Slashdot Mirror
Sunday Newspapers, Now With CDs
VirtualUK writes "The BBC news site has a story today about The Times news paper now distributing a CD along with the tree mass that comes with its Sunday edition. They cite that one of the main reasons is that Internet connection speeds have still yet to catch up on the whole in order to benefit from the rich multimedia content of the CD."
I used to get CDs with my paper all the time. Of course, they were from AOL...
I remember playing pretty decent video on my 486 from a CD yet still forced to a tiny little window with garbled sound quality and badly pixelated video when trying to watch some streaming news.
Does it have the full text of the paper? That would be excellent...
with the sunday edition AND a multimedia cd, nobody will be done reading the news paper before next week!
The CD will come out monthly, not every Sunday as reported in the story.
I'm surprised this hasn't happened earlier actually. Magazine's have been slapping on CDs to their publications for a long while now (especially Gaming and computer mags) and these days you can even get CD's on Breakfast Cereal boxes.
Of course, whether or not any of the information contained on the cd's will be of any use/quality is another matter.
Newspaper is easily bio-degradable, I'm not sure about that of CDs. Plus you can wrap things with newspaper, but not with hard plastic.
Everything on the CD is an advert for something else. You can't even get to the main menu without watching a video of a car advert.
I've seen something like this done in a neighboring city, Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico (I live in El Paso, TX). The subscription rate is really low; the paper is almost completely distributed in stores and newstands. Every once in a while, the paper has a special edition contating a cd. I think it's only music for now, but it may change. The special edition costs around US$0.50 more, which is about the normal cost of the paper (Sunday doesn't cost any more). I have never heard anyone else actually mention it, so I don't think it is fairing well.
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
Somebody should suggest they run an article on Linux, so they'd just have to stick knoppix on the CD and save on the multimediocre content creation.
...
Also, somebody should suggest the same idea to Playboy Magazine. They don't even need to make it fancy, just a directory with huge jpegs and another with videos
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
benefit from the rich multimedia content
"suffer from the bland multimedia advertising"
Feed me a stray cat.
Seriously...this sure isn't very nerdy, nor does it matter, nor is it interesting...what is it doing on /.?
-insert a witty something-
Gonna be awkward trying to read the news while I'm on the throne.
Other than a few media clips the CD doesnt contain anything different from a normal newspaper. I think distributing the same thing in two mediums is annoying. I either want to read the paper, or watch a video. The short clips on the CD are easily available online too. The only place it makes sense to me to put a CD is on computer or game magazines where the CD content (game demos and apps) cannot be duplicated by 'traditional' means. Adding a CD to the paper makes it clumsy.
The Marketing Drone that thought of this baby will be canned and sent back to Publix or wherever he came from.
Yeah, right.
That's good news for the trees, I hope the CD's are recycleable. This reminds me, I get really annoyed when I see a big stack of phone books lying around, that no one really wants. How long do you guys think it'll be 'til phone books go CD for standard (/common)distribution method? I'd much prefer grepping for pizza than flipping through hundreds of pages.
It's a nitpick, but... I'm pretty sure The Times and the Sunday
Times are two seperate newspapers. The Sunday paper isn't the
Sunday edition of the daily, it's another paper altogether.
One of the online course delivery systems I work with has a "CDROM Tool" that allows the instructor to specify a directory, mirror the filenames/paths of the CD in it with empty files, and distribute a CD. The student then sets a preference that says "my cd-rom is located at d:\" or /mnt/cdrom or whatever a mac uses. Any references to files in the CD directory are then re-written to point to the end users CD drive, saving bandwidth, etc.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
but where can i download the iso?
That way once the info is no longer needed, one can reuse the CD.
more coasters
This is nothing new. I have CDs I got from Sunday papers in the UK from a couple of years ago. They are mostly music CDs, but some also have "embedded multimedia" (read: Flash interfaces to Quicktime files).
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a paper-boy on a bicycle.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
The cite that one of the main reasons is that internet connection speeds have still yet to catch up on the whole in order to benefit from the rich multimedia content of the CD.
