Worth Reading

Should You Mobilize Your Meeting or Conference Data?
By jason1178

I am the Vice President for Technology at a company you've never heard of that runs scientific conferences and trade shows for not-for-profit organizations. As soon as Apple opened the App Store after the release of the first generation iPhone, I was besieged by requests to create apps for conferences and have now spent a very long time carefully going through the various options available. As my clients have limited budgets for their meeting IT services, I had to take a very hard look at costs, benefits, and drawbacks of apps and mobile web sites and I'd like to share my experience with the community here. This will be a series of articles that touch on the whole process of providing mobile access to your conference data and future articles will go into great detail on app development and mobile web development. This first article will attempt to take the 10,000-foot view and address some common questions we hear from clients when we try to convince them that mobile development is worth their while.
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Nata's Corner

This is very cool. A man from India who was separated from his mother in 1986 found her using Google Earth in 2012.

Much of the time, I try to keep people up to date on the latest threats to their systems and to give you news about your personal information, letting you know about the various breaches of security that could potentially cause you a lot of difficulty. One of the big busts last year was in November, when the FBI and police in Estonia took down a botnet that distributed DNS changing malware and then made money off advertising on users computers -- an estimated 588,000 of them. When the authorities took down the botnet, in order to keep the infection from spreading further, they replaced the botnet servers with ones designed to check your computer for the virus -- essentially, they used the botnet to clean the botnet. The problem is that the order allowing the FBI to fight fire with fire expires in July, when the replacement servers will come down.

I came across this a few weeks ago, but for some reason I kept letting it slide by. I don't know about you, but in reading all the stories about the people who get busted for hacking into networds and such, I would have thought that all of the bad guys are young people who live in their parents' basements or something like that, but it turns out that most of the really bad stuff is done by people over 35. I suppose that doesn't mean they don't live in their parents' basements, though. But that vision everyone has? It's more true of mainstream programmers than it is of the crooks.

Another public service announcement: The other half not a big Twitter user, but he's tried to avoid a lot of the newbie type mistakes -- not always with the greatest success. So I'm going to use this space to pass along some of the basics.

• You use the @ symbol when you want someone and his/her followers to see the post. @ExpertsExchange at the beginning will mean that anyone following EE will see your post, but it won't be seen by your followers unless they're also following Experts Exchange. But if you have @MickeyMouse later in the post, then everyone following you will see that you have mentioned whoever has MickeyMouse as a Twitter username.
• Any word with a # at the beginning is a hashtag, and hashtags are used to identify the subject, like #WorldSeries or #IDontKnowWhatImDoing. By filtering on a hashtag, you can see everything that is being tweeted about it.
• RT stands for "retweet", which is essentially forwarding someone else's tweet to everyone who is following you. DM stands for "direct message", but you can only send them to people who are following you, and they can't be seen by anyone else.
• You can upload videos and pictures to services like Twitpic and Yfrog, and then post the shortened link to Twitter.
• Speaking of link shorteners, Experts Exchange has one, and if you use a program like TweetDeck or HootSuite, they automatically shorten links for you as well.
• Remember that you only have 140 characters, and you usually want to leave a couple of dozen for retweeters. If you have one thought that takes more than one tweet, use 1/3 (for one of three), 2/3 and so on.

Google Drive is probably going to make its appearance -- it may even be available by the time you read this -- but before you go sending all of your company's data (even if you're not a big huge one) to Google, take a good look at NetworkWorld's article on why IT departments should worry about it, and then listen to Clayton Pippenger's webinar on cloud services from last week.

Finally, Verizon joined Sprint and AT&T in adding an "upgrade fee" you get to pay for the privilege of turning your old phone, getting a new one that is partially paid for by someone else, and signing up for a new two-year contract with more, higher charges. Looks like the other half is going to get the better of them, though -- because as long as he doesn't upgrade and continues to use his Palm Pre, he doesn't pay for data. And he has a backup.

In Brief

Our world, and welcome to it: Mac users, normally pretty effusive in their antipathy for Windows users who have been the targets of innumerable kinds of malware for ... well... ever, could have regarded the Flashback trojan as an isolated incident until a week or so ago, when both Sophos and Kapersky confirmed the existence in the wild of a trojan that attacks through Microsoft Word. What's particularly nasty about it is that it works without user interaction. Fortunately, there's a fix.

