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Slashback: Nigritude, Indignation, Artifacts 181

Posted by timothy from the tomorrow-is-sushiwhore-time dept.
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."
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Slashback: Nigritude, Indignation, Artifacts More

Slashback: Nigritude, Indignation, Artifacts

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  • Google results? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Three Headed Man ( 765841 ) <dieter_chen@yaLISPhoo.com minus language> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:01PM (#9393557)
    Well, I know one way to get great results. All you have to do it be Litigious bastards [sco.com] and you're set.

  • Lemma? No kidding. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:08PM (#9393596)

    Arenstorf withdrew his proof on June 8, noting "A serious error has been found in the paper, specifically, Lemma 8 is incorrect".

    I guess that Lemma turned out to be a real Lemon, eh?

    *symbol crash* ba-dom-bom

    Thank you! I'll be here all week!

    • Re:Lemma? No kidding. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Thank you! I'll be here all week!

      After a joke like that? Not if someone gets you with those symbols first...

    • Some poor grad student isn't gonna be very much liked by his board. They usually have grad students bitch out lemmas like this - but I might be wrong. If I'm right though, some poor schlub is being handed a Master's and shown the door. Piled Higher and Deeper indeed.

  • PageRank. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by salvorHardin ( 737162 ) <adwulfNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:10PM (#9393609) Journal
    Idea of having lots of high-ranking back-links is most certainly an effective one. I used to have a plain old personal homepage, which was ranked as '1' by google, and then I added a link to my site on my page at h2g2 [bbc.co.uk], and watched my rank go up to 4 within a week. Sadly, it didn't last...

    • Re:PageRank. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by iserlohn ( 49556 )
      And this property is being exploited endlessly. Google needs to find a way to recognize the contribution of a site, rather than just its content and the links. There are tons of sites out there that the sole purpose is to link to other sites and prop up their rankings.

    • Re:PageRank. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dasmegabyte ( 267018 )
      I added my website to my sig. Within a week, I had a shitload of spam attached to my article #1.

      At least I'm still the first link when you google for "das megabyte." Like I'm sure you always do. I'm also the third link down when you google for "Sorry, ryan."

  • Claria suing another company??? (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Ancients ( 626689 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:12PM (#9393619) Homepage
    What is this - a game?

    Half time - change sides....

    I wonder what the half time pep talk would have been like in the Claria camp:

    Now troops, we're going to need to pay for filing motions, and all that other stuff that comes along with suing someone, as well as our defence lawyers.

    WADDYA MEAN WE SPENT IT ALL ON REBRANDING???....oh that's right (*fights through the fog of denial*)...we were Gator *blushes*

  • Annoyance (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am a member of the merkey.net forums. While it is (probably) a good thing to have a Slashdot article, it was really annoying to have "nigritude ultramarine" posted everywhere on our forums for two months. All that for an iPod and a monitor too...

  • Use NOINDEX or Robots.txt for Sandbox? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PetoskeyGuy ( 648788 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:13PM (#9393631)
    The sandbox is a junk area where users can play right? So change the .htaccess to use Follow, NoIndex and google should be blind to them. Or the robots.txt file to block access.

    Is there some reason you would want the Sandbox indexed?

    • Re:Use NOINDEX or Robots.txt for Sandbox? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You mean NoFollow, Index, surely?
      • Maybe I do. I'm not sure. I don't know how PageRank works, but my idea is that if you tell the spider not to index something, but still follow links then it would break the PageRank score of that link. You would be coming from an unindexed page to an indexed page which would be like starting over.

        Of course I don't know how the ranking really works.
    • And how does this prevent sandbox pages from being targetted by spambots? If you think telling a spammer his technique doesn't work will stop him, you don't know spammers very well.
      • In addition to making the sandbox harder to find, it also means that spamming that sandbox will be less valuable, since the spam link won't enter into the ranking.

        Since Wiki Sandboxes are for people who want to use that Wiki, having the sandboxes not show up on searches hurts nobody. That is, nobody except for the Wiki admin, who has the initial nuisance of having to reconfigure apache, set up robots.txt, etc.
      • And how does this prevent sandbox pages from being targetted by spambots?

        This is not the spam you are looking for...

