w00t! Sounds like a great start to the weekend to me!

Tennessee Senators arrested by the FBI!

Leading the way in demonstrating that the internet percieves censorship (as well as injunctions) as damage and routes around it, Bram has just incorporated trackerless torrent publishing into a new beta release of BitTorrent. Get it. Use it. Love it.

'Disruptively cheap' web publishing!

I won't yammer on so much, but I'll say that the dialogue, while very much British, isn't so pendulously wordy as say, some of Sterling's 'Quicksilver' books. Read it. It'll keep you occupied for at least a week.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

...for when you're attacked by Zombies.

...although probably the same goes for Conservatives.

Read it.

Oh, and fuck Kentucky in the goat ear.

Important Survival Considerations for Zombie Attack

Well, it's finally happened. Sony has given in to Almighty Greed and decided to cash in on the craze so many Chinese college students got out of the sneaker business for--online game item selling.

Here's a little quote from another article on the subject where the head of Mythic Entertainment (the guys who make that "other" medieval online game that aren't Blizzard) was asked to comment, and specifically Sony's spin on the situation in response to this, as recited by everyone's favorite ass-kissing Giant Gnome, John Smedley:

(from: http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=9464&section=feature&email= )

"Unsanctioned virtual property auctions are now rampant, and will continue to grow whether or not publishers implement their own auction sites. Every MMO company has to assess the needs of its own player base. It is clear to us that we have many loyal and honest players who simply don't have the time to take multiple characters through the game's higher levels of play and want a sanctioned, secure means to broaden their play experience. Increasingly, our customer service department has had to bear the brunt of futily attempting to assist these players when they are cheated by unsecure transactions. Station Exchange will enable these honest players to use an auction service without concern that they will be scammed."

Translated into actual language (as opposed to utter bullshit masquerading as factual statements) it goes something like this...

"As a company, we have completely failed to enforce our EULA which strictly forbids allowing mafia into the virtual mugging and hijacking market. We have also noted over the years that unlike a casino, where arbitrarily changing the rules of the game to increase profit margins (things like declaring that the dealer now wins on 18 or higher and that no slot machine may payout until the user has been seated and feeding it coins for a minimum of 8 hours non-stop) simply causes a stampede of players to the door, an /online/ game can get away with making completely absurd rule changes at a moment's notice, provided that the players are merely given an online forum where they may post their grievances and be assured that someone official is reading them. (...which is a really inexpensive thing to tell them.) Through careful attrition and marketing campaigns, assurances we were building a new game from the ground up, and unofficial leaked statements from anonymous staff members who have now been thoroughly scolded (naughty, naughty!), we successfully transitioned our player base from EverQuest I to EverQuest II without anyone ever noticing that it was just a graphics engine change (it's amazing how easy it was to get the players to "demonstrate an interest" in the exact same gameplay as before) and even drew players who had gotten away from us back into the fold in record numbers. Knowing that either the end is near or the human race is doomed for self-destruction,... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Sony Online Entertainment Opens Online Gambling Franchise (no ID req'd!)

From the initial question posed by mydoghasworms, to the complete and utter lack of evidence to show acquaintance with the subject matter of the people posting, to the rather horrifying upward moderation of their comments, Slashdot has hit an all-time low with this article.

The fact of the matter is that the Linux Standards Base initially neither provided anything useful in the way of defining the structure and operation of a Linux machine, nor did it provide constructive justifications for the things that it *did* specify. Now in what seems like their nth revision, they *still* haven't gotten a clue, and have strayed even further into uselessness--a uselessness which now apparently incorporates a certification body! (Because there's nothing like bureaucratic overhead to make an operating system function smoothly!)

If you'd like some really stellar examples of the kind of mistakes they were making, the initial standards documents actually contained very little in the way of where files should go, and instead focused heavily on requiring people to use RPM. No joke. Their latest revision has entire sections devoted to what amounts to a re-documentation of the X library APIs. It's all well and good to attempt to freeze APIs--development teams for the various projects that make up the typical Linux machine do it all the time--but for an outside vendor to do this in the absence of any context for facilitating the upward change which makes Linux so attractive to people who actually know what they're doing, well, it just doesn't bloody work! A Linux machine effectively ceases to be a Linux machine once you've metaphorically vivisected it and pinned all it's various organs out on the block and then sealed it in ambergris for all time. It becomes a _dead thing_.

Probably a million times more useful is the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard located at http://www.pathname.com/fhs which, in a very straightforward and engineer-like way worries about the filesystem layout first, and trusts that vendors have engineers smart enough to be able to write shell scripts to determine whether or not something is going to work if/when it's installed.

The main difference between these two approaches being that the LSB folks seem to think that installation of software is something between sticking your hand and arm as deep as you can into a nest of sleeping scorpions in total darkness and possibly airlift-delivery of a playground deep into the heart of New York City. They apparently feel that the host operating system should be required to lie there perfectly still and "just take it". The FHS team's approach is one much more like "stuffing" a volkswagen bus. They appear to feel that as long as everything is laid out reasonably, that one can get feedback from the people already inside the bus about whether or not there's room for more people and whether or not they should come in through the door or the back window.

Stupidest Slashdot Topic Ever

Just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder, Microsoft has produced documentation on translating and writing 'leetspeak'.

OMG Th3Y aR3 0nT0 uz N0\/\/!@#$@!@!$$

Microsoft HOWTO: t3W b3 th3 k3wl3zT eV4R!

Okay, so I'm a little twisted but no one was seriously injured in this and basically, it's still awesome footage. I caught it this morning while at work doing routine checks on the cable system and had to do a double-take because it almost looked staged.

W00t! Train Versus Semi video! teh aw3s0M3st eV4r!!@#!

In the stupidest security move microsoft has made to date, they've decided that pirated copies of microsoft products should not recieve security patches.

What's next, 'How to write a worm', published by Microsoft Press?

[ This was inevitable. Its a good idea for their business and a bad idea for computer security on the whole. Its hard to argue that Microsoft has a moral obligation to patch stolen software, but on the other hand this is going to make a bad situation worse. ]

Microsoft: No Patches for Pirated Windows

Now this is probably the most obvious example of blatant snake oil salesmanship I've ever seen. I am utterly astounded that this company does such little fact checking of their database that it actually contains this...

For those not on the up-and-up with Unix software, shadow-utils is the package that provides shadow password authentication for pretty much every Linux distribution out there that isn't using PAM authentication. It does not even work on Win32, and the PestPatrol entry is actually listing the files that come in the shadow-utils *source* package. *Nothing* of the files listed is actually executeable on a Windows machine without some _serious_ application of the Cygwin development suite.

Someone was very, *very* st0ned when it came time to analyze this one for inclusion in the database.

sum1 plz hlp me 2 remov shadow-utils virus frm my box! it has tken ovah!