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"Possibly malicious in intent, but benign in reality, the worm uses the Visual Basic Script language to store itself on an infected computer in 23 different files named, for example, Pamela Anderson movie listing.vbs, collegesex.vbs, Battlefield Earth.vbs, Napster Metallica Crack.vbs and NSync.vbs."
From here

Battlefield Earth? Metallica? ROFL! Anyone downloading such crap deserves to get VBS scripts. Frigging NSync? They are certainly aiming this trojan at the proper audience!

"Even if you are on the right track, you'll
get run over if you just sit there." Will Rogers

writes jbc, he does "Running a debate, between Tim O'Reilly and Q. Todd Dickinson, Patent Office Director he is, it is, the O'Reilly Network is. Tim's call, for a forum, like Slashdot it is, as a means of identifying prior art, serve it will, among the highlights it is." Patents leads to hate. Hate leads to fear. Fear leads to suffering. A debate, bare-knuckled it is, not as in depth as like, I would have, it is. To know Diskinson [sic]'s perspective, good it is. Always an open mind, a Jedi must keep. A list of educational patents, on computer assisted instruction techniques, they are, which go back to the 1960s, some fo them do, mentioned someone else mentioned. Patents, intellectual property, a Jedi craves not these things.

Yu Suzuki

In other news, AltaVista has filed suit for custody of RIAA untill it reaches the age of majority and can be held acountable for its actions. In the words of one nameless C?O, "We think its terrible that such a cute orginazation is able to run around without anyone taking responsibility to make sure it grows up into a respectable member of society. To that end we feel it is our duty to take it under our wing and provide it with a good spanking if needed. We only have its best interests at heart and promiss to divest ourselves of it, once it has reached the age of legal majority."

Several Social Workers contacted commended the action and hoped that some loving but stern orginization would step forward to help guide both the MPAA and DVD-CCA through their formative years and into productive members of society.

Hell is paved with good intentions.

I think the conventional form of this quote is The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. (Similar...)

Living nearby I prefer Shelly's description:

Hell is a city much like London.

(No, I dont know what this has to do with the article either...)

What about Altavista and other robots that actually reproduce the first few sentences of websites in the search?

In fact, this search reproduces two BoA pages in the first three hits.

This also clearly falls under fair-use parody law.

I personally think that under the circumstances it would be a good idea to open source the software behind it.

Yes, it'll just be a simple page fetcher followed by a case/if statement and then a whole load of 'global search and replace' calls, but it'll be nice to be able to base the code on something. After all, half the fun of the Dialectizer was being able to translate other peoples sites (and your own) into 'other tongues'.

If people were able to download the code and use it on their own website, it'll keep a hell of a lot of people happy.

I'm now worried about things like this affect BabelFish and AskJesus...

This is a _program_ which allows a user to Voluntarily translate a page.

Good point. Is this really any different than babelfish?

So long as the good folks at Pantone (the ink people, industry standard color matching) don't start litigation against Oakley (the sunglass people) for showing their swatches in a different tint...
(yeah, it's a stretch)

It looks to me like they're mostly considering the colours used in the images rather than the shapes and you get very fuzzy matches. Still, it is something in the direction of what you were thinking.
--

I am a Muslim, an Arab, and a resident of Saudi Arabia for the last 11 years.

I have built an extensive web site that describes how the internet is setup, list of all the Saudi ISPs, comparison of prices, service issues, internet cafes, ...etc.

You can check the Saudi ISPs site for all the details. The Internet Setup in Saudi Arabia page will give you an idea on the setup.

Slashdot is not blocked in Saudi Arabia. However, some links (related to hacking and porn, specially when CmdrTaco does the Quickies) are blocked.

Prior to the internet becoming available to the public (January 1999), there have been rumors that Saudi Arabia will allow access to the internet thru a "White List", meaning that only those sites that are explicitly allowed can be accessed. This turned out to be just a rumor. Only those sites that are explicitly blocked are unaccessible.

I am told that sites are blocked not by an employee seeing that it is inappropriate, but there is an approval process in place (he has to go to higher levels of authority and get approval).

Anyone can recommend a site for blocking or request the unblocking of a site (the links are on the site mentioned above.

My main gripes about the internet in Saudi Arabia are:

• Price
  It is very expensive compared to neighboring countries, even those with a comparable (see the Arabs vs. West page on the above site.
• Poor Service
  There is overload on the infrastructure. Proxies just make things slower than they should be. Compared to internet access in (say) Alexandria, Egypt, my home town. Access in Saudi Arabia is slow! Check Speed and Service Watch pages.

