110983
submission
Alan writes:
FiringSquad has been running their "American Idol wannabe" contest for a little over a month now. Now that they've weeded out the dredge, there are actually some awesome entries now. One of the best from this round is an article on The Greatest Game You've Never Played: Allegiance R3 Release. Apparently, it's a game Microsoft released several years ago and *gasp* ultimately made open source. It's since been developed further into an incredibly user-centric game. Good read.
109109
submission
mstrom writes:
Walk on the tube (metro) in London anytime now and you'll adverts plastered around asking "Who controls 75% of the worlds information?", "Who is controlling your information?" inviting you to join the "Information Revolution" by going to information-revolution.org. Trouble is, it doesn't say who's behind this revolution. This revolutions most recent trick was to laser-beam a huge advert onto the Houses Of Parliament. It's homepage provides the answer to choice — a search box that lets you choose which search engine to use (well, one of the big-4 anyway) — this is the information revolution!
The entries on their site use hip hand-scrawled or sidewalk-chalked messages to give it a viral buzz as though this is truly a community-sourced revolution. Slick it certainly is, too slick. Hundreds of feedback comments on the site are questioning who is behind it and expressing huge disappointment that a campaign that truly got them to think led them to what seems to be a very expensive anonymous attack on Google.
The culprit looks like non other than Ask.com — the domain name information-revolution.org is registered by Performo who list Ask and Yahoo among their clients. But the actual website is otherwise shrouded in secrecy. The biggest clue is the search links on their homepage — ask.com is the first link and choose Ask as your search provider and then search for Google or Yahoo and hey presto! you get an "Information Revolution" advert courtesy of Ask. So a valid question — why does Google own most of the worlds information — but a bad answer — use Ask. The real question remains — why the secrecy, why is the Information Revolution anonymous and was Ask trying to trick us into thinking their really is a revolution against Google?
109065
submission
Anonymous Westley writes:
Watched WarGames for the nth time recently, and got to the scene where Jim and Malvin (the "hackers") tell David (Broderick) about backdoors. Which got me thinking: Do people still do this? What about OSS? Is there anyone who has written a backdoor recently, in an OSS or other project? Have you ever found one (in code or on a live application) left by someone else?
