Slashback: Australia, Nomenclature, Books

Slashback tonight brings a few updates on topics ranging from linux.conf.au and free books online to how you can help pay off Dan Peng's legal debt to the RIAA. Read on below for the details. Since you can never hear enough about linux.conf.au Kimberly Shelt writes: "Actually I wrote a whole article about it this month. Complete with hype about Kfishes, miniconf etc :) It included the direct link to the current LCA2004 pages :) and a tiny pic of scrubby :) what more can you want :)"

Please, no more name changing. suqur writes "As a follow-up to many stories previously posted, News.com reports that the recently renamed Mozilla Firebird browser (previously known as Phoenix) has finally given up on its new name, and relinquished the name. The new names for the Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird will be Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail, respectively. Looks like they're right back where they started, eh?"

Whatever the name, Mozilla is still only almost perfect: GeekLife.com writes "An old Mozilla exploit continues to crash almost any version/flavor of Mozilla with just 5 lines of plain HTML code (no JavaScript, ActiveX, etc.). If you're very brave, you can test/crash your Mozilla by going here.

It's important to report fairly on issues like this, or people will come to think of the Open Source journals as biased, uninformative, irresponsible propaganda machines, which will greatly harm any legitimate cause that the OS folks are promoting."

Books to download, at varying prices. Scott Pendergrast writes "We're working here at Fictionwise to convince publishers to release Neal Stephenson's works as eBooks. Recently his Cryptonomicon work finally became available in Secure Microsoft and Palm Reader formats (yes, the irony of this title being sold in an encrypted format is not missed ;-)

To encourage sales of this title, which hopefully will result in more of his works becoming ebooks, we're offering a 50% micropay rebate on it (so we're actually losing a bit on each sale)."

If you like your books free and non-fiction, though, mindpixel writes "I am not lying. The National Academies Press which was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States, has more than 2,500 free, searchable, high quality books online. Some random examples:

• The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life
  
• Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time
  
• Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy
  
• Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response"

This ought to be tax-deductable, too! ThreeToe writes "Recently the RIAA settled a lawsuit with four college students; one of them was Daniel Peng of Princeton University. Daniel is accepting donations to help pay his $15,000 settlement fee along with related legal fees. You can send money via paypal by clicking here. Remember that Daniel simply wrote an MP3 search engine; he didn't distribute MP3s himself. Those who share my belief that this lawsuit was wrong-headed should make a statement by assisting Daniel."

Comments

donate money that goes straight to the RIAA?!?

[faceword]

Why would we donate money Daniel Peng? Yeah, he got screwed, but the fact is he settled rather than fight. I'd be willing to donate $ for his legal bills had he opted to fight the RIAA lawsuit -- but not now; why should we give him money to help pay the settlement, when it will go straight to the RIAA?

Yet another example of Slashdot's bias.

[seefried]

If this doesn't get modded up or gets labelled as Flamebait or troll I'll have lost all hope for Slashdot.

You may notice that one of the numerous links in this Slashback is to a page that crashes Mozilla.

cant_get_a_good_nick replies to the following (written by cscx):

"So how come this "exploit" wasn't deserving of its own front page story like the IE one was?"

with

"Umm, cause it wasn't an exploit.
IE exploits gives bad people access to your machines. This just crashes your browser. Does a crash in code that is so obscure that nobody ever triggered it using tags that I've personally never heard of (I'm no HTML expert but I have been a professional webmaster on and off for 10 years) warrant a font page story? My vote is no."

And yes, he is right! But what he fails to remember is that just a few days ago the same sort of crash was labelled as an "exploit" by slashdot.

here

He also makes reference to the fact that this is really uncommon html code. i.e. we should go easy on Mozilla for this. But IE received no such grace from slashdot readers. Go on, click on the link. Read through the comments.

We all know we're biased in some sense to Linux. But does it have to be so god damn obvious? We're geeks. We're supposed to be smarter than average. We should be better than this.

What really gets me though is that cscx was modded as a troll for his statement. Bias doesn't get anymore blatant than that.

Sean