This doesn't surprise me... anything utilizing the technology (if you want to call it that) of Silverlight is bound to be a disaster. Netflix should definitely act appropriately if they're receiving this many complaints or else it will do more harm than good.

There are some good automated security scanners out there. For instance: Nesses/Nikto, WebScarab with proxmon, portswigger, and you can even go as far as using 3rd party companies such as HackerSafe.com or SecurityMetrics.com. Even though this doesn't give you a 100% fail-safe security scenario (*cough* nothing does and probably never will), it at least helps decrease the chances of common and even some more uncommon attacks such as SQL injections, overflows, man-in-the-middle attacks, etc. You also obviously have to write secure code and keep all of your software up to date (especially open source software). This is not only true for PHP, but for all programming languages. You should also try using BSD since you have a LAMP system. Some other good sources of information: http://www.webappsec.org/ http://www.owasp.org/ Hope this helps...

Web development is a nice and diverse field to get in to. The direction web development is heading should provide good job security... you will just need to learn how to use javascript/ajax, some server side language, SQL, and HTML/CSS. By having to handle multiple technologies in web development, your job doesn't seem as monotonous as going through some C# code all day fixing bugs or writing modules. You can also dive in to doing some graphics/ui design in the web development field if you're in to that sort of thing. I have a B.S. in computer science degree at Purdue University and I enjoy web development much more than working on desktop/other standalone applications all of the time.

I don't think of it as an obligation but more of a convenience to them since integrating in to their open API gives them more business.
I also think that any application that implements 3rd party APIs such as USPS Web Tools should have proper error catching to handle problems such as these.

As of right now, we're still experiencing problems with USPS Web Tools and fail-over pricing is still being set. That means USPS has been having these problems for nearly 40 hours now.

A lot of companies selling on the Internet have lost a lot of money in the last 2 days because of shopping cart software not handling USPS Web Tools correctly. This just points back to why hosted e-commerce solutions such as SEO-Cart, Volusion, Monster Commerce, etc are typically better than licensed / downloaded e-commerce solutions. But USPS is also at fault since they're the source of the problem.

The company I work for provides a hosted e-commerce shopping cart solution, SEO-Cart, which supports the USPS Web Tools. Of course the first call coming in for the day was from a client using USPS and having incorrect shipping prices being calculated for their store.

I went ahead and called USPS and the lady who answered was quite rude and explained to me that they had a Worldwide outage which affected other applications than just their Webtools API, and also that they hire a 3rd party company to handle their Webtools API software. She couldn't provide any other information at all and I told her a company of that size should have some sort of fail over plan in place to prevent them from being down as long as they have been. I was really disappointed in the fact she didn't even ask me for my name, phone number, or company by time the conversation was over, but she was probably being bombarded with phone calls all day.

After figuring out that USPS was completely down, I looked through our fail over code and found the following equations seem to come close to the USPS pricing:

National shipping: [cart-weight]*1.6+3.00
International shipping: [cart-weight]*1.6+15.00

These also include pricing for insurance.

After tweaking the fail over pricing code to this, it seemed that everyone using USPS were happy with the results. We also had to decrease the connection timeout set for the request to the USPS Webtools API which was also slowing things down.

The Webtools API seems to be both up and down today, with some orders having shipping prices directly from USPS and others having the fallback pricing. Either way, hopefully their IT department learns from this and also provide us information as to what exactly went wrong.

On that note, this is a prime example that I use when speaking to prospects about the advantages of using a hosted shopping cart solution rather than a licensed/free download solution. Besides the obvious IT benefits that you get with a good hosted shopping cart solution, hosted shopping cart software is typically a centralized application that can provide quick updates to problems like these. Of course this is assuming that the prospect is serious about their online store and doesn't want to handle technical support themselves.