3.13.2008

Fun and Games Department: Experts Exchange's TEEam went out last weekend and played in a football tournament (that's soccer, for all you US folks), and while they might have gotten 25 points and a C grade for their results, they got 500 points, an A grade and the bonus points for their effort against a bunch of 18-20 year olds. And not a single broken bone...

New MVP: Okay, so he isn't exactly a new MVP, but we do want to welcome clayfox, an "evangelist for InfoPath", to the EE family.

New Genius: bhess1, who will be celebrating ten years as a member of EE in November, earned his Genius certificate in the Microsoft SQL Server zone.

Milestones: angelIII became the second member of Experts Exchange with over 20,000,000 points, and mlmcc has earned 6,000,000 points in the Crystal Reports zone.

EE + NCAA = Crazy March Madness: Show off your college basketball knowledge in the first ever Experts Exchange March Madness Bracket. We have set up a group on ESPN.com where you can submit your picks, track the results, and talk all the trash you want on the group message board. For password information and instructions on how to join, visit the announcements zone and read the EE March Madness announcement.

Experts Exchange proudly welcomes its 250th Corporate Account, the British Geological Survey. "Founded in 1835, the British Geological Survey is the world's longest established national geological survey and the United Kingdom's premier centre for earth science information and expertise. The BGS provides expert services and impartial advice in all areas of geoscience. [Their] client base is drawn from the public and private sectors both in the UK and internationally."

Experts Exchange looks forward to providing the BGS a platform to collaborate with the most brilliant Experts from around the world and access to more than 2 million proven technology solutions. The BGS will also enjoy a discounted corporate rate and convenient license management.

Here are 29 more organizations that have recently created their own Experts Exchange Corporate Accounts:

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Every so often, we come across a question or two that have shown some of the best of how Experts Exchange can work to solve someone's problem, or that some people will go out of their way to help, or something else that makes a question noteworthy. Here are three:

Experts Exchange isn't normally about effort; it's about solutions and getting answers that solve problems, but every once in a while, an exception makes a lot of sense, especially when it involves two Microsoft MVPs, meverest and Dave_Dietz. Their working together to help new member max7 is a great example of collaboration.

Some questions just take time and several sets of eyes. That was the case in klgrube's question about an embedded image in a report. It first took several moves by Moderators to get the question in the right zones, and then took several requests to Experts before PFrog finally came through.

Finally, it's a rare sight when an Expert isn't unhappy with a grade that is lower than an A; it's natural for people to think they are always at the top of their game. So we wanted to give a special Thank You to Cyclops3590, who recognized that he didn't actually answer a question about configuring routers, but did point denverjaye in the right direction -- and that the answer isn't worth an A or a B, but a C. Cyclops3590 has the early lead in our race for Expert Of The Year.

An editor by trade, a writer by avocation and an Expert by happenstance, ericpete puts together the newsletter for Experts Exchange.

We have written a lot about people who don't get it when it comes to applying laws to people who aren't in their jurisdiction, or when they try to enforce some edict they have absolutely no control over. If you're interested, just go back and read the archives for all the peculiar things judges and legislatures have come up with.

We have found one guy who does get it, though: Australian High Court Judge Justice Michael Kirby, who gave a speech a couple of weeks ago that admitted that no matter what the law does, computers (and the technology that drives them) are always going to have the upper hand, and that's especially true when it comes to privacy issues.

Read the text of the speech; Justice Kirby knows of what he speaks. He went through a particularly nasty episode back in 2002, and for the past 16 months has been the target of the first confirmed case (according to MySpace) of malicious identity fraud -- we don't believe that for a minute -- on the site. Now, we will grant that he is a public figure, and that in choosing to be a public figure, he relinquishes an expectation of privacy -- but that's not the point.

Taken in context, Justice Kirby's reactions to some of the vitriol that have been sprayed his way are almost saintly; one suspects that a more common reaction to vilification by Anon Y. Mous is closer to that of Paul Tilley, who committed suicide February 22 when a couple of advertising blogs got overly personal in their criticisms. We've seen stories of attorneys who have been recruited for jobs and then denied them on the basis of what someone else has anonymously posted on a website. A relatively well-known blogger gave up her career. A 13-year-old girl in Missouri took her own life after seeing what someone -- an adult -- had written about her on MySpace.

