Postscript: PhotoSIG has since modified its software and policies - the description below is no longer completely accurate.
This month, I'll discuss a web site that photographers might be interested in and tell a little virus tale.
The photography site I wish to share is PhotoSIG at www.photosig.com. This site is a critique and discussion forum for photographers, where they may submit photos for peer review. Each submitted photo can earn up to three thumbs up per reviewer, depending on its quality. Photos deemed as "bad" can earn up to three thumbs down. Two and three thumbs down ratings are generally given to photos which are controversial - poor taste is a common reason that photos gather a significant numbers of thumbs down ratings. If you would rather avoid these, stay away from the "Lowest Rated" and "Most Controversial" links of the Photo section.
I've been a member for a few weeks, submitted a few photos, written a number of critiques and as of April 4, have 146 thumbs. That identifies me as an active participant of the group, but the first extra privileges come at 199 thumbs, so I'm still quite a newcomer. For comparison, the most recent six photo submissions come from participants who have from 8 to over 8400 thumbs and ratings in the tens of thousands aren't rare. Be sure to check out the "Highest Rated" section: the current highest rated picture is Jaap Hart's "Windmill near Schermerhorn", which has over 3000 thumbs, and is one of the most beautiful photos I've ever seen.
There are a few caveats. This site would probably be pretty useless to you if you don't have a high bandwidth connection, and even with one, it can be pretty slow. To get full access to the site, you have to register. It took me a week or two to decide to do this, but I'm glad I did. I've seen evidence that leads me to believe that they may start charging for access soon, since storing over 600,000 photos and 7.5 million critiques has to be expensive.
The site also suffers somewhat from "thumb" inflation. Three thumb ratings are the most common. Some of this comes from the fact that most people tend to rate only what they like. In some sense, the site is an ego site for photographers, but some critics offer helpful advice, which is what the site is supposed to be about. If you like photography and have a high speed connection, you might want to check it out.
The virus story is a bit strange. A few days ago, I got an email from Road Runner that said that our Road Runner email account had received an email with a virus which had been intercepted and dealt with. The sender of the virus was supposedly our own Compuserve e-mail account. While this isn't impossible, it also isn't very likely. On that day, our Compuserve account HAD received a virus, but our virus checker on that machine had intercepted it and neutralized it. The virus in both cases was Klez, the most common virus currently floating around. Klez has a known twist to its behavior - it can and usually does lie about who sent it. When I looked at the email header for the Road Runner email, it had another email address that I recognized. I can't be sure, but there's a pretty good chance that the computer that really had the virus had not only the email addresses of our Compuserve and Road Runner accounts, but also the email address of the person that supposedly sent the virus to our Compuserve account. Klez looked at the email address book on the infected machine, abstracted a different email address to take the blame and sent itself on to both our Compuserve and our Road Runner accounts. At random, it blamed our Compuserve account for sending the virus to our Road Runner account.
The morals of the story are 1) you can't trust the email address that shows up as having sent a virus-laden email and 2) you should really, really, really have good up-to-date anti-virus software working for you if you want to avoid virus headaches.
CATBAR - Brain Candy #69 - Seeing the World As It Is / Brian Rock / Oct 23 2003