In reality, I have not found this censorship to be bothersome.

You should also consider that there are tons of backdoors available for those who are keen to access something that is blocked.

When an Automatic English to Arabic translation service (Tarjim) was made available two months ago, kiddies started to use it as a back door to access pron. The result: it was blocked! (Note to Arabs: The translation isn't any good. Just try it on your own site and sit back and laugh. Bablefish is ages ahead of it!)

The growth of the internet in Saudi Arabia is explosive. Check the Middle East Internet Statistics site for details.

You should also consider that The United Arab Emirates also blocks porn from the net. So does Singapore.

To its credit, Saudi Arabia doesn't block any Voice over IP services (Net2Phone, MediaRing, Dialpad, Yahoo Voice Chat, ...etc.), unlike most of the Gulf countries (Kuwait, Qatar, UAE) and even Lebanon, where the Telecom monopolies are afraid of loss of revenue.

BABELFISH!>

Ramble on!
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0

I sent a message to the webmaster, and I got this reply:

Well, I think we should give them some time. Joshua answered a friend of mine in the same way: "Our thinking was to send text-only users to AltaVista, which has a search that is meant specifically for text-only browsers." "We are currently working on text-browser-enabling Raging Search. The work (optimizing pages for text-only browsers and making sure no functionality gets lost) should be done soon." Even better!

why bother using raging.com when altavista have had a text only search available at http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query? text since like the beginning of time?

and it's not a new search engine, it's just a new interface as far as I can see. I just did a search on altavista.com and on raging.com, exact same results.


--------------------------------
off topic, but i have to say it:

this dumba$$ leech at my high
school made it to MIT, yet today
on the AP statistics test, the
question asked him to draw an
ellipse and he drew a parabola!
(no, he wasn't doing that for
fun, he honestly did not know
what an ellipse was!) WTF? how
does a dumba$$ like that get
into MIT and also get the regent
scholarship from Berkeley while
I get rejected by both schools?
$$#$!#%%$@%%

--------------------------------


Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.

Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.

TIME has an essay from Bill Gates this week.

Here's an AP Article on the essay. It contains this passage (which seems to be broadly paraphrased) regarding preventing future outbreaks of ILOVEYOU type viruses where Gates sounds like an an open source evangelist:

"The front line of defense against such sophisticated viruses is a continually evolving computer operating system that attracts the efforts of eager software developers, Gates said."

I wonder what a successful portable translator will do to the translating business? When do you think humans will be replaced by machines in this field too?

Sure, Babelfish is rather choppy, but I've seen it translate some paragraphs rather well. Thoughts?

Well, they are both using Systran software... so I don't see how one could work better than the other...

Methinks Disney's may be using a newer version of Systran software than the version used in .

Well, babelfish.altavista.com works pretty well, for a website at least.(even though your looking for more of an organizer type thing). The problem I've found when using these is that they are too literal, exact translations.

I just did a search on my own name, and found out that I'm an aviator, author, and humorist. That page, as well as several others with additional evidence, showed up in both AltaVista and Google, so it must be true! Amnesia is the only possible explanation for my unawareness of this obvious fact.

Seriously, though, this just shows that it's fairly easy to get bogus information when trying to pull it together from several sources. Lack of privacy is bad enough, but the possibility of having one's reputation warped by a false positive identification may be even worse. Remember the Harry Buttle / Harry Tuttle mixup in "Brazil"?

BTW, I also found a bunch of old emails I'd sent to the www-style@w3.org mailing list as archived on the W3C's site.

>What we need is some sort of a universial translator. So depending on a browser setting, all text on a website would automatically be converted to the language set as default in the browser.

In the mean time, try babelfish.altavista.com. I agree it isn't perfect, and doesn't cover all languages, but it covers the major one, and usually it gives you enough that you at least get a basic understanding of the page.

segfault@bellatlantic.net

Rather than trying to decide what language should be the norm, or developing a new one what if we did this....

Why not have a web proxy that essentially performs the same action as the Babelfish? You could configure your proxy to automatically translate everything into your native tongue.

Is that funny? To me, it seems just accurate/informative.

