Slashdot Mirror

I'd already mentioned this in Kuro5hin, but it's worth repeating. Given that Carnivore is set up between the ISP's main routers and the rest of the Internet (I'm not sure this is the case, but let's pretend it is...) they can do all sorts of creative things if they weren't restrained by ethics and the Bill of Rights including:

• Man in the Middle Attacks: Carnivore's placement on the ISP is about the best place you can get for executing these attacks, especially when networked with other Carnivore machines - they can intercept encryption keys sent by Bad Guys (such as folks in the NAACP, ACLU or Peacefire), replace them with their own keys, and be able to snoop on & tamper with messages at will.
• Selective, Covert Censorship: If as Cringely suggests, Carnivore is able to shut off an ISP's entire connection to the Internet, they could do that, but wouldn't be able to get away with if for long. It would be much easier to have Carnivore silently drop packets containing information the FBI deems undesireable, and most users wouldn't know why - servers must be busy or something.

A little bit of law enforcement arm twisting would help make sure the sysadmins didn't try to interfere with these activities. Sleep tight everyone...

Not a bad read. I've got a couple problems with it though.

"And, except that all newcomers to /. arrive as AC's themselves, or maybe they haven't learned about changing their thresholds, and so they see ALL OF IT. Every last damn word."

Isn't the default threshold at 1 for ACs?

I don't agree that everything below 2 is crap. There are some good posts that remain as 0s and 1s. They're just not as interesting/insightful/etc. as other posts. Moderators do tend to catch the spam and mod it down to -1. So all spam ends up as -1. I do agree that this is wasting moderation points and also discourages people from reading at -1 (and seeing badly modded posts).

A little revision wouldn't hurt. Not that I'm doing anything to fix the spam problem. It'd be cool if /. could just make it so only the spammer saw his postings, then he'd presumably get bored and go away (I don't know how well this would work for ACs on /. though).

Kuro5hin.org has a no tolerance stance on spam. Freedom of speech != spam. Don't know if the /. editors would have time to go through everything and delete the junk. Maybe they could hire someone... Although some people would probably scream bloody murder.

I'd specifically excluded all of /., including its ad server, from my junkbuster filters. Sorry, but distracting animated banners just don't fly (and this is with the gif animation toggle-munged version of Netscape -- sufficiently long animation cycles will appear, though they won't loop. I've reluctantly added /.'s ad server to my blockfile this weekend.

This is unfortunate, because it's actually useful for me to keep tabs on who's advertising what at Slashdot.

I've already written Rob & Jeff suggesting they review acceptable copy guidelines. Any animation cycling < ~1 second is seriously distracting. More slowly cycling gifs aren't nearly as bad. My skin still crawls remembering a banner which ran almost a year ago with some guy's eyes strobing out of his head (cartoon-style) looking at a bill, advertising low service rates for some luser company or another. That directly prompted my adoption of Junkbuster and other means of regaining control of my browsing.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important! Mkay?

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

--

:-)

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"Now for a real conspiracy, ask why slashdot hasn't posted this story. It has beeen submitted several times by myself and others..."

I saw it once and deleted it - Michael says he hasn't seen it at all - which means that if it really has been submitted multiple times, there are multiple other Slashdot editors, each of whom thinks this story is not worth posting.

(Any slashdot editor can delete a story for any reason. If something gets submitted multiple times and doesn't get posted, odds are very good that none of us thinks it's newsworthy.)

This story isn't a very interesting one. "Dog Bites Man." As far as I can tell, this guy ran a warez haven from his home, and the FBI very politely came and confiscated his computers. That's really not going to be surprising to anybody; it didn't seem like news to me.

Jamie McCarthy

Hehe... I am an admin there :) Me and Rusty are the guys who work on it. Rusty wrote Scoop, the weblog engine we use, and I do the more practical Unix admin stuff. Being an admin isn't anthing special because K5 is all user run (story moderation, etc).

