paleshadows - Slashdot User

Submission + - Censordyne - net censoring gets toothpaste (smh.com.au)

Submitted by on Thursday July 09, 2009 @04:01AM

An anonymous reader writes: Toothpaste is the latest weapon mobilised to fight against the Australian Federal Government's plan to censor the internet.

Online activist group GetUp, which has already run ads slamming the internet filtering policy, today launched a new campaign — Censordyne — a parody ad playing on the Sensodyne brand of toothpaste.

Censordyne promises to offer "unproven, ineffective relief from internet nasties", protection "against fast internet" and a "fresh multimillion-dollar flavour". There is also a video on YouTube that the government attempted to have taken down.

Comment to ./ editor: it's David _Chess_ (not "Chase") (Score 1) 2

by paleshadows on Thursday July 09, 2009 @01:25AM (#28632635) Attached to: MyCyberTwin's AI Technology Put to the Test

sorry

Submission + - MyCyberTwin's AI Technology Put to the Test (davidchess.com) 2

Submitted by paleshadows on Thursday July 09, 2009 @01:10AM

paleshadows writes: In response to slashdot's report from yesterday regarding the recent AI achievements of MyCyberTwin dot com, long-time blogger David Chase of IBM-research decided to put the technology to the test. This rather amusing blog post attempts to verify the following not-less-than-amazing proclamations listed in the MyCyberTwin website:

"Make software clones of your staff. Free the humans for valuable work.
MyCyberTwin staff increase customer satisfaction, look after your customers, and improve sales.
CyberTwin staff are intelligent and always friendly. Every aspect of the conversations with your clients can be analyzed. You will have complete control over what they say, and you can train them to meet specific business objectives.
Best of all, CyberTwins are slave labour. They can talk to thousands of clients a second, 24 hours a day. They perform better than humans, for a much lower cost. They can live on your website in a chat environment, or talk out loud.
Up until now, clients were only able to talk to you by:

Talking to a real human staff member, on the phone, in a store, or in live chat on your website.
Self service. The client wandering around a website by themselves, or crawling through a rigid IVR system, trying to figure out what they want.
CyberTwin virtual staff offer the quality of live human support, at a fraction of the cost."
After conversing with some clones, Chess concludes that while all of the above
"sounds pretty revolutionary, there's one problem, sadly, and that is that they are lying. And I don't mean "exaggerating a bit in the way that press releases and website often do", I mean "giving false information intentionally; conveying a false image or impression", to paraphrase Wiktionary."

Submission + - 123456789 happens today 1

Submitted by

mcgrew

on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @09:10AM

mcgrew writes: "The Chicago Tribune is pointing out that shortly after noon today, the time and date will be 12:34:56 7/8/9. The Trib points out that this happens only once or twice per century, although it actually happens twice on the day it happens in.
serious Cubs fans know the first night game at Wrigley Field was played on 8/8/88 — which just happens to be four sideways infinity symbols.

I imagine you can make any day "special" like this if you try hard enough."

Submission + - The "Amazon Rank" Google-Bombing Campaign (smartbitchestrashybooks.com)

Submitted by paleshadows on Monday April 13, 2009 @07:07PM

paleshadows writes: The girls that run the smartbitchestrashybooks blog were rather enraged by Amazon's new policy to cull "adult" books from their search system. They have therefore decided to retaliate by introducing the term "Amazon Rank" to the lexicon (as underscoring Amazon's shortminded censorship and inconsistent policing of what ought to be accessible to the book-buying public), and by requesting their readers to create a link to http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/amazonrank with "Amazon Rank" as the anchor text, with the explicit goal of turning their definition of the term to be the top most ranking in search engines. (A practice known as Google bombing.) Remarkably, the campaign seems to indeed be successful: the new definition is currently number one in google results.

Example of usage: "I tried to do a report on Lady Chatterly's Lover for English Lit, but my teacher amazon ranked me and I got an F on grounds that it was obscene."

Alternate usage: "My girlfriend wanted to preserve her virginity, and I was happy to respect that, then she amazon ranked and decided anal sex was okay"

Submission + - The Environmental Impact of Google Searches (timesonline.co.uk)

Submitted by paleshadows on Sunday January 11, 2009 @12:34PM

paleshadows writes: The timesonline reports that researchers claim that each query submitted to Google has a quantifiable impact. Specifically, two queries performed through a desktop computer generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a cup of tea. From the article: "While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 [whereas] boiling a kettle generates about 15g [...] Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centers. However, with more than 200m Internet searches estimated daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the Internet is provoking concern. A recent report [argues that] the global IT industry generate[s] as much greenhouse gas as the world's airlines — about 2% of global CO2 emissions." The article also points to the www.co2stats.com website, which was set up by said researchers in an effort to help individuals and organizations in making their website green, energy-efficient, and carbon neutral.

