I have a good friend of mine – Sandi Hardmeier who has spent many a day fighting some of the worst spyware out there in the wild. A lot of her work goes unrecognised, and at times when it is recognised, it’s done without clearing naming “the MVP from Australia” who has yet again saved many a person from infection. More often than not, she gets no recognition at all as the sites infected do not wish to even acknowledge that they had a problem.
Many times, Sandi via her blog will alert the world to some pending threat – the most recent here in Australia was within the last few weeks when the Ad network supply ads to the Sensis group of sites, including whereis.com.au, yellowpages.com.au, and whitepages.com.au. Sandi was the first in the world to detect it, and once she had confirmed it set about notifying Sensis so that they could remove the offending adverts. Ok – so Sandi saved the world again, what did Sensis do to repay her – Nothing, Nada, Zip. Sure – they mentioned her in a thank you email but what does that do to pay the bills? Think of the damage that would have happened had this gone unnoticed. How many hapless individuals would have had their computers infected simply by visiting a “safe site”.
The long and the short of it is that she does this without requesting payment at all. She has saved many VERY large companies from embarrassment, including earlier this year when the ad network that feeds Microsoft’s own Instant Messenger product became infected. Again – for no payment.
What do I want from you, you might ask – nothing for personally at all. But here is a community warrior that is fighting the good fight and not getting paid for it at all. So – what I would ask, is that if you feel so inclined to go and put a few dollars into Sandi’s PayPal account [email protected]. And to the corporations that she has saved, open your cheque books and offer her something decent. Give the woman a true thank you not just some token mention in an email. Heck you probably don’t even realise that during the day, she’s not even employed for an IT company, but instead works for a legal firm supporting their IT Infrastructure. If you’re one of those big corporations, you might even want to offer her a job helping to protect your interests! She is obviously very skilled at detecting and understanding these things.
I can tell you one thing though, people can only keep on fighting the good fight whilst they don’t need to think about how to pay the bills. Once they need to think more about money than the job they like doing, the stop to do it. Think about that for just a little while.
Update – 27/11/07 – Vlad has something to say about this too – http://www.vladville.com/2007/11/should-free-content-creators-be-commercially-compensated-for-giving-away-things-for-free.html
Since when did MVP’s start asking for money for what they do?
MOST MVP’s work tirelessly and they don’t go about soliciting contributions. Sandra is no different to anyone else except she see wants the money and the recognition.
No thanks are needed as an MVP. It’s done for the community not for thanks and definitely not for money.
Wrong person to ever be rewarded.
If she wants a real paying job then she should go out and get one!
Get Real! – MVPs doing things for the community is one thing. Helping home users remove spyware from their computers is certainly the type of thing that MVP’s are looked at and awarded for. But when large enterprises can not secure themselves and in fact rely on community resources to do it for them then I think that’s another thing. Sandi did not ask me to post what I did at all – I did so as I believe she has earned it. We all need money to live – and when you need to focus more on your day job then your community life suffers. My hope is that one of these large corporations might actually see the value in employing someone like Sandi to help ensure that their systems are free of malware – it sure looks like they don’t have enough protection right now does it?
As for her going out and looking for a real paying job – she has and is trying continually, but have you ever seen a male dominated industry like the IT industry give a woman a fair break?
Oh – and I’m not afraid to say what I think AND let the world know who I am – Wayne
Advising the community that web site example.com is infected is a service to the community, and it’s the kind of thing that people who are destined to be MVPs can’t resist doing.
Advising the owners of example.com that they are infected is a civic-minded thing to do.
Rewarding, or at least, recognising, someone who advises you that your web site is infected just seems like a good way to ensure that the next time you’re infected, people don’t say “screw ’em”.
To the anonymous poster of “Get Real”, it’s worth noting that Sandi isn’t asking for payment, and I haven’t yet seen her do so. This is Wayne marveling at Sandi’s ability and repeated contributions, and noting that nobody recognises her for her work, either by naming her in a press release as the discoverer of the problem, or by thanking her personally.
How unbelievably hurtful that first comment is.
It’s sad to think that I am declared to be unworthy to be an MVP because I’ve been stupid enough to let the world see signs of philanthropic fatigue.
It seems that the MVP philanthropic and community spirit is to be an infinite resource and if we show signs of strain, well, then all previous good works are cancelled out and we are not worthy to be an MVP. The public is a hard taskmaster. We must work tirelessly, never stumble, and never need thanks (jeez, what am I, a robot?)
FWIW, I just don’t have it in me to be the hard nosed bitch who says ‘Hey, you’ve got a problem, I can show you what it is, I know where it’s coming from, and how to fix it, but I’m not going to tell you about it unless you pay me for it’, no matter how big and financially sound the company I am dealing with is. I can’t get past the fact that there are sometimes hundreds of thousands of people at risk of their computers being infected with godh knows what, and I just can’t being mercenary about it.
As for soliciting contributions, there is no donations link on ie-vista or spywaresucks, which was a deliberate decision on my part. There is an old Paypal link on inetexplorer, but only because that site is no longer maintained. There is very little activity on that account – certainly no donations in the past year. I never ask web sites or companies for donations or contributions when advising them to get rid of various nasties on their sites, never have and never will.
Politicians and Salesmen are the ones who market their deeds.
There are many intelligent and hardworking people who help to keep services alive each day; they work tirelessly and conscientiously with no expectation of appreciation. Thanks to these individuals across the Globe, we have a ‘civilised” society.