Slashback: Deception, Fusion, Membership

Slashback arrives tonight with updates on the lukewarm path to cold fusion, one more update on what Microsoft claims is "the way out" (really, this time), a hopeful look at Mandrake's Club, and more -- read on below for the details.

"Congratulations! You may already own goats.cx!" King Mongo writes: "Well, well. First Verisign sent mail to trick domain owners into switching registrars ( as described earlier on Slashdot ); today I received a similar letter from Verisign asking me to renew cruel-intention.com with them. The problem is, I never bought cruel-intention.com and I've never used Verisign as a registrar. But what's this? Whois says I've owned it since September 2001? And the Technical Contact is Verisign? And it's registered for 10 years? You can bet I'll be contacting my state AG, as well as the USPS Inspectors' office; what if the domain name was offensive, or actionable (it may even be a DMCA violation)? Verisign has taken it upon themselves to hijack my identity and expose me to litigation! At least they let me know!"

Port softly, and carry a big Club. joestar writes: "Just seen in Mandrake Linux news... It seems that the recent call for Mandrake Club subscriptions had a double effect: it was a financial success for MandrakeSoft ($390,000 since the Club was first created on November 28th, 2001), and at the same time it generated lots of questions about this new approach of doing business with Free-Software. In a really interesting message, MandrakeSoft's CEO Jacques Le Marois gives all details about the Club results and why and how they are currently inventing a new business model dedicated to Free-Software oriented companies, since the traditional business models fail for these companies. Actually I'm impressed."

OK, perhaps we only have the way sideways. gh0ul writes "news.com is featuring an article regarding Microsoft and Unisys' joint venture to steer companies/individuals away from Unix and branch in to the corporate servers based on Windows2000. With all the negative impact towards 'wehavethewayout.com', im supprised they kept it going.. guess that $28 million matters.."

We've patented that way to think, sorry. An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Symantec marketing droids are on the rampage again. After patenting their definition update technology, this time they patented heuristic virus scanning. When will this insanity end? :P"

I'll believe it when it's powering my air-car. abburdlen writes: "A month ago an article in the Journal Science appeared hyping the possibility of tabletop fusion. Quick summary: Sonoluminescence in heavy acetone ... temperature of collapsing bubbles reaching temperature hotter than the Sun ... evidence of fusion. There was some excitement. There were also many initial skeptics. Looks like the doubtful win again. From the APS, 'The possibility of a major discovery has been obscured by substandard experimental techniques.' Ouch."

One day we'll all have decent bandwidth, right? Pathway writes "I know this has been looked at by slashdot before, but here's a good update comparing the Zipp Fiber to the Terabyte Triangle in Spokane at thelocalplanet.com. In the article, they compare how one prodject is so successful, while the other is foundering. It's a good read."

Comments

Mirrors.

[saintlupus]

why and how they are currently inventing a new business model dedicated to Free-Software oriented companies, since the traditional business models fail for these companies.

Hey, how about some dedicated FTP bandwidth for club members? I know the release of the PPC-8.2 may well flatten the public servers.

--saint

Check out this bullshit

[1010011010]

Both Microsoft and Unisys have declined to comment on the cause of the outage. It is unknown whether there was a technical problem at the hosting site or whether the site was merely bombarded with requests from IT managers clamoring for copies of the free papers on the site.

Oh yeah! Spin, baby! spin!

Re:Check out this bullshit

[Toddarooski]

This ain't exactly Microsoft-spin. (I think in this case they were smart enough to keep a low profile.) Note that Microsoft and Unisys refused to comment -- the sentence you're quoting was written by the news.com reporter, and not some Microsoft PR dude.

I think instead, it's a subtle bit of sarcasm on Mr. Kanellos' part. Go back and read it again.

--

Re:Check out this bullshit

[elfkicker]

The best part is, that after the mad dash to change from a BSD/Apache setup over to IIS is that they are still running a MySQL backend.