"Eu sou a lei! Deixes cair tuas armas e preparais para ser julgadas!"

oh, you know...
(what language do they speak in brazil again?)
--

altavista can search newgroups, just click on discussion groups on the main search page (then you have to switch to searching messages instead of disscussion groups). Looks like it is using remarqs database though. (not that that is bad)

Also, you don't have to wade through all the deja.com crap to search the news groups, just go to www.deja.com/usenet. If you use netscape, just put it on your personal tool bar, so you can get at it easier.

A while back, while a friend and I were doing research, we got completely frustrated with altavista, (this was before we knew about google), and asked it why it was so stupid. The first answer that comes up - a link to altavista. Gotta love that question answering technology.

---------------------------------

Need something translated into some language, so those poor brown guys can read it?

Brown guys? You mean Jawas?

Of course you're not going to give the job to someone who speaks both English and Brownish well

I want to learn Brownish. Can you point me in the right direction? Jeeves was no help, and neither was Google. Babel Fish doesn't support it.

three words: don't use babelfish.

How you do it is going to depend a great deal on how you get your content.

For example, is your content mainly user-contributed, or does is come from professional writers? Where the stuff comes from is going to make a big difference as to how it gets translated. User submitted stuff could probably be run through the babelfish in pseudo-real time (a daemon which queues requests, uses wget or lwp-request to have them translated, and then sticks them into a database). On the other hand, professionally submitted content should probably be treated a little better than simply babelfish; hire some native speakers as translators.

The way I would do it is something like this (keep in mind that I am a Perl/C programmer specializing in Apache/mod_perl; some of the things I mention are inaccessible to PHP, like translation handlers):

• Back end daemon that takes queued requests and passes them to babelfish to be translated, then they get stuck into the database (spearate thread, running as a cron or daemon). This daemon could be fed through a web-based form, for example, for a site with user-contributed content, and the data would be put into a staging area, where the daemon would read it, translate it, and then enter it into the live database.
• Web pages would specify an initial two character language code (e.g., /en/foo/bar.html). When a page gets requested, a custom URI translation handler would strip out the initial two character name and keep that around (via r->notes) for future use. This could be done via a Perl module as a PerlTransHandler or a custom C translation handler, or, if you are/can not use perl or C, you could use mod_rewrite to splice off the initial 3 characters, strip off the leading '/', and stick the last 2 into the environment as, e.g., LANGUAGE (fetch them like you would and environment variable).
• Alternatively, if you are using user authentication, you could fetch the preferred langauge from the users profile after the Authentication stage.
• When the time comes to actually produce content, I would retrieve the langauge code from the notes table/environment and use it as part of a custom SQL statement. The database would be set up in such a way that content is broken up into as many different tables as possible, so that as much common (i.e., non langauge-specific) content could be used as possible. Using some sort of a multi-table join, I would bring the content all together before the templates are actually filled in, so that when the time comes to fill them in, you don't need to switch on the language; it's all already taken care of by the database.

Retrieving the data and putting it onto the page would be the easy part... once you have the information stored in your database in the appropriate languages, that is. Designing the database so that you have as little unnecessary redundancy as you can while still ensuring that all of your content is available in all the required languages will definitely be a challenge, but it's an architecture problem, not a programming problem.

Good luck. I, for one, would be interested in hearing how you make out and what track you decide to take.

darren

Ok, but that still doesn't explain why people don't type their query into Google or Altavista or even DejaNews before spewing it as an Ask Slashdot.

Or, for that matter, why the editors don't send the above sentence back to the submitter instead of posting the lame question.

UTFSE; Use The Freakin' Search Engines.

And, of course, Windows 2000 will include real-time disk defragging purchased from Diskeeper, which is one of the many Scientologist "front" organizations that contribute their earnings directly back to the mother cult.

Novell is heavily, though only quasi-officially, involved with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - but the Mormons, unlike the Scientologists, are not considered to be dangerous criminal organizations by several nations.

Do a search at your favorite engine for "dianetics+scientology+criminal". On Alta Vista, you'll get 114 web pages devoted to slamming Scientology and their practices. Look for German language sites and you'll probably find even more!

"Social Responsibility" implies not supporting terrorists or exclusionist religions, in my book.

--Charlie
"I think I should GAIN karma for baiting Xians"

by making "their" information easier to find and access than information "they" don't control, and adding in the cross-promotion potential available to a company that has interests in everything from movie production to chat servers, within the next few years we could easily see a world where 95% of all Web users only access 5% of everything that's potentially available online.

