Slashdot Mirror
NeuStar to Manage .US Registry
flatt writes: "The US Government picked NeuStar, the managers of the upcoming .biz registry, to manage the .us registry today. NeuStar has made a press release and there's an AP article over at Excite about it. Finally a country code that I'll register in." This has been brewing for a long time, and has been criticized as a giveaway.
Eat it, fuckers.
Now I can get my dream domain, VALinux.biz!
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
When will Tuesday finally be over? Stop posting stories! I'm tired of telling everyone about:
The Slashdot Privacy Watch.
An Open Letter to VA Concerning Privacy on Slashdot
To whom it may concern,
It has come to our attention that Slashdot is building a detailed database of every visitor and user of Slashdot. This database includes, among other personal details, an address history which permanently records every IP address assosciated with every Slashdot user and comment for all time. We are concerned that this database is a signifigant Intellectual Property asset that may be abused in the event of a sale of Slashdot by VA Linux to a third party.
In addition, we feel that keeping a permanent and indelible record of every IP address used to post every Anonymous comment on Slashdot erases whatever hopes of anonymity that endangered or threatened users may have had. To name two examples, Chinese dissidents and corporate insiders can have no expectation of anonymously revealing civil rights violations and corporate abuse.
It is our hope that given these concerns, VA Linux or Slashdot may choose to provide an opt-out option to users, whereby users could choose not to be tracked and profiled if they so request. Some discussion has been made of a Slashdot subscription service; perhaps one revenue stream for Slashdot would be to sell Privacy Rights. For a low yearly fee, a user could purchase the right not to be tracked, profiled, and logged by IP address.
Whatever steps are taken, it is our hope that Slashdot will address the current privacy concerns in public to allay our fears and to promote open discussion.
Thanks again for creating one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and all the best.
-The Slashdot Privacy Watch Team.
But people are already complaining about it being slashdotted. So here's the excite AP story.
... American identification is of
...
NEW YORK (AP) - Patriotism is about to get easier online.
The Commerce Department selected NeuStar Inc. on Monday to run
domain names ending in ".us." With the announcement comes the
ability to get non-geographic addresses such as
"clothingstore.us," rather than the more cumbersome
"clothingstore.los-angeles.ca.us."
The new rules, expected to take effect early next year, are
designed to get more use out of ".us." Country code suffixes such as ".fr" for France have been sources of national pride
worldwide, but in the United States it is the forgotten stepchild compared with ".com."
NeuStar officials are hoping to change that attitude and said
recent terrorism events may give ".us" even more of a boost.
"The fact is right now,
increased importance," said Jeff Ganek, NeuStar's chairman and
chief executive.
Also Monday, the department announced a five-year agreement with
Educause, a nonprofit consortium, to run the ".edu" suffix.
Community colleges will be able to claim ".edu" names
beginning Nov. 12. In the past, ".edu" was limited primarily to four-year colleges and universities in the United States.
The ".us" domain name will be restricted to U.S. residents and
companies or organizations that operate in the United States,
though the system will rely partly on self-certification and isn't
foolproof.
Many details also remain unresolved.
Public-interest groups worry that ".us" - historically the
domain of state or local governments, nonprofit organizations and schools - will become yet another frontier dominated by commercial
interests.
"A lot of people are very supportive of opening `.us' for more
commercial, small business and individual use," said Alan Davidson, associate director for the Center for Democracy and
Technology. "What's tricky is how you make sure the policies
are fair and equitable."
NeuStar officials said existing ".us" users will get to keep
their names, and local entities that now assign geographically oriented names like "anyname.los-angeles.ca.us" can continue
doing so.
In addition, a number of names have been set aside, including
"kids.us" as a possible children's channel and "parks.us" as a
central resource for parks in the United States.
The company will establish a policy advisory council to address
usage issues, said James Casey, NeuStar's director of policy and
business development. The council's composition and other details
are still pending.