:P
Seriously, what do I pay you people for anyways?
My blog
If the weekly CD contained all the news for the week, (in both plaintext and html please, none of that pdf crap) I'd sign up for just that, and skip the dead trees.
I prefer to have things available online these days rather than having them on a CD. I have hundreds and hundreds of CD's stacked up everywhere, and its becoming slower to find something small from those cd's than find and download it from the net. Especially the CD's that came with a magazine get useless quite fast as the things there get old, and the process of finding the cd and listening to the loud cd drive reading it is far less comfortable than just finding and using the same content from the internet.
I find it more interesting to have access to magazine articles from the net after subscribing. That way the content is always available from almost anywhere in addition to the paper magazine.
The BBC news site has a story today about The Times news paper now distributing a CD along with the tree mass that comes with it's Sunday edition.
are cds more enviromentally friendly ?, aren't plastics created from oil ?. At least trees can grow back.
The plural of medium is media, d'uh. As if you don't read the word enough to have it drilled into your head.
A few months ago I read about how a San Fran newspaper was providing an audio CD so you can listen in the car. I like that idea.
Taking that idea a step further, I wish Avant-Go would do something like that. I'd like to synch my PocketPC in the morning, then plug it into my car's audio so I can listen to fresh news on the way in.
"Derp de derp."
Talk about a Rube Goldberg way of doing something. There are news stations on the radio, just listen to them! How hard is this?
I'd need to compare the cost of making a CD with the cost of making paper and ink, and printing them. Many newspapers (I don't know about NYT, there are a lot of different presses) are printed with a photographic mythod, where the paper is printed from a film negative, and that requires a darkroom and all that chemicals, plus the energy to run the press, plus the energy and polution in making paper, plus the energy and polution in making ink.
I have no idea what the values for any of the above is, much less how you would add them up.
Forget the CD. The environment comes first.
"Should the case of Murdoch not granting full editorial impartiality be proven he could lose the cornerstone of his international media empire. I'm sure I'm not alone in expressing the sentiment this happens sooner rather than later." Completely off-topic sentiment about to be expressed, but that would be a very very good thing.
An obvious attempt to find a new channel that more closely couples the advertisements and the content. I can see how the marketer-droids at the Times would want this, since with normal webpages it's so easy to run proxies that strip all the ads out. But here you have to endure entire commercials before you can even get to the menu. I bet half the people who look at it are going to shitcan the thing right there, never to try it again.
It kind of defeats the purpose of finding new eyeballs for ads if the implementation is so cumbersome and painful that it drives people away. Will these people ever learn?
How much would it cost to distribute a Knoppix CD with a bigger Sunday journal on newsstands?
If we cannot do it at our own expenses, how much would it cost to *sell* one such disk thru a journal ad and get it delivered to subscribers?
In any case, can we make a little money just to get this scheme working continuously?
I know you're a troll and I shouldn't bother responding, but you do realize that this isn't the New York Times we're talking about here, right? The Times (and The Sunday Times) is a British newspaper. Duh.
More CDs to add to my AOL CD collection!
The loader is quite slick, but unfortunately it has been made with flash and took an age to load the first time on my machine.
As an asside you also got a code with the cd cover to see if you had won 1000gbp. I was tempted to write a program to brute it because it was only 3 letters (all ucase) and 4 numbers, but you also need to send in the cover to claim the prize...
Geez. Seriously, how do you get through life?
It's just a promo disk?
Actually they write on the box how loud the drive is in units of "X". Aim for a low X value like 8X or 12X and you should be OK.
...you have to remember who their target audience is for this venture.
The target audience certainly isn't the more technical or internet-savvy PC or Mac user (the disc is dual format), it's the PC or Mac user who hasn't used their machine for much more than word processing, light browsing and email.
The kind of people who are wary of buying from websites like CD-Wow.com, Play.com, etc who offer great prices simply because they don't recognise the brands that they're dealing with are far more likely to buy something from a site backed by a brand (The Sunday Times) that they are familiar and comfortable with, respect and with which they possibly have a life-long affinity. In that respect, the CD serves its purpose.
