Slashdot Mirror
QuakeNet: Government-Sponsored Attacks On IRC Networks
Barryke writes "Like FreeNode, it seems more and more legitimate businesses or non-profit organizations are being targeted by government subsidiaries in attempts to disrupt and spy on their users. IRC network QuakeNet has posted a press release condemning these efforts. Quoting: 'These attacks are performed without informing the networks and are targeted at users associated with politically motivated movements such as "Anonymous." While QuakeNet does not condone or endorse and actively forbids any illegal activity on its servers we encourage discussion on all topics including political and social commentary. It is apparent now that engaging in such topics with an opinion contrary to that of the intelligence agencies is sufficient to make people a target for monitoring, coercion and denial of access to communications platforms. The released documents depict GCHQ operatives engaging in social engineering of IRC users to entrap themselves by encouraging the target to leak details about their location as well as wholesale attacks on the IRC servers hosting the network. These attacks bring down the IRC network entirely affecting every user on the network as well as the company hosting the server.' One of those tactics applied by governments is the DDOS, which (perhaps not so) coincidentally, is what their suspects are accused of. Is this irony or hypocritical?"
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this [slashdot.org] in a new tab. After seeing that, click here [slashdot.org] to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott [slashdot.org]
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.p... [slashdot.org]
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.p... [slashdot.org]
Alternative Slashdot: altslashdot.org [altslashdot.org] (thanks Okian Warrior (537106))
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Slashdot is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community when IDC confirmed that Slashdot page views has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all websites. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by the stupid fucking beta website and the wholesale discard of user feedback.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Slashdot Beta is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core users. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Slashdot users Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among S&M enthusiasts. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
That crippling bombshell sent Slashdot fans into a tailspin of mourning and denial. However, bad news poured in like a river of water.
Fuck the beta.
I'm not going to quote them without permission, but from talking with one of the editors, some of our sentiment about the beta is shared by them, and they really do want user feedback to help things go in the right direction. Presumably they have no power directly, but if literate and thought-out comments get submitted to the beta feedback, they will do what they can to send them upwards. Don't just complain in the comments, help the editors help you, at least some of them are on your side.
Beta sucks. I will not be back if Beta is made mandatory.
Give it up guys. You know that no stories are going to be discussed. Today is the end of the old Slashdot. Start sending out resumes, since this is going down in a blaze of glory.
Hey, the first story we should get on the replacement site when set up is an interview with Rob and Roblimo on why they really left Slashdot and left these incompetents in charge.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Do not make beta mandatory. Keep classic.
Dice, Editors, your silence is deafening! Slashdot is News for Nerds but no true Nerd wants your Beta. Stop pretending this problem will go away. Maybe you actually hope it will go away, maybe you hope Slashdot itself will go away. Whatever - at least have the decency and respect for your long term readers to give some kind of response to all the negative feedback. Why not keep two versions of the site? If Beta was done properly it would all be a CSS skin with some scripts that could all be swapped out. You already have a mobile site, so it can't be to improve appearence on mobiles, tablets, phablets, touchscreens, etc. Oh sorry, I forgot, that wouldn't keep the advertisers happy. Slashdot was awesome while it lasted.
Your ad here.
Shame, I'd actually like to discuss this topic. But, then I'd be jeopardizing every future discussion.
Javascript dancing baloney and giant pretty pictures belong on USA Today, not Slashdot.
The meat of Slashdot, the substance that draws viewers here instead of the alternatives, is the comments. Lose those comments and you will lose the eyeballs. Lose the eyeballs and you will lose the ad revenue.
Alternatively, you can accept that you made a mistake, keep Slashdot classic, and keep the steady flow of cash. Make the right business decision, here, Dice. Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Alternative alternative: Dice; make us an offer. If you really have written this thing off, give us your stats so we can crunch the numbers and tell us your price. It should be pretty clear that the path you're on will not be lucrative, so show your lowest and best offer. There's some pretty affluent folks here, and this place is important to us. If the workers at Harley Davidson could do it, surely it is possible for us to do the same.
No legitimate discussion until Slashdot classic is restored. Sacrifice a few days of discussion now to save all the days in the future. The Spirit of Mohdri Dragon Lives! (feel free to get drunk and naked while posting)
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
They are trying to get IRC to split to garner some information from the servers about the users and connections to it, or take over ownership of the channel briefly and get information that way about the users in the channel.
Look up General Smedley Butler and read some of his very short books on the subject. Its interesting he isn't' in U.S. history books in school. This all looks familiar somehow.
