Slashdot Mirror

The man is simply a kook. There's nothing else that needs to be said. I don't think Salon really needed to give him even a hint of legitimacy by doing a story about him, and I think Slashdot could have done a lot better than featuring the story.

Frankly, I'm surprised there hasn't been any Slashdot posting of another "article" featured on Salon's tech page: bOing bOing co-editor Cory Doctorow's 0wnz0red short story. It's a wonderful little gem in kind of a Stephensonian vein, sprinkled with the kind of terms and jargon that a Slashdot code-head could appreciate. Seems like it'd be a much better use of time than checking out Mr. Anti-Google.

Mark Frauenfelder is not Greg Proops! At least I don't think he is.

They seem like normal people to me. Mark Frauenfelder is a co-founder of the 'zine Boing Boing and a former Wired guy.

Who would you like to see? Who would be less of "retard"? You? What, you're more "normal" looking/acting than the people in those commercials?

Or is it that you'd rather have some model appear in the commercial, someone who's just paid to say the spew, but really doesn't know jack about the product? Or like some models, doesn't know a thing about computers at all.

http://boingboing.net/2002_07_01_archive.html#8523 7334

Some of us are tooking this seriously.

Cory Doctorow was talking about the Journalism 3.0 talk at the Emerging Technologies conference sometime back, and mentioned something insanely significant:

Eventually, when a major event happens, the first imagery of it won't be from government-released photos or even freelance photographers. It'll be anyone in the area with their cell phones, sending images of the disaster/situation off to their friends. Dozens upon dozens of individual, low quality but zero-hour latency images, sent over data networks to remote archives.

That's the future of journalism -- or at least part of it.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky, CISSP
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

There were 25 hours elapsed between when the boingboing post was made and when the first slashdot story appeared. And since I don't have any overall statistics, I may have to stop arguing this one.

(although there were a lot of blogs that picked this up before Slashdot did.)

Actually, I saw a far more hubaloo on the blogs than I did on Slashdot. And I'd hazard a guess that there were many more links (or readers, if you lean that way) to the original BoingBoing post than there were to the Slashdot story.

NPR claims to be reconsidering its link policy, and in the meantime, it's posted more specious rationalization. Brutally, brutally stupid.

The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism. We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio. We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause. This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.

However, NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement. We are working on a solution that we believe will better match the expectations of the Web community with the interests of NPR. We will post revisions soon at www.npr.org.

Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. If you would like to link to NPR from your Web site, please fill out the link permission request form.

• The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism.

  This policy does not serve this commitment. The end-product of independent, noncommercial journalism is public discourse, which on the Web takes the form of links. If you're committed to journalism, you must endorse linking.

• We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio.

  Was this infringement? If so, why didn't you seek redress in the courts? It's my opinion that someone who constructs a directory -- commerical or non-commercial -- of references to locations on the web no more infringes than someone who produces a tourist map to a city that marks the location of major attractions.

• We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause.

  You are lying. There is no way that one could link to a stream of a fair and impartial newscast (links to streams must be to the whole stream, from beginning to end, remember) such that it can't be distinguished from advocacy or opinion. If there were NPR stories that were indistinguishable from advocacy, this indicates that the NPR stories were not impartial to begin with.

• This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.

  No other journalistic organization of note has a parallel policy (NPR's ombudsman's defamatory fabrications about CBC and BBC notwithstanding). The idea that linking must not be permitted because it would compromise the appearance or fact of ethics is a fantasy concocted by NPR's representatives.

• NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement.

  How grand of you. All linking on the web is not infringement. The recititation of public facts -- this document exists at this location -- is never an infringment. Promulgating this myth is purely wrong, especially from a journalistic organization that prides itself on its ability to seek out and deliver the truth.

• Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.

  In the words of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, "Of course, it isn't 'prohibited.' Or rather, it's 'prohibited' with exactly the same legal force as I have when I say 'False legal claims designed to intimidate the public are hereby prohibited. Signed, Me.' This is the web. If you put a public document onto it, it's linkable. If you don't want to be linked to, use some other means of putting your information online."

"The great irony, of course, is that Disney is also using the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group to make it illegal to develop open source digital video applications."

Also, live discussion on #infoanarchy on irc.openprojects.net

Nope. *Parody* (using a song's form to mock it's creator) is fair use in the US, in the sense that you don't need permission. Weird Al has to obtain the rights for any of his songs that don't specifically target their creators (e.g. "Eat It" isn't about Michael Jackson, so he has to pay).

The EFF's Cory Doctorow discusses fair use and parody in more detail here.

• When Napster was getting off the ground, the labels pooh-poohed it, basically taking the position that anything that got built by average users, ripping their own MP3s, adding their own metadata, serving off their own PCs with their own network connections would suck. Only a centralized system could deliver "High Quality Content," because every file on the network would be vetted and served by a Responsible Grownup from the labels.

• The new, BMG-owned Napster was very much a Responsible Grownup proposition. Responsible Grownups would centralize the files, take them out of that greasy-kids-stuff MP3 format and put them in a Responsible Grownup format with "rights management" that would curtail your ability to format-shift, time-shift and repurpose the music you downloaded. The system really looked like it was going to brutally suck.

  So I can't really feel too sad for poor old dead Napster. Death was the best it could hope for now. Dead, its name can remain synonymous with revolutions; had it lived, its name would have been synonymous with crap.

(No credible source indicates any US support of Bin Laden, for example.)
False, they've found back in Afghanistan of CIA-produced schools manual clearly teaching how to be a good muslim terrorist again evil sovietic oppression. There was a link about that on boingboing month ago.

...or the content has gotten stupid. Ads and spam don't bother me at all. The problem is the content- there isn't any. For awhile, the best and timliest content was on the web. Now it's been displaced by meaningless advertorial drivel.

blah, blah, blah. There is a ton of interesting content, and more being produced all the time. Enough to support an entire web genre of link-centric blogs like this one and that one.

You don't know of enough tech sites to claim that "almost every tech site" banded together on something. No one does.

I found a link to this site maybe a week ago through bOING bOING and first hit a "this site has used up its bandwidth" message, so when I did get through I optimised their images and at the same time gave them a thumbnail image page to replace the text list (see the wayback pages). Great to see they used it!

This was on boingboing Monday. You all seem to be slow with the news lately. What's up with that?

Geez, someone needs to tell these guys about blogs. A few quick trips to Memepool and BoingBoing should be enough to convince anyone that the web is still a pretty eclectic and loony place to be.

WMS stopped making pinball machines last year. WMS owns Bally, Williams, and Midway. No WMS means, effectively, no pinball industry.

I found that link at bOING bOING, if you're interested.