In the past, ".us" policy was handled by the University of
Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, which delegated assignments of specific names to some 800 individuals and
organizations.
To accommodate the distributed assignments, names became long
and cumbersome. It was also difficult to figure out where to go to
get them. Though businesses were allowed to claim ".us" names,
few did.
The change in ".us" is separate from last year's decision by
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to create
seven Internet suffixes to relieve overcrowding in ".com."
A NeuStar subsidiary, NeuLevel Inc., is the operator of
".biz," one of the new suffixes. NeuStar's ".us" database will
share some of the security and technical developments being used in
".biz."
NeuStar, based in Washington, D.C., also runs databases of area
codes and telephone prefixes for the nation's phone system.
The Commerce contract with NeuStar will run four years, with
options for two one-year extensions
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
Of course, there's the "state-sanctioned" version of how Rob "CmdrTaco"
Malda got his most peculiar nickname ("'CmdrTaco' is a reference to a Dave
Barry article where he lists places not to take a date. Among them is any
place called 'The Commander Taco' or something like that.") and then there's
the real reason for said nickname.
In order to explain it, we'll need to hop into the time machine and step
back a few years to when Mr. Malda was still but a wee pup in college. So
I'd like to take you back to the early 90's.
Rob was fresh out of Catholic high school, with dozens of years of Catholic
guilt impressed upon and built up inside him. He'd snored his way through
high school, tinkering around with nothing more than computers. Fact of the
matter is that most girls don't like geeks and he was too repressed to
figure out a way to approach those of the fairer sex. For that matter, he
was even afraid to touch himself. Based on what little sex ed had been
taught in school, he knew better than to engage in premarital copulation or
let his seed touch the ground, lest he burn in hell or suffer the fate of
Onan. It wasn't the bullying and the scornful glances that were the worst
torture of high school, it was waking up in the middle of the night, his
genitals throbbing, gritting his teeth, and clenching his perineum to abate
the oncoming rush of verboten relief (after his mom found his stained
underwear once, he had learned better).
But college represented the ultimate to a scrawny kid who wasn't quite sure
how to play well with others. It was the chance to meet completely new
people and to completely reinvent himself, a rebirth of sorts. And what
kind of rebirth would it be? The kind that meant he would (finally) get
chicks. Catholic guilt be damned! He'd heard that throbbing in his loins
loud and clear and it was finally time to do something about it. But how?
The answer was clear: in addition to the obvious major in computer science,
he'd pick up a minor in art. Women would look at him and see not
only the provider instincts that comp sci implied, but a sensitive heart and
a mind with a flair for aesthetics as well, a heart with art in it. What
lady could possibly resist such a formidable combination?
Unfortunately, all of them. A little scribble on paper saying you know art
is no replacement for the ability to clearly communicate that you love it as
he was finding out. Things at college were no different than in high
school. The girls were still hung up on the football players, leaving him
struggling to make a saving throw vs. pathetic geekdom. He discovered the
concept of alcohol, figuring that cracking a sixer and his inhibitions meant
that he'd be cracking their legs, but again, he turned into nothing but an
incoherent mess.
A year went by and no luck, aside from ridding himself of some Catholic
guilt: the liberal nature of campus and the wonders of the nascent world
wide web meant that with a little (very little) peer interaction skirting
around the subject and lonely hours in the dead of night on weekends when
his roommates were out presumably dipping their wicks meant that he'd
finally been able to overcome his irrational fear of masturbation. And boy,
did he ever.
Saying that he took to it like a fish to water was an understatement: he
masturbated as if he honestly believed that if he did it enough, he'd win a
prize. Unfortunately discovering Usenet, he learned all manner of deviant
masturbatory practices, of course convincing himself that it was all OK and
that this was just practice for when he finally met Ms. Right, etc., etc.
You can justify some things to yourself, but there shouldn't be any way to
rationally justify getting your penis lodged in a beaker. Stupid stupid!
What was he thinking? But the guy on alt.sex.masturbation had said that the
sensation of a penis displacing a beaker full of warm olive oil was the most
"realistic" feeling ever, so who was he to doubt? It was a heart pounding
few minutes waiting to return to his normal, pitifully small flaccid state,
hoping that his roommate wouldn't return to find him in such a grotesque
state. His roommate was, of course, aware that Rob was wacking it like it
was going out of style, but while that was mildly normal, there was
something horribly wrong about having your member painfully lodged in a
glass beaker. But things there all worked out and the beaker replaced his
normal jitrag "hidden" underneath his bed. He even jokingly contemplated
submitting the beaker half-full of swirled olive oil and rank seed as an art
project, but thankfully thought better of it.
This was all foreplay to what would give him his nickname forever. Perusing
alt.sex.masturbation after he'd mauled himself one afternoon while his
roommate was still out, he came upon a life-changing post: the most
realistic sex sensation, ever, guaranteed. Dozens of replies to the
post over the next few days verifying that this was indeed the best thing
since sliced bread assuaged his fears that this would turn into another
Beaker Incident. So for the first time ever, Rob set out to the hardware
store. Having picked up a small length of modestly gauged PVC piping, it
was off to the supermarket to procure some liver.
When he burst back into his room, rosy-cheeked and visibly excited, his
roommate and a few of his friends began to cruelly inquire about why he had
some piping and liver. Malda, somewhere between stutter and a mumble,
blurted out some half-assed explaination about "Maxwell's Demon" and
"passive heating". They laughed and headed on out to "throw some brews back
and nail some broads". Malda waited the longest five minutes of his life
until he was convinced that they were gone, then snuck down to the microwave
to heat up the liver for the longest 45 seconds of his life. Sprinting with
the foul organ in tow back to his room, he stuffed the liver into the PVC
pipe and then stuffed his foul organ inside of it. So amazing was
the sensation that it provided that he copulated with the homebrewed
artificial vagina multiple four more times that evening, finally passing out
with the semen-laced liver-stuffed pipe leaking all manner of horrible
fluids leaking onto his sheets. With a start, he woke in the middle of the
night, scrambling furiously to hide the pipe, dispose of the pearly
mistake-covered liver, and then wash his sheets. His roommate and his
friends stumbled in while he was washing the sheets, and they cruelly
inquired if he'd shat the bed or what. He responded that he'd had a bit too
much to drink and had puked on it. They gave each other knowing glances,
shoved him aside and went back to their respective rooms.
So Malda's love affair with a pipe and some liver continued unabated, and
things were going well: in one of his art classes, he'd even managed to tell
a (not even remotely attractive) girl that he was a comp sci major and an
art minor, and was patting himself on the back for a job well done. He
returned to his room high on life and ready for a few rounds with the
liverpipe, and so thought nothing of it when his roommate invited him over
to dinner at his friend's place. He accepted, thrusted to fruition in his
unholy contraption, cleaned up after himself and then took a shower and a
nap before getting up to head to dinner over at his roommate's friend's
house.
He showed up at six prompt, and they began by cracking open a few Coronas
and watching some TV. It was Mexican night, they informed him. Nachos and
tacos: what would he like? Tacos, he responded.
At the dinner table (OK, huddled around the TV), Malda was talking with
excitement in his voice about how he'd unearthed some of his old disks with
shareware classics like Duke Nuke 'Em, Jumpman, Tapper and Commander Keen on
them and had been playing them all afternoon. One of the guys snickered and
he asked if they weren't into old games.
"*snicker* Hey, uh. Guys. Do these tacos taste a little funky to you?"
"*snicker* Yeah, a little bit."
Rob looked around, not quite getting the gist of it and responded "These
taste fine. Why?"
As his roommate burst out laughing, one of the guys said "Yeah. I sort
of... ran out of meat and I had to make your tacos with this piece of meat I
found in the garbage near your roommate's room. But don't worry. It was
all wrapped up and so it wasn't dirty... COMMANDER TACO!!"
