Slashdot Mirror

Once books are digitized and OCR'd they need to be proofread by humans. The people who can afford this machine might do it another way but Project Gutenberg has volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders.

There was a Slashdot Article about it last year but there have been a lot of changes since then (many due to Slashdotters). If you haven't seen the project in a while you should check it out.

Yeah sure, the articles is why people buy these magazines. But really, this would be cool for Project Gutenberg, or more specifically those scanning books for the Distributed Proofreaders.

I had a rant about this in 1998 on my homepage... It's preserved in all it's glory on the Internet Archive.

http://web.archive.org/web/19980419075203/nuts.ml. org/comment.html

Slashdot has an interview with security legend Fyodor, admin of the famed insecure.org and author of the world's cheapest port scanner, nmap.

The best part of this interview is that Slashdot does not often interview criminals. Many Slashdot readers know that Fyodor used his tool to illegally attack a college student in 2002, for his personal amusement but also to the benefit of Slashdot's admins. For those that don't know the story, I will present a brief summary.

*Those individuals interested in independently verifying the facts presented in this article should skip to the "Verification" section near the end.

Sdem had created a hoax account entitled electricmonk, and used it to post this comment pronouncing that we was actually a cute Linux booth babe. "electricmonk" left an email at Yahoo and encouraged Slashdot readers to get in touch.

Fyodor proceeded to do so, boasting of his previous exploits with women he'd met online. He was even helpful enough to attach a picture.

This is where the story turns ugly. Sdem responded with a truthful email, in which he advised Fyodor that the whole thing was a hoax. After that, sdem posted a log of his exploits to sid=20721 (trolltalk), mentioning that he had tricked Fyodor and referring to many of the biters as "wankers". This apparently really set Fyodor off, and he began to plot criminal revenge.

First, Fyodor dug through insecure.org's referrer logs to find what IP address had requested the picture of Fyodor & his paramour. Using this information (and the logged User-Agent), Fyodor knew from the get-go Sdem's IP address and O/S. From this point, he launched nmap against Sdem's box (he didn't have the money for a more effective port scanner) and was greeted with the holy grail of sorts for BlackHats: an open X windows server on port 6000.

Sdem had been running an X-windows server for Windows on his Win2k box. Fyodor was able to bypass the authentication on the X-windows server and used the X-windows server to take complete screen captures of Sdem's machine whilst sniffing and recording keystrokes.

Fyodor proceeded to take hours worth of screen captures, including information on a "secret troll irc server" that sdem was using. Fyodor wrote a detailed writeup of what he observed, including an irc robot used on the server to detect new Slashdot stories for the purpose of early posting. Fyodor also mined and posted as much information about Sdem as he could find, including his real name and contact information. Jamie McCarthy used this illegally obtained information shortly after it was posted to log on to the irc server, monitor the bot, and modify Slashdot in order to break the story monitor.

Fyodor even submitted his "troll hunting" story to Slashdot, though it was rejected.

After he was done hacking Sdem's computer, Fyodor posted his screen captures and a log of his breakin to www.insecure.org/tmp/trolls. The content was removed 24 hours later. He went on to boast in sid=20721 about his "troll hunting finale". While sid 20721 is regularly cleaned, a cache of Fyodor's boasting about his illegal break-in is available here. Very interesting reading.

So, while Fyodor's interview is no doubt very interesting, I think that, as an accomplished (and due to the lack of prosecution very successful) criminal, the nature of questions given to Fyodor in the interview don't do justice to the type of expertise this man

Slashdot has an interview with security legend Fyodor, admin of the famed insecure.org and author of the world's cheapest port scanner, nmap.

The best part of this interview is that Slashdot does not often interview criminals. Many Slashdot readers know that Fyodor used his tool to illegally attack a college student in 2002, for his personal amusement but also to the benefit of Slashdot's admins. For those that don't know the story, I will present a brief summary.