        The parent wasn't refering to e-mail spam, but rather google-spam, jerks posting links to their website on your site to prop up their rankings. The idea was to kill the usefulness of the technique by blocking Googlebot from the areas that are vulnerable to this sort of spam.

    • Unless a Search engine that disobeys robots.txt gets it and along the way Google picks up on THAT listing.

  • Dear Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)

    by Letter ( 634816 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:16PM (#9393649)
    Dear Slashdot,

    It seems, unfortunately, that comment #9393632, story #110689, is wrong. Simply take v_0=1, r(v):=(1+\cos v)/\sqrt v, \rho(v)=3/\sqrt v, and \phi(v)=v. I imagine that such a mistake has heavy consequences.

    Sincerely,
    Letter

  • Mwahahah (Score:4, Insightful)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 ) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:17PM (#9393657) Homepage
    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.

    • I'm in no mood to defend or praise M$, but... okay.

      Any quote which contains ...in the process they got an entire generation of users hooked on getting stuff for free. - as if that attitude was somehow new (cf. the difficulty in launching a successful micropayment or online-currency biz, '95 - present) must've been written by a twentysomething.
      ("Not that there's anything wrong with that"...)

      <grrr>

    • Re:Mwahahah (Score:5, Funny)

      by PetoskeyGuy ( 648788 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:37PM (#9393766)
      No, No - This is good

      If I ever get an RIAA extortion letter I can just explain that I have a long standing habit of getting free stuff from the internet and that complaining at this late date is pointless because it's become the established norm. Kinda of like common law marriages or squatters rights.
      • So, under the prevailing Deep Pockets Theory (``When suing, go after anyone with serious money, regardless of relevant relationship to the case''), the RIAA should include Microsoft in every one of these lawsuits.

        That's one time I'd cheer for MS to win.

    • Re:Mwahahah (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Minna Kirai ( 624281 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @08:06PM (#9393880)
      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 (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Osty ( 16825 )

        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.

        But Free Software doesn't have to be free software! (Thank you, RMS, for that genious naming scheme.) Remember, it's free as in speech, not free as in beer.

        • It's spelled "genius", genious. :)

      • Re:Mwahahah (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Artifakt ( 700173 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @09:38PM (#9394387)
        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.
        • A typical hour long TV program has about 8 minutes of commercials.

          What planet are you from?

          Can I move there?

          -
          • I didn't go into some tangental assumptions in what was already a lengthy post.
            In terms of what is only a "percieved" price instead of a real market derived one, it's probably fair to not include "station identification", commercials for other programs coming up (that's perceived as a cost the station has to help it sell commercials to someone else, and argueably many viewers are thinking from the assumption that a broadcasting corporation makes no money airing its own program ads, which is almost bu

            • Re:Mwahahah (Score:3, Insightful)

              by mabinogi ( 74033 )
              > 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

              • Re:Mwahahah (Score:3, Insightful)

                by Artifakt ( 700173 )
                Like I said, its an obviously false assumption that most viewers of a TV show can afford a particular product. The point was, if you treat it as true just for the sake of arguement, then the "average" consumer has a much higher income, and so the value of their time would be a lot more. (Say they earn 30$ an hour on average, their time is worth 50 cents/minute, so watching eight minutes of commercials to get a program works out to them thinking the program was worth about 4$, and by that rule, 8$ for a two
            • My original post was just a quicky joke on the estimate of 8 minutes commercials and 52 minutes of show. Your figures are still off. I just did a google search: tv commercials "minutes per hour" [google.com]. Looking at the top ten results and excluding two UK results and one Jordanian result, the 7 US results paint a consistant picture of 15 minutes per hour of actual commercials (plus network promotions and public service announcements on top of that) during primetime. The quantity of actual programming drops to 39 m
        • I have cable TV, and it often angers me that not only do I have to pay for the service, I still have to sit through commercials anyway.

          (back in the day, when cable TV was in its infancy, there were no commercials on the tube)

          So, assuming advertising revenue from commercials on TV is consistent over the years - cable TV must be raking in the bucks - and I have no better experience than I had in the 1970s during any given time slice (i.e. number of minutes of programming versus minutes of commercials).