And, as Justice Kirby said, there's not much the courts can do about it; it is in what Kirby quotes Stanford University professor Lawrence Lessig (himself, until last week, the subject of speculation in the Bay Area as a possible candidate for Congress) as calling it "The Code." Lessig isn't talking about any unspoken tradition handed down through the ages; he is talking about the billions of instructions given to computers, often by other computers, that impact who can see what, where and when they can see it, and what happens when they do.

Privacy is a peculiar notion in that everyone wants it, everyone expects it, and everyone does all kinds of things that put it in jeopardy. We saw something a few weeks ago that said that one of the most commonly searched-for subjects is oneself; as Al Pacino noted in The Devil's Advocate, "Vanity, definitely my favorite sin." The simple act of posting one's email address on a web page is the ticket to an inbox filled with 95 per cent junk, and what isn't irrelevant is probably offensive. Own a website? Someone can easily find and post publicly a photograph of the building across the street from where you grew up, even if you don't tell them where you grew up.

People really don't want privacy most of the time; if they did, they probably wouldn't own a computer, and wouldn't be connected to the Internet, and wouldn't be filling up the servers at MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Naymz, and a dozen other websites dedicated to social networking. What they want is selective anonymity. They like the idea of being able to say whatever they want without having to accept any consequences. They don't have a problem with unleashing a virus that affects millions of people and causes who knows how much damage -- because the consequences aren't nearly as severe as they are for holding up a liquor store. They're more than happy to turn our credit card information over to a 17-year-old clerk (or a nameless, faceless computer system at eBay), but they don't want anyone to know that they're the person who created a website that blatantly lies about a High Court Justice in Australia -- not to mention a 13-year-old girl in Missouri.

We saw that one of the Moderators' fearless leaders, Netminder, responded to a question about points a couple of weeks ago, and was thanked with an "Awesome reponse -- thanks for the help!", so we thought it worth reprinting.

Q: I am still in my trial membership period and I have one question in progress. Without really understanding how the point system works, I assigned it 300 points. After reading over how points work (I think I get it) I am not sure if I spent more points than I have as a trial member OR made some other mistake. I also want to know about the fee of $12.95. At first I thought it was the monthly membership fee but after reading how points work, it seems that I could pay $12.95 at anytime I need more points to ask a question. Is this correct?

You haven't made any mistakes. The trial membership is just the same as the Premium Services subscription, so you have "unlimited points" with which to ask questions as long as the trial lasts, and when you actually pay for the subscription, you will see no interruptions.

Premium Services includes not only the unlimited points. You also get access to the Advanced Search system, you get your own knowledgebase, you get to use the Expert skin (which is great for those of us who are well into middle age, because I think it's a lot easier to read), and best of all, you won't see any advertising.

The only thing that really concerns us about questions that get asked is that you maintain and close them. We're actually quite pleased that Experts Exchange has done some things to both make it a lot easier for you to do, and some other things that remind you to do them so we don't have to.

One note, though; if you DO cancel your Premium Services, and then try to go to a question after your anniversary date, you will get redirected to a page asking you to re-start your subscription.

Been down so long, it looks like up to me: What's down has been the off the shelf sales of Vista, and Microsoft -- not wanting to suggest that an operating system seven years in the making is a head-scratcher of the first order and a marketing disaster -- has done what any good manufacturer does: cut retail prices. Apparently, not enough, though; we saw several eBay auctions ending today that had prices as low as ten per cent of the new retail price.

Silly musicians. You didn't really think... nah... : For some reason, royalties being paid by Google to the record companies aren't reaching the musicians. Must be all those attorneys' fees.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to be different: About this time a year ago, we had items a) reminding everyone that Daylight Savings time was going into effect a bit earlier than we were all used to, courtesy of a couple of politicians in Washington who managed to convince themselves and everyone else that it would save a gazillion dollars, neglecting entirely the cost of making sure that everyone was on the same page when their computers didn't reset automatically, let alone their alarm clocks, and b) suggesting that it was going to turn out to be one of the dumbest ideas ever to come out of a city known for dumb ideas.

