Three stories have been tagged '!ellobo', one of which is one the front page right now. No stories have ever been tagged 'ellobo'.

Why? Why not?

..he discovers some previously unknown element of political theory to explain the discrepancy between the two.

I could list examples of this, but they are so easy to find that I can't be bothered.

Within the last few weeks, something has changed. Whereas tags like 'fud' 'notfud' and 'yes' or 'no' answers to rhetorical questions in the headlines used to dominate, they are rarely seen anymore. There are in general a lot fewer wisecrack tags. and every article has tags for its Section - eg 'business', and often several of the official slashdot sections if it could have belonged to several. It seems to me that very few people would have bothered to add these categorising tags, when you can already filter stories by section heading without a need for tags.
Did CmdrTaco et al implement tags then decide that Web 2.0 style 'folksonomy' was too risky, and skew the tag system heavily in favour of top-down editorial control? Did they blacklist certain tags to avoid the front page making slashdot look like a hangout for the childish, the cheeky, and those with a chip on their shoulder? It would be interesting to find out.

I am never buying a HP printer (or anytthing else made by them) again. Two of their printers this year have died on me. Not the hardware, but the software seems to have fubared on the most recent one. The printer powers on, error lights flash and they refuse to print anything.
My (paranoid?) theory is that running the printer from a dual-booting Windows/Linux system has triggered some kind of DRM in the printer which tries to stop the printer and cartridges from being reverse engineered. printing worked fine under linux then the printer died when i booted back into windows. the printer worked fine previously under a different windows system. the other printer died in similar circs.
now i've seen a cheap lexmark which i'm wondering about since they are apparently 'considered evil'?

liberalism Catholicism autism corporatism Stalinism Capitalism Stalinism corporatism Buddhism Hinduism schism pacificism Capitalism Terrorism facism Catholicism relativism relativism relativism capitalism autism autism autism autism autism autism animism corporatism capitalism atheism iltheism anti-semitism baptism Judaism Judaism atheism corporatism capitalism Racism Conservativism Catholicism distributism radicalism capitalism capitalism capitalism Communism capitalism communism Materialism communism Catholicism Catholicism Relativism conservativism liberalism isolationism Protestantism Evangelism relativism Materialism communism Materialism Catholicism secularism secularism distrbutism terrorism tourism counterculturalism terrorism isolationism Communism communism patriotism communism liberalism Distributism distributism Catholicism Catholicism federalism survivalism Liberalism Conservativism Marxism Marxism Liberalism Libertarianism Marxism patriotism corporatism Marxism Pacifism pacifism Traitorism Catholicism Catholicism Marxism materialism corporatism communism Fundamentalism creationism fundamentalism fundamentalism fundamentalism protectionism Capitalism Catholicism communism totalitarianism capitalism fascism Environmentalism Anarcho-capitalism capitalism anarcho-capitalism corporatism anarcho-capitalism socialism capitalism socialism capitalism capitalism feminism Fanaticism Capitalism Capitalism communism capitalism Capitalism capitalism Capitalism capitalism mechanism Terrorism capitalism distributism individualism Catholicism Catholicism Catholicism capitalism communism Globalism corporatism racism classism capitalism Distributism Libertarianism distributism libertarianism distributism libertarianism distributism Socialism capitalism distributism Protestantism distributism Terrorism marxism Culturalism Racism racism racism
(thanx to leoPetr for the Grabber)

My feeling is that the Network Neutrality wars will be won by Google, which means apparently that the first Net Neutrality war, the current one, will be won by the pro-neutral side. You see after being among the only major web players to escape the dotcom crash fairly unscathed, Google took advantage of the subsequent telco crash to start buying up dark fibre, lots and lots of unused bandwidth all over the US.

I don't know if you would get your broadband provision from GoogleNet, but I reckon a lot of people would. So in the first instance at least, they are not really as subject to blackmail by telcos as a lot of people speaking out in favour of neutrality are suggesting. Everyone else is though, so the question is what do Google see as the future of the Internet? Indexing the chaos of the current system, where anyone can connect and contribute, has made them a lot of money. But perhaps the Hollywood backed alternative of the TVnet, as system whereby you can buy all forms of sanitised and commercial music, film and games in the comfort of your own home will start to appeal to them more once they do an Apple and reinvent themselves as 'content providers'.

my little sister surprised me; we were talking about 'oyster' cards, the rfid-based fare system for most public transport in london. the system is quite new and quite complex as there are lots of different fares and different ways of paying; you can put credit on the card and get charged per journey, or use it as a 'travelcard' which allows you unlimited travel through certain zones over a day, a week, a month etc., or use a mix of both.

my sister has used it for a while and when i talk to her about it she tells me the different ways she 'swipes' in and out of the system so as to avoid paying where it's not necessary (if the station has the barriers open / no barriers) or so.

i'm pretty interested in 'oyster' so i'd been doing a little research into it. i explained to her that there are two ways you can run a system like this. one is that the cards have no information on them except an identifier. when you 'swipe' this just allows the barrier or ticket machine to look you up on the central database, to check if you're allowed to travel, and modify the amount of credit you have if necessary. the other way is that this information is actually stored on the card in some form, which would presumably need to be encrypted. often when i talk to her (and many other people) about stuff like this i get the feeling they are just humouring me by acting interested.