We're sometimes on #kuro5hin on irc.kuro5hin.org (same IRC network that hosts #slashdot), can be mailed, etc, if you want to chat with us.

As for traffic being "free," someone has to pay for bandwidth.. :) But it is nice to get some extra people to read and help the site grow.
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Hehe... I am an admin there :) Me and Rusty are the guys who work on it. Rusty wrote Scoop, the weblog engine we use, and I do the more practical Unix admin stuff. Being an admin isn't anthing special because K5 is all user run (story moderation, etc).

We're sometimes on #kuro5hin on irc.kuro5hin.org (same IRC network that hosts #slashdot), can be mailed, etc, if you want to chat with us.

As for traffic being "free," someone has to pay for bandwidth.. :) But it is nice to get some extra people to read and help the site grow.
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kuro5hin.org has the obligatory "Slashdot is censoring the story!", postings but has at least one seemingly clueful post

Why did you mention that? There is no point other then to cast K5 in a bad light, a light which is certainly not true.

Isn't this a Slashdot is censoring the story post?. How about this one? The post isn't attacking K5, all it points out is that there were several posters on kuro5hin who post slashdot-is-censoring-the-story-messages daily on kuro5hin. Frankly I read K5 everyday and literally every two or three stories has somebody complaining about how slashdot is censoring the story.

PS: Now for a real conspiracy, ask why slashdot hasn't posted this story. It has beeen submitted several times by myself and others on kuro5hin but is always rejected.

kuro5hin.org has the obligatory "Slashdot is censoring the story!", postings but has at least one seemingly clueful post

Why did you mention that? There is no point other then to cast K5 in a bad light, a light which is certainly not true.

Isn't this a Slashdot is censoring the story post?. How about this one? The post isn't attacking K5, all it points out is that there were several posters on kuro5hin who post slashdot-is-censoring-the-story-messages daily on kuro5hin. Frankly I read K5 everyday and literally every two or three stories has somebody complaining about how slashdot is censoring the story.

PS: Now for a real conspiracy, ask why slashdot hasn't posted this story. It has beeen submitted several times by myself and others on kuro5hin but is always rejected.

kuro5hin.org has the obligatory "Slashdot is censoring the story!", postings but has at least one seemingly clueful post

Why did you mention that? There is no point other then to cast K5 in a bad light, a light which is certainly not true.

Isn't this a Slashdot is censoring the story post?. How about this one? The post isn't attacking K5, all it points out is that there were several posters on kuro5hin who post slashdot-is-censoring-the-story-messages daily on kuro5hin. Frankly I read K5 everyday and literally every two or three stories has somebody complaining about how slashdot is censoring the story.

PS: Now for a real conspiracy, ask why slashdot hasn't posted this story. It has beeen submitted several times by myself and others on kuro5hin but is always rejected.

Unfortunately kuro5hin is currently slashdotted so I cannot link to the post to the conversation of the original submitter of the story. This story broke yesterday, the reason it got to kuro5hin so quickly was because someone read Alan Cox's diary and posted it.

To put things in perspective kuro5hin has an average of 2 or 3 stories in its submission bin at anytime while slashdot has over 400 (the last few times I've submitted a story it's been 450). So it is understandable if it takes them a little longer than kuro5hin to get a story posted since all it takes is a handful of yays to get it to the front page.

Remember also that just yesterday slashdot got bitten by a fake story and don't forget the story about the Oracle NIC violating the GPL that turned out to be bogus (can't find the link for some weird reason). Frankly I applaud Slashdot for showing restraint in posting this instead of rushing this to the front page like the many Bruce-Perens-someone-is-violating-the-GPL stories that could have been settled amicably by sending an email or two but instead turned into public tar-and-featherings.

There was an interesting discussion about this yesterday on K5.

The views on this controversy are diverse and conflicting, to say the least.

My personal take: I don't use ORBS and I have no opinion on the quality or fairness of ORBS' anti-spam service, but for another entity to unilaterally deny users who are not their customers the right to use the service, however flawed it may or may not be, and to do so by undermining the very IP protocols we all rely on is reprehensible in the extreme.