*Those individuals interested in independently verifying the facts presented in this article should skip to the "Verification" section near the end.

Sdem had created a hoax account entitled electricmonk, and used it to post this comment pronouncing that we was actually a cute Linux booth babe. "electricmonk" left an email at Yahoo and encouraged Slashdot readers to get in touch.

Fyodor proceeded to do so, boasting of his previous exploits with women he'd met online. He was even helpful enough to attach a picture.

This is where the story turns ugly. Sdem responded with a truthful email, in which he advised Fyodor that the whole thing was a hoax. After that, sdem posted a log of his exploits to sid=20721 (trolltalk), mentioning that he had tricked Fyodor and referring to many of the biters as "wankers". This apparently really set Fyodor off, and he began to plot criminal revenge.

First, Fyodor dug through insecure.org's referrer logs to find what IP address had requested the picture of Fyodor & his paramour. Using this information (and the logged User-Agent), Fyodor knew from the get-go Sdem's IP address and O/S. From this point, he launched nmap against Sdem's box (he didn't have the money for a more effective port scanner) and was greeted with the holy grail of sorts for BlackHats: an open X windows server on port 6000.

Sdem had been running an X-windows server for Windows on his Win2k box. Fyodor was able to bypass the authentication on the X-windows server and used the X-windows server to take complete screen captures of Sdem's machine whilst sniffing and recording keystrokes.

Fyodor proceeded to take hours worth of screen captures, including information on a "secret troll irc server" that sdem was using. Fyodor wrote a detailed writeup of what he observed, including an irc robot used on the server to detect new Slashdot stories for the purpose of early posting. Fyodor also mined and posted as much information about Sdem as he could find, including his real name and contact information. Jamie McCarthy used this illegally obtained information shortly after it was posted to log on to the irc server, monitor the bot, and modify Slashdot in order to break the story monitor.

Fyodor even submitted his "troll hunting" story to Slashdot, though it was rejected.

After he was done hacking Sdem's computer, Fyodor posted his screen captures and a log of his breakin to www.insecure.org/tmp/trolls. The content was removed 24 hours later. He went on to boast in sid=20721 about his "troll hunting finale". While sid 20721 is regularly cleaned, a cache of Fyodor's boasting about his illegal break-in is available here. Very interesting reading.

So, while Fyodor's interview is no doubt very interesting, I think that, as an accomplished (and due to the lack of prosecution very successful) criminal, the nature of questions given to Fyodor in the interview don't do justice to the type of expertise this man

You must have forgotten about Transmeta in it's early days.

What a sexy logo they have! The girl just needs a minor nose surgery and she's done. That logo is enough for downloading the ISO (once the site stops beins slashdotted.. I hope they are allowing to download the ISO with BitTorrent).

Athene
MS Pict
Omega Pict

Athene
MS Pict
Omega Pict

Athene
MS Pict
Omega Pict

AmigaOS , WinTel, and More Screenshots, all thanks to The Internet Archive

Continuing on a slightly more serious note, the only entity that is greatly served by slowing Linux's adoptation into the business world is, indeed, Microsoft. Are there any financial ties between Microsoft and SCO? I find it hard to believe that SCO is self-destructing just for the hell of it. I have not much trouble imagining Microsoft going through the ol' FUD routine.

I do hope that Microsoft is not behind this at all because it would be nice to see SCO run out of cash trying to fight this (and that's one problem they wouldn't need to worry about if they were a Microsoft puppet). It does seem like an unlikely conspiracy theory to me, but who knows.

Go to Distributed Proofreaders and help put some public domain books online!

I don't know why people assume that the projects will be Star Wars related. ILM has created many independent shorts (more or less the wayPixar started) over the years. There was Synchonicity at SIGGRAPH 2000, and Work in Progress and The Moving Pyramid at SIGGRAPH 2001. The artists there work from time to time in their own little projects, as shown in the ILMajan session at SIGGRAPH 96. Heck, in the article you can se that they were working on the ill-fated Frankenstein and tried to do Curious George.

