Slashback: Nigritude, Indignation, Artifacts

Slashback brings you updates this evening on a handful of previous and ongoing Slashdot stories: read on below for more on how to manipulate Google rankings, what's wrong with Sun's Java Desktop, Claria's plucky response to L.L. Bean's suit, and a fly in the infinite-twin-primes theory.

How to not make friends and influence rankings. Ben Michel contributes an update to the search-engine optimization (SEO) contest mentioned last month, the object of which was for contestants to create a site ranked highest by google for a nonsense phrase, "nigritude ultramarine."

Michel writes "The first phase of the competition ended last Monday, and the winner was the owner of a forum called nigritude ultramarine--previously known as Merkey.net. According to Brandon Suit, the owner of this forum, the key to his winning strategy was "getting high PR backlinks"--having other websites with high Page Ranks link to him and vice versa.

What impact does this have on SEO, and indeed for the rapidly growing search industry in general? The viability of certain underhanded methods in the pursuit of SEO has been clearly reinforced by many of the results of the contest--both Suit and his closest competitor, Philipp Lenssen, posted links in Wiki Sandboxes in order to better their standing. According to Suit, "If you want to manipulate [Google], you can." While search engines certainly have come a long ways from relevance-based searching, it seems that they still have significant changes to make before they can more accurately order results for any given query. The search engines' creators themselves must make countless revisions in their own, perhaps quixotic, quests to create the perfect tools to retrieve relevant data in the vast, ever-expanding realm of the internet."

However, not everyone is as matter-of-fact about this method of increasing search-engine visibility; May Kasahara is one of the webmasters and wiki users who isn't.

Kasahara writes: "The Search Engine Optimization contest previously mentioned on Slashdot has had a detrimental effect on wiki users and admins (including myself) lately , as the words 'Nigritude Ultramarine' have been showing up in wiki sandboxes across the web. A search on UseModWiki's homepage brought me to this informative entry, which in turn led me to Nigritude Ultramarine and the Wiki Sandbox Effect [note -- mentioned last week on Slashdot] and to these accompanying comments, mostly from very annoyed wiki users."

OK, so maybe "infinite" was a strong word. Prof.Phreak writes "Quoting wikipedia: On May 26, 2004, Richard Arenstorf of Vanderbilt University submitted a 38-page proof that there are, in fact, infinitely many twin primes. On June 3, Michel Balazard of Bordeaux reported that Lemma 8 on page 35 is false.[1] As is typical in mathematical proofs, the defect may be correctable or a substitute method may repair or replace the defect. Arenstorf withdrew his proof on June 8, noting "A serious error has been found in the paper, specifically, Lemma 8 is incorrect"."

What are these dashed lines all over your sacred cow? reifman writes "Slashdot's link to my article in the Seattle Weekly helped generate 175,000 page views and numerous letters and comments. The article seemed to touch a nerve in the Mac and Linux communities. I've posted a follow up responding to people's letters."

Updates from the Academic Affairs Division. zenrandom writes "As Case Western has just recently been reported, we may as well mention the initiative that will be connecting many schools in Ohio. Oarnet, a part of the Ohio Supercomputer Center and The Ohio State University is building a statewide academic and research fiber optic network. Composed of multiple metro-rings and over 1600 miles of fiber."

In unrelated college news, Mirell writes "After the FBI previously investigated an open records request filed for the tunnel blueprints at UT, students decide instead to enter via brute force. Hooligans - 1, War Against Terror - 0."

The problem with opening Pandora's Box. WC writes "The previous review on JDS2 ended with no successful installation so it wasn't very helpful on what to expect from the Sun distro. This new review has got a working installation but with a slew of new problems: more installation woes, unusable networking, buggy Nautilus and Mozilla window resizing artifacts among others. The author concludes that JDS2 is --effectively-- nothing but JDS 1.1 with the added Sun server software on top, but the desktop part has the same (and more) issues like JDS1 had."

Looking innocent is not their strong suit. tbase writes "As reported on News.com.com, Claria, formerly known as Gator, has sued L.L. Bean, charging the retailer with filing a frivolous lawsuit against its advertisers. As covered in a previous Slashdot story, L.L. Bean has filed suit against current and former Claria advertisers for advertising via pop ups over L.L. Bean's site."

Comments

Mwahahah

[The Bungi]

OK, so the "Microsoftie" sacred cow follow up quotes this from a Slashdot comment in the story, theorizing that "he couldn't have put it better":

"In his lust to dominate the browser market and bring down Netscape, Bill and his cronies decided to give Internet Explorer away for free. They succeeded in undermining Netscape and getting the lion's share of the browser market, but in the process they got an entire generation of users hooked on getting stuff for free. Once users get a taste of free, getting them to pay for stuff becomes difficult or impossible. Why pay for a browser when I can get it for free? Why pay for an operating system when I can get it for free? Why pay for software when I can get it for free? Why pay for music when I can get it for free? Why pay for movies when I can get them for free? In the end, it isn't just Microsoft that's hurt by this."