It was then, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that he realized that
he'd been fed a piece of liver that he'd been intimate with only hours
before. He ran out of the apartment crying and failed his classes for the
rest of the semester, getting enough counseling and living in enough denial
afterwords that he managed to graduate in 4 1/2 years like a real trooper.
So why would he choose such an embarassing nickname for a website he decided
to run shortly thereafter, you ask? Who knows? Brainfart, Freudian slip,
self-deprecation, therapy, anybody's guess, really. On the bright side,
it's one less question that those pesky reporters will have to ask him about
the meaning behind his name, right?
The Government actually has to hire a company to restore damaged registry files. That makes me want to *puke*
I once thought slashdot was a great place for intelligent conversations, but any website that has an entire day of the week dedicated to people flaming each other is pretty 14m3. Where have all the slashdorks gone?
"Core overlay!" - Vic
You aren't sorry, you are a blatant karma whore. Moderators, Mod this down, Noone said it was being slashdotted, and as you can see moderators, it's handling the load quite nicely. Try and gain your pathetic karma somewhere else, loser!
Sorry, but what your doing is more precisely known as a CrapFlood. True trolling is funny and intelligent. CrapFlooding is not. It's pathetic. The only troll I have any respect from is Trollificus, who at least takes the time to craft well done troll posts, unlike this purile crap.
Down with crapfloods. If your going to go through the effort of a "trolling" Tuesday, at least make it a better attempt than this
...otherwise someone may register goatan.us before he does.
An open letter to Jamie McCarthy
Dear Jamie,
There's a reason people look at you like you're some kind of goddamn freak. We're pretty sure there's other reasons you won't show your face anymore; we've been reading slashdot long enough to remember the pictures the Holland Sentinel published of you with your slicked back greasejob haircut and hawkish little face. I remember thinking "God, I know Internet filters are bad, but the last fucking thing that is going to convince anyone of anything is this guy". You need to wash. You need to exercise. You need to get a haircut, and get a real job. Soon, VA is going to fire you, and you're going to be out in the real world. And that is going to be the shock of a fucking lifetime. You need to prepare.
As much as you delight in finding people despicable enough that you feel tormenting them is your righteous duty, I think it's pretty clear at this point that Michael Sims is not a Nazi. In fact, he knew the truth about you long before anyone else did. You and your friends may run THE CENSORWARE PROJECT, but anyone with a lick sense now knows that you're personally responsible for writing the Censorware code that's now built into Slashdot. Let's be extremely clear about this: you define Censorware to be "software which is designed to prevent another person from sending or receiving information (usually on the web)". And you've checked mountains of code into CVS to prevent people with dissenting opinions from sending information on the web. It meets your definition, letter for letter. And guess what? Your Censorware is just as effective as every Censorware project you have ever railed against. How effective is that?
How effective is that? That's a great question. It's effective in exactly the same way NetNanny is effective. It stops technically non-proficient people in their tracks. They become victims of a robotic system that no one understands. Get a new account on this cool site, post a comment about how you had a hard time installing Linux, and BAMMO, you and your whole subnet are banned from posting. Congratulations. But it doesn't stop the clever, does it Jamie? How many times have you written articles about how the folks at Peacefire can walk rings around an Internet filter in 10 seconds flat? Well guess what?
I just spent the whole fucking day running circles around your pathetic little Internet filter. How does it feel to be a commercial software developer paid to block people from accessing something and failing?
Your points about Censorware were something you should have listened to. You and your pathetic system are a bleeding failure. Like your opponents, you have frustrated the weak and enraged the strong. Soon, you'll lose your job, and you're going to be sitting on the other side of an oak desk with someone trying to interview you looking at you, and your resume, like this.
And that, as they say, is poetic justice.