Don't for a second be under any illusion that the CD is aimed at the typical Slashdot reader. A newspaper unlike a website can't differentiate between a nethead or a newbie, and as there are more people at the newbie end of the scale then the nethead one it is natural for The Sunday Times to pitch its offering at the less technical end of the PC and Mac market.
Remember, this isn't an addition to attract people who know one end of a PCI card from the other, it's an addition to attract floating readers to this particular broadsheet newspaper as opposed to the ones next to it on the shelves.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I'm waiting for PDF distribution of the newspaper via the internet. Easier to store. Easier to throw away.
j.
The question of the day is, can you download a CD's worth of material over dialup? The answer is YES. Would you want to? Depends on who you are!
650megs would take about 26hours at 56K assuming conditions were ideal. Ideal conditions are clean line and zmodem transfer from a shell account mind you, but you get the picture.
Reality wise, 28.8k to 33.6 are more realistic speeds for most people... about 43 - 50 hours..
Ok, so between 26 and 50 hours to transfer a CD over standard dialup a connection.
-----------
For a weekly newspaper subscription, this is not exactly *where it's at*. For a monthly subscription though, it could be. Assuming you can actually provide your content in roughly 325 megs... This would cut our estimates down to 13-25hours. Such a document could easily be retrieved if you downloaded something for a week at between 2-4hours a day connect time.
This is by NO means terrific, but I can see it as being do able for a monthly publication of somesort.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I have large picture windows in my living room
and birds keep flying into them, usually breaking
their necks - it's most distressing. However, I
find that if I hang the Sunday Times CD ROM on a
string outside the window they stay well clear.
Thank you, Sunday Times!
Jean, UK
"...have still yet to catch up
Is that like, a triple-negative?
Really, you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a CD or whatever sent through the USPS or a 1976 Pinto. The 1976 Pinto makes broadband look like a joke.
You just wish your ID was as low as mine! I used to be proud to have such a low id, but not so much now. Slashdot most
and if you read such mags as "cabinet" and "adbusters", you get cd's that have content worthy of "art" status
So everyone at /. knows they'll be AOL CDs. Too bad that most of the folks receiving them haven't bothered to do the math:
1045 / 24 = 43.51
Maybe if we invent a new calendar with 44 days, we can at last take FULL advantage of this important new marketing opportunity.
Picasso? Are you alive?
As long as there is recycling for plastics available, A CD is recyclable. The problem is that a CD isn't "clean" in that it usually has a label and the aluminium reflecting layer which must be separated so the plastic is pure.
Well, at least it's not the New York times, or you'd have to put in your registration just to open the CD..
Right now, CDs are as clsoe as we get to universal broadband.
About a year ago, I built a PC which was optimized for video capture, learned Lingo and bought a licensed copy of Macromedia Director (I believe on this site, buying a licensed copy gets more attention than nearly anything) and started a part time business as a multimedia author.
There are lots of decisions that need to be made... formats, codecs, bitrates. What is the 'universal donor' codec for Windows (I chose mpeg1)? What resolution video is acceptable? How fast will the processor be on the slowest machine you care about? How fast its CD drive? Must the end user install anything at all?
If you're careful and diligent, what people see on the CD can be nothing short of amazing.
I would be asked, all the time, why not DVD? The simple answer is, DVD just doesn't have the installed base, yet. You have to strive for maximum compatibility.
Encoding video is an art form, and I quickly found out few people in the business really understood what you do and why you do it.
With excellent full time employment, I have only done a few CDs. But, I am just as excited about the opportunities as I was the first time I saw they were there.
What I notice in the article and in the responses is that we have one more example of piss-poor hybridization. Though a few readers liked the idea most of them found the CD about as useful as the AOL CDs that used to seem to appear out of the ether.
What's sad but telling about this is that is looks like one more lame-brained, half-hearted, probably cheaply implemented, attempt to hybridize, or as I'm sure they PR people would say, synergize, two media. But it's like tacking Greek columns on a log cabin. It just doesn't work. The current CD adds nothing really useful to the newspaper. So eventually the newspaper will probably decide that it's not been as successful as they'd like and not worth the effort and cost to make it really successful. And the few readers who do find it useful will probably give up as it slowly degenerates due to cost-cutting.