That above.net offers a competing anti-SPAM product is not merely suspicious, it is damning.

Finally, what happens if other competitors start advertising bogus routes to competing web pages or services?

IMHO above.net needs to be bitch slapped, hard.

Exactly my sentiments. It seems that the most important news (ie companies routing others into /dev/null) is spread around in the comments in articles. Those comments are, of course, moderated immediately to -1 by the moderation militia. A while ago when the tech stocks started dying off, it was only mentioned after weeks of complaining by the readers. Rob said it as off topic and uninteresting. Techs losing their jobs and half of their personal wealth is off topic and uninteresting?

Jon Katz. Why? He's proven himself to be completely disconnected from what he writes about, his articles are mindless drivel, and he annoys half the crowd. Isn't this a place for nerds, not for men around 30 trying to look hip?

Why isn't slashdot more responsive to the readership? How long have people been asking to be able to moderate the submission queue or even simply view the rejects? Does Andover want to keep some things out of the public spotlight?

Not to mention that half the news that gets posted (between the release announcements of Jayueiima Queeheez Gold Edition Volume 3 and such) is so late these days? Before, slashdot would be on the scene before most of the big organizations.

Yes, I could stop reading slashdot and go elsewhere, but I'd rather see slashdot go back more how it was in the old days. I've been reading slashdot for 2 years now and I don't want to see it go down like this.

Where have you been? Jon Katz, interviews and numerous editorial pieces have appeared here over the years. That may not be the bulk of the stories, but still...

the contributors filter the news that they think are worthy

Uhm, no - that would be kuro5hin. With 200,000+ user accounts and hundreds of submissions in the bin at a time, I would hardly say that Joe reader has much influence. The editors filter the new items they think are worthy.

I don't agree with the original poster that /. will become a Microsoft lap-dog, but you can't discount the possibility of them being bought out by a bigger news source. It has already happened - twice - and the /. editors have no say on whom they get sold to any more.

really up to: Copyright Infringement and the FBI

>Heck, it might even incite some changes around here -
>like moderators being able to see submitted stories and rank them. Once
> a story hits a threshold, it makes the main page...

This is already reality. Look at Kuro5hin!

I've just bothered to start reading stuff about .Net - I thought it was just MS marketing speak. There's actually some pretty cool stuff in there once you get past all the crap. (I've written something at http://www.kuro5hin.org, but it was in the moderation queue when I posted this)

Anyway, reading this guys writing makes me even more impressed with .Net (although did anyone else get the impression he loves C++ even more than most Linux hackers?). For instance:

Session state can be maintained on an alternate machine, allowing server reboots with preserved state,and it can be cookieless via url munging. You get a call stack trace and some verbose error messages. Event log and mail are built in, but mail requires that damn mail service still. Interdev will debug across languages now. Oh, and IIS gets Apache like pre-emptive recycling. The surprise here is they admitted they borrowed it from Apache. ASP is finally in its own process, and has memory leak detection. You can even assign processes and processor affinity to web apps.

Pretty cool, hey! Especially the maintaing of session state across different machines.

Will someone please remind all these VB people that it isn't object oriented, its object based? You'd think these guys are coding in C++ or Java the way the bandie OO terms about.

This guy just doesn't listen. Even MS (now!) admits that VB is only object based. However VB7 (which is the .Net version) is a proper OO language. It has proper inheritance and encapsulation - and it even does exception handling.

Object oriented development in VB.NET...hehehe, title says it all. Alan Carter, yer a dork. I want to see pointers and operator overloading.

I don't. There is no need for pointers in most coding, and generally the parts where pointers are used are the most bug prone. Java, Delphi, Python, Smalltalk - all proper OO languages and none have pointers. (Not sure about operator overloading)

The biggest worry is, of course, this:

ASP+ performance and caching was another welcome to C# filled session, and offered little other than common sense...throughput vs. responsiveness, etc... Warning to ASP coders: A lot of these "features" are going to automatically be shoving preformated html to your users. Remember how frontpage hosed yer code? Now IIS will be doing it.

