Slashdot Mirror

Snocone writes: "On Sept. 11 Canada had two byelections for Parliament on opposite sides of the country. Elections Canada banned the posting of the Nova Scotia results on the Internet until the polls closed in British Columbia. AppleLinks has the story of how a retired schoolteacher who defied the law by posting to a Web site in Scotland had his computer seized by the RCMP and how a B.C. developer has now published a site to provide realtime results of the Nov. 27 general elections. However, being a Canadian resident, he risks having his equipment seized in advance of the election. Any non-Canadian residents out there want to volunteer their Webmastering services to Fight the Power? Massive Canadian media coverage guaranteed! :)"

Scareduck writes: "We've all heard much of @Home's lousy service. Ed Foster's column today in InfoWorld discusses a fellow who got his @Home e-mail account pulled for posting @Home internal documents to a Usenet newsgroup explaining how tech reps are to assume problems are always on the customer's side. He subsequently posted them on various free Web services (WebJump and Angelfire) only to discover his pages mysteriously disappear. @Home earns bonus villain points for invoking the purely evil DMCA in their justification of this thuggish behavior."

Snocone writes: "Here is the first real world application (researching drug effects on the brain, ironically enough) of Terra Soft's 8-way Black Lab Linux cluster. Even if they didn't deserve mad props for standing up proudly against the Lintel hegemony, there's just something fundamentally hilarious about selling an $18K supercomputer made out of iMacs." So - eight Imacs. You could get the different colors, and call it a Lifesavers Candy Cluster?

Snocone writes "Cringely's latest column asserts that PayPal is now sufficiently dominant that it is pretty well certain to achieve de facto standard for micropayments over the net. Goes into the history of PayPal and why their model works where no one else's has. Even if you don't agree with him, there's some good insights into digital currency infrastructure to be found here." I now use paypal to pay my girlfriend back when she picks up dinner and my roommate pays his share of the rent using PayPal. Its great... although with the $5 they pay in referrals, plus the $5 they pay to new users, ya gotta wonder ... (if anyone wants to use me as their referral, thats cool *grin*). its actually making the Tipping Jar concept practically feasible. I mean, can I tip artists a few bucks when I enjoy their MP3? Can I tip a few bucks when I enjoy reading someone's website? The potential to change a lot of things is within reach.

The latest Netscraft Survey is out. Apache enjoyed an over 1 percent increase, with Microsoft and Netscape showing some decreases. According to the survey, Apache has a 54.81 percent "market share." Also reported is the fact that Webjump actuals uses a hybrid setup with NT serving static content and the dynamic content with a Solaris/Apache/Perl system. Tucked away in the report is a small factoid that PHP is on over 1.1 million domains.

The latest Netcraft Survey is out, covering through October 1999. Apache continues to lead the pack, but Microsoft's IIS showed a significant increase due to, basically, the influence of one web hosting company, Webjump.
Is the Netcraft survey still relevant? A cursory glance might lead some to believe that Apache decreased in the number of sites hosted, which is definitely not the case. Are there maybe better ways to display the numbers to give a more complete picture?

IceFox writes "Last week CSS Disk encryption was cracked. Soon after the data encryption was cracked. With some hagling I got everything working and was able to watch DVDs in Linux. Sound, Video, the works. I wrote up a how to for anyone else that cares to do it." Its not quite ready for prime time. No sound and vid at the same time. Update by roblimo: Jens Axboe sent a link to his page, which contains additional Linux/DVD info.

Weld Pond sent us a link to Hacker News Network, a new web mag that covers computer security and the computer underground. Joseph McDonald wrote in to inform us that someone has been registering typos of our Domain name. I'm flattered. I guess we're big now. An anonymous reader sent us a link to Da French Linux Page which looks strangely familiar. Contrary to what you may read elsewhere, it does not use any of my code, but the design is (ahem) borrowed (and uncredited). Lastly for the evening Star Wars news wrap up, derf wrote in to say that Entertainment Tonight will be showing the Prequel Trailer on TV in its entirety tomorrow evening for those who couldn't download the mpeg, were annoyed by the quality of the net version, don't live anywhere where they showed it in the theater yesterday, or just can't wait until friday. And ToiletDuk (who definitely wins Most Amusing Email of the Day) put together a wallpaper package (.Z) or a BMP. It's pretty good. I downloaded my copy of the trailer, watched the first few seconds, and as xanim chewed it to shreads, I decided to just abort and wait until friday. It'll be much inspiring on the big screen then on my piece of crap laptop. I can hold out for 48 hours (shake shake shake) really I can.

Weld Pond sent us a link to Hacker News Network, a new web mag that covers computer security and the computer underground. Joseph McDonald wrote in to inform us that someone has been registering typos of our Domain name. I'm flattered. I guess we're big now. An anonymous reader sent us a link to Da French Linux Page which looks strangely familiar. Contrary to what you may read elsewhere, it does not use any of my code, but the design is (ahem) borrowed (and uncredited). Lastly for the evening Star Wars news wrap up, derf wrote in to say that Entertainment Tonight will be showing the Prequel Trailer on TV in its entirety tomorrow evening for those who couldn't download the mpeg, were annoyed by the quality of the net version, don't live anywhere where they showed it in the theater yesterday, or just can't wait until friday. And ToiletDuk (who definitely wins Most Amusing Email of the Day) put together a wallpaper package (.Z) or a BMP. It's pretty good. I downloaded my copy of the trailer, watched the first few seconds, and as xanim chewed it to shreads, I decided to just abort and wait until friday. It'll be much inspiring on the big screen then on my piece of crap laptop. I can hold out for 48 hours (shake shake shake) really I can.