Did you expect anything else? In order to save you reading through gobs of stuff trying to figure out who is going to win this dust-up, we're going to give you a summary of the day's hyperbole -- with luck, in 25 words or less -- in the Oracle lawuit against Google over the use of Java in the development of Android. After all, the trial is supposed to last eight weeks; it'd probably take that long to read all the documents; c|net has the Cliff's notes version of the dispute.

• April 16: Oracle says that Google used "someone else's property" (and knew it) when it build Android.
• April 17: Google says "No we didn't, and we had a license anyway, and if we didn't it was open source anyway".
  
  Round 1, by a slim margin, to Oracle. Today, Oracle's stock was up over two per cent.
   
  
• April 18: The red carpet was rolled out; Oracle's Larry Ellison and Google's Larry Page both wore suits.
• April 19: The first of what promises to be many emails about Google's attitude toward licensing.
• April 20 The beginner's guide to APIs.

And speaking of Google and lawyers (one wonders if they have to take the test), the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit is also headed back to the courts, it's the target of a class action lawsuit over bypassing Safari cookie settings, and it got fined by the FCC.

Should be available for Christmas (hint hint): Anyone who has bought furniture from IKEA has an abundance of Allen wrenches. By the second half of the year, you'll be able to buy put-it-together furniture that has a flat panel TV built in.

Jason's discovery of the week: A heck of a style sheet.

Sign me up. Put your money where your mouth is on the IndieGoGo page.

That special corner of Dante's Inferno: Peter Norvig is Google's Director of Research, which means he has to have at least a smidgen of a sense of humor (anyone who writes a performance review of Albert Einstein has to have one). He saved his best work for a rather scathing indictment of PowerPoint though, using the Gettysburg Address.

If you have nothing better to do Monday: SpaceX is launching a Falcon rocket with a Dragon capsule -- the first privately funded mission to space -- on April 30 at 12:22 pm Eastern time from Cape Canaveral. If you're not in the neighborhood you can watch the webcast. Just remember that it's a good thing.

No conflict with our interests: Wouldn't it be great karma if those big huge tech firms were given a comeuppance, not by the government, but by their own employees?

In requiem: Jack Tramiel, known as the father of the Commodore 64; Dick Clark (an amazingly nice guy, by the way); Groupon's market value (Oxymoron the First); WalMart's corporate credibility (Oxymoron the Second); and 102 years ago, Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

Speaking of IPOs: Spending $1 billion to buy Instagram (without telling the board of directors about it) is almost typical Zuckerborg behavior, but it makes sense to banks in the prelude to Facebook's IPO in the next few weeks.

Easily worth a beer: A vulnerability, discovered by a student taking an ethical hacking class, in the software used by professional penetration testers, has all kinds of folks in a huff.

Now there's an idea: A couple of weeks ago, former White House security advisor Richard A. Clarke took to the op-ed page of the New York Times to write about how China is stealing secrets (though he doesn't say a lot about how the US in general has a kind of "it'll never happen to me" attitude towards just about everything), which makes a Foreign Policy article on things script kiddies should steal from China all that more intriguing, especially since China's "Great Firewall" might be becoming less imposing than it's been -- but if you take on the Chinese, be prepared for retaliation. If you think his girlfriend's grandmother is the only reason Mark Zuckerberg is learning Chinese, guess again.

Calling the kettle black: Google thinks Facebook and Apple, because they are "walled gardens", are threats to Internet freedom (whatever that is). But it seems to us that the difference between building an environment restricted systemically, as opposed to encircling and absorbing an environment (and even cutting some parts of it off arbitrarily), is just a semantic difference that perhaps Google doesn't see.

Sign of the Apocalypse: We get it in Chicago. We get it in Florida. We don't get rigging an election at Cal State San Marcos. A Taliban leader in Afghanistan turned himself into NATO forces for the $100 reward.

Milestones

New Geniuses: Four members of Experts Exchange have earned Genius certificates in the past two weeks. garycase has his fourth certificate, in Hard Drives, while our occasional correspondent, jason1178, has picked up his third, in WordPress. Receiving their first million point certificates were logudotcom in PHP and Run5K in Windows 7. Outstanding work, folks!

Milestones:

• By reaching 2,000,000 points in the Microsoft SQL Server topic area, matthewspatrick became the fifth member of EE to have 2,000,000 points in each of four topic areas.
• Ray_Paseur has earned over 12,000,000 points since joining EE.
• CodeCruiser has reached the 9,000,000 point level in the VB.NET topic area.
• RobSampson brings to 52 the number of Experts who have earned over 7,000 points.
• hanccocka has earned over 2,000,000 points in both the VMware and Virtualization topic areas.