This is not at all to say that I think that it couldn't work. It just seems to me that most people aren't willing to spend the time and money to really think through a winning hybridization that both makes money for the newspaper and gives readers something that they really want. I have to think of Google in relation to this. They came up with something that soon became indispensible to most people. It's possible that something similar could be done with newspapers and other media. It's just that no one's had the vision and resources to make it work.
Ah well. I guess you can't get a Google every day.
I remember reading somewhere that Mandrake GNU/Linux was distributed with a french newspaper. The same place I read that Mandrake is almost synonymously with Linux in France, because of this. I tried to find the source where I read this, but I couldn't seem to find it. Can anyone confirm this?
This is a British paper owned by Rupert Murdoch. Fair and Balanced (with 500% more ads!)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
n/t
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
"Encoding video is an art form, and I quickly found out few people in the business really understood what you do and why you do it."
Write a book about it, and make some money.
Expertise sells.
>The BBC news site has a story today about The Times news paper now distributing a CD along with the tree mass that comes with its Sunday edition.
Who cares about the Times on CD?
We want the Sun--page three(*) in particular!
*--for explanation see http://home.freeuk.com/webbuk/page3/about.htm
Why not have ONLY CDs and stop killing 75,000 trees for every Sunday edition? Even better, put it all on-line and don't print a damn thing.
I suggest you read Slashdot
before the vast nature of the internet today, I used to think that the computer world would be just as big it has become today. One thing i didn't evaluate is the fact that we would have such a vast network of so many machines from household to household.
I thought that multimedia for the newspapper companies would have to change in the future to meet this demand in some other way.
I predicted that we go to the newspapper vendor and pick up a diskette or have a news cd delivered everyday to my house with todays news so i could read it at my giant and very load home pc with my morning coffee. I think that the idea must of hit a few other people back then.
But now the fact of the matter is that consently chaning data that has to be physically delivered to you on a some sort of digital format just isn't practical anymore.
Even if I'm in area without broadband, who cares when its just news? A 33.6 is just fine to read my msnbc & slashdot in the morning when out of town in a hotel. Not to mention, I can always find a wireless hotspot if i want to make a quick update on my advant go content with my pocketpc.
I think in the long run, the cost of the cds won't produce anough interest to make any sort of profit from the idea.
No.
Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.
Don't most people just flip on the TV (or 'telly' in the UK I guess) when they are seeking "rich multimedia content" that neither broadband nor a newspaper can deliver?
Oh well.
How many people do you know that actually read the daily paper that would be willing to stuff a CD in a computer? I don't know any.
CD's and paper don't mix... two completely different media... two completely different markets.
The only place that it makes sense to put a CD is a computing magazine or a gaming magazine... where the content of one is directly related to the other.
People read newspapers to get quick news and to scan the headlines. You can't scan a CD in a split second.
"Don't most people just flip on the TV (or 'telly' in the UK I guess) when they are seeking "rich multimedia content" that neither broadband nor a newspaper can deliver?"
Wasn't Intercast and TeleText suppose to be the "rich multimedia content"?
I was expecting the article to be about the Sunday edition of the New York Times. When I looked at the article I was shocked, SHOCKED to see otherwise. This is another fine example of Slashdot being too Euro-centric.
I dunno about you but mine comes out hot. The only way to achieve the effect you describe is to pee into the evaporative air conditioner. And my co-worker only did that once, it has a way of inflicting its own punishment.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
that's where this is going. they'll put the weather and other important sections on CDROM and stick a shrinkwrap license on it, depriving you the right to do... well... anything with it. That's the whole point here.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Internet connections are not where they should be because of a small minority of companies controlling their development. It is not a matter of lack of technology. They used to use that excuse for a number of years. Now the cat is out of the bag and the little minority is loosing control of the rest of the dumb heads.
Reading through the comments, I saw the reaffirmation of my ongoing belief that you've got to have a serious masochistic streak to do multimedia development these days. People are never satisfied because the desireable media experience is such a personal preference.
