Kudos

Over three months ago, bergquistcompany asked a question about a printer failing intermittently. He got responses, and over the next couple of weeks, working with jsnyderman, murphey2 and Gary_The_IT_Pro, eliminated several possible causes... but still didn't really have a solution. By early May, he thought they were on to something, and he posted that he would wait until the next incident to post. That's when the question went stale, and eventually became abandoned. The cleanup process kicked in, and the question was deleted because nobody objected. That ruffled a few feathers, and a week or so later, the question was reinstated. berquistcompany finally closed the question last week: "@Gary and @ Murphy - you two are amazing and I can't thank you enough for all your time and attention. We are going to apply the PTFs this weekend and I would have never been able to come up with a next step for management without your help! You are an asset to this site and I will close this and award you both for your time and if after the application I run into further issues I will create a new post related to what is going on, but after IBM and other administrators pointing fingers you helped me find a path to follow and I can't say thank you enough!!"

It took aikimark several posts to find out exactly what Rayne was trying to accomplish with "changing the structure" of a tab in a spreadsheet, but once he got the information he needed, he wrote some VBA code to help: "Thank you aikimark, I have no words to describe my thankfulness to you for this awesome solution, its a lifesaver...I can tell you that :) Thank you for the deep effort you put in here....I might follow up later if I have any questions or post follow questions for this if I need changed or anything....but thank you for your effort, once again."

lrbrister, who joined Experts Exchange nine years ago, posted a non-question in Community Support earlier this week: "Hey folks, I've been a member of EE for quite a few years. Over most of that time I've had to wear a lot of hats in my various positions. I use EE as a resource...pure and simple. I'm not interested in acquiring points. I am swamped in my job and use it for help. When I'm on another tough deadline and need to get something done... I post my question on EE and work on other aspects of my task until an expert replies. During these years, angeliii, CodeCruiser and TheLearnedOne have consistently provided answers of the very best quality. And it's greatly appreciated. Other experts should emulate thses guys. Thought I'd pass that along."

On behalf of all of EE's Experts, thank you, lrbrister. The kind words are very much appreciated as well.

Nata's Corner

There have been a lot of things written -- I think the Editor wrote something a while back, in fact -- about big Internet companies and the information they collect on you. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL (among others) read your mail (that they let you have for "free") so they can "improve your user experience" by showing you the advertising they think you're most likely to respond to. Facebook does the same thing, reading all of your posts and all of your friends' posts. But there's a little company in Arkansas (no, not WalMart, but give them time) that makes all of them look like first-graders. The bottle has been opened, and there's no way to get the genie back in, but there are solutions (but they all cost money). There's a German company that supplies credit information that is even planning on using social media -- a convergence of both worlds -- to tell if someone is credit-worthy.

I don't really have a lot to worry about with the latest threat outlined by McAfee and Guardian Analytics, because nobody is ever going to accuse me of being a "high net worth" business or individual they talk about in the report they issued last week. The damage, all in Europe, involves server-side transactions, and has been found to have been attempted toward North and Latin American financial institutions as well.

There have been emails saying they're from the FBI floating around for years, but the bad guys are getting a lot more sophisticated about how they try to get personal information from you. Fortunately, we know someone who works at the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) -- he's not a bad guy, really -- and he assures us that the FBI never sends emails asking for personal information, so if you get one, either delete it or, if it's too late for that, file a complaint.

I got an iPad some time ago and I'll confess -- I haven't really had that much time to use it, but when my son said he wanted it I started playing around with it a little. I found one little trick that was kind of cool; if you hold the power button and the Home button down at the same time, after a second you'll hear a sound similar to a camera shutter. If you then go to the Photos application and look at the Camera Roll album, you'll see a screen shot. I know the other half was going nuts trying to find something that would do that, so it's nice to be one up on him.

And while we're talking about photos, you may have seen a news item that Facebook is acquiring Face.com, which makes facial recognition software. Facebook uses it to look at the photos that are uploaded by people, and if it thinks it recognizes you, it's going to ask your friends to tag the photo -- and you can't turn it off. But what you can do is stop Facebook from using the information it collects; here's how:

1. In your Privacy Settings, edit your "Timeline and tagging".
2. Set "Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?" to No one.

Google+ has a similar set up, except that unlike Facebook, you're opted out of the system by default; with Facebook, every time they make a change, it's worth checking all of your privacy settings to make sure they haven't opted you back in to something they opted you out of.

Have a great holiday!

In Brief

Just desserts: Has anyone forgotten about all the nasty stuff that big companies with lots of cash did, sending the world's economic stability into a tailspin? And how all of that happened under the supposedly watchful eye of several government agencies, including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission? Well, apparently someone in the Commission's employ bought into one of those emails from Nigeria, because the agency suffered a breach that revealed personal information about its employees.

I'll take the job if they pay me $10 million or so to let them fire me after a year: Faithful readers know we have said a number of things about TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who was shown the door by AOL after a very public spat with Arianna Huffington, who sold her Huffington Post website to AOL for about ten times what Mr Arrington sold his site to them for, and most of those things were pretty snarky. But we have to give him credit where it's due, and even sort of apologize for not noticing this back in May, when newly-hired Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson was found to have played fast and loose with the accurasy of his resume. It isn't true that Mr Arrington was or is the CEO of Yahoo, but all things considered, maybe it's not such a bad idea.

And speaking of totally destroying one's career, it's a good idea to not use the district's email, especially if you're going to take another job but haven't yet.

Good thing it was a holiday weekend (in the US, anyway): Amazon Web Services had an outage last Friday that took down both Instagram and Netflix.

On and off: Facebook's "find friends nearby" feature, saying it was "just a test"; and Zynga's stock price after its Zynga Unleashed party.

Other people's money: Since Yahoo hasn't ever figured out how to make the kind of money like Google and Facebook do, last week it cut deals with radio conglomerate Clear Channel and music service Spotify that will generate revenue by putting both services in front of more people.

It can still be painful: Given that Google likes to think it knows what you want to search for based on what you've searched for in the past, the retro desktop might not be a bad idea. (Thanks, Ed!)

In requiem: Andy Griffith. Lonesome George. No truth to the rumor that he was a special consultant to the Microsoft new product release scheduling team.

The sky is falling: Facebook's unique visitors numbers dropped in May. You've gotta love the Reuters report: "Nearly half of the Facebook users polled spent about the same amount of time on the social network as six months ago." -- which means, of course, than more than half do not.

That number could get a lot higher following the site's decision to change everyone's email address -- the visible one, that is -- to an @facebook.com one. Not everyone was happy about it; just remember how you started getting all that spam in the first place.

Running dry: Those of us who've been around the Intertubes since the last century will recall fondly The Well, one of the most influential online forums in the early days of the commercial web. Its owner has put the site up for sale.

Santa resumes production: The judge at the US International Trade Commission who recommended that Microsoft not be allowed to import Xbox 360s into the US has been told to think about it again.

Happy birthday: Alan Turing would have been 100; Atari is 40; Reuben Lucius Goldberg.

Wouldn't that be something: There's a quiet little case winding its way through the Washington state court system that could cause a lot of trouble for just about any website that allows the posting of third party content.

Dick the Butcher nailed it: There's nothing funnier than watching scumbags spend money on lawyers who insist on making fools of themselves where the rest of us can watch. In our last issue, we offered the tale of The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman's attempts to get a site to stop stealing his stuff and making money off it, and the resulting threatened legal action and not so polite response Mr Inman had to it. Now the lawyer for the scumbag site is trying to stop distribution of the $220,000 and change that was donated in Mr Inman's name to the American Cancer Society and World Wildlife Fund.

Signs of the Apocalypse: ICANN, the folks who decide ... something... was running a game to decide who should be granted new top level domain names (like .google or .scuba or .joessbarandgrill) but had to shut down the evaluation process because of a security breach. Also, the IOC Social Media, Blogging and Internet Guidelines for participants and other accredited persons at the London 2012 Olympic Games (have you read it yet, Matt?) and Google's search results being protected by the First Amendment.

Milestones

New Geniuses: iSiek is our first dual Genius certificate winner in quite a while, reaching the 1,000,000 point level in both Active Directory and Windows Server 2003. Topic Advisor Mikal613 has earned his second Genius certificate, in Windows Mobile. Earning their first Genius certificates were dlethe, in Server Hardware, and FishMonger, in Perl Programming. Outstanding work, folks!

My First Million: Experts Exchange members who reached the 1,000,000 point level in June were ChrisStanyon, jogos, JamieMcAllister, OP_Zaharin, xuserx2000 and the irrepressible Bartender_1. Thanks to all of you for your outstanding service!

Milestones:

• byundt became the 22nd member of EE to earn 11,000,000 points overall.
• mkline71 has earned 5,000,000 points in the Active Directory topic area.