** DOWNTIME ** Monday July 12th, 2010

SpotWalla will be down starting at 11:00 PM on Monday July 12th until 12:00 AM for a system/application upgrade. This upgrade will take longer than the ones before as we will be performing various system security updates as well as a database upgrade. And, of course, we'll update SpotWalla with these latest updates:

• URL Security
• Custom Message

Securing your location data is important. When enabled, the Last Known Location widget allows you to share your location with others. Embedded within the URL is an ID that identifies the device. Once this URL is exposed to the world on your blog or in a forum post or any other medium, your location has the potential of being compromised. This upgrade will allow you to generate a new ID/URL for the device thereby invalidating the previous URL. Conceivably, you could expose yourself to the world while you're on a trip and generate a new URL when you get back. If a web crawler or person saved your URL for later usage, it wouldn't work.

The functionality described above is also available for trips. Additionally, trip IDs are no longer sequential which will eliminate the ability of someone or something from snooping in a suspicious manner.

The Last Known Location widget, by default, displays an international stop sign when the last location falls within an active secure zone. Now you can configure each secure zone with a custom message that will be displayed instead of the international stop sign.

During this upgrade all SpotWalla interfaces will be down. SPOT devices will recover missed messages when SpotWalla comes back online. Since the Google Latitude and Yahoo! Fire Eagle device interfaces do not provide location history, these devices will not recover missing locations sent during this upgrade.

I don't anticipate the upgrade will take longer than 30 minutes, but if problems arise the upgrade may take the full hour. I'll post here on the blog when the upgrade is complete.