Slashdot Mirror

With the recent merger of VA systems and Andover.net, Slashdot has gained an unreasonable degree of dominance over the web discussion market, claimed the Justice Department Wednesday. Negotiations are continuing between Andover lawyers and government officials, but a current plan would break Slashdot up into a number of competing operations, each in charge of one of its flagship products:

Slash: News for nerds
Dot: Stuff that matters
org: Hot Grits

A press release from CmdrTaco claims that they are cooperating with the Justice Department, but do not feel that criticism of their business as monopolistic is warranted. As competition in each of their major areas, Taco cited Kuro5hin, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the work of Jesustussinheadface.

See the thread on Kuro5hin for more of a discussion on setting up one's own root nameservers...

First off, this story was on k5 yesterday. At that time, the site was still accessible. I wonder whether all mirrors have got antifile.zip - which includes 4 MB of email addresses of people who replied to get off Rodana Garst's mailinglists. I would never have put that file online.
By the way, the archive didn't shock me because of Rodana's pictures, but because of the size of antifile.zip - if those people are only the ones who hoped to get removed from Garst's List (I found five of my co-students on it), how big must the full archive be?? Twenty million email addresses? Forty? One billion?
We are just some toy in the spammer's hands. I'm never going to reply spam again "to be removed". Deleting is the only thing that helps. Well, I could put up a .procmailrc filter on the headers.. :)

And if you log in, maybe you could check out and vote on my story, which I worked on a while today? :^)

And if you log in, maybe you could check out and vote on my story, which I worked on a while today? :^)

Kuro5hin ran a piece on spammers and attacking them back today.. kinda an amusing read, even though I don't feel attacking people back directly is the answer.

Mounting is built in to most Linux desktop environments. Works pretty much like the Macintosh, BTW, which is geared to ease of use, and, also BTW, is based on the basic premise of "mounting" removable media.

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

Malda doesn't approve too many stories any more but the ones he does are fairly reasonable. Robin is reasonable and can only really be critisized for his opinion. Beyond that it is really hit an miss. You need to have a decent editorial team if you want to have a good site.

I'm sure if this story had been mentioned to anyone else there they would have confirmed that it was really mis-informed. Perhaps this is why Kuro5hin.org is often brought up in posts like this.

I disagree. Encryption, even non-hardware assisted, is easy to have setup.

Look at theTEA project (Transparent Encryption Agent), or look at the methods for transparent PGP of mail I outlined in Gnu Privacy Guard tutorial, part 2 towards the end of the document.

So, unlike your tank cars, this can be implemented easyily and quickly -- with no extra material cost. Replication of software and data through computers is essentially cost free, which how the GNU project can get away with giving away free [libre, beer] software :-)

I'd prefer constant, perversive encryption to having someone listen into even the most insignificant private conversation I hold any day.
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I think everyone should be able to vote on a post... let the score reflect the total of all votes applied to it.

How about a system where any logged in user can rate any comment from 1 (hot grits) to 5 (gem), and the displayed score is the average of all votes applied to it? I'd call it Kuro5hin.

• While the article doesn't say it, the librarian's information about the problems with filters came, in no small part, from SlashDot discussions

This is interesting, but not really surprising. Slashdot, as a community (without counting the trolls), makes up a significant part of the technical population. Slashdot readers, on the whole, tend to be well educated, informed, and concerned. When a story gets over 500 comments, with 200+ moderated to 2 or higher, chances are pretty good that there is going to be some pretty insightful (legitimately insightful, not "+1 Insightful") stuff in there. There are few ways that are better to get public opinion than a peer-reviewed, peer-moderated community forum.

For officials to take the time to read a public forum, like Slashdot, not only shows some enlightenment on the part of that official, but also shows that democracy does work -- public forums such as slashdot, Kuro5hin, and others, are the vox populi, even ones that are not "officially" sanctioned.

darren

Since it relates to Borland, it might be of interest to those reading this story.

I've written a little piece on kuro5hin on Borland's Kylix, which is their upcoming RAD tool for Linux.

Rather than reporducing it here, go and have a look.

This is currently being discussed at Kuro5hin (pronounced "corrosion").

Please...

"Have you considered suing slashdot, or perhaps andover for compensation for the bandwidth that it took to download the banner ad at the top of the page you're seeing now? if not...why? you didn't ask for the banner ad. It's a blantant infringement of your rights as an internet user."

