Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: NWLink, Vivendi, Gatherings
"Uhh ... isn't this the 'Slammer'?" An anonymous reader writes "According to the BBC, two people suspected of creating the Slammer worm have been arrested in a combined operation by the FBI and the UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. The raids in the UK resulted in the seizure of two men, aged 19 and 21, accused of being members of a hacker group that calls itself THr34t-Krew."
Gather together, hoist a few drinks. We've made a few mentions of this year's CodeCon; Len Sassaman writes "The schedule for CodeCon 2.0 is now online. CodeCon is already starting to get some media attention. There's less than two weeks left to register at the reduced rate, and conference seats are filling up quickly.If this conference is anything like its predecessor, expect to see some of the most interesting new technology of the coming year discussed."
And a slightly different type of gathering: Tony Stanco writes: "The agenda is up for the March 17-19 Open Source in Government conference and the free registration is now open. Please see www.eGovOS.org.
It promises to be another educational and exciting event with over 120 sessions and the keynote from the White House. Even Microsoft is trying to directly engage the community at this conference."
On the count of three, everyone shrug at once. In January, I posted a link ("far from confirmed") about the possibility that Microsoft would buy Vivendi. Now, Yagdrasil writes "USA today is reporting that the Microsoft buyout of Vivendi's game division (which includes Blizzard) was a hoax. It looks like the hoax originated from a student at Purdue."
But the EOLs are nearly upon us! Flee! Wister285 writes "Mandrake announced that they are going to stop updating the packages of 'legacy products.' It seems as though they took their cue from Red Hat and their continuing financial problems. I was a little surprised though about how short the support periods will be. Mandrake 9.0 will be considered obsolete September 30, 2003 (for desktop) and March 31, 2004 (for the base). This brings up two questions. First of all, do distros release too often thus creating too many versions to maintain? Secondly, how much faith do you have in the upgrade feature of install?"
I hope it features a dunk tank and some perpetrators. The ongoing war on spam continues; here's your chance to influence its direction (or at least to hear about what's going on in that sphere), even if you missed the conference at MIT. wayne writes "The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced today that they will be holding a three day public SPAM workshop in the end of April. I wonder if they will get an overflow crowd they way the MIT SPAM conference did. I hope they also make streaming video available."
Bandwidth is expensive. ndogg writes "NWLink.com has posted a response to the events that have happened in regards to SDF. In short, they say that they support SDF and what it is doing, however, the DDoS attack over the last three weeks has been costing them a lot of money."
fonixmunkee puts it differently: "The message is an interesting read, to say the least. instead of working the issue, NWLink's apparent (unofficial) solution to combating DDoS'es is to simply terminate the subscriber's connection. with all the slammer worms & Code Reds nowadays, NWLink should have no more customers left in about 2 years."
Legal liability is expensive, too. Tom Allender writes "irc-chat.net has announced a more restrictive Acceptable Use Policy after being contacted by the MPAA. They also refer to DALnets AUP changes mentioned here recently."
Prost? Could it be? Probably not. But at least I tried. And trying is half the battle (as GI Joe didn't say).
Thank you.
I think I'm in love with MAKE IT STOP ARRGGHH! He/she is so funny and should be made emperor of
I got another story submitted. I'm really surprised I got this one, since I'm sure the stupid Lunix fanboys submitted this 500 times. Of course, the discussion that followed was purely anti-Microsoft, even though there are a billion LUnix systems out there that are vulnerable to other exploits, and can be just as big a pain to patch. Fucking hypocrites.
I'm improving in my ability to karma whore, as you can see. As I type this, I've got "Positive" karma, and I ping-pong pretty freely between Positive, Bad and Neutral. Not bad. Hell, I've even posted a blatant anti-michael post logged in and not been any worse for wear.
With positive karma, I'm metamodding several times a day now, pretty much marking everything as "unfair" (unless it's a troll, who's karma whoring and has been modded up. Then I either stay neutral or metamod "Fair" or "Funny"). $20 says I spend more time meta-moderating than most -- and I'm doing it for the sole purpose of getting the signal/noise ratio as low as possible. I wish my other accounts were able to metamod.
On to the subject of this little Journal: Predators improve the breed. It's occurred to me that my work, and the work of the many trolls (most of which are far more competent than I) might actually make Slashdot better if Taco were to begin listening to them. He's mentioned in his journal that he's heard all the grousing about moderation, which means grousing is not going unheard.
Don't get me wrong -- CmdrTaco is still an idiot, totally out of his league running a site like this. But the fact that he puts oil on the squeaky wheels means he has ears and can be annoyed. Unfortunatly the "oil" is an even more fucked-up moderation system, hamfistedly added to allow editors to put the "squeaky wheels" (trolls) into more-and-more-soundproof rooms instead of solving the problem. You know why divorces happen? Because the people in the relationship don't address their problems. Instead they push them aside and try their hardest to ignore them until they can't any longer, spending more energy ignoring them than they do dealing with them.
Why not just meet the issues head-on?
1) Ditch the irrational, unprofessional condescending LUnix fanboyism from the editors. As FortKnox says, "Lunix isn't always the answer. Microsoft isn't always the problem."
2) Before publishing articles, have the common sense to spellcheck and fact-check them. Is it a dupe? If you want to preserve the stupidity of the submitter, just put some "[sic]" marks in the article.
3) Don't pull a michael and add unnecessary snide remarks. It's unprofessional.
4) If you won't do #1, #2 and #3, please drop any pretense of being objective or even rational. It's insulting.
5) For fuck's sake, stop pretending you're not censoring. Stop insulting your readers' intelligence and just admit that the mod system is there so editors can ensure Slashdot reflects THEIR opinions, not those of the readers. Then you can do what you really want to do: delete comments and users that you don't like.
6) The only redeeming quality of michael is that he seems to post fewer (if any) duplicate articles. Fire him. If that's not enough, please fire him because he's the only editor with the sense to check for dupes, which probably makes the other editors jealous. Does he have rich parents or something? Is he paying Slashdot to keep him occupied so he can research his petty conspiracy lunacy?
7) I'm fully capable of reading Wired, The Register, CNN and The New York Times all by myself, and I won't get Slashdot's editorial bias or mind-numbingly stupid interpretations by Slashdot editors and article submitters. Sooner or later, even the stupidest of your drooling LUnix fanboys will realize this and leave. How about stopping Slashdot from becoming the unofficial comment board for these sites?
See, Taco, that's what a lot of the grousing seems to be about. If you were to truly embrace your Liberal sensibilities, you'd see that your Predators -- your trolls -- are trying to improve their Prey -- Slashdot. It's Darwinian, you stupid twat, but you're too dense to see it.
YHBT. HAND.
EDIT:
Hahhahahaha. CmdrTaco is predictable as drool from a retard. I posted the text of this journal entry in a CmdrTaco story, and I've been bitchslapped AGAIN! Here's some cut&paste HTML from my messages:
See how the first moderation of my thread post occurred less than a minute after I posted it? Then all those other mods occurred at the same time.
I've been bitchslapped again! Taco REALLY doesn't like it when you criticise. Such a fragile ego!
I also think most of you may be very interested in this poor little sheep that was engineered to have a pig's heart on its neck.
:-(
That's so incredibly unethical that I can barely read the article. Seeing the picture of the poor helpless animal with another creature's organ on the outside of its beautiful white coat makes my eyes water.
I'm fucking sick...absolutely sick and tired...of these misuses of technology.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
But what about Digital Teenz? Isn't that site devoted to teenz worthy of a slashback?
Diaries keep YOU!