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We are going to war with Iraq for the freedom of the people, not the plunder. Right?

The english version of the Al-Jazeera TV's website was online since Monday. The adress is:
http://english.aljazeera.net

I could see it on Thursday and now it is gone. Washington Post has a article about a hack attack. Apparently the name of the website does not resolve.

What i found very suspicious are these imposter sites:
http://www.aljazeerah.us/ and http://www.aljazeerah.info/
Only the latter has a little headline that the website is not connected in any way to Al-Jazeera TV.

These sites can be easily confused with the original site and it already happened.
Imagine something like foks.news in a arab country without a clear statement that it is not us media.

ps: I already submitted the story about the imposter sites but slashdot did not post it. That's why i am posting it here...

Did you know that some of the most socialist countries in Europe have a better quality of life than the US?

The worst terrorist attack in recorded history

The atrocities committed against the innocent civilians in the World Trade Center (killing approximately 3,000) pale in comparison to the atrocities committed by the Axis powers of World War II against innocent civilians of certain ethnic groups (killing well over six million).

and you people have the gall to be discussing robots????

If you don't like the topics discussed on Slashdot, then don't visit Slashdot. If you want to talk politics, there are several other sites for that.

Go away troll.

It appears to be about the situation where people bid for ad space. Emergent Music does that. A lot of sites do, it arguably includes the phenomenon of "text ads" such as are used on Kuro5hin. One thing that is important to keep in mind. This isn't a patent, but a published application. The patent has not been issued or approved by the PTO. However, once a patent is published, companies that would infringe if it were issued can be contacted, and if they continue to use the claimed matter, can be sued for damages retroactively when it is issued. The patent was applied for on October 8, 2002. It seems obvious that there was plenty of prior art. I don't know, though, whether the patent "takes priority" from some earlier application such as a provisional patent application. I'm not sure whether the online publication mechanism normally makes that information available. As I get more info I'll post it to my blog.

What kind of punishment do you recommend for him ?

I have found that in such situations, the best that one can do is look for news sources which you expect to be biased towards both sides of the issue. I mean, read BBC and, say, DAWN, a pakistani newspaper (a rather respectable newspaper, very balanced, relative to most others that i have found from islamic countries).

So both of these are mostly very unbiased, but on such a issue, probably leaning to opposite sides. one can expect them to report pretty much all relevant points to the issue between them, and then, once u have all the information, build your own opinion...no, not as easy as getting your opinion ready made for you by a single source, but i think the only way one has any chance at knowing even a part of the truth. I know this is what i am going to do.

One thing i am not going to do is read CNN, though. CNN has recently been a major dissapointment in its over all coverage of ALL issues, from the ENRON and co. scams, to the IRAQ issue. I think they are guilty of fraud, the way they omit an anti-goverment viewpoint, eg in the case of the hugely edited UN weapons inspector transscript posted on CNN (read about it on that other site )...thats just one example. Their coverage of the worldwide anti-war protests could have made one feel that it was just a dozen hippies who made a bit of noise, not the 10 million plus who marched all over the world. What good is the guarentee of freedom of press when the press is unwilling to use that freedom? Its weird that a govt. owned news channel (BBC) manages a much more balanced reporting that a completely independent and very powerfull entity like CNN. The irony get worse when you consider that CNN gained most of its worldwide popularity during operation desert storm, when it was the only international news network allowed to operate from inside iraq by saddam, because, as the iraqi govt put it: "they are the only ones we trust to objectively report the truth".

Its a weird world.

Ghoul2

Anarticle talks about the evils of freespeech mechanisms like freenet.

It's pretty sad that our elected officials are waiting until the tanks roll, in order to debate this, it's also equally sad how silent the media is on this issue. If I were a betting man, i'd say that congress will lose on protecting the status quo.

If you were making over 1million dollars per year, sitting on your arz, minipulating public opinion, you'd want to do everything, including supporting war to preserve your cash flow. Now that there is a decentralized, encyrpted p2p system that will transform the way information flows, those current IPDroids are running like scared chickens to congress for some "protection".

Plastic if you have a liberal bent.

K5 for general high quality zine type stuff.

Or check out all the sites that run slashcode. The above two are the most popular.

That's more real than you think: look at this...

As far as this thing goes, I wonder what the effect of having a considerably heavier, and powered, front wheel has on the handling and ride of a bicycle. Having the extra weight at the back (yes, I realise that this is going to be much lighter than the motor on my machine, but there's still a fair bit of extra weight in that wheel) seems like a better idea to me. Additionally, that range is no better than an electric bike. A few hundred millilitres of extra fuel seems like a good idea. Yes, it wouldn't be hard to carry an extra bottle of fuel, but who wants to be refilling the thing in the middle of the street?

