Nata's Corner

I'm almost a little embarrassed to bring this up, but somehow, I managed to get the MoneyPak scam virus -- I'm pretty sure it came through a Facebook game, but don't quote me -- and naturally, I turned to EE's PAQ for help. Three things I found out about it during the hours we spent getting rid of it: 1) that there are a number of varieties, so not all of the various pages with steps on them will always work; 2) that even if you get rid of the annoying page that takes over your computer (and locks it up), you might not have solved all of your problems; and 3) that as long as you don't panic and click the button, you'll be fine as long as you take care of it now.

Among the sites we looked at for assistance (besides EE, of course) were McAfee, botcrawl.com, BleepingComputer.com, Microsoft, 2-Spyware.com and MalWareTips.com. If you have one of the millions of blog sites hosted by WordPress, and you haven't taken a look at it recently, you might want to. And I know it sounds a little silly, but you might want to ask your local hospital what they do to protect you from viruses -- the computer kind.

The other half works at home, and since we're in a rural part of the world, we do a fair amount of ordering things on line. We also get our mail at a post office, but most of the people we seem to order from would rather deliver to a street address, which means FedEx gets a good portion of our business. But what if they want to deliver something when we know we're not going to be here? Now, they'll hold it for you, and you can tell them in advance.

There's a note at the top of this newsletter about a survey EE is taking about buying an iPad Mini, and I'll give you one reason why I won't: I don't like the idea of being tracked. I know -- my Droid does it too -- but that doesn't mean I have to like it, and I mostly just use it as a cell phone and camera anyway. Turning the tracking off isn't all that difficult.

Finally, my daughter-in-law is pretty good about sending me photos and messages through her phone, but she's terrible about checking her email, and as you've probably gathered by now, my cell phone carrier isn't the most reliable (none are out here in the boondocks). But I can send her a text message from my email -- which is very handy for me. First, put the phone number in the To: field, followed by the carrier (Wikipedia has pretty complete list) after the @ symbol. Enter your subject and your text, just like you normally would, and click Send. Depending on your plan, you may or may not be able to send files, but at least you can keep in touch!

In Brief

First, we kill all the politicians: The Federal Trade Commission is offering a $50,000 prize to anyone who can tell them how to block robocalls.

It just isn't the same without Steve: Apple held one of its events (if you want a play-by-play, with video and snarky comments, this will work, though this one has better tech detail). Since everything was about the worst kept secret since the last Apple event, we mostly paid attention to it for the tweets. Curiously, there was also no talk of Samsung either, but that mess is getting increasingly hard to follow anyway. Maybe all these patent rulings will cause all of them to be invalidated.

And while everyone was paying rapt attention to Apple, Zynga was laying off 100+ employees in Austin and closing the Boston studio. We're guessing that Facebook doesn't care. Apple went one better, waiting for Hurricane Sandy to arrive before shaking up the executive suite.

There's also the Microsoft Surface and Windows 8, and even the Google Chromebook, which is the least expensive one of the bunch.

Sorry, Cat: We couldn't resist. Twice.

Christmas just got a lot more interesting: The keys to the Sony PlayStation 3 were published by hackers, while Barnes & Nobel payment terminals in seven states were compromised. We're sending everyone turnips and avoiding Walmart on Black Friday.

They won the World Cup too: India has added to its world-leading status in one more area.

Speech at a cost: A couple of everyone's favorite sites (and several universities) took a beating over the last couple of weeks. Reddit got smacked around for blocking Gawker stories about a troll who got outted. Twitter exercised its right to block an account. Campuses everywhere are trying to shut up their students, and the Chinese block anyone who is mean to them.

You've been a b-a-a-a-d boy: The EU says Microsoft didn't show the "browser choice" screen for over three years; Microsoft called it a "technical error".

No conflict with their interests: The consulting firm that is supposed to be independent and to make sure that you don't get sued for downloading 30 songs was a paid lobbyist for the recording industry for five years.

Guess it wasn't as reliable as eHow.com: Facebook has dumped FB Questions. Go figure.

Us? Launching cyber attacks? Oh heavens: A couple of weeks ago, every news broadcast in the US featured a clip of the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, giving a speech warning about a "cyber-Pearl Harbor" -- an attack on the computerized infrastructure of the US. That annoyed the heck out of F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen, who wrote a blog post pointing out that the US has been responsible for launching more attacks than it's been on the receiving end of -- except for Middle East oil companies.

In requiem: George McGovern, whose frustration with the backroom politics of his party led to seminal changes in the way Presidential candidates are nominated and elected; Russell Means, instrumental in moving the plight of Native Americans to the front of the stage; and Stanford Ovshinsky, who is in part responsible for the screen you're reading this on.

Recycling: A 3-wheeled car from old hard-drives and a mousetrap.

Sign of the Apocalypse: Convicted for failure to perform. Adobe's new marketing strategy. Comic Sans logos.

Milestones

New Geniuses: matthewspatrick picked up two Genius certificates in the last couple of weeks, in SQL Server 2008 and Spreadsheets, making him only the second member of Experts Exchange to have eleven of those. MASQUERAID has earned his second, in Miscellaneous Hardware. Two EE members each earned their first 1,000,000 point t-shirts: Joe_Woodhouse in Sybase and johnsone in Oracle. Well done, all!

Milestones:

• mlmcc has earned 17,000,000 points since joining EE, and is now ranked fifth in the Hall of Fame.
• Ray_Paseur has earned 11,000,000 points in the PHP topic area.
• leakim971 reached the 6,000,000 point level in JavaScript.
• By reaching 3,000,000 points in Virtualization, hanccocka has over that total in two topic areas.
• sdstuber has earned 8,000,000 points overall at Experts Exchange.