Slashdot Mirror

How very magnanimous. Amazing Quantum Man writes "ZDNet reports that Timothy Koogle and Yahoo were acquitted of condoning war crimes by selling Nazi memorabilia. The article is rather sketchy, so that's all I have. Here are some background articles from Slashdot history."

He doesn't sign anything, just sprinkles on some invisible nanobots. shawn writes "The Penguin Group's site has a schedule of upcoming book signing events for Willam Gibson's Pattern Recognition . The new book was mentioned on Slashdot earlier."

And now Gisbon's new book has been reviewed, as well. Look out for a review of the No Maps For These Territories DVD (with extras) soon too.

Aren't you glad some people are realistic enough to be paranoid? For everyone worried about your ISP suddenly deciding to detect and crack down on everyone who's taken advantage of the currently ubiquitous, simple-to-use NAT hardware (here's the post we ran about the means to snoop behind your NAT box, which links to the Bellovin paper mentioned below), an anonymous reader writes with one way to foil detection efforts: "Good news coming from OpenBSD camp! Read CVS log message (mail archive): 'Add scrub option 'random-id', which replaces IP IDs with random values for outgoing packets that are not fragmented (after reassembly), to compensate for predictable IDs generated by some hosts, and defeat fingerprinting and NAT detection as described in the Bellovin paper.'"

Right place at the right time when the wrong thing happens. fonixmunkee writes "an 11-year-old Mac and a COTS (commercial-of-the-self) telescope may have captured a very helpful image in solving the shuttle Columbia tragedy. this article here at CNN tells the story of how some self-proclaimed 'geeks,' working on an Air Force project aimed at watching satellites & incoming missiles, whipped up a contraption with some simple parts that captured an image of the shuttle on descent that may offer some light on what happened. also interesting is how many news sources mistook the image as a capture from the high-tech cameras that the people *actually* worked on."

Just a scratch in the historical record. truthsearch writes "In response to a leaked Sun memo complaining of Sun's Java implementation on Solaris, News.com has Sun's response. Many posters doubted its authenticity (myself included due to missing dates), but 'Sun confirmed the memo's authenticity, but said that the document is two years old and that the problems it describes have been fixed.'"

GPS, free databases -- these are a few of my favorite things ... Tony Pryor writes: "In April 2001, while there at arsDigita University, I developed a web interface called the Godseye Project, designed to enable 'grassroots cartography,' allowing individuals with web access to add subjective knowledge details about their surroundings to closeup satellite images. Although I wrote Godseye over a year and a half ago, it isn't currently online- I'll spare you the gory details of the events between then and now.

I just wrote two new pieces which *are* live. The first is a script that dynamically adds geolocation pages using Movable Type, and automatically registers each of them with http://www.geourl.org. The second part is a geolocation-based search centered upon any one of these geopages. The search aggregates the results of consecutive google queries on each of the sites (or geopages) within a given radius."

Visit the still-growing Godseye Project to test out this cool geographic search capability; Tony promises that the functionality will improve with lots of visitors and suggestions.