Experts Exchange Gift Guide One

Nata's Corner

Back when I first started doing this, I thought a lot of it would be answering reader questions about the kinds of issues people were hesitant to post at EE, but it's turned out that I mostly write about things I find interesting to the more non-technical people who are members of EE; I keep telling the people I meet how amazing and brilliant the Experts I've met are -- and it's really the truth. But there's one thing I'm not sure a lot of Experts know a lot about, so I dug up this handy guide from a few years ago that might help you survive the office Christmas party. Have fun, and send me pictures!

I've decided I love Facebook. Without them, I might have to spend a lot more time looking for things to write about. EE beat me to the punch last week, but they missed the part about the European Union getting ready to hit Facebook with sanctions -- maybe even including fines -- over privacy issues, but it avoided fines from the US government. Also hitting Facebook: a new worm.

One of the sites I read pretty often is KrebsOnSecurity.com. Last week, he posted the details of an attempt by a malware group to inject malware into his site by buying advertising on his site, which is novel, to say the least. But given the millions (billions?) of dollars that are at stake in the security business, not to mention the money these guys make by stealing your personal information (or someone else's through botnets and the like), the few dollars they would have had to spend seems pretty trivial. But the main point is that while Krebs' ad provider had the foresight to check the advertising before it got served, not every website or ad provider does that. That means you should be extra careful this time of year, especially if you do any online shopping or banking.

I also got quite a few emails last week from what looked like the division of Intuit -- the maker of Quicken and Quickbooks -- that sells supplies like checks and invoices. That's cool, except that I've never owned any Intuit products, and I certainly don't have any need for a free trial payroll program. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people still writing out paychecks by hand, so you know they're going to jump all over it, even though the file is about 200k in size, and find themselves infected with malware. Let's face it. There are going to be all kinds of attempts to hijack your computer this time of year, and about the only thing you can do is be extra careful.

By the way, those nice little ads you're seeing in Chrome? No, they're not coming from the websites. Three wild guesses as to who is making all of the money from them. They have to make up for all the money they poured into Wave and several other products, not to mention the solar thermal energy thing.

Finally, a few people out there know that my other half and I have ties to Mark Twain, since I spent most of my life in the midwest and he grew up where they jump frogs, so I had to laugh that on the same day Google celebrated his 176th birthday, we were reminded that he wouldn't be welcome at either Facebook or Google+. Go figure.

Experts Exchange Gift Guide Two

In Brief

What goes up... A few years back, we were reading breathless prose about the End Of The Empire that was Internet Explorer and the rise of the Darling Of Open Source, the Mozilla Firefox browser. Then along came Google with its Chrome browser, and with Mozilla's advertising revenue arrangement with Google having just ended, well ... let's just say the future isn't very bright.

Flashbacks: In our college days, no bulletin board was complete without at least half a dozen pieces of paper asking or offering to share rides. Now, there's an Internet equivalent.

Future shock: In Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, the protagonist gets shipped off to learn how to be a general by playing video games -- in our day, the little handheld devices given to children to occupy them on long trips to grandma's house for the holidays. Fast forward to today, where handheld technology is redefining both command and control and battlefied combat. And we're only scratching the surface of what's possible.

There's gotta be a country song in here somewhere: Why you should never cheat on your tattoo-artist significant other. Contrast that with the hazards of being a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

(Yes, we've used this before, but it's so perfectly appropriate for Washington) The ANY key: We have been buried with emails over the last few weeks from all kinds of organizations and newsletters asking us to send in our emails to Senators and Congressmen to stop passage of two bills, written by those charming people in the recording and movie industries, that turn them into what amounts to a private court system where they make the rules and issue orders to shut down websites. The odds of it passing and being signed into law are currently at 7-5.

What's truly astonishing about this whole kerfuffle is that apparently, people in both houses of Congress aren't questioning whether the proponents' reasoning has any merit, choosing to exclude from hearings those organizations who are best in a position to provide accurate information, and instead use it as a club with which to beat up on Google on issues without foundation (as opposed to beating up on Google for the somewhat unsavory things it does do.