Electric-assisted bicycles don't quite have the range to be practical yet, IMHO, but if somebody can put together a lithium-ion one, or even better, a fuel cell one, they should wipe gas-powered models off the market in fairly short order.

When this FreeBSD-native port of Java hits stable and Freenet goes from 0.5.1-RC1 --> 0.5.1 I'm putting a node back on my FreeBSD box.

Think it's just for child porn and terrorists? Make it useful. Host your free software project on Freenet, tell the world about your hobby.

If you think having a node will use all availible bandwith, there are throttle options in the config file (but don't use them please unless you really need to :). Dedicate what space you have free for the benefit of the network.

Think it's slow? Encourage others to set up their own nodes.

It's 1st ammendment freedom of speech - don't let it dissapear! Read more at Kuro5hin.org

Developed by Arthur Whitney (the creator of A+) and a big name in the APL circles, K uses the ASCII only character set, is even more compact and faster (both in runtime and development time) than Perl, and very flexible.

Here is a short introduction I wrote for the people at Kuro5hin.

A shallow introduction to the K programming language.

It's kind of like J.

you're completely right. I'm always wondering, why watching the screensaver completely sucks. Even the simplest screensavers are not moving as smoothely on my 1200 Mhz, 256M laptop as on a lousy Atari ST.

How come? It's a shame.

I do admit that those machines have very good graphics routines because, well, they were designed for doing graphics. Their graphics processors are also optimized for rendering to lower end monitors (like televisions) and could time the interlacing and refresh properly to achieve really solid graphics effects.

Any time you design a piece of hardware towards a specific function, you get amazing results. Whenever I play a few games on my SuperNES, I think "this machine is less powerful than an old IBM AT, but look at what it can do -- 3.87MHz designed for gaming can do a lot".

Now let me jump into more modern things. Your screensaver not appearing to be silky smooth can be from a couple reasons: 1) the author may not be as talented as those who implement powerful graphics libraries, and thus his/her rendering routines may not be as fast; 2) not using certain graphics libraries on some platforms means having to go through the environment's layers of abstraction. Modern operating systems do not allow direct hardware access unless you go through certian libraries (this is correct enough for the purposes of this discussion).

I bet if you look around for some screensavers that utilize your 3D accellerator, you'll be very pleased. I remember when I first got my nVidia TNT2 card and downloaded RivaLights (a non-Glide version of VoodooLights), a program that spun a bunch of lense-flare textures around on flat polys. Incredibly cool effect and silky smooth (usually got a full 30 fps). Today on my G4 PowerBook, I've got a couple of screensavers with OS X 10.2 that do some nifty things. There's one screensaver that pans pictures around on the display with a very subtle zoom that looks like you're watching physical photos get moved around. It's amazingly solid and rendered with OpenGL (as everything else is on this platform :-).

Not if this bill passes.

Be glad it's not like this:

(2) Subject to the payment of fees under this title, such grant shall be for a term beginning on the date on which the patent issues and ending 70 years after the death of the last surviving inventor.

Why can't subscribers get a chance to mod stories during this "preview" time

Sounds like Scoop of Kuro5hin.

Why can't subscribers get a chance to mod stories during this "preview" time

Sounds like Scoop of Kuro5hin.

Taco, man, you're confused. Rusty handles news from the trenches -- you're supposed to be giving us stuff that matters! ;)

Try Kuro5hin. Reader supported (even the bulk of the ads are by readers).

yeah.... i believe that other place does have far better submission system.

(i'm surprised my karma hasn't ignited yet)

if a substantial section of the community want to take a thread off-topic they should be allowed to do that.

There's a reason Slashdot doesn't have just one big thread (or maybe two--"News for Nerds" and "Stuff that matters"), and it's the same reason there are more newsgroups than misc.misc. Topics are useful for both finding what you do want to read and avoiding what you don't. No matter how big a "section of the community" wants to violate the community's norms, reducing signal/noise is still wrong.

In the oracle case the vast majority of discussion was going on in the offtopic thread and people realised that the normal moderation system probably would not have been so harsh.

Think of it as getting out the body armor and tear gas because the regular cops on the beat can't handle the riot on their own.

Why do you think the admins would reject this topic, just because they minimized vandalism in a completely unrelated topic?

what i think is mising from /. is a decentralised story submission system

If you want K5 you know where to find it. Slashdot exists because the audience thinks the admins' selections are worth reading.

I've said it a few times before in a few places, but it bears repeating. . .

Homeland passes. Here's what to do. (This post was a little intense sounding, but still, I believe, entirely valid. It's interesting to look back at where we were in November; not just at how the unimaginable happened, but how it now feels normal).

A German Jew on why he didn't get out in time. (This post is REALLY informative; it's a story by a German Jew who explains how he let all the warning signs slip past him and didn't get out before the Nazi axe fell. Read this one! It's gold.)