I was told that the redesigned /. will look like balls. I logged in, the other day, with Opera (wanted to try the old Opera before WebKit) and oops?! WTF is this? A UI that tries to HINDER me from accessing information? Not good.
I will be boy cot ting! 10-17 of february
Cut this shit out. Revert. Take the DICE Marketing department out for a nice big lunch, drinks and all. Then send them home for the weekend. Then undo the damage they've done.
I'm sadly sure that this is an intentional ploy to drive away long-time users ("geeks" and "nerds") who have contributed so much that, like me, they're eligible to disable advertising. What they don't understand is that even if my karma was shit (we don't get numbers anymore, I guess mine would be 50++++++), I'd still be using Ghostery and AdBlock to block the ads without Slashdot's generous option.
Wake up, guys. This is a tech site. The comments make the site. The users make the site. We aren't going to sit around and watch it go to shit. You will have nothing, ZERO left if the beta interface goes into production, except for a few new users who came over from MSNBC.
Writing, wall, see it, hope you have negotiated a nice severance package.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Ok, I tried the beta. Yeah its not pretty, the comment section is pretty small width wise, it looks HORRIBLE on my iPad... The client side filtering of comments completely ignores my long time preferences, etc etc.
To the point; Many have asked about cloning Slashdot, and retaking the community site. But has anyone thought about how such a mission could be accomplished? Yes I know I can go grab slashcode and standup a 16 core xeon box to toss on my 100mbps connection. But what about the users, the stories, the comments. We can't just screen scrape those to stand up a new site.
In what possible way could we honestly standup a new slashdot that is community owned?
Brett
It's usually obvious to the users. For instance, look at Slashdot's beta design... No normal webmaster who knows this site and its users would ever let garbage see the light of day. Slashdot Beta is obviously Government-Sponsored malware.
Open up a story for all of this. There's been dozens of red marked stories in the firehose, and you're all going on like nothing is happening. It's your job, I can appreciate that, but as site staff you need to address this at some point.
If Dice are wanting to turn /. into another me-too Cloud/Biz/TV news aggregation garbage, it's your jobs that are on the line too. The slashdot you know will get eaten alive.
Ask yourselves, what will the site have left if nobody contributes?
Just another comment saying FUCK BETA
That's one way to look at it what this Beta will do.
I was wondering why anyone would DDOS a mining pool. It doesn't seem to me like that would be an effective method of stealing cyrpto-currency, but the Government surely doesn't like it, so there's the answer. https://www.multipool.us/index...
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
If Dice doesn't reconsider this redesign by the 17th, I guess there won't be anything left to do on here other than earn membership in GNAA.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Car analogy time:
I have gotten rid of vehicles that sucked less than the Slashdot beta. Seriously even that '85 Bronco II where everything was rusty, none of the body panels matched, and that had bad compression on the #5 cylinder sucked less than beta.slashdot.org.
Time to offend someone
...says the guy whining about all the whining.
Slashdot is dead. I'm willing to bet that half of the regular contributors will be gone by the end of the week. They see the future and the future is Beta. No thanks.
Please learn the lesson that M$ should have learned with Windows 8. Don't push a cantankerous and cranky user base towards a pseudo-modern U.I.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
The more star systems you squeeze, the more will slip through your grasp, NSA Vader.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
FUCK BETA. I want my classic back. And one more thing, FUCK BETA!
Another Slashdot reader since 1998 here. Not for much longer, presumably: if Beta stays I will most certainly leave, as may others will, no doubt. Appalling.
It's been over an hour, and there are no comments. The old guard here really has fled. A decade ago, I would have expected 200+ comments the first hour rather than zero.
-- Proud AC since Oct '98
Sorry Dice, but I have to jump on the beta-hata wagon. I'll just point out two things:
1. Right side bar squeezes out comments. We are here for the comments, not whatever crap you want to cram down our throats.
2. Vertical spacing of text wastes tons of real estate. It looks like a High School book report padded to fill the required pages.
Dice Holdings, Inc: Please consider your next steps carefully. The /. castle was not built in a day, but it can easily be destroyed in a day. You have one chance to avoid a mass exodus. As others have said, eyeballs == advertising $$.
Stop trying to squeeze blood from a stone. The reason we come here is because most other news sites suck. If you want to throw your hat into the sucky news site ring, all I can say is good luck with that.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
There are a lot of users who do not like the beta design. I don’t especially hate it, but I do like the turquoise bars signifying the start of a new thread or comment. The beta uses a larger font which is not nearly as apparent.
