Astroturf organizations are fake grassroots organizations, usually sponsored by large corporations, used to support any arguments or claims in their favor, or more often to challenge and deny those against them. They represent the corporate version of social movements. The aim is to influence public opinion in such a way as to create a social movement that benefits the organization or perhaps government concerned with a given target or issue. There are of course some rather serious underlying social and ethical concerns with such an approach. Right now there is no better example than the broader global warming movement.
Yes this is indeed a complex issue. On one side are the organizations identified as evil polluters who want society to see them as not as bad as other make out. On another side there are the pseudo environmental groups who were the evil polluters to be punished. On yes another side is the governments who see the benefits of overt or hidden tax dollars that can go into their coffers. Yet another side is the organizations, educational facilities and scientists who can see a way to get a slice of the money available in the process. The final side, and the one most attacked, is the scientists and researchers who have discovered that the whole thing is really a lie based on a false premise. Now carry this over to Web sites.
In a recent study the results showed that people who used astroturf websites became more uncertain about the causes of global warming and humans’ role in the phenomenon than people who used regular grassroots websites (yes this was a US study). In this was businesses and special interest groups were able to promote their viewpoint over real environmental issues. So in addition to the ethical considerations it also threatens those groups trying to get real information out. Put more simply these groups setup fake websites to promote fake data. They use links to other fake websites and ‘articles’ without providing any references or links to supporting data. Move into the regular cyber criminal community and we find that they are creating over 57,000 Web sites per week.
The moral of this story is if you read it on the Web, hear it from the media or your favourite organization you need to do some checking. Look for alternative sites with alternative views. Compare the level of proof they present, if they point to data sources for independent checking. Examine the backgrounds of the authors to see if they have any experience in what they might be commenting about. Of you could just believe everything you read.
So my adventures with Access continue. I must admit to learning a few more SQL statements and since I am also working with SQLServer, what the differences are between them. There are more differences between the two of them than I thought so it is a continuous learning process.
Before I continue I found a neat way to format your 2,4,8,16GB etc. thumb drives to NTFS. Yes normally they are FAT32. Try this, pop in a thumb drive, right click on it in say My Computer , Click of Format and then on the File System drop down. Yes, there is no NTFS. Now right click on My Computer, Properties, Hardware, Device Manager or however you get there on your OS. Open Disk Drives and right click on your thumb drive name and then Properties. Under the Policies tab change the selection from Optimize for quick removal to Optimize for performance. Click on OK and go back to right clicking on the device under My Computer. Now when you click on Format and the File System drop down NTFS will be there. Reformat as you like and now you can save large files on your thumb drive.
So where was I? OK, right, Access. I am now using Office 2010 under Windows 7 which is interesting if you are using the 64 bit version, set up some ODBS DSNs and decide you need to switch to the 32-bit version of Office because say your email driver does not have a 32-bit version. The first thing you will notice is that your ODBC drivers don’t work. This is because you now need to re set them up as 32-bit versions. This is not available from the Control Panel and you need to go to the SYSWOW64 directory under Program files and run the program you find there, no not under the 32 bit sub directory you find there but right from SYSWOW64. Don’t ask me why as it makes no sense to me either. Anyway more on my Access adventures in later articles.
Industry News
On the subject of reading Yahoo! is being criticized for its new webmail rules. They give themselves the right to read your emails and make you responsible for telling anyone who may be emailing you, even if you don’t know who that might be. To be fair Google was the first to start this practice, which made some switch to Yahoo! because they didn’t do it. Not sure where those people are going to go now. This will all be part of the latest Yahoo! email upgrade and users will see a pop-up, that most ignore, when they make the change. IF you don’t like the changes then simply use the old account.
In a stroke of irony only jailbroken iPhones and iPads will be safe from the latest vulnerability. Those who have stayed with the unmodified units will have to wait around for a patch from Apple. Version 3 of jailbreakme.com that now works on the iPad can use PDF Patcher 2 to guard against the underlying flaw. The reason? Easy, jailbroken devices allow the installing of apps besides those approved by the official Apple App Store. Oh and Apple does not allow anti-virus software to be listed in the official iPhone AppStore, so there's no protection via that mechanism until a patch for the underlying vulnerability is published by Apple.
Well into the really cool category this week is the one billion pixel camera that will be used to map the Milky Way galaxy. Yes that is not a mistype 1 billion pixels making up a 1 by half meter array. It is going to map about 1 million starts over a 5 year mission. The camera will work in stereo with two sets of 51 CCD device arrays. The satellite will map the star, its position and relative motion along with colour, intensity and spectrometry. Gia as the satellite it know will sit motionless at the L2 Lagrange point a million-and-a-half kilometres from Earth. This point is the position of the balance between orbital movement and gravity that will allow the satellite to sit motionless in space providing the stable platform necessary for such detailed photography and detection. To give some idea of just how large our galaxy is the mission will map only about one percent of the stars. It will also be looking at a few distant quasars, a few asteroids and galaxies right out to the edge of known universe.
Microsoft wants XP users to move to Windows 7. XP is about ten years old now but is still a very popular OS, I am using it as I type this article for example. Support for XP will stop in about 1000 days from now. Yes that is indeed nearly three years and pushes XP out to about 2014 before current users will need to think about upgrading, to Windows 8 perhaps? So after 8 April 2014 there will be no more security patches and hot fixes so you had better start planning, for whatever OS might be around by then.
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