Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Picnic, Sperling, Quickliness
Now where can we rent giant Tux costumes for such events? You've already seen Marc Merlin's report on the Big Event, but an Anonymous Brave Guy pointed out a piece over at the BBC about people's mostly-mushy feelings about the current 10-year Linux streak, noting that "It's worth reading just for the post on airlines from 'Lee, UK'. :-)" (Oldie-but-goodie, defined.)
And Totally_Tux writes: "LAN parties are generally associated with LAN gaming. The South Australian Linux group though recently held the Linux InstallFest 2001 that aimed at introducing Linux to new users by helping them install the OS onto their notebooks and desktop PCs and holding talks last Saturday. The InstallFest was also marked by a tenth birthday celebration to Linux's Tux persona on the 25th of August. This short article includes some shots from that day. Read about InstallFest 2001 here."
So you wanna make your box jump to life? Many readers were interested in General Software's slimmed-down, quick-booting experimental system; General's Steve Jones writes: "In order to accommodate the numerous requests for more information about the General Software Quick Boot Soyo Experiment, we've set-up a web page, and also an email alias for additional direct queries. The web page contains more details about the project, and a FAQ which the company would like to update based on inquiries to the email address."
Call Occam, ask him to bring his biggest razor. gh0ul writes: "Sheldon Sperling of the DOJ has sent out his own press release regarding last week's Report Security Problems, Face The Consequences story. Brian K. West's defence team has posted their own reply to Sheldon's release here ..."
To help you laugh through the tears: A nameless reader wants you to know that the "BBC's Radio 4 is repeating all 12 episodes from the two series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy originally broadcast in 1978 and 1980. Wednesdays, 5 September -- 21 November, 6.30pm UK time (17:30 UTC until 2001-10-28, then 18:30 UTC.) Listen here."
Seems that the rebroadcasting of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is in Real(Player) format. That pisses me off. How I loathe realplayer...
--hongpong.com
(I've decided to make one last post of this so that anyone who didn't catch it the first two times has a chance to read it. I think it's pretty important that as many people in the community read this as possible, as it affects all of us. Slashback seems to be the correct place to revisit issues that have been discussed in the last week, so I'm posting it here. Thanks.)
OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"
The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.
Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.
On to modslap. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.
OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.
To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.
We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"
comments.pl: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".
You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.
The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.
The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.
What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!
As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.
Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.
A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.
Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.
As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.
Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.
Wow thats great news ! and it's good that it's in realplayer .. no more of going to windoze to listen to them.
Try contacting the Danish Unix User Group that lends out this Tux costume
[Connection closed by foreign host]
the doj letter reminds me of the song by ronin. .. really it's an art to write such a long letter without saying anything.
so typically diplomatic
...Linux users come up with a way to increase their OS flavour of choice from its current .00937% market share to something more impressive.
[Insert the usual disclaimer here]
what's with this ip? drop it in netscape and nothin, whois is blank. The reverse is nothin, google gives me nothin. Damn it, I hate jokes that I can't understand!
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
from the linuxfreak artical:
>>Third, senders of certain kinds of SPAM (not the lunch meat) may also be subjected to criminal prosecution under this statute.
SPAM (upper case) is a lunch meat and a trademark of Hormel.
spam (lower case) is unwanted email.
Hmm. Did you try any tux rental sites?
Say, since it's well know that any important links in a posted article get "slashdotted", does that mean that we should be expecting slashdot to be slashdotted because of this?
..
General Software, Inc.'s demonstration of a 0.8sec BIOS boot time led to many observations and questions on the technical forum Slashdot, prompting us to provide more details on this project. We?ll update this page periodically ove
Your rebuttal was read and noted. Thanks for participating!
BBC has some really great shows (one of my favorites, when it got to PBS, was Jeeves and Wooster - of "ask Jeeves" fame, not to mention Monty Python). Is there a way to get the BBC in the US? Can people with DirecTV etc see it?
Crucifiction? To the left please, one cross each (Life of Brian).
and what did he do to deserve this?
:)
from the 130.49.77.223 dept.
to save you the time
[stewart@byte stuff]# host 130.49.77.223
223.77.49.130.in-addr.arpa. is an alias for 223.77.64-19.49.130.in-addr.arpa.
223.77.64-19.49.130.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer dhcp77-223.pittsburgh.resnet.pitt.edu.
you heard me. get the whole series in mp3 format from audiogalaxy. just search for it, it's all there. linux client available.
It's a perennial favourite anyways, but when Adams died it set off a new round of posting/requesting.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
from the 130.49.77.223 dept.
Could anyone explain the significance of this IP address to me?
Thanks.
They're trying to slashdot somebody by posting their IP and making everybody curious (I pinged too).
130.49.77.223
I can feel my sanity, beyond my reach and slipping...
(How some 20-odd seconds of music, clearly used as a parody, can be copyright infringement, I'm not sure. But I've still got that short segment of the show "memorized", and they can't jail me for playing it back in my own head! Not yet anyway! Free Dmitri! Free Dmitri!!! ;-)
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
Anyway, I'm sure those oh-so-clever Slashcode people can make it so that stuff goes through fine. Hell, why not take every example of ASCII art and whump it into a database, so that every new masterpiece has to be original?
Now *that*'s fsckin' brilliant.
