Slashdot Mirror

First time accepted submitter jansaell writes "When Sean 'Vile Rat' Smith was killed in the attack on U.S. Consulate in Libya, the EVE Online MMO and Something Awful communities banded together to help the family of a fellow gamer. A fundraiser for Sean Smith's family has now passed $100,000."

New submitter overmoderated writes first with news of an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya. From the article: "The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other embassy staff were killed in a rocket attack on their car, a Libyan official said, as they were rushed from a consular building stormed by militants denouncing a U.S.-made film insulting the Prophet Mohammad." An anonymous reader adds: "Sean Smith, a.k.a. Vile Rat, an EVE Online CSM member, and diplomat for the GoonFleet corporation, was one of the four killed in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya last night. He was 34. A fundraiser is being organized for his children by the Something Awful forums." Update: 09/12 21:28 GMT by U L : Ozma from Something Awful mailed in a link to the memorial thread on the SA forums (including details on the memorial fund).

First time accepted submitter say_hwat writes "Today Reddit announced that it has banned subreddits dedicated to posting sexualized imagery of people under the age of 18. Last year, the site came under fire for r/jailbait, a subreddit dedicated to posting images of people under 18. The subreddit was shut down, but many others, such as r/gaolbait and r/bustybait, continued existing or sprung up afterwards. The policy change today came hours after a thread on Something Awful called for a public campaign against Reddit's lax attitude towards the sexualization of children. The Something Awful thread creator claims that Reddit's administrators know about child pornography being traded, but refuse to act. Among others, the thread creator cites r/preteen_girls as being particularly egregious."

marcan writes "Comcast users are reporting 'connection reset' errors while loading Google. The problem seems to have been coming and going over the past few days, and often disappears only to return a few minutes later. Apparently the problem only affects some of Google's IPs and services. Analysis of the PCAP packet dumps reveals several injected fake RSTs, which are very similar to the ones seen coming from the Great Firewall of China [PDF]. Did Google somehow get caught up in one of Comcast's blacklists, or are the heuristics flagging Google as a file-sharer due to the heavy traffic?"

An anonymous reader sends in word of the well-known artist Todd Goldman, who has been accused of stealing images and ideas from an Internet comic artist/author and others, and profiting from them. Goldman has now threatened to sue the Web page that pointed out the apparent theft to the world.

TunesBoy writes "Only a couple of days after being shipped, the Apple TV is already being modified in a variety of ways. A thread at Something Awful discusses installing VLC, and a dedicated site, AppleTVHacks.net, has appeared and is cataloging hacks including a hard-drive upgrade tutorial. Did Apple intend for the Apple TV to be so easy to upgrade and hack?"

Petey_Alchemist writes "Silicon Valley gossip rag Valleywag is carrying a story about Second Life being a new spin on the old pyramid scheme. The article, which consists mostly of selections from the report of financial consultant Randolph Harrison, suggests that not only are most people deceived about the amount of money they can make in Second Life, but also about how easily they can withdraw it. It says 'Like the paid promotion infomercials that run on CNBC, sadly SecondLife is a giant magnet for the desperate, uninformed, easily victimized. Its promises of wealth readily ensnare those who can least afford to lose their money or lives to such scam in exactly the same way that real estate investor seminars convince divorcees with low FICO scores to buy houses sight unseen with no money down.'"

gloom writes "In 2000 the Finnish demoscene musician Janne Suni (also known as 'Tempest') won the Oldskool Music Competition at the Assembly demoparty with his four-channel Amiga .MOD entitled 'Acid Jazzed Evening.' A Commodore 64 musician called 'grg' remade the song on the C64 (using the infamous SID soundchip); it is this that was stolen. The producer's name is Timbaland and he is one of the hottest names in American music these days. The track in question is called 'Do it' and it is featured on the Nelly Furtado album 'Loose' on the Geffen label. Getting nowhere with Geffen, the demoscene has now risen to the aid of Tempest, first by creating a stir at SomethingAwful (files downloadable from the forum), then at Digg.com, then on YouTube, with a video demonstrating the blatant ripoff. Being an online-posting musician myself — what rights do I have if this should ever happen to me, and what can be done to raise awareness about such things?"

TechFreep writes, "Amid a slew of incidents involving exploding Sony batteries, Virgin Atlantic announced that it won't allow passengers to use batteries in any Apple or Dell laptops on flights. The announcement, posted on Virgin's website, said that passengers may carry on the laptop itself, but batteries must be properly wrapped and stowed away in carry-on for the duration of the flight. However, the airline provided no details as to what proper wrapping entails. For those who wish to use a laptop while on the plane, Virgin plans to provide power adapters on flights where outlets are available." Will Virgin allow on board exploding Sony batteries in IBM ThinkPads?

logan5 writes "SomethingAwful's forum denizens, on the call of site admin Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, raised over $20,000 dollars to be donated to the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. This was done via a PayPal donation link, and PayPal has now frozen the account on a twofold basis: one, that there have been reports of "suspicious behavior" from the "buyers," and two, that no shipping records have been provided for the donations." Since so many users are asking for it, SomethingAwful has provided a link for those wishing to still make donations to the Red Cross in the meantime.

Reader Mantorp wrote in to mention an article over on Something Awful (reader beware) discussing the good and bad points of everyone's favorite video gaming channel, G4. Except for not mentioning Icons (which I view as a variable but generally good program), they nail the channels pros and cons dead on. From the article: "I almost wrote an update like this when the merger first happened, but it would have been purely reactionary. The resulting channel needed time to ferment for better or worse, and luckily for you it got much worse because my only backup article idea was a fake guide to an NES game based on the Herman Melville book Bartleby The Scrivener."

Gridle writes: "In short, eFront was a company which bought out successful websites and turned them into cash cows by maximizing profit through different ways of banner and other advertising. Not a bad idea, except that their methods aren't exactly pretty ones. A disgruntled employee obtained some crucial ICQ logs (mirror), which show the true spirit behind eFront. It includes cheating on banner companies, cheating on top100 sites, talking about raping a female webmaster because she doesn't agree on some points, tax evasion, delaying payment to webmasters, literally harrassing sites out of existance and all kinds of other nasty stuff. Somebody put together a summary about how it concerns the emulation scene. Also notice OverClocked's comic about it and Tim Eckel's previous ventures against the emulation community, and Penny Arcade. And it's all over the place already. FuckedCompany, SomethingAwful, Lum the Mad (and their forums), Get High Forums, mame.dk support pages and Retrogames' General and Current Affairs boards. Somebody even found that their CEO has earlier been convicted."

Jonas Acres writes: "Lowtax of the [in]famous Something Awful has posted a commentary on the future of Internet advertising. It's a pretty interesting read. He's bounced from dying ad network to dying ad network, so he has a decent platform to preach from." I've also had to deal with a number of ad networks over the years - both for Slashdot prior to the Andover acquisition and a couple of other projects. It definitely sucks. Companies that break contracts, don't pay you, and never getting any return phone calls or anything is the norm that I dealt with.

Jonas Acres writes: "Lowtax of the [in]famous Something Awful has posted a commentary on the future of Internet advertising. It's a pretty interesting read. He's bounced from dying ad network to dying ad network, so he has a decent platform to preach from." I've also had to deal with a number of ad networks over the years - both for Slashdot prior to the Andover acquisition and a couple of other projects. It definitely sucks. Companies that break contracts, don't pay you, and never getting any return phone calls or anything is the norm that I dealt with.

Effugas writes: "Thank Memepool for pointing everyone towards The LED Museum, an absolute geek haven if there ever was one. The Museum archives, tests, and describes the multitude of LED types out there, from Ultraviolet to Turquoise to Infrared--and, most amazingly, true full color LEDs! Apparently, I wasn't the only tech drooling over the possibilities that these devices could be put to use towards: Color Kinetics threw 75 of 'em into a spotlight can and added a surprisingly versatile digital controller with external interfaces. The result: A 16.7 Million Color Programmable Spotlight, for $500US." This is an incredible site; I look forward to when the full color LEDs (and that spotlight - Yow!) are a lot cheaper. And unaccountably, Effugas has linked that "A" to something awful.

mindpixel writes: "Sandia National Laboratories is reporting the demonstration of the first UV microcavity laser which could be used to replace gas-filled fluorescent tubes in home and commercial lighting applications. Successful penetration of the lighting market by this and LED technology by 2025 "should translate [globally] into cost savings of $100 billion a year, power generation capacity reductions of 120 gigawatts, and carbon emission reductions of approximately 350 million tons per year (assuming that all the savings come from coal-fired plants)."

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Rev. DOG. writes: "According to Lowtax at Something Awful, the now defunct GameFan Network, bought out by Express.com a while back has sent a letter to their sites saying that they won't pay them a dime, because the bulk of the banner ads served up were for GameFan/Express or hosted sites. Apparently, during Lowtax's stay there, they wouldn't let him take any non-GameFan advertising. Anyway, it's all at the 10-9-00 article on the front page at SA, especially warning others on other banner-ad networks that they may be next." I'm not knocking on Gamefan/Express as much as this is a good example of /always/ read the fine print. Read it again. Have a lawyer read it. When I was selling the ads on here, there were a couple times that people tried to screw us over - so be prepared.

Rev. DOG. writes: "According to Lowtax at Something Awful, the now defunct GameFan Network, bought out by Express.com a while back has sent a letter to their sites saying that they won't pay them a dime, because the bulk of the banner ads served up were for GameFan/Express or hosted sites. Apparently, during Lowtax's stay there, they wouldn't let him take any non-GameFan advertising. Anyway, it's all at the 10-9-00 article on the front page at SA, especially warning others on other banner-ad networks that they may be next." I'm not knocking on Gamefan/Express as much as this is a good example of /always/ read the fine print. Read it again. Have a lawyer read it. When I was selling the ads on here, there were a couple times that people tried to screw us over - so be prepared.

Puck3D writes: "The RIAA is the one being sued. Mp3board.com is suing the RIAA to keep them from shutting their site down for linking to sites that carry illegal MP3. " The article notes that nobody has ever been held liable for linkage. Sure seems like there sure are a lot of lawyers getting paid trying to take that right away.