Meet BBC Sport's f#*k%£g Desktop Monkey

MMT Digital are very excited about Adobe AIR and have started to build AIR applications for some of our major clients. So we were thrilled to see that the BBC had produced an Olympics themed desktop AIR application. You can think of AIR as the Flash player for the desktop so the more people that install AIR the better! Adobe were also excited about the launch and their 'Platform Evangelists' have been blogging about it for a while.

We pride ourselves on building applications that are robust and secure so wanted to look at some of the techniques used by the BBC in this flagship application. However, what we discovered left us speechless for all the wrong reasons.

Installed along with the application is a file called 'bbc-swear.txt' (actually located in 'C:\Program Files\BBC Olympics\assets\data') the contents of which is a little fruity to say the least. It is a non-encrypted list of all the words that, we presume, the BBC deems unfit for use in the application. Why they have not encrypted this file (very easy to do with AIR) or kept the list server-side is a complete mystery.

If they (or anyone else!) would like any help with developing AIR applications they can always give us a call.

Interested in installing the f#*k%£g Desktop Monkey:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics/monkey/7479984.stm

Check out the official word from an Adobe Evangelist:
http://www.ashorten.com/2008/07/17/
bbc-olympics-coverage-on-your-desktop-with-air-and-on-the-web-with-flash-player/

 

6 hours later that day....

After getting a lot of attention from the legendary 'psyked.co.uk' the BBC have rapidly deployed an auto-update that removes the text file. A good demonstration of the power of the Internet (and the impressive update capabilities of AIR!)