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VLC 2.0 'Twoflower' Released For Windows & Mac
Titus Andronicus writes "Years in the making, the major new release of VideoLAN's media player has better support for multicore processors, GPUs, and much, much more. From the announcement: 'Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental). Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use. Twoflower fixes several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers.'"
GreatBunzinni, real name Rui Maciel, has been regularly accusing almost 20 accounts of being employed by a PR firm to astroturf Slashdot, via anonymous comments without any evidence. Using multiple puppet accounts, he mods up these anonymous posts while modding down the target accounts in order to censor their viewpoints off of Slashdot. GreatBunzinni accidentally outed himself as the anonymous troll who has been posting his baseless accusations to every Slashdot story. For example, he wrote the same post almost verbatim, first using his logged-in account followed by an anonymous post days later. Note the use of the same script and wording.
It turns out GreatBunzinni is actually a 31-year-old C++/Java programmer from Almada, Portugal named Rui Maciel, with a civil engineering degree from Instituto Superior Técnico and a hobby working with electronics. He runs Kubuntu and is active on the KDE mailing list. Rui Maciel has accounts at OSNews, Launchpad, ProgrammersHeaven, the Ubuntu forums, and of course Slashdot. While trolling Slashdot, he listens rock music like Motorhead, Fu Manchu, and Iron Maiden, but lately he's been on a big Jimi Hendrix kick, with some Bootsy Collins on the side (as you might have guessed, he has a Last.fm account). He's also a fan of strategy games like Vega Strike and Transport Tycoon.
Most of the users Rui targets have done nothing more than commit the sin of praising competitors to Google or other Linux-based products at some point in the past. Some of them are subscribers who often get the first post, since subscribers see stories earlier than non-subscribers. When one of Rui's accusations is posted as a reply, the original post suddenly and mysteriously receives a surge of "Troll" and "Overrated" moderations from his puppet accounts, while the accusing post gets modded up, despite presenting zero evidence. Often, additional anonymous posters suddenly pop up to give support, which also receive upmods. At the same time, accused users who defend themselves are modded down as "Offtopic."
Rui Maciel's contact information
Email: greatbunzinni@gmail.com or rui.maciel@gmail.com
IM: greatbunzinni@jabber.org (the same Jabber account currently listed on his Slashdot account)
Blog: http://rui_maciel.users.sourceforge.net/
Programming projects: http://www.programmersheaven.com/user/GreatBunzinni/contributions
Known puppet accounts used by Rui Maciel
Galestar
NicknameOne
Nicknamename
Toonol
flurp
chrb
psiclops
anonymov
forkfail
tl;dr: An Ubuntu user named Rui Maciel is actively trolling Slashdot with multiple moderator accounts in an attempt to filter dissenting opinions off the site.
Fascinating, our very own Cat and Mouse game here on Slashdot!
I hardly think iTunes was the first video player to have a single window, and it's probably not the best example of one.
Does he sells cocaine to little children ? If not I do not give a fuck !
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
My name's not Rui and if you read my comment history you'd probably know that i live in australia.
also, i'm not even 30 yet and i hate Java.
but go on, please continue to think that i have no life and would create multiple accounts to spam & modbomb slashdot.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Not very convincing Rui. I think we all know that you have no life and you love Java. Going to pubs wearing Java shirts and corrupting Slashdot are your favourite pastimes.
A fellow slashdotter directed my attention to this post. This sort of persecution made by these people has started a couple of weeks ago, when I read this post and this post and this post outing the bonch and overly critical guy accounts as accounts used to astroturf slashdot by posting the same marketing drivel, copied almost verbatim from the same PR script.
Then, after stumbling on a post where the bonch account was being used to post messages trying to discredit the astroturfing going on in slashdot here, I've posted this message in reply to bonch, outing that account as being one of a set of shill accounts employed to astroturf discussions here on slashdot.
Due to this, I started to receive personal attacks from anonymous posts. I've posted this message, and a couple of followups such as this reply.
As further retaliation, I had all the posts listed in my comments section suddenly modded as -1 troll, and a wave of messages posted anonymously with conspiracy theories and attacking me personally, such as this one, started to be posted in multiple discussions. This particular version has been repeatedly posted, often in the same discussion and as the first post, as can be seen here
So, thank the people behind accounts such as bonch, Overly Critical Guy, TechGuys and others for this spam and astroturfing campaign. It appears that their astroturfing operation isn't working smoothly anymore, as bonch complains here. So, to stave off some of the flak they have been receiving, they now waste their time with online stalking, personal attacks and creating absurd conspiracies regarding people who posted messages outing them as corporate shills. They quite often throw accusations like this through anonymous posts. For example, after MrHanky pointed bonch as a shill, the overly critical guy and SharkLaser accounts start attacking the user who outed bonch, and start to throw the shill and conspiracy accusations with the followups to this thread. In this post the Overly Critical Guy account is used to post the exact same accusations, but as they precede the post where I out these shill accounts, they only mention users such as Galestar, NicknameOne and flurp.
So, keep up with your conspiracies to try to save your ass. And while you keep blabbering how posts outing the people behind shill accounts, such as bonch, overly critical guy, sharklaser, jo_ham, and others, are posted by conspiracy theory loons, maybe you can spend a minute arguing why those affected by these shill outings actually take the time to compile and publish all this personal information on a single user who happened to post a message reiterating their outing.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.