This is about as embarrassing as the time I accidentally mixed up my boss's 12 year-old son's site with shemalesonline.com

Very Interesting Read on Cold Fusion

[BigBlockMopar]

Professor David Goodstein of Caltech has a very interesting paper on the physics of cold fusion and the history of the initial "discovery". He doesn't predict Mr. Fusion reactors strapped to the backs of our DeLoreans anytime soon.

Maze

[phrontist]

wehavethewayout.com has that image with the window at the end of a maze, and it leads off to a drop. very good analogy :-) ---------- Phrontist=Geek

Support alternate roots

[davidu]

There is a way to begin to move away from Verisign
OpenNIC :: http://www.opennic.unrated.net/

The OpenNIC is a user owned and controlled Network Information Center offering a democratic, non-national, alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries.

Membership in the OpenNIC is open to every user of the Internet. All decisions are made either by a democratically elected administrator or through a direct ballot of the interested members and all decisions, regardless of how they are made, within OpenNIC are appealable to a vote of the general membership.

Using their root zone will have NO adverse effects on your current websurfing but it will allow you to view alternative roots which have been democratically decided upon.

Check it out!

--davidu

Re:cool! (oh wait)

[NanoGator]

Obviously you're not an AMD owner...

I'm looking for "the way out"

[Pinball Wizard]

so I'm writing Perl functions to serve as drop-in replacements for people porting asp applications to perl. (I'm porting an application now, unfortunately Chilisoft asp couldn't handle the traffic this site gets).

So far I've gotten Trim, InStr, InStrRev, Left, Right, and a few others done. Having these functions really make translating the code a lot easier.

I wonder, is this too trivial to post on sourceforge? I'd love to share.

Is there a good registrar review site anywhere?

[Jelloman]

domainnamebuyersguide.com was mentioned here about a year ago, but it's since been bought by a registrar (which is why I didn't make it a link).

Since there are so many ill-behaved registrars out there (starting with the root of all DNS evil, Verisign), I would really like to see some unbiased reviews of some of them. But Googling around, I'm having a hard time finding anything.

I'm mostly looking for a registrar whose customer agreement does not state somewhere in subparagraph J that they actually own my domain and can take it away anytime they feel like it for no good reason. I know the courts have said that they have that right anyway, at least in the US, but I'd at least prefer that they not shove it in my face.

Re:Is there a good registrar review site anywhere?

[Mr_Person]

Gandi has worked great for me. Only 12 euros per year (about $10) and their terms of service are very good (you actually own the domain). They also do website and e-mail redirection for free.

Re:Is there a good registrar review site anywhere?

[washirv]

I can't recommend gandi (www.gandi.net) highly enough. In addition to the small and entirely pro-consumer terms of service, it's really cheap: a mere $10. And since I switched to them, the email address that I use to register domain names has stopped getting spam. (The old one that I used with netsol still gets plenty). These guys are the best.
--
kurukshetra all the desi news and views you could use

Other instances? More Proof?

[sourcehunter]

"Verisign has taken it upon themselves to hijack my identity and expose me to litigation! At least they let me know!"

Has this happened to anyone else? I'm a bit skeptical of this. This could really land Verisign into some HOT HOT HOT water. It ain't like Verisign is going to target ONE person. If this has only happened to ONE person, then perhaps someone else registered the domain. What other domains does this guy have? Anything similar? Info Info info!!!! The slashback doesn't give much!

What DB is wehavethewayout.com?

[(H)elix1]

Jumping over to The Register

But is the site itself entirely clean? The server yesterday revealed that some interesting ports were left open. The most interesting of which is port 3306, which is used by MySQL and Postgres. Since wehavethewayout.com was a BSD/Apache combination, it was almost certainly running an open source database, too. While Unisys has switched the front-end server to Windows IIS, the most likely explanation for keeping this port open is that the back-end still interfaces to a MySQL database. MySQL is cross platform, and there's a Windows version too. This would certainly make for a rapid port, as it doesn't require a rewrite of the cgi scripts.

Oh, will the pain never end (grin)...

Steps to Buying a Domain Name For Dummies(tm)

[BigBlockMopar]

Is it possible (easy?) for someone to register a domain name using someone else's information? That could be an explanation for Verisign sending you a letter about a domain you never registered...

Uhh... yeah. I guess you've never bought a domain.

Okay. For *.com, *.net and probably *.org:

1. Type the name of the domain you want.
2. Read the message that it's already been taken.
3. Choose a new domain name.
4. Repeat 1-4 until you hit paydirt.
5. Type your name, country, address, telephone, e-mail address. Note: this e-mail address will be spammed, and all this other info will be visible in whois.
6. Whip out your credit card. Pay $35/year. Make sure your browser is using HTTPS before you click the form submit button and send your credit card across 400 unsecured routers.
7. Enter the hostnames of your nameservers. If you're hosting the site yourself, you will need to create a host record including name and IP address for each of your primary and secondary DNS.
8. Wait for confirmation e-mail, telephone call, etc.
9. Look your domain up in whois and find yourself!
10. Wait an agonizing two days or so before top-level DNS servers catch up with the whois database and people can see your Apache test page.

It's really not very difficult.

Re:Goats.cx?

[quantaman]

Just think of all the poor /. newbies who just clicked on your highly rated link to see what it was! I never saw I would see a goatse.cx higher than -1.

Clarification regarding "the way out"

[Jayde Stargunner]

Last time I checked, the site really wasn't touting IIS for web hosting, but using Windows servers for enterprise solutions. That's a pretty different situation.

It's also quite possible that since this really isn't an "in-house" Microsoft deal, they didn't have their web developers working on it...they probably farmed it out to some starving web-heads from SF for an absurdly low price. That said, most web developers don't develop for MS boxes simply because hosting companies charge twice as much for Windows space as a general rule.

Sure, it may seem like some mass hypocricy or something...but if the website isn't about "Use IIS for hosting two-page, temp web pages!" there really isn't much of an issue.

Also, notice the page has at the bottom:
"©1994-2002 Unisys Corporation. All rights reserved."
NOT
"©1994-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved."

-Jayde

Patents

[felipeal]

When will this insanity end?

I don't know if this is the case with Symantec, but I have a friend that works for a company in the semi-conductors business, and that company has a patent-incentive policy: for each patent request filled, the author receives a US$500 bonus. If the request is approved (and the company - not the author, of course - gets the patent), he/she gets another US$2000.

That would explain a lot of crazy/stupid/useless patents...

Re:Patents

[zmooc]

I think the main reason for this bonus-system is to stimulate employees with good innovative ideas to "give" the idea to the company. most employees of most companies are required to do that by their contract anyway. This is probably just meant as an extra bonus for not keeping the idea to yourself (and making money of it yourself). This is pretty standard actually; a lot of good ideas come from education/experience you get by working at the company so they'd like to profit from that. I don't think it was meant to have as many patents as possible.

Re:cruel-intention.com

[Rick the Red]

Oh, it's very easy. My wife got a similar letter from Verisign; someone stole her identity last year and signed up for several domain addresses.

We naturally checked out the domain and it's unused -- probably because the initial payment to Verisign bounced (we had to cancel all our credit cards and start over) -- but Verisign's still trying to get us to pay for a renewal! Gotta love their optimism; too bad we can't get 'em arrested for fraud, but then I guess Verisign itself has technically done nothing wrong here, just tried to perpetuate someone else's fraud.

OpenNIC will never catch on

[Starship Trooper]

And there are a number of reasons why, but I can tell you the one most glaring and obvious reason: aesthetics. The original TLDs .com, .org, .net, .edu, and .mil are all short, easy to type, one syllable to pronounce (except for .edu), and most importantly look good at the end of a domain name.

From OpenNIC's TLD list, you have chosen the TLDs .glue, .indy, .geek, .null, .oss, .parody, and .bbs. All of these are either horribly narrow-reaching and have no reason to be a TLD (.geek, .oss, .parody), sound stupid (.glue, .indy), look stupid (.geek, .oss, .bbs), or are too long (all of them except .oss and .bbs).

