Slashdot Mirror

oscarcar writes "Dan Gillmor is reporting on the White House website's use of its robots.txt file to disable search engines from crawling certain material. Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of Iraq, possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere."

Clive Thompson writes "All over the net, there are little shockwave games inspired by political events -- from the WTO-style New York Defender to War on Terrorism to even Downing Street Fighter (where British politicians beat each other senseless, Street-Fighter-Style). Sure, like most Shockwave-generated stuff, they may suck as games. But that's missing the point. What's happening here is nothing less than the emergence of the online video game as a form of social comment -- something you dash off in a couple of hours to make a sardonic political point about something. It's a new notepad for communication. Or at least, that's what I argued in this piece in Slate today. In addition to the craven self-promotion of sending it in to Slashdot, I'm interested in hearing what everyone thinks of this issue. After all, courts have recently been arguing that video games cannot be protected speech; these games make it patently obvious that this view is insane." The columnist missed a better example of the genre - the EFF's game of digital restrictions management.

Pomeranian writes "Sci fi readers often deplore book bestseller lists -- because review editors actively ignore many sci-fi sales, since they don't consider that stuff "popular", even though sci-fi titles often sell in far greater numbers than "serious" highbrow lit. But this all might change soon, with the launch of Bookscan: New technology that tracks actual sales at the cash register with greater precision than ever before. When similar technology launched in the music industry ten years ago, it proved the popularity of "new country" and hip-hop overnight. This story in the Washington Post wonders: Will Bookscan do the same thing to sci-fi? NOTE: this is a *shameless* self-aggrandizing plug, because I wrote the Washington Post story! But I figured it'd be of particular interest to Slashdot readers" CD: While I'd love to see lists that are more reflective of reality, I don't think that a pure unadulterated list is in the interest of the reading public. When I worked at Waldenbooks many moons ago, we would commonly receive copies of one book, Dianetics, from the publisher, with our (And our competitors) sales stickers already on them. While this was an extreme case, it does serve as a cautionary tale about the lengths some will go to manipulate the numbers.

shawk writes "Vita Nuova today announced that it has obtained the exclusive, worldwide rights to the Inferno Operating System from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs and that it is to publish the Inferno source code under inexpensive, commercial licence terms. Vita Nuova has also announced that Lucent Technologies and a UK investor have invested equity capital into Vita Nuova to develop and market Inferno. Personal Inferno Subscriptions cost $300 with a 50% discount for academics and students. Corporate subscriptions cost from $1000 for five developers. You can order your Inferno boxed set including CD, programmer's manual and papers today. Full details can be found at the Vita Nuova."

XLawyer writes "In an article about Defcon, a reporter from the New York Times tried reasonably hard to explain and observe the difference between hackers, who like to figure out how things work, and crackers, who like to get into other people's things and sometimes stop them from working. An interesting item in the article shows how crackers make reporters' jobs harder by calling themselves "hackers." " The article itself is well written, and lucid with some telling interviews; (NYT requires free login, BTW) .

damian sent us A Link to CNN where you can read that yes indeed, MS can now ship Win98 with their browser.