Facebook scrabbles to control third-party applications

The three greatest games the human race has ever produced are Chess, Scrabble and Alley Cat.

Scrabble has had something of a resurgence in popularity lately, with a growing number of people playing via a Facebook application called Scrabulous. Such has been its popularity that it has even been blamed in some companies for a dip in worker productivity (as if Facebook itself wasn’t bad enough in that department..)

However, all that may change now as Facebook users who logged on to play Scrabulous this morning were greeted with the following message:

“Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice.”

Since it was designed by Alfred Mosher Butts in the 1930s, the ownership of the rights to the Scrabble game have…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.