Comments are also very squished with the right bar eating so much space. 3 comments deep you can fit 70 characters opposed to 140 in classic. I also don’t like the font change in comments.
In reality I do hate the squished comments. I wrote that part before I went into comments.
I refuse to sign
The topic is fuck slash beta until it goes away. If it doesn't go away, then fuck this rob malda left it in terrible hands. He has lots o money and he didn't even leave the site in good hands. He left it in the hands a fucking content farm company. He might as well as sold it to answers.com.
He wanted /. to die in a fire so people would migrate to his new company, Trove.
States exactly what the problem with the current situation is (I love the Liver and Onions analogy, good show)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
stop whining.
Like many people, I hate the beta slashdot but it isn't the only problem facing this site. The quality of stories have been in decline for some time. There has been an explosion in trolling comments by ACs. Browse at -1 and you often see a first post that is particularly sickening. When I started reading slashot, many years ago, it was for the user comments that opened the subject on perspectives that I might not have considered. Now, I read fewer comments and find most are completely off topic. There are other sites that I visit while drinking my morning coffee and slashdot might be dropped very soon.
simply stop whining and begging for attention. The idea of an "alternative slashdot" is ridiculous. If you prefer to use a weird wannabe alternative, do so and never come back to /. again. Nobody will miss your off-topic nonsense comments here anyway.
We are geeks. We can get tech stories from a billion places on the web. Actually, we don't really need web browsers, if all we want to do is read tech articles. There are better news readers than browsers. We read these stories here, because we know a bunch of smart people are going to provide context in the comments. Some are programmers. Some work in the industry. Some are hobbyists. Some are fanboys. But the comments let us refine our opinions on a piece further, and god forbid, teach us something. If that is not there, I can just fire up a newsreader and read the same product without ever coming here.
If you know commenting is so broken, why are you forcing people to use the Beta?
For the last 4 days, I've been stuck using the beta when I browse from work (IE8, not my choice) because the page is too broken to give me the option of using 'Classic mode'. I emailed the feedback link (once I found it, another thing I can't see in the beta), and got no response.
The UI and back-end stuff may be beta, but the comment system is alpha, at best, and shouldn't be forced on anybody.
Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
Freenode #slashdot-refugees
I thought it was my imagination, but several others have commented on this apparent downmodding.
Regardless, I have been using my mod points lately to mod up constructive criticism type comments, and will continue to do so.(making heavy use of "+1 under rated" mod-I heard that can 'lock in' the mod point[as does "-1 over rated"], but I don't really know how true that is)
Even if it just keeps them busy downmodding, maybe that's less time they can spend on that abomination they call beta.
I usually get 15 mod points about every other day on average,(I doubt I'm unique in that), and I'm not afraid to use them in the "Down With Slashdot Beta" campaign. ;-)
(now I wonder if I will ever get mod points again after this comment?)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Freenode, #slashdot-refugees
I personally like the beta, I think it needs some improvements; but leaving? What is there to leave over?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I have nothing against BETA design, except perhaps that it has less room for text.
I just hope my boss doesnt think i'm venturing on some "The 9 Things About Cats You Should Know" website or Youtube..
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Soulskill,
Aaaand?
Dice can't see it, since they are new here (he he)... but you and the editors should know well what I am about to say:
The most loyal long time most avid readers of Slashdot, are not trolling the site, in protest of the failed beta. Never thought I would see the day ...
Where is GNAA, Natalie Portman grits, and frist prost when you need them!
I sent feedback on the beta months ago on the survey, and sent it again today. I sent emails for feedback, and I posted this several times:
Requiring Javascript to browse the site is suicide!
Please, save the site from your managers ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I've emailed them... they ignore... the more they ignore the quicker their downfall.
Ignore your userbase, and you shall have none. If I am ignored much longer, I will leave. Just like I left mashable after their AOL'ed it.
PS. I've been a slashdotter for 7+ years.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
...but would we discuss the article please?
...except if it's illegal government spying? i guess they don't read TOS either.
Yes, please fuck the beta.
Beta will kill this community.
It's idiots like you that are ruining it.
I, like many others often read but seldom comment. I don't participate in these retarded arguments you hardcore slashdotters do.
I am having trouble using this site because I used to be able to trawl through the comments after reading the article to see the occasional constructive discussion and real insight into the article from people with experience.
Now I have to trawl through a shitload of "Fuck Beta" threads to see any of this. To me, Slashdot just looks different. Cleaner layout, more modern and some nice pictures - I like it, but I can't be fucked with you fixed-focus assholes who cant handle change. Just fucking get over it.