Wrong, buddy. I do nothing, and I receive spam. It's completely passive on my part. It's like a telemarketting call: they initiate it, and enter my private space. With telemarketters, I can just ask them to never call again lest I persue legal action against them. I can't do the same with spam.

With banner ads on slashdot and the like: that's accepted when I choose to load the website. Being a proactive person, I installed Internet Junkbuster years ago, and continue to reap the benefits today. Again, a completely easy and legal way of avoiding unwanted advertisements -- something spam does not provide.

Perhaps you'll also claim Kuro5hin is somehow evil, too. When we do bring in ads (eventually), anyone with a user account has to opt in. If you don't have an account, you get a mixed-bag of ads. But I will personally (as an admin of the site) ensure that IJB has an updated blocklist containing the URL for the K5 ads so people can opt out even without an account. Something which Spammers don't even think of providing.

And if you do choose to opt-in for ads (supporting K5), you get to choose the advertisement classes you see. No more adverts for random things you don't want!

So before you paint everyone who doesn't like advertisements as some sort of evil person who wants to freeload: realise that they probably (like myself) dislike advertisements you cannot opt out of, like those wonderful advertisements positioned right above urinals. Captive audience, anyone?
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Slashdot is (for good reasons) the biggest and most populare forum on-line.
However if Microsoft and the like think taking down Slashdot would kill the open source movement, or even drive it under ground they are sadly mistaken.

Slashdots very own Slashboxes are stuffed with content from other forums.
There are sevral forum programs out, Slashcode Blade Squishdot Scoop and of course my own ZenToe

Of course there are many I missed... :(
In any case...
Each of thies represents a Slashdot like web forum. Slashcode itself is Slashdot, Squishdot is Technocrats, Blade is made by and for "The Stuff" and of course my own ZenToe is by me for me and my own forum.

All of thies are open source as such any given open source web forum can pick and chouse the best for his or her needs [ZenToe being easy but would crash and burn in any sort of attack].
It might be posable to develup some sort of commen post arrangment between forums and forum programs. Just a standard handoff system implented in Perl, PHP and Zobe so it could be easy to pass posts between forums. As such a distributed Slashdot.
(Starts scribbling stuff down) Hay if anyone wants to work on this just drop me e-mail I'm sure at least CmdrTaco of Slashdot and Bob of TheStuff would consider this and I can say I Felinoid of Meowpawjects love the idea (of course it's mine so I have to) :).
Anyway however things come down... Slashdot is certenly importent and losing it would hurt the community very badly but it wouldn't have anywhere near the impact Microsoft and the like might be expecting....

I think Microsoft wants a legal confrontation... Just as much as Microsoft is a defender of "Inovation" Slashdot is a defender of Linking.

Of all the posts Microsoft asked that Slashdot remove ONE containned the supposid violation.

However Microsoft made thies specs public the liccens itself MUST be bypassed by anyone wishing to view the document with out using Windows (Using unzip for Linux, Mac or Amiga as running the executable isn't an option for non-windows users).

The bulk of the posts to be removed are links to other websites. Had Microsoft contacted the websites linked they would no doupt willingly remove the pages making the Slashdot links void in the first place.

Publishing the specs in whole or in part dose not devalue Microsofts property (sence it is mearly specs for a product and of no value apart from the product) and posting it is fine under normal copyright law.

The base problem with the issue is you will find it nearly imposable to critisise Microsoft if you can never refer to Microsofts copyrights or trademarks.

Windows oh wait umm that Microsoft ohh s** umm That well known operating system sold by a larg company....
How can anyone talk about the specs for a Micosoft product if they can never refer link to or in any way acnoladge the specs?
Thats pritty much what Microsoft is asking. All posts making any attempt to refer back to the specs...

That is using copyrights to silence opposition. Acceptable use prevents this... The DCMA dose not...

When this showed up on.. Technocrat I had to check it out. It also showed up on Kuro5hin.

I of course had to post it on MeowBBS.

This is a major issue...
Can someone liccens your freedoms away?
Microsoft is betting they can... Slashdot is betting they can't.....
I'm taking the paranoid route...

Look for the new MeowPawjects liccens. You may not even THINK about our software with out agreeing to open all your standards....
This will only be attached to future projects.
(It feels like a violation of trust to switch liccenses on people.... I don't want to do that)

The significance of a trade or certification mark is control over branding. Forking the code, extending it, whatever, is allowed, but, as an example, Microsoft cannot call its forked Kerberos "Kerberos", if the trademark-holding authority says that they can't (note that a trademark search at the USPTO's website for "kerberos" produces no hits).