OK, Rob, I think you're missing a point here. People search the web. Yes, if this 95% you're talking about just want to turn on the computer like they turn on the tv, then they won't find the sites you cherish. Otherwise, if they're looking for information, there are nifty little sites like google and altavista out there.

Just thought I'd share...

No, you see: It's really as simple as 60 years ago, in WW2: When the Germans heard the words:

Certicom's ECC2k-108 Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm challenge has been broken!

Elliptical curve Certicom ECC2k-108 was interrupted separate logarithm challenge!

This, however, hasn't brought me any closer to understanding what we're discussing here. But I do know that, once the Americans learned how to decrypt the Germans, the war was won. And this is why we'll never be taken over by the machines - we're smarter than them, and we speak real German :-p

Excuse me for being offtopic. It won't happen again. Promise.

For whatever it's worth, check the contents (translated). It does say "DVD: Videos mit versteckten Botschaften" or "Video with hidden messages".

So apparently this isn't a /. hoax, at least. Of course it's hard to say if it's a c't hoax. Anyone have the actual physical magazine to verify what it really says?

Perhaps Babelfish could add L33t5p34K to their translation capabilities...

--

Why doesn't Babelfish have a pig latin to english translator?!

At any rate.. give it up already! News should be *read*, not deciphered!

Alex Pentland, academic head of the MIT Media Lab he is, and Eric S. Raymond (ESR), software evangelist and straight-shooting author of some of the Free sofware world's most influential essays he is, be there they will. If you zero dollars (or the equivalent in lire, persos, krugerands, galactic credits, ec.) can cough up and Boston on Friday (31st March) or Saturday (1st April) get to, well met at the 3rd annual Geek Pride Festival you will be. Free and brought to you by Andover.Net / VA Linux, Addision Wesley, and SwitcHouse the Festival is.

In attendance the esteemed Cmdr. Taco himself, Rob Malda he is, and Christopher Locke and David Weinberger, authors of The ClueTrain Manifesto they are, will be. The assembled throngs listen to them address, and questions ask. Food, chair massages, Quake II competition for $500 cash prize it is, support from the Boston Linux Users Group an install fest with, and booths groups like Perl Mongers, the Free Software Foundation, and more representing they are, in addition to speakers there will be.

Be there Roblimo will. The street party is thrown for his and his lovely wife Debbie's wedding anniversay believes he, and enjoy it he will. Be there Jon Katz may as well. The first person to about his dog and the manhole ask Katz and to hemos transmit a recording of his reaction win an as-yet-undertermined fabulous prize he will. For April Fool's make it to Boston. Do not make it and experience vicariously the gathering via downloadable video and audio -- for the same price as the festival less the cost of getting there, available it is. There is no try to make it.

Someone would really have to go through a lot of work to masquarade as Matthew for a year before he writes cphack, unnoticed, in order for him to pretend to be him on Slashdot.

Whoa ... wait this isn't possible ... how in the world could netpliance do this? Ahhh yes the Internet service ... take a $5 a month internet service and charge $20 for it ... within a year the I-Openers would reap in millions of dollars ... until some geek decided he wanted to play inside his. If they were going to have such a cow why didn't they just lease the boxes? ...

As for canceling the Service or getting a free service like NetZero, FreeI, TheSimpsons, Lycos, Altavista, or BlueLight you are forced into this horrid agreement. Not to mention what if you own a cable modem and want to just network the box into the home lan. Can't do that.

I actually can see the article in maximum PC's "Watchdog" right now ... Netpliance will soon be the enemy that once stood in the place of WebTv ... BTW why has no one hacked one of those yet?

--

The ruling Social Democratic Party is against it, the co-ruling Greens of course too. It's just a proposal from record industry representatives.

Link in German
Babelfish translation

It wouldn't work and they know that. In Germany everybody remembers the XS4all case that lead to the world-wide mirroring of the far-left texts they wanted to block.

From this article:
In a statement released by his secretary, the best-selling author of more than 30 books said he was "very excited at the possibility of a new market opening up.'' He added, "and as a dedicated and long-term Mac user, I am surprised and a little unhappy at how hard it is for Mac users to access the story but thank God for the Palm Pilot which is making it accessible.'' Eisemann said Macintosh users were not able to access the story Tuesday but "They're going to fix that as soon as they can.''

It's too bad we don't have a 'CEO' or 'President' to make official Linux statements about situations like this. I say we have a SlashDot election, and make one person the 'SpokesPerson'...