-Fantastic Lad

I've said it a few times before in a few places, but it bears repeating. . .

Homeland passes. Here's what to do. (This post was a little intense sounding, but still, I believe, entirely valid. It's interesting to look back at where we were in November; not just at how the unimaginable happened, but how it now feels normal).

A German Jew on why he didn't get out in time. (This post is REALLY informative; it's a story by a German Jew who explains how he let all the warning signs slip past him and didn't get out before the Nazi axe fell. Read this one! It's gold.)

-Fantastic Lad

Bullshit. If not for the crapflooders, people with a clue would read at -1 or 0. But because of the page wideners, goatse guys, YOU FAIL IT / all your base / Natalie Portman / meme-of-the-month and gratuitous profanity posts, the SNR there is awful.

Yes, there are some diamonds in the rough. If you have plenty of time to wade through the crap, you can find them. But then again, anyone who's that serious about the geek news is over on k5 anyway.

Maybe it's synaesthesia?

Gee, troll much?

I didn't pay a search engine optimization service to make this happen. I didn't use any tricks like "doors" either. It cost me no money, but it did take time and hard work to achieve it.

I explain everything I did in How To Promote Your Business On the Internet.

What's my secret? No secret at all:

• Put stuff on your site that people find interesting and useful
• Ask people for links, and give them reciprocal links in return.

Other pages I have that you may find helpful are:

• Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants
• Search Engine Submission Form Index

and finally, from my K5 diary, A Webmaster's Strange But True Tale.

Thank you for your attention.

It's not really their Search algorithm, it's their method of comprehensive PageRanking.

They basically measure Web pages as either 1) portals, or 2) authorities.

Sites like Kuro5hin and *nix have a lot of "Google juice" (i.e. weight in their ranking system) because they have so many links to other sites, while also garnering a slew of links to their main page.

• BBC News is usually first on my list. I hit the (non-UK) front page, use Ctrl-Alt-click in Opera to kick open all the interesting links, then go to Americas (because that's where I am) and do the same. Sometimes I go for Europe or Entertainment.
• Slashdot - unlike all those other silly people who are replying!
• If I actually feel like thinking, I look at Kuro5hin, which takes a different approach to same idea as Slashdot. Most everyone can post a new article. Many articles tend to go into depth, rather than just presenting a summary. You can vote the articles up or down; you can choose to view even low-rated articles in certain subjects, etc. Self-service text ads let you support the site - and you can let people comment on the ads.
• Sometimes I look at top stories on Yahoo, or go for most popular stories and images.

After that it's usually off to non-news stuff like Diesel Sweeies or whatever.

I look at the local newspaper occasionally, even though their editing is awful and they get facts wrong in the subject areas I know about, which makes me wonder if they ever get it right the rest of the time. I only watch TV news if something important is happening. (Celebrities getting arrested isn't important, so I rarely watch TV news.) If something interesting is happening and I don't think the TV news is worth turning on, I hit the Google News beta site and type keywords.

This post is not off topic, I swear to Dios. The second paragraph contains a bunch of shit, but the first contains useful information. The first paragraph begins here: I just love it when some huge Microsoft ad comes up when I load up a story. Astute readers probably know that I hate Microsoft's guts and that I firmly believe that everything they are/sell/do/say is pure garbage. So when I see one of their ads on Slashdot, I click on it and when their ugly webpage finishes to load, I simply hit the 'back' button. I never look at what they're advertising. Even if I did, I would certainly not be interested in it, whatever it is, because I use products that are in every way superior to theirs. Products like six different distributions of Linux, all three BSDs, versions of BeOS ranging from 3 to 5 (because it's still useful), QNX, IRIX and HP-UX. There were others, but I reduced the list of operating systems to the ones listed here. So Microsoft has to pay for another click that led them nowhere. And I wasted some of their bandwidth. These two facts make me feel good about myself and about who I am. I firmly believe that causing them additional expenses such as the one described herein is a good way to increase one's self esteem (not that I need to do so, what with the 6 different girlfriends I have that don't know about each other, and would probably still love/screw me if they knew, since I am such a studmuffin, so yeah, I have lots of self esteem... girls love guys that troll Slashdot).Now, to what I was going to say about this article before that stupid ad got in my way... Oh, that was in the first paragraph... sorry, forgot.

Actually, I was going to stop here but I think I'll add more...

• http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~wayne/microsoft-sucks.h tml
• http://pub32.ezboard.com/fogrebattle6432793frm13
• http://brighten.bigw.org/humor/mine/microsoft_suck s.html
• http://www.taikahn.com/mssucks.html
• http://www.microsoftsucks.com/
• http://www.never.com/eva/
• http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/talkback/talkback_ 253.html
• http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/12/18/155016/66
• http://www.spiffle.com/rants/10-05-1999_01-05am

This post has been moderated -9: Sewage.