As a form of protest and understanding that Slashdot isn't what it used to be. I don't really know when DICE bought Slashdot, it feels like eons ago but I've been around since around 2001 and seen it get better and then worse and worse. I left Engadget after Timewarner bought them out because they stopped caring about their audience. I liked it back when it was indie since most things indie tends to care about their fans. Slashdot is becoming like wired. Very bias, late with every article posted, and tries to be something that it is not and it's forcing its new slashdot down our throats. But if they make the decision to go with the beta then I'll also be leaving. I left a few sites before because of their greed. IGN, Engadget, Wired, Joystiq and a few others. I don't miss out on anything since these sites just retell the same news you can find on any other site, in fact slashdot is probably the worse because it has piss-poor editors that don't edit summaries or titles properly and misguide you to RTFA. I don't think DICE understands its audience.
Well, I don't really know how I came about slashdot but normally nothing you look up will bring up this site so it's like its invisible to the web. Maybe 10 years ago this site was all over the web and that's how I found it but these days there's nothing. Perhaps the new slashdot (not the one in beta) is also hidden from searches and only the elite can find it rotfl Cowboyneal, please guide us!
We could go back to dupes, terrible HTML formatting with broken threading, page loading issues, very bad and biased summaries, various live updates being performed on the website because the developer felt like working on the actual site to develop in real time.... But personally, I don't really want to.
Reflecting on my above comment, Slashdot feels better from a site administration point of view. Comment wise, I don't find myself debating with people as much anymore; but I don't know if that's just a personal issue of my own or just that other users on this site are no longer that interesting to discuss things with.
You must be new here... I remember incredibly bad bias many years back, but nobody decent would trust their summaries to begin with.
Seriously, I don't think you know Slashdot's past that well or you're viewing it through rose tinted glasses.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Dastardly deeds on irc, NO Say it isnt so.
Sooner or later there will be roundups.
No one or thing can stop this, it is as sure as you breath to live.
I think that's about the size of it. /. an over emphasis on whitespace and no tools to make the bland text comments more interesting.
Last redesign swapped me from visiting several times daily to visiting maybe once or twice a month.
This time round I don't think I'll be back, the whole thing seams to be little more than playpen for some new employee, I see no evidence to strengthen the "community" aspect of
first post on slashdot beta, possibly among the last on slashdot. Can I just say thanks to everyone it was fun while it lasted, you hung in there while all the others fell.
I did not want to get involved in this, but this here goes *way* too far.
1) it is a no-go to post contact information of people without their consent.
2) Asking to flood people with spam (and that is all this bitching is!) is another no-go.
3) Calling any person names is not appropriate. Calling a woman bitch is another huge no-go in a public forum. Yes, it might be cool in your "gang", but totally unacceptable when talking to grown-up people.
4) Claiming that somebody is evil and has no soul just because she is of a different opinion is another no-go.
Either get some manners or shut up.
So ... you are a bunch of crazy whackjobs that has come to slay your childhood hero, for some crazy notion of love?
know what makes the beta so awful?
comments like this.
i thought irc networks were being discussed here
I don't see what would prevent you from screen scraping the archive, and bring our history with us to the new site.
url_pattern = "slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=bytime&keyword=&year=&page="
for year in (1998 to 2014):
thread_page = 1
while true:
url = url_pattern.replace(").with(year).replace("").with(thread_page)
threads = extract_threads( fetch(url) )
if no threads:
break
for thread in threads:
comment_page = 1
while true:
comments = extract_comments(thread + "?page=" + comment_page)
if no comments:
break
append_to_database(comments)
comment_page += 1
thread_page += 1
How long would it take?
The Slashdot archive spans 16 years.
Let's say there is an average of 35 pages worth of threads each year.
Each such page of thread links takes about 7 second to load.
In an hour you should be able to get all thread URLs.
Let's further assume it takes 4 seconds to load a comment thread and that there are 270 threads URLs per page.
That gives us a total of 16 x 35 x 270 ~ 150000 thread pages.
Getting all those threads so you can extract the comment related data and meta data would then take about a week (7 days).
Finally, lets assume each discussion thread has two pages, so we double that time. Still it's only two weeks of linear scraping to get the entire slashdot archive.
Now if you parallelize this, it'd naturally go much quicker. A few hours of scraping is all that's needed, or a bit longer if we don't want to put undue stress on the site (being good netizen).
Go for it I say, before the PHB DICE folk realize that they bought a platform for technical people by technical people and start removing useful features from the site (like the archive).
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié