Jane Manchun Wong: The Woman Winning Silicon Valley

Copyright of the image
Jane Wong

She was the first person to have a detailed overview of Facebook's new online dating feature prior to the release of the designs.

She discovered that Airbnb was testing a new flight integration feature that alerted hosts to the website when their customers' aircraft landed safely.

And she made the horn ring when Instagram started experimenting with augmented reality profile images.

Technology companies in Silicon Valley like to make waves when they unveil new features. But on the other side of the world, a software engineer based in Hong Kong is given the ambition to spoil their business.

Jane Manchun Wong is a 23-year-old blogger and technology researcher known for discovering new features before launching them.

By reverse engineering popular applications such as Facebook and Instagram, she can preview changes still in test mode. She shares the drawings of her Twitter account, closely watched by journalists eager for clarification – and by companies wishing to avoid landing at the center of it.

& # 39; explosion & # 39; on Twitter

The object search is only a hobby for Ms. Wong. She does not take advantage of her scoops, although media organizations eager for her exclusive offer her jobs.

However, some of Ms. Wong 's clients are so big that they threaten to have an impact on the stock market, causing some to accuse him of insider trading.

When Facebook announced its new dating feature last spring, the Match group, owner of the Tindr dating app and the Match.com website, saw its shares dive by more than 20%.

So, when Ms. Wong tweeted the first public screen capture of the Facebook Dating home page a few months later, she was faced with an avalanche of comments on Twitter, claiming that she deliberately manipulated the market for his own profit.

"Not everyone understands computer and information security, and sometimes, when people see something I post, they overreact," she said.

Ms. Wong said the charges earned her an "explosion" on Twitter.

"I felt very angry," she said. "But I do not see a lot of trolling, it's hard for them to find a subject for discussion against me."

A white hat hacker

Although she is a hacker, Ms. Wong tries to stay on the right side of the problem. Even as a toddler, her tricks tended to delight rather than aggravate.

She told the South China Morning Post, in an interview, that one of her first hacks was to manipulate software to calculate the typing speed. By modifying the underlying JavaScript code, she's pioneered a path to the top spot of a school contest.

She credits her father's interest in technology, not because it encourages programming, but because she's taught valuable subversion skills while trying to exceed passwords. that he defined on the family computer as early as his childhood.

And, like his father, the tech giants of Silicon Valley must improve their game not to be hacked by Ms. Wong.

"Since I started to have a little interest and companies started watching my tweets, more and more companies are improving the security of their applications," he said. she told the BBC.

"This is one of my arguments: companies will improve the security of their applications and it is therefore more difficult to intervene."

Turn heads in Silicon Valley

Ms. Wong can say that her business is causing a stir in tech companies that she tends to hack most regularly. After sharing screenshots from Facebook's Dating page, she quickly added a code that prevented her from taking any more pictures from her phone.

Sometimes the features that she discovers disappear quickly – that's what happened to a Facebook card that she found and that indicated the location of close friends. A Facebook web address listing all publicly available Wi-Fi networks in a given location also quickly disappeared after she tweeted about it.

Employees sometimes contact her on Twitter, complimenting a crack of code and sometimes offering references to work in their technology companies.

And more and more often, companies keep their updates until the announcement to introduce new features. According to Ms. Wong, when Instagram announced the launch of its IGTV vertical video platform last summer, they only released the code half an hour before the announcement.

"I knew that they were going to have an opening speech, I continued to support with frustration on the update update, on the update application of "Update," she said.

"Normally, when companies test experimental features, they publish the changes made to a production version of the application, and then […] enable the feature for some users. Then, during the launch, they activate the feature indicator for everyone.

"For this feature, they used a different approach – and they said it was because of people like me."

Copyright of the image
Jane Wong

For the love of apps

Ms. Wong says she spends up to 18 hours per weekend analyzing the code. This adds to his paid work as a bounty hunter, signaling security breaches to companies before a malicious hacker can access their software.

So why does she do it?

Ms. Wong says her motivation stems largely from her love for the applications she uses daily and her desire to understand the changes underway.

When an update of an application is published, the description of the changes on the App Store usually only mentions patches and improvements. "I do not find it particularly transparent," she said. "I want the change log to be collected by myself."

She also told the BBC that reverse engineering applications help her learn more about the code. She is studying computer science at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth, United States, but is currently taking a break from her studies.

"Once I've found a model, it only takes five minutes to crack the code, but often in the process, I learn something new," she said.