--Everybody on Trolltalk
An open letter to Jamie McCarthy
Dear Jamie,
There's a reason people look at you like you're some kind of goddamn freak. We're pretty sure there's other reasons you won't show your face anymore; we've been reading slashdot long enough to remember the pictures the Holland Sentinel published of you with your slicked back greasejob haircut and hawkish little face. I remember thinking "God, I know Internet filters are bad, but the last fucking thing that is going to convince anyone of anything is this guy". You need to wash. You need to exercise. You need to get a haircut, and get a real job. Soon, VA is going to fire you, and you're going to be out in the real world. And that is going to be the shock of a fucking lifetime. You need to prepare.
As much as you delight in finding people despicable enough that you feel tormenting them is your righteous duty, I think it's pretty clear at this point that Michael Sims is not a Nazi. In fact, he knew the truth about you long before anyone else did. You and your friends may run THE CENSORWARE PROJECT, but anyone with a lick of sense now knows that you're personally responsible for writing the Censorware code that's now built into Slashdot. Let's be extremely clear about this: you define Censorware to be "software which is designed to prevent another person from sending or receiving information (usually on the web)". And you've checked mountains of code into CVS to prevent people with dissenting opinions from sending information on the web. It meets your definition, letter for letter. And guess what? Your Censorware is just as effective as every Censorware project you have ever railed against. How effective is that?
How effective is that? That's a great question. It's effective in exactly the same way NetNanny is effective. It stops technically non-proficient people in their tracks. They become victims of a robotic system that no one understands. Get a new account on this cool site, post a comment about how you had a hard time installing Linux, and BAMMO, you and your whole subnet are banned from posting. Congratulations. But it doesn't stop the clever, does it Jamie? How many times have you written articles about how the folks at Peacefire can walk rings around an Internet filter in 10 seconds flat? Well guess what?
I just spent the whole fucking day running circles around your pathetic little Internet filter. How does it feel to be a commercial software developer paid to block people from accessing something and failing?
Your points about Censorware were something you should have listened to. You and your pathetic system are a bleeding failure. Like your opponents, you have frustrated the weak and enraged the strong. Soon, you'll lose your job, and you're going to be sitting on the other side of an oak desk with someone trying to interview you looking at you, and your resume, like this.
And that, as they say, is poetic justice.
--Everybody on K5
Hi, I'm a pretentious cock who will make some gay comment about ignoring AC posts here.
But you didn't post as an AC??? Bye bye Kama - haha
*Homer J. Simpson pronouncing 'Uruguay'*
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Hi! Even though I've been bitchslapped, I'm still reading. That was excellent work. It brought a tear of joy to my eye.
No, first, they'd check whether your site really in unpatriotic. If it is, then you'd have a problem. If it promotes patriotism by lambasting all those pinko-commies whores in America's ivory towers, then you'll have a following much like Rush Limbaugh. It's too bad in a so-called 'free' country, free speech is tolerated, not just by the government, only when it's not "biting the hand that feeds it". And about all those references of American soldiers having to protect those "god-damn hippie communists", all I have to say is if you, as a soldier, ever have doubts about fighting to preserve their freedom to dissent, then you're not fighting for people's freedom, but for their favor.
Hello. Please kiss onto my ass.
Calvin Coolidge had nothing on thte Ol' Professor from Princeton - oh, wait, that was Woody Wilson! Oh, never mind - here's a nice ditty:
... is that alliteration or onomotopiea?
Boy the way Glen Miller played!
Songs that made the Hit Parade!
Guys like us we had it made...
Those were the days!
And you knew who you were then
Gals were Gals and Men were Men
Mister we could use a man
Like Herbert Hoover again!
Didn't need no Welfare State
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee, our old La Salle ran great!
Those Were The Days!
Calvin Coolidge - Woodrow Wilson - Herbert Hoover - I forget
Shit dude - get over it.
What the fuck? Why was my previous post a flamebait? Are the /. moderators intentionally poorly rating all the posts on purpose?
How can you expect us, the readers, to give feedback on stories if all you guys do is mod down posts that are not from your buddy buddies.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.