By code, I mean programming - Perl comes to mind. The thing's 90% punctuation as it is.
Last post!
It looks like they broke/disabled it. It was here, at the bottom, but no more hidden sids for you.
Click Start->Run... and type in msconfig.exe. The "System Configuration Utility" will come up, allowing you to do all sorts of cool things to Windows. The most important is the "Startup" tab. Go there and look at the checkboxes. These allow you to selectively disable _all_ programs that get started when your computer starts (even those not shown in the Startup folder in the Start menu).
Even if you uncheck all the boxes (even the important-sounding ones such as scanRegistry or TaskMonitor), your computer will still start up and work fine. I've tried it. So go crazy! Uncheck anything having to do with RealPlayer, or anything that sounds suspicious. To find out what some of the more obscure programs do, try pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete and killing them selectively, then seeing if you notice the difference. Common ones are the on-screen displays for keyboards with Internet buttons, antivirus tray icons, software registration reminders, automatic Internet update checkers, RealPlayer, scanner software, and AOL/AIM tray icons. By only checking the things you want, you can eliminate useless crap and take control of what programs do to your system.
If you see something called WebHancer or SaveNow, UNCHECK its box with EXTREME PREJUDICE! These are evil spyware/forced advertising programs that are using your computer for their nefarious purposes.
If you do this for your parents, they will be forever grateful.
Another great way to "fix" Windows is Microsoft's TweakUI. If you are a computer geek running Windows and you don't have TweakUI, get it now! Its a great control panel applet that allows you to customize Windows features that you can't customize anywhere else. Get it from Microsoft (search their site, its available for all versions of Windows if you look hard enough, even though its not supported it works perfectly).
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
woops, i lied, you just have to be logged in with an account, and you can create 'em.
I apologize for being rather offtopic, but what's up with no more quickies? I personally enjoy the quickies a bit, but all I get are these silly slashbacks! What's up?
http://www.talknerdy.org
Wow. I am constantly reminded how clueless the folks are who make legal decisions in so-called "developed nations".
.txt files. Again: of course I looked in these files. They were in a public location. That's the point.
.sig, as well. Must be some hacker. Totally above the law.
Of course this dude found the hole by accident! Tech support folks are always poking and prodding to see how things break. It's called "problem solving" and the DOJ should look into it.
I mean, I have personally reported security holes to webmasters on three separate occasions. In one case, browsing to the right URL got you a dirlist which showed a bunch of
How is it my fault that the files contained credit card information (including expiry dates) with associated personal information (in some cases, Social Insurance Numbers (it was a Canadian site, eh)?
If it was a wallet, I'd look for a name and address and return it, wouldn't I? Why am I suspect if I pick up the wallet in the first place?
Even if the so-called hacker is suspect, it is often recommended to legal types to do their homework and investigate before flying off the handle. Where there is one hacker, there's three. Why not try and catch a few more, especially if they are stupid enough to contact you about their "exploits" using a valid email return email address.
I bet he had his telephone number in his
I'll stop now. This much sarcasm is not good for me, and I'm starting to feel all superiour to the government, again.
-- clvrmnky
No one places cookies on other people's computers. People download and store cookies on their own initiative. Web browser == user agent, therefore a user is responsible for what his web browser does.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Please remember to remove your tux suit while in the woods during hunting season as not to confuse any drunk hunters.
ello
" Mr. Sperling or the Federal Bureau of Investigation"
But isn't Shelly a woman's name?
..to celebrate the 6th anniversary of Windows 95?
What about those shmucks who waited at midnight to buy it, or are they all using Linux now?
Good one!
Oh yeah, very nice.
None of the mechanics are quite sure where the planes are because they haven't had to work on them for years. All the planes are pilotless and are controlled by a single operator who just does periodic health checks. The passengers hand their tickets to a boarding attendant and then walk through a hallway. At the other end they step out at their destination, never realizing they were even on an airplane.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
West's lawyers state: If this case goes to trial, the Microsoft personnel who developed these programs will likely be subpoenaed as witnesses by Mr. West's defense team. Or if it is found that this software contributed to, participated in or caused the events under investigation to occur, Microsoft could be indicted under the same statute.
That should rack up some billable hours for West's defense team.
Trying to distract from the facts of the case by raising the issue of Microsoft's complicity suggests that the West may not have such a strong case. It's as if an accused murder based his defense on the fact that handguns are dangerous and called a handgun manufacturer as his star witness.
Software doesn't break the law. People break the law.
i won't go into the failings of the moderation system, that is obvious to most people, this one is funny..
when trolls post lengthy off-topic threads, we don't insist that users waste their mod points sending them down to -1, we do it for them.
Great going big brother!! It's only for our benefit right?? At least most other totalitarian countries don't hide their true intentions. i like how you don't even trust your own users to maintain order here.
i really would have no problem with this whole system if the editors (specially michael, timothy and jamie) with their crusade for "our rights online" and other such nonsense practiced what they preached.
Re:BBC TV? It's on DirectTV...
Microsoft isn't guilty here either (unless it misconfigures itself) though Frontpage isn't exactly all that great.
The person who is guilty is the guy who configured Frontpage Extensions or IIS.
Calling Brian K West guilty is like saying a guy who sits on a whoopie cushion lacks manners.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.