The trick is that the trademark owner can establish his/her own standards for licensing, which can be loose (Linux (TM)), strict (Xerox (TM)), or subject to meeting some standard (Harris Tweed (TM), Underwriters Laboratories (TM)). And if the mark holder wants to change the terms (to head off noncompliant extensions), it's their right to do so.

Licensing terms are an arbitrary decision on the part of the mark holder. The obligation of the markholder, however, is to uphold the mark. Trademarks can be lost -- asprin is one, dixie cups (IIRC) is another. A lawyer friend once had to do research in defending the Hooters (TM) trademark (I kid you not).

What we've seen in the past are modifications to code which wasn't subject to trademark (kerberos), or attempts to regulate ability to modify code directly, rather than certification of compliance (Java). Neither mode works particularly well, as we've seen.

The use of a mark to insure compliance means that someone contemplating a code fork has to weigh the strategic advantages of noncompliant operation with the loss of branding or certified compliance. Likewise, the licensing authority is under pressure to keep terms reasonable enough that a seperate compliance program isn't launched in competition, with more reasonable (or easier to comply with) rules.

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

Excellent point, and it shows the importance of trademark and certification mark in free software. While there's a strong argument to distributing spec and code in free software, there's an equally strong argument to retaining and reserving the rights to the trade name of the product being released.

One of the better ways to do this is to provide a regression test for the software in question, requiring it to meet the test. Microsoft, in this world, would be free to embrace and extend all it wanted, and would have free access to the source to do this. However, unless they met the terms for the trade name usage, they would have to call the product by some other name -- defeating the whole marketroid check-off item school of product promotion.

Many free software firms and propenents don't yet see the importance of this. Sun Microsystems in particular has just plain got it wrong in attempting to enforce compliance through code regulation rather than certification marks and compliance/compatibility testing. Very frustrating, as I've worked with some of the folks involved in the SCSL concept. IMO most of the issues Sun has seen in licensing Java would be non-starters had they used an alternative approach. As things stand, they're fighting with Microsoft for the standard, while IBM emerges as the market leader in workable Java implementations.

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

While what happened in your class was pretty clearly cheating (sale of results by one student), I'm bothered by similar stories I hear in which several students collaborate on methods, and tend to converge on similar (though usually not identical) code.

IMO, this second case is a valuable lesson in the power of group development, sharing ideas, and the open source methods described by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Much more valuable than the typical function-and-methods lessons taught in CS programs. Education has the problem of trying to assign credit for work performed, but an enlightened instructor could probably work out some compromise method.

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

Hot damn...gotta like being one of the Anonymous Cowards in that sid. Is anyone else concerned by the sheer number of people that went ahead and clicked it? Aren't you people the ones that are always crowing about how much smarter you are than the average "luser"? Everyone just believed that all that script would do is post a comment, just like a bunch of idiots believed that someone at Dow Jones sent them love letters.

All it did was post a comment. Theres a link to the source at sid=numb. It could have done worse though if I had added the javascript thing (provided you use Windows and IE.) As for clicking links no one is safe (unless they have redirection disabled.) I could e-mail a similar link and have it look completely benign, yet have it post something incredibly embarrassing.

BTW, to find out more about it click here.

or just go to http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/ 5/9/183550/1910 if you don't trust the link :)

One other thing, I used a PHP script because Slashdot's software recognizes duplicate posts and I needed to make the content dynamic. However, for a targeted attack plain old HTML on a geocities web page would do the trick.

numb

numb

There was a problem with the code I was using so this wasn't working properly earlier. It is now. There's an interesting article about this type of web trojan on kuro5hin.org. There's a lot of discussion about it on Zope as well. It affects just about every web site out there.

I decided not to have the link cause you to profess your love for Bill Gates to this thread. Instead I set up a sid here.

numb

Cool, my retort got published on kuro5hin....and slammed rightly. The next version is better....

--

Jamie specifically noted that only one of several developers responded to his queries:

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

(Maybe they've never heard of Slashdot?)

This is consistant with several other reports -- I'd also exchanged email with Blake Ross. Two emails (one asking if he'd posted to Kuro5hin) netted a grand total of "that's me :)" in response.

While I haven't seen compelling evidence of skulduggery in this case, Netscape/AOL have been less than forthcoming.

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

Jamie specifically noted that only one of several developers responded to his queries:

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

(Maybe they've never heard of Slashdot?)

This is consistant with several other reports -- I'd also exchanged email with Blake Ross. Two emails (one asking if he'd posted to Kuro5hin) netted a grand total of "that's me :)" in response.

While I haven't seen compelling evidence of skulduggery in this case, Netscape/AOL have been less than forthcoming.

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

For smaller-scale stuff you might sign your stuff over to Ms. Edna Graustein like they do at kuro5hin with comments...

-JD

For anyone that's interested there's another article about this on Wired. I found it on kuro5hin 3 days ago. I just stopped by there the for first time a couple days ago--very cool site for tech news junkies.

I rarely go to web sites I read about in print or see on TV because most of the time they don't point you directly to the content you want. I always pictured a cheap pen reader hooked to a USB port a good method of getting the URL from paper to the computer. If a web cam can do it that's great, but it will have to be fairly reliable. This technology will be great for business cards too. Especially if you can encode all the printed data on a business card into the barcode.

numb

Ahhhhh, finally I can read slashdot, play quake, and download my pr0n with gnutella all at once. (while avoiding the wall of shame of course)

Slight rant follows, skip to next comment if you don't want to hear ranting:
I just have to question, is this really stuff that matters? I mean sure it may be a slow news day but is a link to a commercial site really worthy of our esteemed /. ? They've got news over at Kuro5hin.org...

Anyhow, keep up the good news.


-Mad Dreamer

Lately I have been going to Kuro5hin instead of slashdot. Kuro5hin is a weblog much like slashdot but the registered user votes for the stories in stead of a selected few moderators.

The other benifit of the site is that Rusty will delete the trolls, making things much easier to read. Its liabilities are that voting on the submissions are not good for news stories, it has a much smaller readership (1500 or so ids at last count), and Rusty is still fixing some of the old bugs. Anyway, swings and roundabouts, you don't like /., no one forces you to read it.
--

kuro5hin is one.

Or if you don't like what's on offer, start one of your own, but don't complain.

--
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean

Well, there's... http://www.kuro5hin.org/ where they let readers vote for which submitted stories should reach the front page, and then there's http://theGEEK.org/ which is also pretty cool.

Don't get me wrong, I love Slashdot. When I want to read news, I come to /. but when I want to write news, I got to theGEEK or kuro5in.

--

There are better alternatives than Squishdot. See the recent discussion on scoop.kuro5hin.org for why.

Of the options you've given, old-style BSD. I'd like to encourage forking, including proprietary forking, of MSFT OS and apps. I'd also like it to be impossible to convert or merge it to GPL. No copylefting here.

Yes, this is punitive in intent.

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

Listen twit, it's all done algorithmically based on how much time you spend on slashdot. So anyone can be a moderator provided they don't spend too much time on slashdot (like me) or too little. Secondly what is this crap about moderators pissing you off, there is all sorts of customizability to slashdot that enables people with accounts (like you) to never see scores or simply browse at -1. Why not read all the past articles on moderation?

Moderation Ideas by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 14, @10:11AM EST 328
Slashdot's Meta Moderation by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 07, @01:31PM EST 284
More Moderation Madness by CmdrTaco on Monday September 06, @05:07PM EST 321
Slashdot Moderation Phase 1.1 by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 25, @07:15AM EST 71
Slashdot Notes by CmdrTaco on Monday May 24, @12:25PM EST 208
Assorted Slashdot Notes by CmdrTaco on Wednesday April 14, @11:00AM EST 69
Slashdot Forum Updates by CmdrTaco

And to satisfy the moderators who would love to mark this as offtopic. Here's my take on the AMD shortage. The article states that both AMD and Intel underestimated demand. This means that a possible reason for the large demand for AMD chips is less to do with price/performance as some posters have mentioned and more to do with the fact that Intel chips are rather scarce, and there won't be a large influx of them for at least two months.

PS: To all the twits that think slashdot sucks why not move? Go to Advogato or Kuro5hin or any of the dozens of other slash sites. Trying to wreck slashdot does you no good and doesn't do anyone any harm. Most people simply browse at 2 or 3 and never see your rantings and ravings anyway, and even if you did drive everyone away from slashdot, then what?

I was actually referring to Kuro5hin, though.

--

...and what's to keep you from upping the ante on the computational difficulty. Say your problem is "brute force this hash". Increasing the keylength by one byte doubles the (mean) compute time. Make this user configurable, or if you're really smart, code the program to generate problems which require some specified mean time to compute over recent requests recieved, or such.