then she surprised me by telling her what i was just about to tell her: "Yes, oyster seems to use a mixture of both." I knew this from reading information on the internet about it, but she didn't.

from observing the behaviour (input and output) of a black box, she was able to create a theory about how the system worked inside. that is the hacker property.

i have mod points and nothing to do except abuse the moderation system.

it's just a lot easier to mod down ppl who have drawn attention to themselves by FOEing me than to actually read whole stories and dozens of comments.

someone had a sig that said (paraphrase)
'wikipedia is the type of thing that only works in practice. in theory it couldn't possibly work'

i've begun to doubt that the last few days. the first part anyway.

i wrote in my journal (and slashdot featured on the front page) a few weeks back about the takeover of Freenode, the FOSS IRC network, by hackers. It seemed a group called 'Bantown' were the most likely culprits. A few days later, I wrote an article about them for Wikipedia.

A few months back the same group had appeared to be responsible for a series of cross-site scripting attacks to LiveJournal.com. Back then, I'd become curious, and tried to find out more about them. So I did a few Google searches and so on and found out that not much about them was known, but what was out there was quite interesting for various reasons.

Now, when I was in the first year of secondary school I learnt what an encyclopedia was for. When you don't know anything about a subject you go there for the first and most important facts. Then you either know enough to be getting on with, or you have some idea where to look next. Wikipedia has become enormously useful to me in this respect. A year ago if I heard something mentioned and didn't have the faintest what it was, I'd Google it. Now I search wikipedia for it instead.

Having been i exactly this position with Bantown previously, and knowing a little more about them now, I decided to write a simple article about them, putting together the few concrete facts and the links that I'd stumbled upon.

All very well at first. Last weekend the article was nominated for deletion. Now, the subject isn't the most important in the world, and the article was far from being comprehensive or finished. But there were a few references, enough (I thought) to show that the subject was notable and back up the facts stated. The original work probably took around 3-4 hours all in. In the last few days I've probably spent 3 or 4 times that justifying myself repeatedly to users (and one wikipedia admin in particular) who want this page deleted. Perhaps 2 hours of that was adding to and improving the page a little bit in response to criticisms.

It seems that, not only do lots of people have nothing better to do than to browse and edit wikipedia all day (and good luck to them). Some of them have nothing better to do there than piss all over other people's work, form cliques, cabals and hierarchies, the better to do so, quote 'policy documents' to each other at length, and generally indulge in power trips. In my case I haven't given up yet on the article being kept. But the way this process has gone makes it clear to me that there are people out there whose contributions are being thrown out, for no reason than they don't have unlimited time to indulge in edit wars and discussion page pissing contests.

Now, there are definitely some articles I would recommend for deletion. But it shocks me that someone can put so much effort into distorting and abusing the deletion process, just to get rid of something that clearly isn't nonsense or vandalism, but that they happen not to like / approve of. In this case it seems that I am suspected of being a member of Bantown, promoting and aggrandizing my own organization in order to experience the giddy heights of being mentioned in a wikipedia stub! (This although I've denied it about 4 times).

I've never been someone who believed that human nature itself leads inexorably to power struggles and oppression of the weak by the strong, that cooperation and peaceful coexistence are ruled out by our very genes. This sort of thing does make me wonder though.

freenode, an irc channel i use a lot, was taken over today. every user who logged on during the time it was compromised may assume that their password is known to the attackers (passwds are used to identify to services in order that others can't steal your nick). obviously it is also reasonable to assume that anyone on irc is or could be impersonated.

my password is the one i use at lots of low security web places, and no, that doesn't include /.

i stole my first password aged 14. the password on the library computer at school was the name of the librarians little son. i knew the son, and the story of War Games but nonetheless i was surprised when it worked. if you really want to access people's accounts, apart from 'love, sex and secret' just remember that everyone uses their kids names. its the one constant of password choosing. last job i had i watched someone type their username firstname.lastname, followed by a passwd '?????lastname'. it's just an exercise to find out their son, daughter and husbands first name.

when i was looking away from the keyboard as my girlfriend typed her hotmail password, i heard the number of letters it had, and knew straightaway what it was. i only tried it once to check i was right, and didn't read anything - until we broke up. when she started going out with someone else i read her email regularly for a while. when decided not to do it anymore, i told her that i knew the password, but not that i'd used it, and got her to change it.

i worked in a hospital once and most of the access pin numbers were set to things like 1066. the photocopier pin i just read off of the worn down keys. at college i've only found out the entry pin by being told it - but then both times i've seen afterwards where it came from / what the mnemonic is.

i was just thinking about someone i know online, and how i would social engineer theire password, and realised immediately what i knew they would use as a passwd - their real life first name, which people online wouldn't know.

everything I know about zen I learnt from playing pool (eightball).

when you play pool, you don't play against your opponent, you play against the table.