Heh. This, coming from the "teh softwarez must be free-as-in-um-actually-i'm-just-cheap" crowd (which unfortunately makes up the majority of the people who use open source) is absolutely hilarious.

In any case, Microsoft has given software away for ages. Suddenly because they gave away IE, the world is on track to become evil purveyors of stolen... things.

If that isn't ironic I don't know what is.

Re:Mwahahah

[Minna Kirai]

Why pay for music when I can get it for free? Why pay for movies when I can get them for free?

The concept is basically right, but it's misapplied. The public is addicted to free music and movies because they've been getting them for free on TV and radio for decades. THAT's why P2P is not viewed as wrong by the public- "because TV is free anyhow"

Suddenly because they gave away IE, the world is on track to become evil purveyors of stolen... things.

That's not what was meant at all. The Slashdotter's theory was that consumers addicted to free software would look for... wait for it... Free Software.

Re:Mwahahah

[Artifakt]

People may point out that most 'free' tv is paid for by watching ads, and that consumers are mistaken in counting that as free. But, what if the consumer is aware of that, and it still gives rise to the current situation? A typical hour long TV program has about 8 minutes of commercials. For a person who makes minimum wage, 8 minutes of time is worth about 75 cents, IF he treats all his time as worth as much as work, and that's itself debatable. If 52 minutes of entertainment has a base value of only about 75 cents, or argueably less, then what's the 'fair' price of a music download? 75 cents for a number of tracks the consumer will listen to for 52 minutes total? A two hour movie watched once? $1.68? For as person making 11 bucks an hour, that "fair" value is more like 3 dollars, by the same reasoning. There's going to be some price points where the 'fair' value of downloads looks about even with the amount a person pays for internet access or a commercial news server, even though none of that money is going to the content producer.

Re:Mwahahah

[mabinogi]

> one that assumes most advertisers are marketing a product that most viewers of a particular program can afford

Starting to get off topic but anyway -

I don't think that in a lot of cases they are marketing towards people that can afford the item. At least in the case of things like cars or other non trivial or mundane stuff. If someone was in the market for a new car, and could afford one - they'd buy one. They wouldn't see an ad and suddenly decide to. So what the ads are doing, is trying to put the desire for the product in you - regardless of whether or not you can afford it now. Because one day, you might be able to. And you're far more likely to buy a product after having lusted after it for years, seeing the ads wishing that you could afford one, and now finaly being able to, than if you could already afford it, and you saw the ad for the first time.

My turn to use '9-11'! My turn! My turn!

[teamhasnoi]

"It's a Homeland Security issue," he said. "We've been aware of the security aspects of the tunnels for a long time. We became more conscious of the security needs after 9-11."

Jesus, does everything have to be a Homeland Security issue and tied to 9-11?

Whatever happened to harmless breaking and entering? Really, what the hell is the impotent Homeland Security department going to do? Guard the tunnel entrances? Overreact and send the students to Git-mo?

Terrorism is old and busted, and is nothing but a political tool and soundbite op.

Those who respond, "tell that to the victims of 9-11", I submit that if all those people were here today they would be pretty fucking pissed at all the unconstitutional bullshit that has been done in their name.

Re:My turn to use '9-11'! My turn! My turn!

[Grrr]

...does everything have to be a Homeland Security issue and tied to 9-11?

Only so long as it works...

Remember It's for the children! ?

<grrr>

Re:JDS

[Anonymous Coward]

Or more likely an incompetant reviewer. I have had JDS2 running on several machines for over a week now and have not experienced a single one of the problems this reviewer mentioned.

Re:For the Wiki Sandboxes

[AnotherBlackHat]

I think a better option is a meta tag that lets search engines know that there's user contributed content on the page.
(Or maybe something in robots.txt)

Google could still index the page, but weigh links on the page lower.

-- not a .sig

Re:JDS

[cbowland]

I have installed JDS on at least 5 machines at work, mostly low end 2 year old pc's, but also 1 v60x (dual booting suse). JDS seems pretty on target for Sun's stated market, i.e. limited functionality/requirements people. Call centers, hospitals, etc.... Basically, people who need word processing, spreadsheets, email, and and a browser. Sun is not targeting Slashdot readers for JDS users, although a some number us will probably end up administrating them. Sun is not trying to create a sexy, leading distribution, but instead is trying to replace (in their eyes) buggy, insecure, virus ridden, expensive windows machines. Of course, all slashdot readers know this, but still insist on judging the distribution on whether it meets their personal needs, including any wingnut hardware combination they may have. Of course its not a perfect distribution, but that's not Sun's pitch. They are going in to companies saying "Look, we have a product that is more secure, less expensive, and provides all the fuctionality your people need. Plus, we will support it, including phone support."

I think the "Java" in JDS is a hint that the linux base is not important to Sun. My guess is that they are trying to get to a Common Desktop Environment ;-) across all their platforms, sparc, x86, and thin client (sun ray). Using the Java name is just a marketing thing now, but it could be more meaningfull (project looking glass, anyone?) in the future.