Product Advisory Committee

Nata's Corner

So far, all we're seeing on the airstrip below us are normal radio-controlled planes. But if I ever see a drone, I'm breaking out the shotgun.

There's gotta be a law against people like this. The funny part is that considering Facebook has always been so bad about how it "helps" users with privacy, it's kind of odd to think of them agreeing with the FTC. I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg's picture was on one of the 73 million profiles.

If you think your personal information was in jeopardy last year -- nearly half a billion identities were compromised in 2013 -- then you ain't seen nothin' yet. By now, everyone has heard about the Heartbleed flaw that made logging into a website a crap shoot, and while that's a biggie, it's not the only one. The app created by Fandango that lets you book movie tickets from your cell phone has been downloaded about 100 million times and transmitted unencrypted data, like passwords and account information. Meanwhile, Experian, the credit reporting company, was reported to have exposed 200 million Social Security numbers. I don't expect that it will get any better before it gets worse.

Molly Wood of the New York Times wrote a good piece a couple of weeks ago about getting rid of your search history. Given that it's not all that difficult for someone to analyze search results and figure out who is who (anyone remember the AOL search debacle?), and how easy it appears for companies to overlook a flaw like Heartbleed, maybe we should just all go back to tin cans and string.

Finally, Microsoft is making a lot of things available for free lately. If you're into mobile devices, Windows 8 and Windows 8 Phone is now free for devices with screens smaller than nine inches. Versions of Windows 7 can be downloaded for free through Digital River -- but you still need a valid license to use them. A good portion of the .NET technologies are being released as open source. Don't be surprised if the editor steals this as a Sign of the Apocalypse.

In Brief

Chicken Little was right: A "mundane coding error" in OpenSSL, the open source library at the heart of securing data using the HTTPS protocol, has been exposing about two-thirds of the Internet's servers to the possibility of attack that is apparently undetectable. The good news: According to EE's new chief information officer, Gene Richardson, Experts Exchange runs a newer version of FreeBSD that was released after the flaw was fixed. The bad news: A good number of very popular sites ... ummm... weren't so diligent.

Meanwhile, the NSA, upon being accused of knowing and not saying anything about the flaw, denied everything, not that there is any reason to believe them. So it's perfectly reasonable that everyone from Angola to Yahoo will be figuring out ways to avoid spying by anyone. Here's what it looks like.

The best money can buy: Comcast is trying to buy Congress so it can buy (okay, "merge with") Time Warner.

Meet the new boss... er... there... he... goes: On March 25, the Mozilla Foundation named co-founder (and JavaScript creator) Brendan Eich as its new CEO, promoting him from the job of CTO. Within a week, three board members had quit, and Mr Eich's contribution to an anti-gay ballot measure in California was creating a groundswell of anti-support both inside Mozilla and outside. He resigned two days later.

Still clueless after all these years: The Republican party has its collective panties in a twist over the transition -- started during the second Bush administration -- of authority over domain names and numbers implied by the cancelling of the contract between the US Commerce department and ICANN, the non-profit corporation set up specifically to manage domain names and numbers worldwide. Our favorite observation is the one attributed to the Honorable Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who doesn't want the US to give up control of the Internet because she doesn't want to see any single country having control of the Internet. No wonder government workers hate their jobs; their bosses are idiots.

In requiem: Windows XP, of euthenasia April 8, unless you're the government of the Netherlands or the United Kingdom. Mourners were able to assuage their loss with an upgrade for Windows 8.1 that they couldn't install anyway. Also, Mickey Rooney, who most of you are probably too young to remember anyway.

Someone should make a movie: The movie industry has filed another lawsuit against MegaUpload. Maybe they can get Chewbacca for the starring role.

Kicked to the curb: A couple of years back, some video game hardware designers took to Kickstarter to raise $250,000 for development kits, exceeding their goal by an order of magnitude. Fast-forward to last week, when Oculus was bought for $2 billion by Facebook, making its owners very wealthy young men who are suddenly losing friends in both the gaming industry and among those who gave Oculus seed money. On the other hand, the deal makes for some great pieces of social satire.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Google has submitted a one thousand, nine hundred twenty-eight page application to trademark the word "Glass". A new take on flappy birdies. A five-year old hacked the Xbox. The North Korean space agency (we'll wait for you to stop laughing) has a new logo that looks a lot like NASA's and is the Spanish word for "nothing".

Milestones

New Ace: hdhondt has earned his Ace certificate in Printers.

New Geniuses: Two Experts Exchange members have earned their first Genius certificates. They are acbrown2010 in Active Directory and BriCrowe in MS SQL Server.

Milestones:

• Ray_Paseur is the sixth member of EE to earn 18,000,000 points.
• hanccocka has reached 16,000,000 points since joining EE.
• byundt has earned 11,000,000 points in Microsoft Excel.