Yes, it makes perfects sense. How many people link to "autoPron"? If not many, then the algorithm ranks it low. As it should be. That means it's not a well known site.

102 sites. Anyway, it certainly makes more sense then returning this which is just a description of my site in German, with a link to it as the second result. Or this my kuro5hin account information (which also links to me) is the first result?

The fact is, 'autopr0n' is only ever used as A) my username or B) in reference to my website, almost always with a link. So why am I ranked near the bottom, after a few sites that decided to stick 'autopr0n' in the massive keyword lists they use to try to Spam search engines?

I also used to be the #1 returned result.

I know that you guys at Slashdot can't be perfect and that half of the time one quarter of you don't have a frigging clue what the other two eights are doing, but if you figure out later you made a mistake in rejecting a story, just fucking say so, don't lie to those of us who go the trouble of submitting the stories that pay for whatever passes for food with you people. It was "just in" two days ago, and you threw it away, and now somebody has given you a second chance. Okay, I can live just fine with that, as long as you can admit when you went wrong.

Stuff like this is seriously offensive and is one of the reasons why people are turning their backs on this site and are moving over to Kuro5hin.

I think, for whatever reason, one of the editors does not like your reviews; they probably feel that they compete with their own reviews.

Keep this in mind: The editors have unlimited moderation points. If they do not like what you have to say, they can, and will, moderate it to -1. Regardless of the merits of what you say.

I sugesst stop wasting your time with Slashdot; this is a flame forum for letting off steam by people flaming each other. Instead, post your reviews to usenet or Kuro5hin, where people will appreciate the time and effort you go to to review books.

Of course, Salon is not public radio or television but they could be public internet news....

Salon is not really a news site... it's more of an analysis and opinion site.

There's already a website that's sort of going on the public radio/TV model: Kuro5hin. Back in June, rusty posted We're Broke: The Economics of a Web Community and began an fundraising drive which, by all accounts, has been successful.

Of course, Salon is not public radio or television but they could be public internet news....

Salon is not really a news site... it's more of an analysis and opinion site.

There's already a website that's sort of going on the public radio/TV model: Kuro5hin. Back in June, rusty posted We're Broke: The Economics of a Web Community and began an fundraising drive which, by all accounts, has been successful.

After the review of my novel on Friday, it got over 20,000 hits per hour for the next four hours, and over 200,000 hits by the end of the day. Good thing I didn't try using my Bellsouth Personal Webspace to host it ;-)

--sex

Turns out, it's just talking about how they don't make much money.

It was on k5, among other places.

Mostly it affects where banks choose your pin for you (which happens in the UK among other places) based upon a hash of your account number. Not that a 4 digit pin was particularly strong an encription method, but this paper merely says it's even weaker when based of the users account number. However, it seems this crack is most easily acheived by an insider, not your local script kiddie with Aunt Edna's ATM card.

Read more here:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/2/20/61350/0548

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/19/05641/7357

See here for details. Don't get ripped off.

I wish there was a way to moderate the *parent* article down

I think Kuro5hin allows this - not that it helps you here.

You should post that to the humour section of the other site...

That would be kuro5hin..

My sweetie got Joe-Jobbed a couple of weeks ago. 20K bounces over the course of the day. Thankfully, the payload of the spam was only two lines of text, containing a URL to a (non-existent) pr0n site. So the bounce messages were comparatively short. A cursory look at the headers in the bounces suggested that the attacker -- 'spammer' is too genteel a term for this -- was using a constellation of open relays to spread the stuff.

She came into my office, saying, "Make it stop!" Sadly, there turns out to be little one can do to stop it. The emails were coming from thousands of different legitimate sites, all serving a legitimate bounce to an illegitimate spam. It was very distressing for her. Fortunately, the attack stopped, and things settled down after about 24 hours.

I wrote up the experience on Kuro5hin. Feel free to have a look.

Schwab

Kuro5hin had a similar thread last year, with some hilarious comments in it.

A personal favorite I heard from a coworker years ago:

Q. Why does the condemned man get a last cigarette, instead of one of those
through-the-skin stick-on nicotine thingies?

A. Don't patch the executable.

This is a MAJOR assumption, and one that's shown to be wrong on many occasions.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to give up *porn/indecent* material on public resources... but the reality is that a) there is a "moving line in the sand" of what people consider porn, and b) censorware repeatedly oversteps its bounds and blocks non-porn sites that have protected speech.

Ultimately, I'd be happy with a censorware solution that was a) open sourced b) open-access (you can see the sites that are blocked as well as the reasons they were blocked, and could contest censoring openly).
Sadly, I doubt that this will ever happpen.