I've little doubt the product sucks and the criticisms are justified, but I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be on the, most likely, small staff cranking out a multimedia CD every week and I thought --you know, it's probably not such a happening position.
And for the people complaining that it doesn't work on their Gnu-Linux systems I have to ask --did they even try running it under Wine? From the article it sounds like a Macromedia based product and I've yet to see a Director or Authorware packaged piece that doesn't work under Wine. In fact, these types of products often work better under Wine than on Mac or MS systems because when Wine encounters an error that would freeze the program on the proprietary
OS's, Wine simply pops up a dialogue and asks you if you'd like to ignore the error. This makes life difficult for multi-media people trying to create DIY DRM techniques that work by intentionally crashing the program under a given condition on Mac or Windows platforms.
They cite that one of the main reasons is that Internet connection speeds have still yet to catch up on the whole in order to benefit from the rich multimedia content of the CD.
Yeah, true, but at least web content has more of a gaurantee of working on my computer. We can guess that this is most likely a windows app. Nothing wrong with that. Just that the web content is a little more universal.
I wonder if people will actually use the cd? I know that the CD's I've gotten free in magazines and whatnot were ignored by the third or fourth cd...
Just my two cents...
The point should perhaps be made that The Times is ultimately owned by the same company as Fox News, that purveyor of "Fair and Balanced" news.
The wierd thing is that Murdoch and the BBC have long had a hateful relationship (as demonstrated by Fox's anti-BBC news reports during the Iraq war). Quite why the BBC is offering free marketing to Murdoch, I'm not sure.
As one person left on the comment page on the BBC site, why not use a DVD?
I could understand using CD back in 1998 but in this day and age majority of people have DVD Rom drives over in the UK (I should know I gota deal with them every day)
Maybe this is something they'll change in the future...
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
My only complaint with online papers is that they don't carry local advertisers. I'd love to read the online paper and see ads for local merchants just like reading the old fashioned news print. Heck... Send it to your printer and get a coupon for boneless chicken breasts at $.99/lb down at the local Kroger.
Alas, online papers don't follow the same paradigm as their successful predicessor... Instead I see ads for match.com and other online services I'll never subscribe to. This is where I don't get it: People who surf online still have lives offline. (I know this is Slashdot, but admit it, you occasionally squint at that bright thing up in that big blue ceiling.) When will companies realise they can combine local content with local advertisers for products people might be interested in buying when they step outside the door in their locale?
...hold down right shift while inserting it.
I have no idea how much an average printing run costs for your average paper, but surely it'd be a packet.
So, how hard would it be for a newspaper co to go moderately into 'offline' e-news?
What if you could buy a decent reader for 10 bucks (subsidised) and just zap the content in every day for 50 cents a pop? A 100-page pdf / zipped html of the daily paper'd have to fit in 32MB, even with pics. Perhaps you could keep yesterday's news as well , until you run out of storage space.
For those with slow net connections, you could wander into your nearest newsagent, give them yesterday's card and get another card with todays news. The advantage there being that it could be updated throughout the day, rather than the "print it at 3am - good till tommorrow" approach. Your old card simply gets flashed again , ready for someone else tomorrow.
After the initial outlay (subsidised readers, cards etc) , would it balance out in the end?
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Ah, Sunday! The day to kick back, drink coffee, read the paper, play with the kids. Perfect! Ah, sunday! A day to NOT look at a computer screen. Why would anyone ever ruin their Sunday (or any other day) by loading up a cd/dvd that you KNOW willl be filled with ads? It's just junk mail in a different form. Junk mail that takes work to view.... sigh.
Sky TV in the UK (co-owned by the same Murdoch company as the Sunday Times) has recently taken steps to block reception of many free-to-air channels which share its satellite. If you 'phone to complain, you're told that you must buy a Sky subscription at 150 pounds ($250) per year - for channels that you don't want - in order to receive free boadcasts from e.g Channel 5.
. stm
See:
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3142005
forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/t/83149/ds.html
Having been caught once, I'm not about to trust software from a Murdoch company. Once bitten, twice $ky.