          I w
      • That's a good point about TV being free. There's a friend of mine who doesn't have a TV, but likes the new Enterprise show. He downloads them from newsgroups to watch them. I don't think there's a problem with that because if he had a TV and VCR, he would have just been recording it instead. The movie thing, however, you usually have to pay to see. (unless it gets shown on TV, but it is usually edited down to fit the TV time)
    • 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.
      Yep. Guilty as charged. If I wasn't so cheap, I'd not only pay SCO $699 for a runtime licence, I'd post to slashdot telling everyone what a bargain it was.

      It makes me wonder: if "greed is good" how come "cheap is bad?" Is frugality only a virtue when practiced by CEOs?

    • Re:Mwahahah (Score:3, Insightful)

      by phliar ( 87116 )

      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.

      And you know that "the majority of the people who use open source" are cheap bastards, how?

      My experience has been that people who use Unix tend to be technically oriented adults who are more aware of ethics, copyrights and patents than the general population. It is self-evident that the Microsoft-using population i

    • Trust a Winnut to twist this in to some kind of anti-MS / anti-OSS statement. But hey - let's start off by making completely unrelated attacks:


      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.

      Hey - let's ignore the Windows-based warez scene. Windows freeware, shareware, and spyware. Let's not bother ourselves with how gleefull Winnuts get when Microso

    • You wrote:

      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.

      By calling OSS users cheap, I take it you mean they are less willing to spend money on software than some other crowd.

      First of all, why is that a bad thing?

      Secondly, compared to what other crowd?

      I might point out in response that OSS users are more willing to spend their time learning how to use so

  • JDS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BigGerman ( 541312 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:20PM (#9393676)
    kinda interesting to watch the JDS effort.
    You would think that someone like Sun has nerves,resources,etc. to pull a decent Linux desktop.
    The reasons it is not are probably combination of:

    internal apathy of the development group - Linux, desktop, whatever.. Any AC from Sun can comment?

    cluelessness of the upper management - there is no marketing plan, they just grasping the straws

    wrong marketing (different from cluelessness). Wtf it is called "Java"? To me, JDS would mean a Swing-based desktop shell on top of very thin Linux distro. Now, that would be innovation.

    Overall, the JDS just confirms the point that you do not have to be a multi-billion-dollar co to produce major product and when you ARE a m-b-d co, your product may still suck. The innovation is the field owned by talented individuals and hungry startups.

    • Re:JDS (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:39PM (#9393776)
      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:JDS (Score:3, Insightful)

        by BigGerman ( 541312 )
        This is Eugenia that we all know and love ;-)
        • Eugenia \Eu*ge"ni*a\ ([-u]*j[=e]"n[i^]*[.a]), n. [NL. Named in
          honor of Prince Eugene of Savoy.] (Bot.)
          A genus of myrtaceous plants, mostly of tropical countries, and including several aromatic trees and shrubs, among which are the trees which produce allspice and cloves of commerce.

          I don't get.
      • I smell an astroturfer.

        Two reputable reviewers found major problems with JDS2, and some AC on Slashdot negates them? Hmmm...

        -Jem

    • Re:JDS (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 )
      Here's another review [slashdot.org] if you're interested.

    • Re:JDS (Score:2, Insightful)

      by neomac ( 97478 )
      According to Sun, they're capitalizing on the Java® brand recognition...

      ...which is dumb. We, the folks who know what things like "Linux," "desktop," and "Java" mean from a technical point of view, would likely be confused. I know I was before I read into it. My first reaction was, "Why the hell are they building a Linux desktop distro in Java?" (For the record, my second thought was, "How the hell are they building a Linux distro in Java!!?!")

      This is a good example of what happens when Marketing

    • Re:JDS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cbowland ( 205263 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @09:23PM (#9394284)
      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.

    • Re:JDS (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cbowland ( 205263 )
      Sort of off topic, but JDS is starting to show up in screenshots of linux machines, even when the main focus of the article isn't JDS.

      See Windows Compatibility for the Linux Desktop [linuxdevcenter.com] for an example.

  • the object of which was for contestants to create a site ranked highest by google for a nonsense phrase, "nigritude ultramarine."

    I was picturing a black supersoldier, kinda like my old drill instructor at Fort Benning. That guy was freakin scary. He was six foot five and hard as a rock in both physique and attitude and had those crazy looking eyes like Bernie Mac. Once out on bivouac he actually opened up a bit and told us about his days in Vietnam when he was a seventeen year old private.

