Articles in “August 2007” from Datamation Blog

Business 2.0 has an article here about how tech giants such as Google, eBay, Microsoft Amazon.com use open-ended problem-solving questions to find the best and brightest programmers, the ones who can "think on their feet." Here are some examples:

Why are manhole covers round? How many golf balls can fit inside a school bus? You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it?

These are child's play, of course, questions merely designed as initial screening devices. Once Google and the others get serious about a candidate, they roll out the real brainteasers. Using my extensive contacts in the industry, I was able to obtain a sample list of these "make or break" questions:

1. I'm thinking of a number from one to infinity. What is that number's square root? 2. Finish this limerick: "There once was a Linux programmer from Nantucket"... 3. Bob and Mary live five miles apart in a suburban section of Denver. What color is Mary's house? 4. It's best to adopt a "wide stance": a) In a batter's box b) At the foul line c) While trapped on a mountaintop ledge d) In a men's room stall at an airport in Minneapolis-St. Paul 5. How can we obtain exclusive legal rights to the Sun? (Oh, sorry, that's a question they ask job candidates at Exxon-Mobil.) 6. Should minotaurs be allowed to vote? Cite legal precedent in your answer. 7. Qui?n es m?s macho, senor Bill Gates o senor Ricardo Montalban? Gates? O Montalbahhhhn? 8. If you could build a time machine, would you use it to: a) Right previous wrongs b) Gain pre-emptive revenge c) Engage in humorous frat-pledge pranks d) Return to a certain airport restroom in Minneapolis-St. Paul to adopt a "narrower stance"

Now those are what I call brainteasers. And if you can answer most of them, I guarantee you can write your own ticket in Silicon Valley. So study up.

I'm way into this municipal wi-fi thing. See, I believe the opportunity to be driven mad by wireless glitches should be available to all of the people, not just those of us lucky enough to have their own balky home/office Linksys routers. (Balky Home/Office Linksys Router Update: I got my old Linksys Wireless-G router -- it of the miracle "push-button configuration" -- working again merely by holding down the reset button in the back for about five seconds. Such a simple solution! How could I have been so dumb? Oh wait, I also tried this trick with my new, identical Linksys Wireless-G router -- even muttering the same exact incantation -- and zilch. If I can't get it working by week's end, I will pursue a leveraged buyout of Linksys parent Cisco Systems. Just try to stop me.) So it's disappointing to hear that EarthLink's financial woes not only are resulting in the layoff of 900 employees, but are delaying the ISP's ambitious plans to continue building municipal wi-fi networks that blanket entire cities. From PC World:

EarthLink has been reining in its municipal efforts since earlier this year. Most recently, in July, the company said it would not take on any new municipal Wi-Fi projects until it's confident of a reasonable return. ... EarthLink's troubles point to a couple of problems with many of the municipal Wi-Fi business plans, said Phil Solis, an analyst at ABI Research. "The whole premise of doing municipal Wi-Fi was that it would be extremely low cost," he said. "But the low-cost assumptions were built on having 30 or 40 Wi-Fi [access points] per square mile." In practice, operators found they might need as many as 100, which changed the economics, he said.

Those damned business models! No one had to worry about those things during the late '90s. Well, even if it's not EarthLink, municipal wi-fi is bound to happen eventually. The public will demand it, just as it demanded water, electricity and American Idol.

Of all the things MySpacers (and other social networkers) do on their voluminous web pages, one of the most popular is commenting on the photos that other MySpacers post of themselves and their friends. "Nice pose, Barbie237!" might be a typical response to a photo. "Can I be added to your friends list??" This sort of thing grew out of sites like "hot-or-not" or the unfortunately named "rate-my-rack." We should've seen this coming, but now a startup is hoping to make big bucks on the social-networking/photo rating hobby. Zivity, a social-networking site that invites users to rate "sexy" photos submitted by other users, said this week that it had raised $1 million. The San Francisco-based startup is helmed by chairman and co-founder Scott Bannister, who helped launch IronPort Systems, an anti-spam company bought by Cisco for $830 million. Zivity says it will have rules about what kinds of photos can be posted. Nude pics are OK, but models must prove they are 18 or older. They must submit a W-9 form, so they can get paid. The company stated this in a press release:

Powered by Zivity's innovative, patent-pending voting system, Zivity is the only media company that lets its members distribute royalties. Zivity members determine what photos are published on the site by casting votes for models and photographers who submit appealing content. In this way, it is the members who distribute the royalties and who ultimately determine how much models and photographers will earn for their contributions.

I'll be keeping an eye on Zivity and its "patent-pending voting system," because I think they'll have a hard time keeping out the fraudsters and the con men (and women.) On the other hand, who knows what site will be the next social networking wonder kid? ? Stay tuned.