The funniest thing his his whole speil:

They held up a poor guy, Eiffel author, as proof of their party language support. His language looks similar to C#...he won't be there next year.

Now this poor guy was (I believe) none other than Bertrand Meyer who (while he doesn't know much about open source software) does know his stuff when it comes to high quality software engineering. For the author of this piece not to know who he was, and to claim His language looks similar to C#... is pretty dumb. Since this guy seems to think he is some kind of technology guru, I would have expected he would have heard of Eiffel. It's not particually similar to C#, btw - have a look at design by contract for a start.

Let's see: Memepool and RobotWisdom spring to mind... Also ArsTechnica, Kuro5hin and KernelTraffic (which isn't only about the kernel; the Samba summaries are also very good).

Ugh! it's just not been a good day for me and typos. This should read, of course, "posted this story over at Kuro5hin..."

I also posted this story over at which has generated quite an interesting discussion as well (it's still in the "moderate submissions" queue for now).

PS They also sell t-shirts if you want to "support their cause".

Alex Bischoff
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PS They also sell t-shirts if you want to "support their cause".

Alex Bischoff
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mm'kay, almost no MPAA. I'm not a rabid zealot. I try to watch good stuff. It's just the good stuff looks less and less like L.A. of 2000's to me, and more like, say, Prague of 1960's. So may just as well stop watching Hollywood crap completely.

It's sad to think that the inevitable result of /. growth is a decline in quality. I don't know.
E-mail me for my essay on why /. got popular. However, lack of user feedback incorporation isn't very open source. K5 is a /. refugee camp, and might replace /. -- already has, to many former Slashdotter. Might want to visit it. Not quite 'forking' in the classic CatB sense, but kinda.

Offtopic? Possibly. Informative? Definately.

I should take this time to point out that if you're fed up with the way slashdot is posting its stories then you should take a proactive stance.

Kuro5hin is a much better website, which allows user moderation of the story submission queue, unlike the closed we-only-post-irrelevant-junk slashdot seems to be turning into these days.

-- iCEBaLM

Inoshiro publishes a series on practical Linux security at Kuro5hin.
__

Neither's Internet Explorer then:
Neither's Netscape 4.x then:

Tetris done in DHTML by Rusty Foster, creator of Scoop and my fellow admin at Kuro5hin.org.

Really, this complexity is not needed in browsers. I'd be happy if people would just use HTML 4 + XML 1.0 + CSS.. Browsers should only render marked text, not be used to play 1980s games written in scripting languages. Do one thing, and do it well!
---

But what I'd like to see someday is a site where news stories are put in, and the users actually vote on it (much like the moderators here).

It exists. Go to K5.

In the slashdot tradition of insisting upon the distinction (that no one else at all ever bothers to make) between "crackers" and "hackers," may I insist, in the cause of verbal precision, that we now also distinguish between "trolls" and "spammers"?

By the commonly accepted definition, a troll is someone looking to stir up a heated discussion by posting messages which aren't quite, ah, sincere. There may be, no there is, a certain degree of dishonesty in the composition of a traditional troll; however, the fact remains, if no one gets excited enough to respond, then the troll must be held a failure. Now isn't that the essence of a web log, to stimulate readers to participate? Isn't this the very reason why it is better to prowl slashdot than to sit and soak up TV? A successful troll on a weblog like this one is typically followed by many responses and rebuttals. And indeed, often what a troller has to say is often intellectually stimulating; on other occasions the substance of a troll is garbled, absurd rubbish, but at least it gets people to laugh, and while laughter may be officially verboten and verba non grata at the otherwise excellent Kuro5hin, I hope no one reading this here has a soul so dead that he decries the value of laughter. So at the very least, a troll has a certain definite value.