  • My turn to use '9-11'! My turn! My turn! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi@yahoo. c o m> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:33PM (#9393747) Journal
    "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.

    • ...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:My turn to use '9-11'! My turn! My turn! (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Whatever happened to harmless breaking and entering?
      You mean like, what it clearly states the students were charged with at the beggining of the article?

      Really, what the hell is the impotent Homeland Security department going to do?
      Nothing, I'd assume, since the article makes no mention of the Homeland Security department, the FBI, the Austin Joint Terrorism Task Force any other government organzation, and that quote was made by the "associate director of utilities and energy management" at the colle
    • "Terrorism is old and busted, and is nothing but a political tool and soundbite op."

      In a political sense, yes. In a practical sense, not on your life. Just like "the war on drugs" was mostly a political tool, there was a REAL underlying problem that existed (and still exists). Just because some polish up phrases and use them as soundbites doesn't mean the root cause isn't important.

      There's some very real people out there that want to do some very real harm to our very real civilians. Are they as numer

      • Re:My turn to use '9-11'! My turn! My turn! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi@yahoo. c o m> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @10:23PM (#9394617) Journal
        I'm glad you brought up the 'War on Drugs' - I agree that there are problems with drugs, terrorism, piracy, poverty, illiteracy, and many other things.

        Why is it that every time that a 'War' is declared, we end up fighting the symptoms of the problems and not the root causes?

        We'd probably be somewhat safer from terrorists if we'd stop training them and giving them weapons...

      • Re:My turn to use '9-11'! My turn! My turn! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Friday June 11, 2004 @02:55AM (#9395777) Homepage
        There's some very real people out there that want to do some very real harm to our very real civilians. Are they as numerous as people say? No. Are people be incorrectly persecuted in this country for it? Yes.


        There seems to be a growing trend of people interviewing themselves as a rhetorical technique. Does John Ashcroft do it every time he's on TV? Yes he does. Is it an effective means of controlling the direction of the interview? You bet. Is it starting to grate on my nerves? Absolutely! Will it get old and go away soon? We can only hope.


        (Yeah, it's off-topic, but when the topic is "Nigritude Ultramarine", so is pretty much everything else)

    • Uni of Queensland [uq.edu.au] has a tunnel network underneath it's central buildings aswell. I am told that it was originally designed to be used by the army in emergencies, but I can't find any record of that (although I believe this is a picture [uq.edu.au] of the tunnel construction).

      After a few years mapping what entrances were visible, we found a grate that had been left open, so those of us who dared went for a jaunt.

      They must have had silent alarms aswell (I saw the sensors) so I knew we wouldn't have long. The group

    • Re:My turn to use '9-11'! My turn! My turn! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's like the Reichstags fire in the Weimar Republic (Germany). Blamed on "them nasty jews" and used as an excuse to round up undesireables and put them into concentration camps. You'll eventually find out that America is not one iota better, and that you have given up just as many rights as the Germans did in 1933. Sure, sure, you are still allowed to vote; but as long as they count the votes what are you going to do about it?

    • 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.

      Agreed. If I died in any manner, and someone used my death to justify fucking up my country, I'd be pretty god damned pissed. (Well, moreso.) What are we doing about it?

    • I agree with you, teamhasnoi. A couple nights ago I watched Ashcroft squirm while Congress grilled him (replayed from that morning on CSpan). Boy that was high entertainment. (He almost got jail time for "Contempt of Congress. ;) But what really caught my attention when he protested that some Patriot Act provision (something to do with police hijinks sans subpoena) was just an extension to terrorism of what they already could do with health insurance fraud. Health insurance fraud!

      Sound like some congress c

  • For the Wiki Sandboxes (Score:5, Informative)

    by LuYu ( 519260 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:41PM (#9393789) Homepage Journal

    Why do they not just disable links to outside pages entirely? It is experimental, right? So why have links to other websites at all?

    Links could create a bogus page like:

    You have linked to the URL: http://somesite.wherever.net
    Internal links within the wiki could be preserved.
    • Someone learning might want to test ceating outside links. I think the noindex option is better so that sandboxes are invisible to the google bots.
    • Why do they not just disable links to outside pages entirely? It is experimental, right? So why have links to other websites at all?

