spill the beans – Disclose a secret or reveal something prematurely [dict]

A basic principle in the cryptographic research is that unconditionally trusted third parties do not exist. In other words, no one is absolutely trustworthy – not even the law-enforcement authority.  Here is an example from BBC. The UK police maintain a central criminal database which contains valuable information. However, one cop wanted to make money out of it. He abused his trusted role by contacting the convicted offenders and threatening to spill the beans on their crimes unless he was given “hush money“. Of course, he got what he derserved.

willy-nilly – whether one wishes to or not; willingly or unwillingly [dict]

Modern computers have abundant memory such that programmers often write codes in whatever liked style without worrying about the memory usage. However, the case is different with programming smart cards where the available memory is extremely constrained. “When programming for the (Java) smart card,” someone warned, “Don’t create new objects willy-nilly.”

get feet wet – to experience something for the first time, especially something that involves taking a risk. [thefreedict]

This is a commonly used idiom. If you have never invested money in the stock market, you can get your feet wet by just buying a few shares.

fools rush in while where angels fear to tread - This idiom is used where people who are inexperienced or lack knowledge do something that more informed people would avoid. [UsingEnglish][wikipedia]

By the US federal law, a website cannot keep private data of users who are under 13 years old unless with the explicit consent from their parents. This creates a number of technical difficulities in the practical implmentation. (Sony was fined 1 million dollars for not doing it properly). To avoid the trouble, Facebook simply limits memberships to users who are older than 13.

According to Regsiter, there is this new social network website – dubbed Facebook for Kids – due to lauch in a few weeks time. This webiste targets users who are between 7 and 12.  It might start off as a useful idea to create a network that brings together children and parents. But the design of the website is terrible with little regard to security and privacy protection. Security researchers found that anyone could can view the children’s private data on that website. Disappointed by the slack security design, they concuded their finding by a saying: “fools rush in while where angels fear to tread“.

monkey see monkey do – It refers to the learning of a process without an understanding of why it works [wiki]

Our team uses a fairly complex software build system, which often gives strange and confusing error messages. A new comer was assigned to investigate why a particular software package couldn’t be compiled. After struggling for a long time, he finally passed the compiling without errors. His manager, however, was not very impressed. “It works now,” he says, “but I suspect it’s the case of monkey see monkey do.”