Comments on: Aurora Feint Temporarily Offline

By: Partners in Grime

Partners in Grime — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:49:23 +0000

Is that why it's called Aurora Feint — after you find out what they did with your data you faint?

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:28:37 +0000

Ooo, he put us in our place.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:03:24 +0000

This is exactly why the iPhone was a closed system for so long. This is the very thing Apple was concerned about when everybody cried that they wanted to jailbreak the system. Kudos to Apple for looking out for the integrity of our data from the get-go.

By: Poor

Poor — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:15:48 +0000

Rich n' Pals,

I looooove your "*sigh*," it says a lot about your incredible patience dealing with the simpletons in here. I can't imagine how any of them could pooooossibly care that some buggy tetris game uploaded their address book to a random server somewhere on the Internet. How could they not expect this to happen, when the zero-doc game's hypo verbose one-liner on the community tab made it so clear what was going to happen? I mean everyone knows that phone number+email=upload your addressbook.

Anyway, you and other like-minded posters here are right. Data abuse isn't even remotely possible in this case. The reasons are so numerous, for example after they got caught, the developers said they didn't keep any of the information they designed their game to collect, so therefore by the laws of physics and such, that has to be true. Clearly, to believe otherwise requires a tinfoil hat.

The corollary to those same laws of physics is apparently that nobody can be upset that it happened in the first place or they're just "freaking out about this for nothing." I have no "quarms" about saying I'm pissed. It would have been great if you and the rest of the fanboi brigade could stick up for the AF devs without being condescending to those of us who care about privacy, but so be it.

P.S. Ben – Whatever you think "NIMBY" means is not what it means, look it up.

By: girlgeek101

girlgeek101 — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:46:51 +0000

There was an update today but after I updated it stopped working. Now it won't load.

By: oracle_ab

oracle_ab — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:49:59 +0000

Agreed about folks freaking out about this for nothing. Opt-in is just that. If you opted into something w/out doing your homework, that's no-one's fault but yours. Google Mobile App searches your iPhone/iPod touch, as other have said, other apps do this very same thing. And I'm in agreement that it's Apple's fault for not making it more secure w/in their SDK. If they didn't specify how this functionality should or shouldn't be used, then Apple failed to ensure their SDK was as secure as they may have wanted it to be. I, for one, continue to play the game, would love to see the full effect of the Community feature, and have no quarms paying for an update if the developers so chose to charge. With blogs, social sites and e-mail, most everyone's privacy is just about up for grabs.

By: Rich

Rich — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:15:39 +0000

Love the game, still love the game, still gonna play the game.

Seriously people, the devs have been 100% honest about this. Yeah, they made an error of judgement (which they're now fixing ASAP), but that's a looooong way from data abuse.

*sigh*

By: Nachoes

Nachoes — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:58:35 +0000

You can actually still install Aurora Feint, just google it. The phobos.apple.com link's still valid, they're just filtering searches for Aurora Feint in the App Store.

By: Nag

Nag — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:26:56 +0000

To all the people that have questions about what happened please read the link in the article. It includes all the information as to what was going on.

Just incase you don't read it here are the important points:

1) If you never used the community feature it never sent any contact info to the servers. The community feature is opt in, if you just played the game you never sent any contacts to them.

2) All personal information on their servers was deleted after they realized they were popular. Apparently they released an unsecure version not expecting so many people to be using the game. While this is somewhat of a bad excuse (you really should do security first) it is understandable.

3) If you did use the community feature in the game your contacts were never stored on the server. The only thing they stored was your number and email address you gave them when signing in to the community feature.

So, all the people freaking out just calm down. Yes, this was a screw up. No, it isn't the end of the world. Hopefully they'll get this sorted out and a good game can return to the app store.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:37:39 +0000

Please understand the situation before you comment, people. The majority of you here look like complete idiots. NIMBY much?