      Links could create a bogus page like:

      you have linked to the URL: http://somesite.wherever.net

      That's not very helpful because it would be difficult to test the link that way. The idea is to encourage legitimate users to actually make and edit pages.

      It is unfortunate that Wiki site administrators have to do anything at all. Phillip admits that he does not get it:

      I

      • It's a sandbox. It's there so that people can experiment there instead of messing up the other sections. Did he use up inordinate amounts of bandwidth? Did he use up tons of CPU? I doubt it - they weren't even complaining about that.

        If you say "Please test here", heck why complain if people actually do so?

        Based on the complaints by Wiki owners it's a fact that at either Wiki software is not up to handle these things or Wiki owners aren't.

        If people bring to attention flaws in code (in this case inadverten
        • Based on the complaints by Wiki owners it's a fact that at either Wiki software is not up to handle these things or Wiki owners aren't.

          It's the format of wiki that's partially to blame-- most wiki owners want to keep the things open to the public at large. This is assuming that the best way to control the content of a wiki (including the Sandbox) is to regulate its users, and require registration/passwords.

          The Nigritude spam is a nuisance, one that I shouldn't have to deal with. It's not that I'm not up

          • The wiki stuff is nice and all that. But what if people subtly alter stuff (e.g. history). Would people notice errors? It's just like the patent office problem - they let through almost any crap nowadays that looks half intelligent to the examiner.

            Would really attacking wikis be worth it? (This nigritude stuff is nothing). Maybe not at the moment so at least some wikis are safe. And maybe just captchas and similar stuff will keep most (not all) wikis safe from automated spamming whilst not requiring the us

    • Re:For the Wiki Sandboxes (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AnotherBlackHat ( 265897 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @09:02PM (#9394180) Homepage
      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

  • More Googlebombing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bios_Hakr ( 68586 ) <xptical@@@gmail...com> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:52PM (#9393829)

    Recently my local computer user group's blog was spammed with user registration. The same user registered about 200 times with slightly different user names and all his home pages linked to the same website. The user never needed to post a single comment in our forums, just the registration page alone gave him 200 links to his home page.

    If you wanna read a more detailed account of how this works, read here [britecorp.co.uk].

  • Lemma 8: If there are a unlimited number of prime pairs implies there are a unlimited number of prime pairs.
  • I don't understand what WIKI site owners have against people putting links in sandboxes.

    The sandboxes are there for users to PLAY IN and test Wiki commands. Nobody is harmed with some silly links in there. The next person in wipes them out (usually). Also most sites clean their sand daily.

    --
    3D Photography [callipygian.com]

  • Nigritude? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What did you just call me? You racist son of a bitch! I'll fucking kill you and your fucking family.

  • Meh...if I were google i'd have... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Phil John ( 576633 ) <phil@@@webstarsltd...com> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @08:21PM (#9393960)
    ...made all searches for nigritude ultramarine return results in a random order, shouldn't be that hard for them to do, would have been side splittingly funny as well, hah...SEO spammers...take that, and heres another one for your pointless competition ;o)

    • Not hard at all, but I'm glad they didn't. Doing so would have undermined their credibility as being impartial.

      As I write this, the top link for search engine [google.com] is AltaVista. Google is #7. That's honesty, and they should be proud of it.

      I really hope they don't become evil after the IPO.

  • With the author having withdrawn the twin primes paper in the wake of the discovered flaw, arXiv no longer has the original up so we can see what went wrong. Does anyone have a mirror?

  • PlayingWith Fire (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nigritude, ouch...

    Playing with fire. Expect the wrath of the NAACP
    anyday now. Remember the guy who actually got
    fired for using the word niggardly?
  • UTPD officials say the current security system is adequate. "I think we've got a good system in place, and I think the apprehension of six individuals shows how the system works," Stalder said.

    So, they caught the perps. That's fine for simple vandalism, but if they continue to hide behind "homeland security," I would demand that they actualy provide that level of security. Specifically, the system failed in three ways:
    - They don't know if all intrusions resulted in capture. I suspect not; it's the crimina
  • Wiki admins are irritated that a widespread net meme is showing up in their sandboxes?

    Heh.

    All your nigritude are ultramarine to us

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