Remember the Hewlett-Packard boardroom surveillance debacle? The latest chapter in the saga is that a group of reporters and their family members, whose private phone records were secretly obtained in the scandal, are suing the tech giant and two former executives. They are alleging that HP's investigation tactics amounted to an invasion of privacy and a violation of state rules on business practices. Before the suit was filed, HP said it apologized to the people affected by the spying and also made a settlement offer. The reporters nixed the offer and are suing, the Associated Press reported. I worked with two of the reporters filing suit, Stephen Shankland and Dawn Kawamoto of CNET Network's News.com. Shankland is one of the best reporters/cubicle mates ever, and it incenses me that he and his family had their privacy violated. Also suing is Rachel Konrad, an AP reporter, who is Shankland's wife. Konrad is also a CNET alum. (I was hoping to get more of the story from Shankland, but he was unavailable.) This HP case, and the increased frequency of reporters being killed, either in a war zone or on the mean streets of Oakland (as in the case of gunned-down Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey), has me concerned about the future of journalism and the safety of reporters. Let's hope Shankland and crew get the type of settlement they deserve, a settlement that will send shock waves to big, paranoid companies.

I think this is ultimately going to be one of those you-can't-put-the-Genie-back stories, but Perfect 10 -- which describes itself as a "publisher of tasteful model and supermodel images" -- is not happy. It's not a perfect summer for them. Perfect 10 is once again suing a search engine. This time it's suing Microsoft for copyright infringement, saying the software giant's MSN Search engine displays thumbnails of pirated versions of Perfect 10's copyrighted pictures in search results, and that those results include links to the full-size pirated pictures. It's similar to a suit that that company pursued three months ago, against Google and Amazon. Our sister site internetnews.com, quoted Perfect 10's president, Norm Zada, who said:

"Microsoft is showing tens of thousands of extremely valuable celebrity images, along with Perfect 10 images, without authorization, which it obtains from hundreds if not thousands of pirate websites. "Search engines could greatly reduce infringement if they would simply delist obvious infringers upon receiving notice, and stop copying and linking to copyrighted works without permission, but that would adversely affect their revenue," Zada said.

Later in the story, Zada said: "In the end, I firmly believe that those who knowingly profit from the theft of billions of dollars of other people's property will lose." It remains to be seen, but Zada's contention is far from perfect, and I think he'll lose this one -- just like Hollywood will never stop people from finding ways of downloading music (and movies) and getting around the scourge of digital rights management.

You can't say Google plays favorites in its never-ending war against spam. According to Elinor Mills over at CNET.com, the search giant took down a blog that it had identified as a harboring spam. Unfortunately, it was one of Google's own corporate blogs. It seems the blog in question, Google's Custom Search blog, contained a message that bore the suspicious earmarks of spam -- oddly placed punctuation, bad grammer, etc. This got the blog flagged by Google's automated spam classifier, which notifies the blog owner that he's a spam suspect. The owner then can request that humans at Google verify whether the blog is spam. If that request isn't made -- which apparently it wasn't -- the blog is automatically disabled. After that, things get a bit technical, which is the enemy of funny, so I'll only say that the mistake eventually was reversed. The point is, I think we should be able to laugh at Google while we still can.

Today's global economy increasingly rewards nimbleness, adaptability and the leveraging of technology. Which are among the reasons that telecommuting -- with its numerous time, cost and talent-pool benefits -- has become more popular in recent years. Yet far too many business executives remain incredibly reluctant to let employees telecommute. Why? A rhetorical question, of course. We all know the answer: The Man doesn't trust us. This recent Telecommuting Survey by software vendor Intranet Dashboard, written about on Intranet Journal here, reiterates the point quite clearly. Seventy percent of respondents to the U.S.-based survey reported being restricted from telecommuting. And the main reason? The Man. More specifically, The Man's inherent suspicion that any employee not herded into a webcam'd cubicle plantation during the workday is goofing off somewhere, even if just for a few minutes. Well, some of us are. And some of us are working. Ironically, that's exactly what's going on in the cubicle plantations. There are people working, and there are people who just look like they're working. They check their email every two minutes, they call their mother, they visit espn.com to catch up on the West Coast scores. Newsflash for The Man: It doesn't really matter where you are, it matters that you produce. Are there legitimate concerns about telecommuting? Sure. Productivity can be one of them. So measure it and shut up. Another is document safety. Laptop users who like to work from Starbucks can cause some genuine security issues, such as transmitting sensitive corporate documents over an unsecure network. There's also the bonding factor; seeing the people you work with every day, being part of onsite teams, catching up with corporate gossip, these all have real value that telecommuters miss out on. As a longtime telecommuter, I know this. But by focusing on the downsides of telework, wary executives deprive their organizations of telecommuting's many advantages. First and foremost is as a tool to retain talent. The Internet Dashboard survey found that 83 percent of respondents say their staff view teleworking as a perk or incentive, and 65 percent of respondents said flexible schedules were more important for motivating and keeping staff than higher salary and bonuses, stock options and other equity incentives, and gifts and reward programs. Did you hear that, The Man? Nearly two-thirds of respondents say their workers would be happier telecommuting than being given more money. Not exactly sticking it to you, is it?

Coincidental, probably. Embarrassing, definitely. There was a high-ranking official from the U.S. National Security Agency telling attendees at this year's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas that security professionals must work with the government to combat cybercrime. Meanwhile, as this internetnews.com story explains...

Noted Black Hat presenter Halvar Flake was denied entry to the U.S. after landing in Detroit and was returned to his native land of Germany. According to a blog post by Flake, he was denied entry due to an issue with his H1B-Visa status.

Good way to cultivate relations with the security/hacker community. Not to worry, though; the NSA already is doing another kind of cultivating -- recruiting the future codebreakers and codemakers of America through its web site, America's CryptoKids.