Comment Invisible Things Labs is J. Rutkowska (Blue Pill) (Score 5, Informative) 105

by paleshadows on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @07:48PM (#26351121) Attached to: Researchers Hack Intel's VPro

"Invisible Things Labs" means, more or less, Joanna Rutkowska, discussed in these related slashdot stories

Submission + - Dr. Dobb's Journal going web-only (wordpress.com)

Submitted by paleshadows on Monday January 05, 2009 @05:49AM

paleshadows writes: The first issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (DDJ) was published in January 1976. A few days ago, Herb Sutter (the chair of the ISO C++ committee and a long-time DDJ columnist) announced through his latest blog post that, "as of January 2009, Dr. Dobb's Journal is permanently suspending print publication and going web-only." This follows an earlier announcement that PC magazine is to become digital-only too. (As of February 2009.) To those of us who enjoy reading such stuff away from the computer these are bad news, as there seems to be no other major technical programmer's magazine left standing.

Comment why not use a standard C library function instead? (Score 1) 465

by paleshadows on Sunday January 04, 2009 @09:38PM (#26324919) Attached to: The Exact Cause of the Zune Meltdown

There's a standard library function that performs the required functionality, see: http://linux.die.net/man/3/localtime . I think there's only one (good) excuse to do time-related calculations directly "by hand" rather than through a standard library function: It is only justified if the standard library is unavailable. But since this library, as its name suggests, is in fact _standard_ (in Windows and Unix variants alike), such situations are not that frequent...

Submission + - Gaiman's Read of Graveyard Book Publicly Available (mousecircus.com)

Submitted by paleshadows on Monday December 22, 2008 @02:56PM

paleshadows writes: About two months ago, Neil Gaiman read his new bestseller, "The Graveyard Book", in its entirety, on a 9-city video tour: one chapter per city. The video recordings of these events are now publicly available. They are delightful. Especially when it's snowing outside.

Comment Re:Don't fight it - Perl is here to stay! (Score 1) 390

by paleshadows on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @01:19PM (#25302025) Attached to: Where's the "IronPerl" Project?

"I know it and it's installed" aren't really strong advocacy arguments"

I disagree. I think these are very, very good arguments for using a language.

Submission + - Assessing the Popularity of Programming Languages (langpop.com)

Submitted by paleshadows on Thursday November 29, 2007 @01:46AM

paleshadows writes: An interesting analysis that has recently went on the air attempts to quantify the popularity of programming langauges through Internet queries. The idea is to query various sources with appropriate strings and use the number of hits as an indicator of popularity. For example, "PHP programmer -"job wanted" site:craigslist.org" was used to estimate the number job postings for PHP programmers. While this methodology is far from being perfect, the results are still interesting. The sources used were Yahoo (estimate general popularity), Craigs List (estimate job offerings), Amazon books (documentation), Freshmeat (popularity within the open-source community), Google Code (also open-source), del.icio.us (social bookmarking), Lamda The Ultimate (academia interest), Programming reddit (programmers talk), and Slashdot. From the nearly 30 langauges surveyed, C turned out to be the most popular in 5 out of the 9 sources, often followed by Java (which is, perhaps surprisingly, the clear #1 in Slashdot). Other top-3 languages are PHP, SQL, VB, C++, JavaScript, Haskell, and Python.

Submission + - Most people unaware of Macromedia Flash Cookies 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28, 2007 @11:13PM

An anonymous reader writes: They were certainly not known to me. To those of you who want to see how to view and/or erase this junk be sure to see this website. Now I trust Adobe/Macromedia about as much as I trust Microsoft.

Submission + - Google purges thousands of suspected malware sites (itnews.com.au) 1

Submitted by

Stony Stevenson

on Wednesday November 28, 2007 @06:37PM

Stony Stevenson writes: "In response to a concerted effort by cyber criminals to infect the computers of Google users with malware and make them unwitting partners in crime, Google has apparently purged tens of thousands of malicious Web pages from its index. Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software, noted that many search results on Google led to malicious Web pages that expose visitors to exploits that can compromise vulnerable systems. Sunbelt published a list of search terms that returned malicious pages, the result of search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns by cyber criminals to get their pages prominently ranked in Google — Sunbelt refers to this as "SEO poisoning."

Let's hope Google has done its research and hasn't purged legitimate sites."

Submission + - CMU Algorithm Identifies Top 100 Blogs for News (blogcascades.org)

Submitted by paleshadows on Friday November 23, 2007 @07:40AM

paleshadows writes: The CASCADES project (Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks), which is developed by a research group at Carnegie Mellon, attempts to identify the smallest set of blogs one should read in order to be the first to know about most important stories. To this end, the ranking algorithm utilizes the the following metric: the number of stories that were published by a blog and later recycled by very many others. You can find all the gory details in this scientific paper, and also browse the list of top-100 blogs that the algorithm produced (out of a total of 45,000).

Slashdot Top Deals