Slashdot Mirror

The blog that hosts the "original article" shows that to have been posted by "Roland Piquepaille" another name that pops up frequently on the front page of /.

crap forgot the http

http://www.thedarkcitadel.com/~ovrlrdq/firefox.htm l

teach me to use preview to check the bold but not the url.

The Truth About Roland Piquapaille

If it were me with the concern, I would have sent a serious letter to slashdot, and then I would have made a post showing my concerns. This has gotten way out of hand.

Posted anonymously to preserve my precious karma!

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced ( link ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network Solutions cost $34.99 per year, or about $3 per month. This leaves Roland Piquepaille with $647 each month. He may pay for additional services related to his online jou

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

There. Happy now?

Federal courts have held that web spiders must obey the
established ROBOTS.TXT mechanism by which web site owners limit automated access,
and that a failure to obey ROBOTS.TXT constitutes trespass.

At that time, the accepted
strategy for getting around such blocks was to obtain multiple web hosting accounts to act
as proxies for HMS's harvesting systems. I did not then realize that knowingly bypassing
blocks placed by web server operators was illegal.

hijacking thousands of vulnerable machines all over the
Internet, using them and their network bandwidth without the knowledge or
permission of their owners as unwitting accomplices in HMS's data harvesting
operation.

Under PSC 3933, every instance - every single instance - of hijacking an
open proxy is a misdemeanor of the first degree.

Site was sluggish and can't remember if we've ever slashdotted NASA before :)

Long
Short

and what the hell Torrent Too

Don't read the overview. Just more ad revenues for him. (Info on Roland Piquepaille)

Perhaps he's saving up for a trip to Mars, to enjoy the tres, tres haute cuisine.

I say we all pitch in, send him up, then cut off his web connection. Or his oxygen, whichever is easier to grab.

Don't read the overview. Just more ad revenues for him. (Info on Roland Piquepaille)

Like /.'s (and michael sims' - har har) favourite plagiarist Roland Piquepaille, you mean?

as far as I can tell, http://www.thedarkcitadel.com/ is just a blog, and he is linking from auto-generated links made by the blog software.

Yes, auto-generated links to affiliate URLs.

though it is fairly odd that he just doesn't directly link

He does it to obscure the fact that he posts links to click.example.com/?ref=his_id instead of just www.example.com. There's a double redirect.

Please read granparent post more carefully...

as far as I can tell, http://www.thedarkcitadel.com/ is just a blog, and he is linking from auto-generated links made by the blog software.

now he does appear to have a couple text advertisement links on his blog to help pay hosting costs (maybe these links drive up his traffic and make him more money like he says about roland), but otherwise it seems rather innocent.

though it is fairly odd that he just doesn't directly link

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced ( link ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced ( link ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced ( link ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced ( link ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network

Please don't visit and comment on Slashdot discussions in which you have no interest.

I find that I am interested in only about one-twentieth of the articles on Slashdot. I was interested in this article, and was surprised to see people doing an anger trip over it.

Three points: 1) Roland does not have much chance of making money from his Slashdot articles. (See quote below.) 2) He puts a lot of work into his articles, which may be the reason they get accepted by Slashdot. 3) By complaining unreasonably, you have made him more famous. I was only vaguely aware of him until now, because of a few complaining comments. I didn't know he had a web site of his own until now.

Quote from a comment to an article objecting to Roland's articles, which are sometimes posted on Slashdot:

"I have not seen a SINGLE slashdot article attributed to Roland that requires travelling through his blog.

"Every single time I have seen his articles, the header always links to his sources. Only at the footer do you have the option to go to his site and see a more thorough writeup.

"I have never been forced to view Roland's site just to see the article.

"Compare and contrast with an article posted from the NY Times...."

It's not that it's a bad story, I liked the story, unfortunately, Roland's self-serving self-linking is what puts me, and so many other slashdotter's off.

He blatantly rips off content to get cheap hits on his site for ad revenue.

Read this to see why.

Here, read this: http://www.thedarkcitadel.com/index.php?itemid=276

another one here

and if that mirror dies Coral Version. (look for robo_s.wmv)

Lets keep it simple, put all of the Roland Piquepaille conspiracy posts here. :)

Editors: GIVE HIM HIS OWN DAMN SECTION SO CAN HIDE HIS POSTS

I would've posted as myself, except i'm still working hard to get up to a normal karma level again :P

I'm thinking a bunch of fairly recent moderators would mark it troll immediately.. and the only time i want a post marked as Troll is when it's at +5 :P

Ah, well, it's only karma after all.

The Truth About Roland Piqawhatever.

I for one welcome our new Roland Piquepaille overlords !

In case you missed it when I posted it on Roland's scam last Sunday, here is a writeup someone did on how Roland is trying to use Slashdot to make a living, and is apparently being aided in his efforts, for one reason or another by Slashdot's editors.

Here is a pretty good write up about why everyone hates Roland. He is basicly making a living by finding someone elses interesting article, submitting it to Slashdot and using it to generate ad revenue on his web site. He has improved lately since he actually links to the original article first and to his web site second. Used to be you were steered to his web site first I gather.

Haven't checked myself but the writeup indicates that EVERY article he was submitting to Slashdot was being accepted which is a near impossibility unless he is recieving somekind of preferential treatement from Slashdot or its parent company.

The worst case conspiracy theory is he is partnered with Slashdot, or its parent company, or he is sending a kickback from his ad revenues to Slashdot and they are in turn insuring every one of his submissions makes the front page.

Read

I stole it from some comment here on /. by somebody I can't remember, so I take no credit for it.

Link, read the second blockquote there ;)

Kinda ironic that if you claim to be that person you'd sign up on a system where:
A) you're easily logged
B) many geeks congregate who are more then knowledgeable enough to trace you regardless of proxies used. just dont click here. :)

Kinda like how Kerry does too?

hitting a php/*sql forum isn't a nice thing to do, I got a static copy of the linked to page.

Enjoy

Note: Was converted with *gasp*powerpoint so yes it is horrible :)

Torrent link here.

If I would of known that just about anything get's posted to /. I would of submitted Project CRAC. . . Hey atleast it has a catchy name!

Quasi-Mirror Didn't get the style-sheets, so the formatting is a bit whack.

If anybody Can seed it'd be much appreciated :)

You know that doesn't help when the tracker is down . . . somebody change the tracker to point to http://www.thedarkcitadel.com/phptt/announce and re-upload

You know that doesn't help when the tracker is down . . . somebody change the tracker to point to http://www.thedarkcitadel.com/phptt/announce and re-upload

BitTorrent

You mean something like this??

This is a dupe of thiswhich was a dupe, funny that. Here is a mirror of it (the first dupe), since the site was taken down: My Mirror

Mirror here