These are the same reasons nobody wants a domain under .biz, .info, .museum or any of the other "official" new TLDs. Geeks seem to be naturally deficient at proper design, so I'm not blaming what is essentially a geek project for having this problem. An alternative to the monstrosity Verisign and ICANN have made of their root servers is severely needed. But, if I may, I would like to suggest you ditch these ugly TLDs and put some more thought into choosing names people actually would want on the end of their site names. Think to yourself, would you seriously consider getting a ".parody" domain? Here are some tips:

• The TLDs must all be short. Extremely short. No more than 3 characters. Preferably monosyllabic.
• Don't use ugly letters like 'y', 'k', or 'z', especially at the beginning or end of the domain.
• Avoid catering to special interests. ".com", ".org" and ".net" all work because they're broad and unspecific. TLDs like ".geek" and ".oss" are just going to make nongeeks roll their eyes and look elsewhere.
• Most importantly, before you approve a new TLD, seriously ask yourself (and preferably a few other regular people), "would I buy a domain under this TLD?" Few people are going to want a ".geek" domain, I can tell you.

I really want to see a project like this succeed, but you have to create domains that appeal to broad ranges of people, are easy to type and remember, and look good.

Versign: They're Bastards!

[IronTek]

A friend of mine had registered a domain through Network Solutions (Verisign) and had renewed it for several years.

Last year, when his domain was coming up to expire, he didn't want to pay Verisign's fees...so he just figured he's let it lapse and maybe go reregister it with someone else...trouble is, though its expired, Verisign hasn't released the domain!

So my friend can't renew/reregister with anyone except Verisign b/c they won't release the domain back into the pool of available domains!

Expensive Experts

[Gurp]

Remember how, according to Microsoft/Unisys, companies shouldn't need "expensive experts"?

So far, their non-experts:

1) Installed a system that has embarrassed the company (by using the competitor's OS)
2) While fixing this, it was down for ages (more embarrassment)
3) Now that it's up, it's a sitting duck (with MySQL bound to the external network interface) for crackers

Now, tell me again about how companies shouldn't use experts?

"hacking" see "Whining "

[autopr0n]

As a hacker, I felt it entirely natural to begin to attempt to encapsulate, measure, and then control reality with software. (For what I mean by the word "hack," see http://www.tuxedo.org/ ~esr/ jargon/jargon.html#hack:. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. 'Whatcha up to?' 'Oh, just hacking.' " Criminals need to get themselves another word, we had it first.)

Wank, wank, wank.

Well, keep that up and "hacker" will soon mean "a whinny little bitch." I'm so sick of that crap (well, thankfully it's mostly died down of late). It is entirely possible for words to have multiple meanings. The fact that a word you think sounds "cool" does not give you license to go out and try to change the English language. Sheesh.

Re:"hacking" see "Whining "

[neo]

The fact that a word you think sounds "cool" does not give you license to go out and try to change the English language. Sheesh.

Actually it does. English is a living language and usage dictates the meanings of words. A dictionary is not the guide to how words are spelled and what they mean, it is rather a reflection of usage.

From Ambrose Bierce:

"DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. "

More of the firestorm about that fusion experiment

[sunhou]

There were two more articles in Science about this "bubble fusion" stuff: one, called To publish or not to publish that explains why they published the article despite the controversy, and another one called 'Bubble Fusion' Paper Generates a Tempest in a Beaker which has some opposing viewpoints. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure you need to be a subscriber or at a university which subscribes to access those (I access it through my university account).

It's all very interesting, and I'll be curious to see what the final conclusions are. I'm still not sure if I think it was best to publish now, or wait for more independent confirmation. At least they didn't try to hide all the controversy (they even point out that senior science managers at Oak Ridge Lab contacted the journal and asked them to delay publishing the paper..)

Sure - kick the danes, while you're at it!

[Hektor_Troy]

Don't use ugly letters like 'y', 'k', or 'z', especially at the beginning or end of the domain.

.dk is an official TLD for the "danish" part of the web.

Thank you for telling us, that our TLD is ugly.

Go suck on my.dk ;-)