"Don't try to confuse the issue with half truths and gorilla dust."
Bill McNeal (Phil Hartman)

Sorry, couldn't resist the troll...
According to babelfish, the English word hand translates to mano in Italian, and hand in German.
The English word man translates to uomo in Italian and mann in German.
Clearly the words man and hand are of Germanic origin. But the Latin stem man means hand.
THIS IS THE SOURCE OF THE CONFUSION

Go ahead and seach on altivista for "India programming". You get tons of links and good resources for farming out programming work.

Of course, don't search just slashdot for articles like this. Also search the archives of papers that have been presented at various USENIX/SAGE conferences (in particular, LISA), and other USENIX publications, starting at http://www.usenix.org/publicat ions/publications.html.

You will also want to use index sites such as Yahoo! and Excite, as well as search engines like Google, Altavista, and Hotbot, not to mention community directory projects such as dmoz Open Directory.

That's just a sampling of the sorts of research that you should START with. Of course, to do this right, you'll need to do much, much more.
--
Brad Knowles

The Story is Here

She's probably never had a hot bowl of them poured down her pants. Thank you.

Troll487

After whacking the good fish upside the head, I think I've made some more sense of this.
It looks like hamburg.de is a pre-existing portal (I think run by the city - the translation is really bad) and the city has partnered with a private company to actually run it. As part of the deal, the city is going to be putting a lot of its administative functions on the site. Also, it looks like they're trying to get local businesses to move into e-commerce through this thing.
Some more poking around got me to this, which indicates that an EU commission called Telecities is responsible in part for this. Created in 1993, its goal has been to help Europe become part of the "Information Society" - and it boasts a pretty impressive set of member cities. Interestingly, its sister projects are Car Free Cities and something called POLIS, which looks to be creating new regional transportion systems.

The Story is Here
She's probably never had them poured down her pants. Thank you.

Troll487

when i searched for "cock monster" (don't ask why) at altavista, I got this banner which leads to this site.

I was looking for a cookie monster mis-spelling and got a gay pr0n ad from doubleclick. hmmmm.

oh, btw: I'm a minor, so can my parents' lawyers assure that I can afford Stanford and a whole lot more now because I was exposed to pr0n?

-----

FWIW:

Altavista.com, Advanced search, "chocolate chip cookie" (with quotes) in the Boolean Query field, page 2, hit #20 yields soft porn (www.pinupmall.com/Julie.Html) as of Monday 7pm PST. For the record, I am still wholly supportive of the free speech cause; the above is solely an interesting experiment.

As a fellow Michigan resident, I sympathize with what is happening in Holland, which seems to be one of the most hardcore (forgive the wordplay) conservative towns in this mostly Republican state. I am a liberal socialist myself, and I am very disturbed by what is happening in many Michigan public institutions.

My school district, the Saginaw Public Schools, uses a Bess blocking server (you can find Bess' numerous failings catalouged at Censorware). Not only does the NT-based server have about 20% downtime, it also severely slows our shared T1 down. Ordinary web browsing is often barely usable due to overblocking (I wonder what's obscene about kernel.org?), and a quick look at IE3's history (yes, you read that right, the district doesn't allow "unauthorized" software installations) shows that several URLs including XXX are being frequently accessed by some students. Despite numerous complaints on behalf of staff and students, the service still blocks many educational resources. I, for example, can't use babelfish on my Spanish homework (OK, so I workaround that by going to altavista.co.uk, but that's not exactly something students district-wide have thought of.

Worse yet, my local library, where my mother is employed, is considering installing blocking software. As an unpaid computer maintenance volunteer, I have some say on the machines. I've got Netscape on them, but the network is still 100% NT4-based (I hate buearacracy). Does it matter that erotica and graphic violence are included in the pages of the books prominently displayed on the "New Books" shelf? Apparantly not, as there are rumors of state legislation promoting the use of blocking software in Libraries and Schools pending.

I call on other Michiganders out there (particularly those of you who are of voting age ;)) to write your representatives in Lansing and encourage them to do just the opposite: Ban censorship in public libraries and schools! Viva libertad!

go to altavista.com and search for "+cookie +grandma" and go to the third page, link number 27

The link is to:Grandma's Free Cookie Jar-free sex pics /thumbnails of sexy mature senior women

Unfortunetly, there's no pictures on the first page. You never know, she might have clicked 'hot pics' thinking they were pictures of hot cookies...

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