Across the pond in government news, the UK is trying to figure out a way to "cyberban" groups like LulzSec and Anonymous, and would consider shutting down social networks in the face of civil unrest. In a related story, ads are running in all the major papers for teachers who are bilingual in English and either Chinese (mainland dialects preferred) or North Korean.

Just because it's cool: A natural, accidental optical illusion.

Turkey jokes accepted:

• AT&T's boss gets a holiday call from the FCC.
• Mobile phones log everything, the disclosure of which ticked of its creator until the lawyers got involved. [Editor's Note: Verizon phones don't have the "rootkit", but iPhones do; ZDNet has a fix.]
• The rich and famous who spend so much of their time staying rich and famous can now complain about the unwashed masses behind a very high wall.
• An iPhone battery exploded on a flight from Lismore to Sydney.
• Yahoo has been offered $16.60 per share. In case you're keeping score, that's about half of what Microsoft offered in 2008.
• LinkedIn. Pandora. Groupon. Facebook. Let the hype begin.

Sometimes, you know there's a connection but just can't put your finger on it: SmartPlanet had two stories last week that must have been assigned by the same editor. One was borrowed from the New York Times and titled "Engineers develop new tool for detecting Kim Kardashian's cellulite" (and no, it doesn't involve her latest soon-to-be-ex-husband); the other was an interview with the developer of AdSense who is building a social network that includes digital therapy sessions.

Poor little rich boy: We weren't the only ones who had something to say when Michael Arrington left TechCrunch in a ... okay, maybe a pout, as opposed to a huff ... to start a VC fund and create another blog. We'll even grant that he makes a halfway decent point about whiny workers. But he shouldn't do that by quoting people out of context -- especially 14 years after the fact.

Help wanted: Beta testers. Gymnastics judges need not apply. Also, there might be a summer gig in London, and there could also be some spots opening up for Pre-Cogs.

Brother, can you spare me a dime? You don't want to know how much money the banks made when taxpayers bailed them out. A possibly more up-to-date song is out there, but please, put the headphones on if you're at work.

Just for fun: We are gladdened by the return, over the last month or so, to EE of COBOLdinosaur, who for many years was a grumpy and strict proponent of user-friendly web development (he was and is also a fierce advocate for putting the users of EE on a par with, if not ahead of, virtually any other considerations). So in his honor, we are borrowing from TechRepublic a list of ten web design tragedies.

Sign of the Apocalypse: It's not so much that Ashton Kutcher has fallen off the top ten on Twitter; it's that anyone cares. A possible Pulitzer Prize for tweeting (we can just see Walter Cronkite rolling over in his grave). And nothing quite says "Merry Christmas" like a photo with Santa.

Experts Exchange Gift Guide Three

Milestones

New Geniuses: There is an interesting theme that runs through the list of people who earned Genius certificates in the last couple of weeks. First, nobus continued his remarkable run by reaching 1,000,000 points in PC Laptops, his ninth; he is the first EE member to be listed in this section for doing that in three consecutive issues, or to put it another way, he has reached the Genius level five times in the past six weeks. Second, one of the members whose username has probably caused come scratched heads among EE's programmers over the past fifteen years -- rrz@871311 -- earned his Genius certificate in Java Server Pages (JSP). Finally, dragon-it reached 1,000,000 points in the one of the original topic areas at Experts Exchange: MS DOS. Congratulations to all!

My First Million: Experts Exchange members who reached the 1,000,000 point level in November were ve3ofa, e_aravind, StephenJR, als315, farzanj, itkamaraj, RobMobility, IanTh, BillBach and pivar. Very well done!

Milestones:

• RobWill became the 26th Savant overall since joining Experts Exchange as he went over the 10,000,000 point mark.
• CodeCruiser has earned 8,000,000 points overall; he has also reached the 2,000,000 point level in the VB.NET and ASP.NET topic areas.
• kaufmed is the newest member of the 5,000,000 point group.
• slightwv has earned 4,000,000 points in the Oracle topic area and is the all-time leader.