This idea inspired by the "Universe Today" personalised newspaper in Babylon 5. Alternatively, the linked article suggests printing on a re-usable (as opposed to re-cyclable) paper substitute, such as Tyvek.
--
...and by that I mean movie DVD not DVD-ROM. Seriously, it's Sunday afternoon, what would most Sunday Times readers prefer to do? Boot their PC and mouse away at an interactive CD-ROM (so very 1996) or throw a DVD into their DVD player and widescreen TV and navigate through the movie clips and articles from the comfort of their couch?
If it comes out once a month, but had the whole month's newspapers availbale in searchable format, then it would be worth having! But if it's just another way7 to ram advertsiing down our throats, then it's just another coaster that isn't worth booting up.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
...for viruses to make it into the home! And spyware. And ads. And... well, you get the idea.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Just distribute CD full of shitty advertising and useless programs!
Desi Noise, Live!
Ever since the term was coined, I've felt that multi-media lacked something. I never could quite put my finger on it. To me, multi-media means a combination of different types of sources coming together to create a single more impressive product. Yet almost every multi-media project that I have ever seen fell far short of my expectations. Typically the products have seemed rushed and lacked depth or are missing elements that I had expected to be there.
The application that would define what multi-media is never really came along. Perhaps some games have come close but I don't really know since I no longer game.
Frankly, I don't blame a newspaper for trying a CD-ROM. I can't think of a business that needs to look at changing how it does business in response to the computer and the internet more than the dead-tree based newspaper. They need to change or they will be left in the dust. Like blacksmiths, saddle makers, and buggy whip companies. Newspapers have huge investments in printing presses, delivery methods, and other things that the internet could simply kill. It probably already has to some degree.
If I were a newspaper publisher, I can see how I would think a CD-ROM could be a useful adjunct to the tree based edition of my product. I'd see it as a bridge to moving away from paper and on to something different. If I were sitting in that seat, I think I would see the internet and computers as being a double-edged axe. If I moved towards internet publishing I could reduce costs but would also risk alienating a significant number of my subscribers. That is where the bridge would need to come into play. You could gradually get the readership used to it and as the profitability of the paper portion of the newspaper started to decline you reduce the size of it and put more of your efforts twords the CD and online versions. Eventually you reduce depencance on the CD and get everything online. This weaning process could take a decade or longer or may never have to happen. I'm sure newspapers suffered with the advent of radio and TV but they have weathered both rather nicely.
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9511/df951102 .jpg
Yeah, but if they don't ship the paper with a cd it'll be much easier to dispose of. And it would not need an exciting strategy involving marketing-English.
They want to create a unique interactive off-demand pseudo-resource solution for today's well-informed computing specialist. (in English: They want to sell stuff that no one else sells, that no one wants or needs and that consists of theoretically recyclable materials to people who can barely use Windows XP Home.)
BTW, when will AOL start shipping newspapers with their CDs?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Someone may have already said this, so I apologise ahead, but like AOL CD's this a huge ecological f*up. Tons of uselss plastic platters that 90% of people wont use for 2 min and will then go to the landfil. At least send out cd-rw's so people can re-use the silly things!
G.
"I'm sure I'm not alone in expressing the sentiment this happens sooner rather than later."
Ah yes, but there are some who think that;
"he could lose the cornerstone of his international media empire.", doesn't go far enough and the words 'tackle' and 'in a blender' should be shoehorned in there.
Optionally 'nailed', 'testicles' and 'the bastard son of Mary Whitehouse and the average spammer' can be included for colour.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
No that's not the only reason. PDF is good at retaining the "This is the way I want it to look.", as well as the other advantages of PDF.
Spray on computer. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/2 4/054219&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=137
Then spray on a monitor..umm oh yes, spray on speakers and BAM! Newspaper that needs a CD.
anybody clock the spyware in the CD? ;-)
There's spyware on the CD. It reports your usage habits back to some central servers. v. interesting running TCPdump on my firewall. Points will be awarded to the first slashdotters to report the "black" IPs the CD reports back to!