Just had a go: it's great!

Great post, really enjoyed following the trail along with the author. The sad part is, knowing how useless a lot of ISP's abuse@ emails are, the FTP might never be taken down this way.

I'm hoping that "emailed the ISP" means "deleted the contents of the server and emailed the ISP".

Deleting the contents is illegal, heck, even accessing the server is illegal. Furthermore, it destroys evidence the ISP needs to shut it down.

That's why I hoped it was code. He wouldn't want to acknowledge illegal activity on his blog; though technically logging into the FTP server is probably illegal in itself.

depends I didn't see any banner and one could argue that his posting was covered by hue and cry :-)

"In common law, a hue and cry is a process by which bystanders are summoned to assist in the apprehension of a criminal who has been witnessed in the act of committing a crime."

Or, change the FTP password and email that to the ISP abuse team. Spammer is locked out.

How are you going to change an FTP password from an FTP client?

Good point. Meh. Assume it's also root pass for SSH on that box?

Hard to imagine how they arrived at the total cost of €1,400 - what about the hours of work that went into the web app and iPhone app, and all the visual design? Are they calculating their hourly rate as insignificant?

Product looks good, but this €1,400 figure is meaningless.

Hey, the €1,400 amount is made up of every out going we had in the company. That included the logo design, to company formation which is about 300 euro in Ireland. I'm not a designer but I learned how to design so we could build it, we worked hard in the evenings and weekends to get the product built. So what we're really trying to say to people is you can do it. Sure it doesn't include our time, but running it so tight is a reflection of how significant we value our time. Everything we did, piece of copy we wrote had a time cost, that made us focus on what people wanted. So to me the €1,400 means everything. Hope that makes sense :)

So true. I have never, ever taken a job I knew how to do (fully). I blagged it, and learned it all on the job.

Just total nonsense which makes no mention of either general inflation or the price-deflation of consumer electronics. My parents saved up to buy my Spectrum when I was a kid. Now, a parent could get a laptop off eBay for $50 and install Linux. Computers are WAY cheaper now than they were then. sigh

Anyone care to leech them all and make a torrent? My corporate firewall won't allow it, or I'd be doing it now. :(

Wouldn't that be kind of a dick move?

I'm not seeing how. This stuff is free, and a torrent would make it easier for users and reduce server load for the site.

Printing ads on toilet paper could still be a tech business needing many hackers.

Enrolment, ad bidding, printing, logistics, crm, etc etc

Disqus?

Any reasons in particular for Disqus? I've only really ever seen it on Engadget and thought Facebooks solution was better.

I've gone with FB comments. Up now.

I refuse to use Facebook.

OK. Well if some more feedback like this comes this way I shall have a rethink (on this and other projects!).

Had a hunch this was the case, just needed someone smarter than I to confirm.

How do banks ensure nobody makes a phishing version of their apps?

They can't. If "no phishing" is a desired property, then it would be up to the distribution ecosystem to either carefully monitor for such products and deny them, or to at least allow some mechanisms for users to verify products themselves (such as SSL combined with URL bars do for general web traffic).

That is interesting, but surely the client-side cert could just be copied and used in a dummy app?