Conversely, a spammer is an odious fellow who overloads communication channels with innumerable copies of a message which no rational person has the slightest interest to read. The essence of spam is that it is something which emburdens you with the task of throwing it in the garbage.

osm is a troll, a damn good one. streetlawyer is a fucken troll. 80md is a troll, and so is Jon Ericson, and so is gnarphlager, and so is spiralx, and so, logging in from Chiapas, is Estanislao Martinez (andale! andale! arribe! viva Che!). The guy who penned this swell little piece of nuttiness is a troll. I'm sure if you peruse slashdot regularly you can think of other favorites of your own. Did you ever see any of these guys flood a thread with copy after copy of their works? No, you have not. These are funny guys, and their light and wacky humor is nothing but good news here in slashdot. I don't propose that we hand slashdot over to the true troll underground entirely, much as they'd probably like it, but I do say that slashdot can and should tolerate their eccentric literary troll art, in the reasonably small doses they supply.

But now compare these artists to beer mug man, or penis bird guy, or this fellow who has posted, out of the 141 comments here, 40 (as of my last count) pointless content-free comments titled "NOBODY" to this article. The basic difference is, their posts are all empty and all the same, i.e. boring, and they repeat and repeat and repeat themselves. That, fellow readers, is nothing more nor less than pure spam.

Please refrain from insulting osm by comparing his creative stuff with repetitive boring crap such as that. Hormel Spam(tm) is actually pretty tasty pan-fried with poached eggs and wheat bread toast - try it sometime - but weblog spam is naught but slop, fit only for the garbage pail.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

The other value of multiple windows is that you can choose different display settings for, say, full page vs. a thread.

For full page, I tend to set threshold at 2 (or 3, if things are really bad), mode to threaded, highest moderated and most recent first. For a thread, I prefer threshold=0 (filter nothing but trolls), and mode to nested. I do this by hand-editing the URL (eg: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/07/04/04302 49&mode=nested&threshold=0&cid=46), and changing the cid to view different threads.

It would be kinda nice to be able to set seperate front page and thread view modes ;-)

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin

The problem with w3m is that it has to load the page fully in order to know how to render it. Somewhat like Netscape. You buy some time by skipping graphics, but lose otherwise. I think you're stuck.

Mozilla (and IE 5.x) both render and redraw on the fly. This makes for much faster percieved page loads and redraws (say if you resize a window). If the console-mode browsers could emulate this behavior, things might be cool, but I'm not sure how 'zactly you'd go about doing that.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin

I submitted this article three days ago but it was refused for some reason, probably because the story also ran on kuro5hin. So far I have read all the posts in this thread and most of them are focussing on DoubleClick which is incidental to the news story instead of discussing the fact that dotcomms are not only selling dotcomm info but are taking out ads to do so.

From the artricle: Toysmart, meanwhile, advertised the sale of its customer list and database in The Wall Street Journal last month after ceasing operations. The company overseeing the sale of Toysmart's assets, the Recovery Group, said several interested parties have bid on the customer information.

I am very worried at this trend, because I have a lot of personal data at CDNow and considering that they are in serious trouble will my personal data also be sold? I have begun to fear for all the dotcomms I have ever bought anything from because the last thing I'd want is for my address, credit card info and shopping habits to be sold by some failed e-business like some email spam list. The fact that the companies are taking out ads to sell our info and hiring agents to do this shows completely that industry self regulation has failed. I sincerely hope the FTC jumps on this like a porkchop in a dog kennel.

"...NOT the same as Slashdot deleting all references to kuro5hin. It might be analagous to slashdot not posting any stories about kuro5hin, which, to the best of my knowledge, is actually the case."

Four of our stories reference kuro5hin in April/May, including this one where I wrote: "I need to start reading kuro5hin more often."

I even bought myself a kuro5hin T-shirt for chrissakes. It's ReallyCool(tm) and ILikeItALot® and EveryoneShouldBuyOne(tm). Maybe if I get a kuro5hin tattoo on my ass, people will stop accusing Slashdot of bias. Maybe.

Jamie McCarthy