Just imagine if instead of "file sharing," it was "beard sharing". And someone could come along and just get exactly the same length beard as you, just by wanting it! Now who's feeling threatened, not just by Alan Moore, but by all potential beardos everywhere. Now who's livelihood is under attack. Why, we'd probably be so hungry, we'd have to eat things right off our own feet.

My server is a very nice case mod with transparent panels and blue glowing lights that sits on a shelf next to my flat screen TV. It's so cool. It screams steal me! On top of it I leave several DVDs of porn each in their own DVD jewel box wrapper with all the porn photos on them.

Of course, there are three other IP cameras pointed at this wonderfully blue glowing empty box too, each camera with motion detection and set to email pictures to my gmail account and ftp video to an external host.

I got the email too, and it used the unique email address I gave to the NY Times, so either they were breached or some company they gave my data to was breached.

Joe Katz on twitter says the same thing:

"Joe Katz @joekatz 1h
@NYTPRGUY thing is, I got a "subscription cancelled" message sent to an email alias that only @NYTimes has for me. Was your list hacked?"

So remember folks when you outsource your IT and marketing and provide them your customer data, you are opening your customers up to their low security practices.

I've been on many projects that opted for Centos over Red Hat, and some in which the CIOs demanded Red Hat over Centos. All on various perceptions of what free means and what paid for means. Sort of a Rorschach test.

If you feel strongly about this, you might ask the CIO if you folks will be open sourcing the software you write, and if not, why not.

I guess Bill Gates won eh?

For the record: I really thought that champagne cooler was empty.

In 1997, right after Chips n' Dips had faded away, to be replaced by the enigmatically named http:///..org, all of us free software nerds hung on its every story, comment and poll like it was carved on tablet and flung from a burning bush. A year later I had started at hardware maker VA Research and /. was falling down for lack of machinery, so we rummaged through our returns piles and sent Rob and Jeff some 2u servers to help out. That was for me the beginning of some of the most important friendships in my adult life.

Its hard to explain how important Slashdot was to all of us 10 years ago. Indeed, without it it would be hard to imagine HN, Reddit, Digg, Fark or any of a thousand lesser sites. The editorial perspective of Rob and the other editors of /. is what kept people coming back and for a long time that perspective was Rob's, then Rob and Jeff and a bunch of us (some, like Timothy and samzenpus, still around!), but then Jeff left, now Rob. In some way I see this as a passing of an era in free software.

Throughout, while some have left for those greener shores, slashdot abided even while buffeted by the markets and the de/evolving internet news world, and it has remained a default tab in my and many others' browsers.

I didn't mean this post to be about Slashdot though, but about my friend Rob. I'll only say that while the site will be the lessor for you leaving, I firmly believe that computer science will gain my. While this note reads like an epitaph or the last pages of a book, it is really no more than a thank you note from me and many I know to your for your decade+ of work on the site. So...

Thanks.