Technical Issues

Right from Twitter we have a report that Plenty of Fish is down:

The twitter report is only 40 minutes old (as of writing this at 6:00pm) but we have people commenting that they couldn't access the dating site since 3:00pm EST. If you visit POF.com using Firefox it shows a connection problem with the message "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.".

Call me crazy, but part of me says this is just basic common sense. If a company gives you a device, it's for work. It's not for surfing BuzzFeed, uploading pictures of your cat to Instagram, or looking for Saturday night plans on a dating app.

But let's get real. That's an idealized world we don't live in. If someone gives us a device, we're going to do whatever we want on it (but maybe in Incognito mode). That goes for the listicles, the cat snaps, and the dating apps.

You may think it's no big deal, as long as your boss isn't looking over your shoulder, but a new study by IBM may change your mind. The study found that employees who use dating apps on their company’s smartphone or tablet risk exposing themselves to major security threats. We're talking hacking, spying, data theft – all kinds of big scary things you don't want to have to explain to your supervisor.

Researchers analyzed 41 dating applications and found that 60% were potentially vulnerable to cyberattacks that put personal or corporate data at risk. Many apps have access to additional features on mobile devices, such as the camera, microphone, storage, GPS location and mobile wallet billing information. IBM also found that nearly 50% of the organizations they reviewed had at least one popular dating app installed on mobile devices used to access business information.

Hello, hacker jackpot.

The potential vulnerabilities include:

• Downloading malware onto your device through your dating app
• GPS location information being used to track your movements
• Your credit card numbers being stolen through the app
• Remote control of your phone's camera or microphone
• Hijacking the content or images of your dating profile

Using your personal phone for work purposes (known as “bring your own device” or BYOD) can also pose a problem. “The trouble with BYOD is that, if not managed properly, the organizations might be leaking sensitive corporate data via employee-owned devices,” the report said.

To protect yourself against dating app hacks, avoid divulging too much info in public on your profile. Be sure to check an app's permissions before you download it, so you know what it has access to. Use unique passwords for every account you have, and only connect trusted Wi-Fi networks.

Finally, always apply the latest updates to your apps and device when they become available. This will fix any bugs that have been identified in your device and applications, resulting in a more secure experience.

Tinder only launched in 2012, but already new apps are trying to make its popular “hot-or-not” visually-based format a thing of the past. TrueView, a new location-based dating app wants its users to take dating a little more seriously.

TrueView is based out of London, and its founders advocate a switch from Tinder to improve not only your dating experience, but your odds of matching with someone at all. As many people as there are logging on to Tinder regularly, TrueView points out there are 998 million rejections daily.

The app works more like a social media platform than a traditional dating app. Similar to an app like Zoosk, TrueView logs a person’s actual behavior while using the app so users have a better, “truer” view of who they really are. Users are encouraged to share things they love to do (while they are doing it), discovering people who have similar interests. The app has a “stuff to do” section which lists events, clubs, restaurants, sports and concerts in your local city. The “news” section keeps you up to date on the things most important to you, and prompts more discussions.

The idea behind TrueView is that you can have a more organic conversation online first to see if you’re interested in someone before you meet him/her – as opposed to just swiping through photos.

True View was inspired by Andrew Ibbotson, one of the founders whose real-life online dating experience left him frustrated. He was tired of the hook-up scene and a lot of matches that led to nothing, spending more time and money for very little return. He wanted to create a better experience for himself, so he teamed up with friends Matt Verity and Damian Mitchell. They came up with the idea of a service that uses what they call "real-time micro-blogging" to make two people meeting feel more organic – and True View was born.

Tinder is still the app to beat, despite all the recent apps who are trying to outdo it, like TrueView. But it seems there is room for a new player, since even the celebrities who made it popular are now starting to turn against it. As actor Sam Smith said: "No offence to people who go on Tinder, but I just feel like it's ruining romance...why would I swipe people who are 'unattractive' when I could potentially fall in love with them?" 

TrueView is betting the people who become disillusioned with Tinder will look to the app for a new experience. While this may be true, it has hit some bumps along the way. According to a dozen reviews in the Google Play store, people are encountering some bugs with the technology, but they have had a few thousand installs so far.

TrueView is available on both iTunes and Google Play. Currently, the app isn’t available yet in the U.S.

Some users have reported due to Tinder being down on Wednesday that they have lost all of their matches. According to The Wire and their communication with Tinder's VP of Communications, Rosette Pambakian, the Lost Matches bug has now been fixed.

No matches have been deleted and all you need to do to get your Tinder matches back is to log out of the dating app and then log back into it again.

We also learned that the reason why there was a Tinder outage on Wednesday was because Facebook went down. Tinder relies on Facebook to retrieve the user information for their members. If the Facebook service is not accessible then Tinder will not work either.

Tinder reported on their Twitter account and Facebook that they had a brief outage on September 3rd around 1pm. The resulting outage prevented people from logging into the Tinder dating app both on the iPhone and Android phones.

The technical problems appears to have only lasted about 20 minutes. No word yet on what caused the issue.

Update: The Tinder dating app was down because Facebook was down. Since Tinder uses your Facebook account to log you in that was the cause of the service interruption.

If you tried to access PlentyOfFish on May 20^th, you may have run into a major roadblock. The site’s 503 page simply said “The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. Check back shortly!" Behind the scenes of the service outage, something a little more sinister was going on.

Around 7am that morning, POF received a warning of an impending DDoS attack. It isn't unusual for large websites to receive similar threats that turn out to be fake, but in this case the threat was real.

The DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack hit just before 8:15am. Such attacks are launched from thousands of computers around the world that have been infected with malware. Without the owner's knowledge, each computer repeatedly sends false requests to a site until it’s overwhelmed. The initial attacks took down the Plenty of Fish website, followed later by the company’s mobile apps on iPhone, iPad and Android.

POF was quick to note that although the attack was large, it did not compromise anyone's data in any way. “That said,” the POF blog noted, “these requests can overload our servers and can even cause ISP problems, so we quickly worked with our ISP to identify the offending traffic and tried various means to block it.”

Later in the day, another message was sent to POF, this time asking for money in exchange for ending the DDoS attack. POF refused to negotiate, and by 1pm they had successfully blocked the attack and returned all services to normal.

“We’re still on high alert and working hard to respond to attacks like this more quickly in the future,” concluded the blog post about the attack, “but in the meantime I’m happy to report that all of you are back to doing what you do best; sending messages, going on dates, and forging meaningful relationships. Thanks for your patience today.”

DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly popular and increasingly powerful, thanks to new methods being used by attackers. The attack on Plenty of Fish was 40 Gigabits in size, making it much larger than the attack that took Meetup.com off-line for nearly 5 days last month (which was “only” 8 GBps). The list of companies that have been attacked in this manner is increasing all the time, including Basecamp, Vimeo, Bit.ly, and Moz.

The good news is, that although DDoS attacks are irritating for users and even more frustrating for the companies who fall victim, they do not put users’ data in danger.