You can see a couple of those shorts here:

Work in Progress
How to Make Hollywood Cheese
Work in Progress
The Moving Pyramid

I don't know why people assume that the projects will be Star Wars related. ILM has created many independent shorts (more or less the wayPixar started) over the years. There was Synchonicity at SIGGRAPH 2000, and Work in Progress and The Moving Pyramid at SIGGRAPH 2001. The artists there work from time to time in their own little projects, as shown in the ILMajan session at SIGGRAPH 96. Heck, in the article you can se that they were working on the ill-fated Frankenstein and tried to do Curious George.

You can see a couple of those shorts here:

Work in Progress
How to Make Hollywood Cheese
Work in Progress
The Moving Pyramid

Courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine, at:

http://web.archive.org/web/19991012061147/sock-mon key.com/y2k.html

What is the Y2K problem? Well, It's a metaphorical timebomb pre-programmed into hundreds of millions of the world's computer chips. Years ago, to conserve memory space, programmers used two numbers to record the year. For example, 87 would mean 1987. The problem is that on January 1, 2000, computers that still use a two-number year will interpret the 00 to mean the year 1900. This will cause most of the computers in the world to either shut down or generate incorrect data.

Utter chaos is what would occur if our information-dependent society lost its computers. There would be hot air balloons floating out of the storm drains, peanut butter all over the roads, Abraham Lincoln doing calisthenics on your roof, mannequins rummaging through your CD collection....quite simply, an entire culture gone higgledypiggledy.

The government's solution has been to procrastinate for ten years and then in 1999, they decided to have a few programmers begin fixing the program code. Unfortunately, it would require all the programmers in the world to work 24 hours a day for five years to rewrite all the code. And we haven't that kind of time.

But don't panic! In dire times like these, most people would run for the hills like a yak in drag. But not me. Using my superior education, a PHD in Stuffed Animal Psychology from Austin Community College, I have devised a plan that, if implemented, could avert this horrible disaster.
My solution has its roots in the old adage that says that a million monkeys working at a million typewriters would eventually write a Shakespearean play. It is my hypothesis that if a hundred million sock monkeys worked on a hundred million computers, all the faulty code could be re-written before the onset of Y2K.

I have already tested my hypothesis at a small scale. On November 11, 1998, I brought five sock monkeys to the eighth floor of the Trensi Computing building. I then set each monkey in front of a computer and waited for seven hours.

The results were limited, but I would certainly not call them negative. Three of the monkeys; Bruce, Red, and Andy sat motionless in front of their computer screens for the entire seven hours as if they were inanimate. Pete, the small monkey, was lost and turned up three days later in the coffee cup of a Trensi employee. And the remaining monkey, Mr. Bowels, went crazy from staring at his computer screen and attacked my colleague. My colleague, the poor delusional fool, claims that he was not attacked and that I simply threw the monkey at him out of boredom, but that's a lie.

Some people might see my experiment as a failure, but I am still highly optimistic. I feel the experiment did not produce the expected results because of my limited number of test subjects. Surely it would work if millions of sock monkeys were involved, but a man of my meager means could never afford that many monkeys.

Therefore, I am making a formal plea to the government to bankroll my project. I will need no more than eight billion dollars, and maybe a few female androids if NASA's got any lying around. That should be enough funding for me to effectively save our society. But time is running out, so please lobby your senator or congressman to support my solution before it's too late.

Why people don't check archive.org on a story as OLD as this, I don't know. here it is.

here's archive.org's mirror:

http://web.archive.org/web/20020914113646/http://o hmslaw.com/robot.htm

These guys have already started (slashdot coverage) .

What's otherwise a fairly interesting piece of hardware has no relation to the RIAA, so it's given one to make it more interesting.

I've been bootlegging shows with something known as a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) deck for years. I just moved to something known in taper circles as a "laptop with a S/PDIF card in it". These devices, on the surface, seem quite tame at first, as well.

