So, I already mentioned my main problem with this meeting over on misbehaving. And David Weinberger’s posted some good observations about the meeting today. But there are some other things that I’m noticing today.
One is that there are a couple of people here who are dominating this discussion, and being heard over them is a challenge. That’s discouraging. Free-for-alls aren’t necessarily the most effective way to get a variety of opinions, particularl when some of the voices are convinced that they have the only right answers in the room.
Another is that I hate sitting at a table watching people talk for hours and hours at a time. Why aren’t they doing some breakout groups, so that they can isolate some of the voices, get people to talk about things that they care about and/or are knowledgable about? I’m not the right person to ask about things that are Windows-specific—but I know a lot about information-seeking behavior. Put me in a small group with the people developing the web interface aspects I’m interested in, and let the windows geeks talk about platform-specific issues.
It’s also quite clear that a room full of blogger geeks is not a good cross-section of the web-using world. Things that power users care about—from tabbed browsing to ubiquitous RSS feeds—aren’t necessarily important to the rest of the world. My kids need a good search engine…they don’t care (yet) about RSS feeds, and probably won’t for quite some time. My freshmen students (in IT and CS) don’t use aggregators. Maybe it’s true that the rest of the world will follow the geeks, but maybe it’s not.
Yesterday afternoon when I arrived at the hotel in Seattle, my connectivity (wireless in the lobby, wired in the room) worked beautifully. But last night and this morning, connectivity was awful. First I couldn’t get IPs, then the response time was beyond sluggish. They assured us that by this evening it would be fixed, and right before we got on the bus I tried it again and it seemed fine, so I was reassured.
But when we returned this evening, it was awful again. I called the front desk and threw a fit, and they sent their tech support guy up to my room. He was baffled, because he’d been on the network with no problems the entire day while our group was away. (Figured it out yet?)
Well, he finally fired up a packet sniffer and took a look at the network. It was being flooded with junk, almost definitely the product of a worm like MyDoom. And it was coming from multiple machines on the hotel network.
What that means is that one (or more) of the people in the “Search Champs” group showed up with a worm already on their computer, and proceeded to both flood the network with DoS traffic and infect other computers on the network.
As the only Mac user one of the very few Mac users in the group, I must admit I’m feeling a bit smug at the moment. I’m 100% sure that I’m not the culprit, and that I’m not at risk.
The hotel’s service provider is in the process of banning the offending machines from the network, and those folks will have to get their machines cleaned before they go back online. Good thing we’re headed back to the Microsoft campus tomorrow…maybe they’ll be able to find someone there to help them get their systems under control.
Ah, sweet irony.
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