sogolytics not only offers SSL encryption, but our engineers also constantly test our software to identify and eliminate potential hazards to ensure your data has the highest levels of protection.
Open-source code has been a boon for software designers and consumers alike. But as apps collect and store an increasing amount of our personal information, we must begin to take data security more seriously. If the example of a bored teen dismantling and reassembling Vine for kicks and giggles doesn’t force us, maybe nothing will.