When I saw this thing, I knew my illegal concert bootleg-creating days could continue on!

You are clearly deluded if you think evil music pirates such as myself won't take full advantage of this device. Expect to see me stealing all sorts of live concerts with this thing in a couple of years, and sharing them with everyone I know!

- A.P.

Now we are told once more that the best cure against spam should be to reinvent something to replace the tried-and-true eMail system of decade-old reliability, just because some sociopaths apparently cannot learn to behave without getting a spanking (or jail time) and U.S. privacy laws are still too weak to stop the spam.

And after all the years that spam has plagued the networks, that's quite a poor achievement for a nation that managed to outlaw junk faxes, and had confirmation from the courts that regulating advertising does pass constitutional muster perfectly well:

"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or to view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit... We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has the right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another... We repeat, the right of a mailer stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."
Supreme Court
Rowan v. U.S. Post Office
397 U.S. 728

This is not about "lawmakers never knowing enough about the Internet to regulate any aspect of it in a meaningful way", it's about doing something to prevent imposing compulsory changes to technology that keep fighting the symptoms rather than the cause.
Congress should get over such shameful cowardice and make the simple law that's needed and proven to work.

There is no need to re-engineer the Internet.
There is no justification for widespread surveillance and data retention under the poor excuse of trying to track down spammers.
There is no risk of banning mailing lists or commercial eMail.
There is no doubt what the sociopathic behavior is.

All that is needed is mandatory opt-in for unsolicited bulk eMail (encompassing all kinds of electronic messaging).

And yet some self-proclaimed "experts on electronic advertising" (whose only merit probably is that they know how to spam because they've done it a trillion times at everyone else's expense) keep pretending that opt-in wasn't legal, or feasible, or desirable.

Opt-in works, and it does not hurt anyone but the spammers.

Europe has adopted it, Australia is adopting it (how far behind do you want the U.S. to be, are we to wait for China to outlaw spam before the U.S. will?!), but most importantly the USA have successfully adopted it themselves against junk faxes.

There's probably something wrong in Washington D.C., and the news media in general, when the most insightful newspaper article on the issue comes from USA Today.
Be sure to fax or eMail it to your congress(wo)man though.
Don't spam them, but do attach some selected masterpieces of spam if you think they need an idea of what ends up in the inbox of their constituents, and of their children, 9 billion times, every single day.

survive.html If you plan to go, this is worth reading.

That idea has been considered.

Proof, courtesy of Old Man Murray: http://web.archive.org/web/20010417025123/www.oldm anmurray.com/features/doa/page1.shtml

Playing around on the wayback machine shows that their own law firm was once using something very similar to what this patent describes..

From the current law firm site (linked in the article):
MuseumTour.com's web site "has links on the left side that go to other web pages within the site but does not lose the left side navigation links."

Playing around on the wayback machine shows that their own law firm was once using something very similar to what this patent describes..

From the current law firm site (linked in the article):
MuseumTour.com's web site "has links on the left side that go to other web pages within the site but does not lose the left side navigation links."

Playing around on the wayback machine shows that their own law firm was once using something very similar to what this patent describes..

From the current law firm site (linked in the article):
MuseumTour.com's web site "has links on the left side that go to other web pages within the site but does not lose the left side navigation links."

yeah, i just figured that out; google cache gets around the filtering, thus it has been blocked as a loop hole.

internet way-back machine (archive.org) is not listed at all.

For those that want to read the article but can't due to the slashdotting...

Darth Vader It's slow, but works,
Link brought to you by archive.org
Then here's the text only version...

About Darth Vader As Washington National Cathedral approached completion, the west towers rose towards the sky, striking toward heaven. During the building a startling idea was hatched: hold a competition for children to design decorative sculpture for the Cathedral.