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

Unfortunately, the USPS's change of address form feeds directly into a database which is, you guessed it, sold to marketing firms.

The turnaround time for propogating the information out is about three to six months, so for the first half of a year, you're ok, but afterwards, you've become identified as a high-quality (recent) address, and to boot, recently moved so a good candidate for household goods, services,....

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

A funny interview, nevertheless....

There have already been a bunch of great ideas; here are mine.

Build community ties. By helping out with other projects, you get your own name out there. When people know who you are, especially when you have helped them with their projects, they will be more likely to use and advertise for your site. How can you help out others?

• Offer to code review projects you are interested in
• Offer to write content. Sites like osOpinion, OS Online, and Kuro5hin are always looking for content. themes.org has been advertising for help for a while, in a bunch of areas, inclusing webmastering, PHP development,and mysql management.
• The GNU project is always looking for help, and has a large tasks list; helping out the FSF is a great way to establish yourself.

Once you have content up on some of these sites, its easy to reference your own site, whether through direct links, author bios, or something similar. I'm not advocating using other sites for your own gain; I'm advocating reciprocation. You help them, they help you. You may even find that your site has a very natural tie-in with another site, and you can work together to share data, user info, stories, and the like.

Of course, you can always just stick some advertising in your /. sig.

darren

Since you obviously have an understanding of the matter, I'd love to see some "advanced cryptography" feature articles posted to K5, thanks to you.

Your "critisms" remind me a lot of the same "critisms" that "Beginning Security" parts 1 and 2 brought. They didn't mention a single thing about auditing code, probing firewalls, setting up security policies, etc. If you look at the feature box on K5, you'll see those went under different headings ("Security the Border," "Bullet Proof Code," etc).

What I'm doing is trying to help some of the newbies to become more clueful, and help others avoid problems. Once they've mastered the material, or at least have a basic understanding of the problem, they can move on to the more advanced stuff.
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Since you obviously have an understanding of the matter, I'd love to see some "advanced cryptography" feature articles posted to K5, thanks to you.

Your "critisms" remind me a lot of the same "critisms" that "Beginning Security" parts 1 and 2 brought. They didn't mention a single thing about auditing code, probing firewalls, setting up security policies, etc. If you look at the feature box on K5, you'll see those went under different headings ("Security the Border," "Bullet Proof Code," etc).

What I'm doing is trying to help some of the newbies to become more clueful, and help others avoid problems. Once they've mastered the material, or at least have a basic understanding of the problem, they can move on to the more advanced stuff.
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And if both your parents are dead, my condolences. Losing a loved one sucks more than anything else.

--

You're thinking of kuro5hin.org. I just discovered it last week, and it's okay. Fewer comments, but the story set doesn't look much worse than Slashdot's; and the gritsboys haven't found it yet, so the comments are pretty good.

--

Slashdot targets "News for nerds" and other "Stuff that matters." Unfortunately, as in cases like this, we get a bit of a conflict when the story poster doesn't see the relevance.

Rather than harrrasing Mr. Malda, why don't you move to a site that has story moderation so you can see if the general populace wants to read and discuss such a story? Kuro5hin.org is the place. It's oriented towards technology and culture -- not just news about nerdy things or things that matter. We've even had stock stories before.

I agree with Mr. Malda that this story doesn't really fit with Slashdot, it could fit on other sites. So why not use them?
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Slashdot targets "News for nerds" and other "Stuff that matters." Unfortunately, as in cases like this, we get a bit of a conflict when the story poster doesn't see the relevance.

Rather than harrrasing Mr. Malda, why don't you move to a site that has story moderation so you can see if the general populace wants to read and discuss such a story? Kuro5hin.org is the place. It's oriented towards technology and culture -- not just news about nerdy things or things that matter. We've even had stock stories before.

I agree with Mr. Malda that this story doesn't really fit with Slashdot, it could fit on other sites. So why not use them?
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Kuro5hin has a write-up on this here and Advogato has one here. They've had these articles for most of today they have some interesting posts already.

Tired of Slashdot? Try Kuro5hin.

The directory, created by the Open Directory Project, is Open Content... so anyone can use it for free. And many do. (Including Google.)

Read this article... it gives an introduction to the Open Directory Project.

Er, it looks like you submitted this one a while back (Linux 2.2.11), and there was the Andover sues Kuro5hin joke from April 1st, as well as a not so subtle Scoop plug (from the search page).

Don't mean to pick. Good work with Scoop, BTW (another free plug!).

darren