It was a bust; it was supposed to save about 168,000 barrels of oil during the four weeks affected, but it cost a lot more. Now, a study by a UC Santa Barbara professor proves that rather than saving people money, it actually cost them more. So let's do it again -- what the heck. With the price of gasoline going up a nickel a day, we're not going to be driving anywhere.

No truth to the rumor that they're calling it an iSDK: Apple has finally released the "Software Beta", also known as the developer kit, for the iPhone. There's also a $100 million fund out there for new applications. Have fun...

It's spring training time: Microsoft wants Yahoo for any number of reasons, and there are apparently far worse things than being purchased by Gates and Company. Yahoo doesn't want to be bought up and absorbed into a big company (despite the fact that it has ruined other companies by doing that itself). So Yahoo, like a base stealer trying to disrupt a pitcher's concentration, is feinting this way and that, while Microsoft, like a closer with two outs in the ninth, is rearing back and throwing a high hard one.

How to encourage the use of MySpace, French style, OR how we learned that French courts make rulings that prove definitively they don't know where the ANY key is either: So, in true French fashion, there's this nice little website that allows students and parents to say what they think about teachers. As one might expect, the teachers weren't too happy about the idea, so they sued, and got a court to tell the owners to shut down the site or pay 1,000 Euros for each infraction.

Requiem: The Sony Trinitron Cathode Ray Tube Television, Gary Gygax and Building 25.

It's a better job than standing on the corner waving a sign for the furniture store: Comcast hired people off the street to take up the seats at a FCC hearing at which it apparently expected to be soundly boxed on the ears over its practice of choking the bandwidth of high volume users. You'll want to click on the link just to see the photograph of the two guys asleep during the hearing.

And speaking of asleep, Congress is getting close to letting the telephone companies off the hook for participating in the government-requested illegal wiretapping of its customers. Judge Tucker was right.

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see? Microsoft has decided that Internet Explorer 8 (available in a preview edition now) will "by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can", which is no doubt a great comfort to everyone. The decision is based on Microsoft's own "Interoperability Standards", which, in the past, has always meant doing what it wants and letting the rest of the world conform to it. Of course, IE8 will also have an "IE7 standards mode", which, as almost anyone will tell you, bears only marginally on the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium. In other words, Microsoft isn't really doing anything it hasn't done in the past, except that now, maybe the European Union will stop fining them. Right.

Something to think about when you're on Spring Break: The federal government is going to play Cyber War Games II in the next few days. Let's hope they don't get hacked again.

Be careful what you wish for: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who "imagine[s] a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge," is finding out the hard way what it's like to be an Internet celebrity. And while we're on the subject of celebrities, Fortune has a remarkable profile of Steve Jobs, and Forbes has listed its 100 Richest People. Bill Gates is number three.

Sign of the Apocalypse: How do you say ooops in Pakistani?

Frequent readers of my column know that I tend to rag on people about making sure they keep their antivirus applications updated, and to be careful about the emails you open if you're not sure who they are coming from. So the word last week about the MonaRonaDona virus really ticks me off; it didn't take long for a question about it to show up at EE.

It turns out that the virus was written specifically so people would pay $40 -- to the company that wrote and unleashed the virus in the first place. These guys are cretins of the lowest kind; they even posted videos on YouTube saying how wonderful they are. So in the interest of public information, I'm going to give you the link to the fix. There are words to describe people who do this, but I only use them in front of my other half, who is used to it.

What's just as annoying is that the odds of finding these [...] are pretty slim. They registered their domain using a company that does nothing but hide the information about who owns a domain. Then they have it hosted by a company that is notorious for ignoring customer complaints -- they do a lot of business, though, because they're damn. So the odds are pretty good that they're going to get away with it -- and make a healthy chunk of cash in the process.

Speaking of crooks, a teenager from New Zealand, alleged to be the head of a gang that created a botnet of 1.3 million computers, made his first appearance in court last week. Canadian officials announced the arrest of 17 people in Quebec in connection with another botnet, and an American teenager pled guilty to running a zombie network.

And I know I've mentioned it recently, but it's worth mentioning again, because the Internal Revenue Service has said that phishing emails have gone up to 12 times what they were a year ago; the IRS folks also say they've already shut down 1,700 sites. The IRS website says

If you get an unsolicited email, just forward it to phishing@irs.gov.