Darth Vader Drawing (img.)
Word of the competition was spread nationwide through National Geographic World Magazine. The third-place winner was Christopher Rader, with his drawing of that fearful villain, Darth Vader. The fierce head was sculpted by Jay Hall Carpenter, carved by Patrick J. Plunkett and placed high upon the northwest tower of the Cathedral...

Newspaper Clipping (img.)

Darth Vader Location (img.)

To Find Darth Vader you have to leave the building through the ramp entrance. This is located at the northwest corner of the nave, through the double wooden doors of Lincoln Bay. Go down the ramp, and step into the parking lot. Then, turn around and look back up at the tower closest to you. He is almost impossible to see without the assistance of binoculars.

Way way way up, almost at the top of the tower is a gablet, or small peaked roof, located between the two huge louvered arches. At the bottom of each slope of this gablet is a carved grotesque. Darth Vader is on the north, or right-hand, side. There is a carved skull situated on a gablet much closer to the ground which many people often mistake for Darth Vader. From this skull, Darth Vader is up and to the left.

For those that want to read the article but can't due to the slashdotting...

Darth Vader It's slow, but works,
Link brought to you by archive.org
Then here's the text only version...

About Darth Vader As Washington National Cathedral approached completion, the west towers rose towards the sky, striking toward heaven. During the building a startling idea was hatched: hold a competition for children to design decorative sculpture for the Cathedral.

Darth Vader Drawing (img.)
Word of the competition was spread nationwide through National Geographic World Magazine. The third-place winner was Christopher Rader, with his drawing of that fearful villain, Darth Vader. The fierce head was sculpted by Jay Hall Carpenter, carved by Patrick J. Plunkett and placed high upon the northwest tower of the Cathedral...

Newspaper Clipping (img.)

Darth Vader Location (img.)

To Find Darth Vader you have to leave the building through the ramp entrance. This is located at the northwest corner of the nave, through the double wooden doors of Lincoln Bay. Go down the ramp, and step into the parking lot. Then, turn around and look back up at the tower closest to you. He is almost impossible to see without the assistance of binoculars.

Way way way up, almost at the top of the tower is a gablet, or small peaked roof, located between the two huge louvered arches. At the bottom of each slope of this gablet is a carved grotesque. Darth Vader is on the north, or right-hand, side. There is a carved skull situated on a gablet much closer to the ground which many people often mistake for Darth Vader. From this skull, Darth Vader is up and to the left.

Slashdot -- if it's not a dupe, it's old, or ripped from The Register. Or all three.

When in doubt, use The Internet archive. It works wonders, and it archives images (unlike Google Cache).

Darth Vader at National Cathedral Mirror.

When in doubt, use The Internet archive. It works wonders, and it archives images (unlike Google Cache).

Darth Vader at National Cathedral Mirror.

Available here . Although it might be a bit old. Doesn't have an image of the actual gargoyle, just an image of Darth Vader's head and an idea on where it would go on the Cathedral.

Been there, done that. QuantumBill seems to be defunct. The site is gone, and so is "qlshop.com". (They're still in archive.org.) Calling their answering machine hasn't yielded much. Quantum Communications is a valid New York corporation, but their address for process of service is a P.O. box. (That's not a dead end, but it takes some time to trace.) I haven't been able to find a "Richard Demley" in Islandia, NY. "80 Halsey St." shows as a vacant lot in Earthviewer. So the obvious searches didn't yield a definitive result.

Just chop out the datetime string, like so.

but I say that the Strawberry Shortcake material was the primary subject of the material

Gabe Newell disagrees with you on that point (he says so in the text he wrote to accompany the image). I'd expect the same from a judge or juror- upon learning the comic was written for a professional videogames website, they will agree that the primary subject was the one most pertinent to videogames (that is, a famous game designer, rather than a 15-year old pink doll)

Did he wake up in the morning and decide "I think I'll write about a toy I saw once in elementary school?" Of course not- he read an annoucement of "American McGee's Oz" and pondered "What other innocent, girlish fantasy-land could he plunder next?"

