Secured

I'm at work, banging my head against a particularly frustrating .NET/Safari bug - because you apparently can't debug Safari using "attach to process" from Visual Studio... WTF Microsoft? (Do you like how I blame MS rather than Apple? Yep, that's how I roll...)

So instead, I'm going to write a post about my shiny new Blizzard Authenticator. :) This little bad boy arrived yesterday in the mail, despite all the talk about out-of-stockness and shipping delays. (I must've gotten my order in just before the madness.)

After pairing it to my account at worldofwarcraft.com/account (there's a serial number on the back that creates the association from your device to your account), I'm now required to press a little button on the keychain device to retrieve a temporary PIN to enter along with my user name and password. It's like having a second password that changes every minute or so. Brilliant!

Now, I'm not naive enough to think that I'm 100% hackproof, but my limited knowledge of application security tells me that my WoW account is way more secure than it was 24 hours ago. The fact that many corporations and financial institutions use these seems to support the notion that multi-point authentication with physically-held security devices are the way to go.

In other news, iPhone's 2.0 software was released today, which now officially includes support for third-party applications. (ZOMG gamez!) Super Monkey Ball is superhard and superfun and super-better-graphics-than-I-expected. I now have something productive to do while flying from Darnassus to Gadgetzan. (Or from Seattle to Vegas?)

So given the surprising graphics and processing capability of the little iPhone, is it too much to expect we'll see some sort of mobile gaming experience from Blizzard? How about a 2D side-scroller-jump-n-shoot game in a Diablo/Starcraft/Warcraft theme? WTB!!!