More accurately, the comic is making a statement how American McGee would (unintentionally) make a parody of Strawberry Shortcake if he were allowed to convert it to a videogame.

Exactly. That's the gripping hand. "making a statement how American McGee" tells us that the critical commentary is directed towards McGee primarily, not Strawberry Shortcake. You say they allude to a parody of SShortcake, suggesting that McGee would make one, but even if that's so, they aren't themselves parodying SShortcake.

I like it, but then I've been following Penny Arcade for years.

It's a good joke- somewhat esoteric, so a reader will feel satisfied if he understood it without hints. (and people who needed hints from the text to remember who AMG or SS were probably wouldn't get the joke even with help)

I agree that the material you are infringing should be the subject (or one of the subjects) of the parody

I don't agree with that, actually. Yes, that is the law. But I don't believe it should be.

I like it, but then I've been following Penny Arcade for years.

It's lasted better than Nickel Arcade, that's for sure.

Yes. Microsoft has acknowledged the authenticity of these documents. Halloween I, II, III and VII are real; IV, V and VI are satire/commentary consequent on
various Microsoft statements.

Since forever? It even validates!

...and they could call it 1-800-THEY-ALREADY-DO-THAT...

(AFAIK they don't, but the Dell ad just popped into my head.. :-)

The Distributed Proofreaders (see http://texts01.archive.org/dp) is an online "feeder project" for PG.

That project doesn't currently have a capability for people to participate by reading books aloud ... and even so, the "page-a-day" concept doesn't work if you have 30 people each read a few pages here and there in a book. People like to have the continuity of a single voice.

But maybe you could collaborate with them on a new component for PG...

As memory gets cheaper and cheaper, and as spiders get better and more intrusive, that's also changing as well. For instance, I still have a seven-year old version of my resume still floating around on the Way Back Machine. Don't ask me why it's there, I don't know. It was recorded through my personal web page and at the time, it didn't even seem like people were reading my web page.

These days, some robots are even caching content purposefully labeled not to be spidered. Some others are recording content dynamically generated. And some others still are recording privately intented content (emails and password protected web pages).

So for all we know, the content you speak of could still be floating around somewhere.

Proofreading Nazi here -- that should be "research" in the department heading, right?


<<<< This Service brought to you by Distributed Proofreaders >>>>

Just for a neighborhood in Sweden, but they had 100 Mb/sec fiber to the houses. A bit smaller than an entire town, but the basic idea is there. (Unfortunatley the page linked in the story isn't there, but here is the link through the Wayback Machine.

Just for a neighborhood in Sweden, but they had 100 Mb/sec fiber to the houses. A bit smaller than an entire town, but the basic idea is there. (Unfortunatley the page linked in the story isn't there, but here is the link through the Wayback Machine.

What was that about MS writing software for Linux? Try this. Anyway, I thought it was Windows F(uck the) U(ser). And their anti-piracy measures don't work. I'm downloading FP and Publisher XP now, and I've cracked Office XP Trial!

It also starts with the following bit:

Living steel is the product of a tradional school of European swordsmithing and is a trademark of Angel Sword. (emphasis mine)

The blurb on magic comes after a number of paragraphs on the history, politics and science of swordmaking. It's a short, almost throwaway bit, and it's really not the focus of the page. If that's all that they have about magic on their website, then I'd say that ridiculing them over it is a red herring.

Magic

Living Steel also gathers, focuses and transmits a low frequency electromagnetic energy similar to that which our bodies run on, similar perhaps to the way in which a ruby focuses a laser. This is a measurable phenomenon that can also be felt by the human body. In ancient times there was no explanation for this other than magic. It is still magic today.

For the curious, here is a link to the "Living Steel" section of the angelsword.com site which no longer appears to be there, courtesy of archive.org.
Living Steel

That isn't a mirror ... the real mirror is available at archive.org (here).