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Facebook Mafiosi Go To the Mattresses vs. Zynga 102

Posted by Soulskill
from the concrete-galoshes dept.
sympleko writes "Zynga has the lion's share of traffic in Facebook applications, and Mafia Wars is one of their most popular social games. Collapsing under the weight of over 26 million users, Zynga has been scrambling to thwart hard-core gamers who reverse-engineer URLs or script the game to optimize their enjoyment. Many of the workarounds have annoyed users who were accustomed to various game features, and even worse, the hastily-deployed changes have resulted in many players losing access to the game, in-game prizes, or statistics. Fed up with a software company seemingly bent on discouraging people from enjoying their product, a number of tagged players have organized a boycott of all Zynga games. The first 24-hour boycott on Sunday 12/13 resulted in an 11% decline in Daily Active Users, and an emergency thread on Zynga's forums (from which most of the flames were deleted). The current boycott, extending Wednesday through Sunday is being supported by a 428K strong Facebook group. At issue is the social contract between software companies and their devoted user base, as well as the nefarious tactics Zynga has used to raise cash."

Comment: Perl in decline, at least here (Score 4, Insightful) 390

by Asmodai (#25296781) Attached to: Where's the "IronPerl" Project?

Based on what I gather in my country the use of Perl is actually in decline, while Python's is growing. Then there's Ruby that's also popular (not sure if it proves to be stable as Python's growth though).

This does confirm, at least for me, why IronPython and IronRuby happened, but why IronPerl is nowhere in sight. Of course, YMMV in your country, but I think it is a global trend to be honest.

Upgrades

What's the best way to recycle old tech in the US?

Submitted by Tim Danhamn
Tim Danhamn writes "SmartPlanet.com, a green-focussed Web site, has put up an article about the best way to recycle your old tech, including local recycling centers and reusing old technology in other ways. I'm about to upgrade to a new PC and I have a lot of old radios, MP3 players and other electronic goods lying around the house. The article though is mostly about solutions in the UK, so I want to know what the best way to recycle old tech in the US is?"
Encryption

German amateur cracks WWII mega-code in 46 second

Submitted by
JrOldPhart
JrOldPhart writes "Another fiat for the radio/computer geek team! http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071116/wl_nm/britain_germany_codebreaker_dc_1;_ylt=AgP7WztOUETnoN_c56IonDwE1vAI While the re-created Colossus computer ground away, "Schueth's computer program actually managed to crack the hardest part of the challenge — deciphering the code of a Lorenz SZ42 encryptor, which has approximately 16 million million million permutations — in just 46 seconds.""
Linuxcare

Ubuntu scores first major pre-installed server win 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Ubuntu is extremely popular on the desktop, but it's made comparatively little progress on servers. That's about to change. Dell is expected to announce in the first quarter of 2008 that it has certified Ubuntu Linux for its server lines.
  For now, Dell will direct customers who get pre-installed Ubuntu Linux on its servers to Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu community for support."
Networking

Jun-ichiro 'itojun' HAGINO passes away

Submitted by
Asmodai
Asmodai writes "According to http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20071030220114 as well as a communication in Japanese by itojun's younger brother, Jun-ichiro 'itojun' HAGINO passed away on the 29th of October at the age of 37.

Itojun, as he was commonly known in the BSD world, was one of the major driving forces behind the KAME IPv6 networking stack which is present in the BSD OSes as well as many other devices.

For more information about itojun, please see his homepage at http://www.itojun.org/"
Operating Systems

Linux Kernel v2.6.23 Released 346

Posted by kdawson
from the worth-the-wait dept.
diegocgteleline.es writes "After 3 months, Linus has released Linux 2.6.23. This version includes the new and shiny CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, and variable process argument length. SLUB is now the default slab allocator, there's SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support. Also the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers, and many other minor features and fixes. See the changelog for details."
Privacy

Googlebot following Gmail users?

Submitted by
omeomi
omeomi writes "I recently set up a script that emails URL's with unique id's to users of a mailing list that I maintain. When users click on the URL in their email, they are directed to a private page on my website, and their username and IP address is logged. However, I noticed that when the user is a Gmail user, their IP address is always followed by a Googlebot-IP address (confirmed with whois). It appears that the Googlebot follows Gmail users when they click on links in their emails. I wonder, what does it do with this information? Is it used only for Gmail-advertising, or are these pages that I've intended to be private and unique being indexed by Google? Has anybody else experienced this?"
The Internet

FTC report says no need for net neutrality->

Submitted by
bpc123
bpc123 writes "WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission's Internet Access Task Force yesterday issued its report on broadband competition policy. Entitled "Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy," it follows the agency's two-day public workshop in February 2007 on broadband competition issues.

FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said in the agency news release, "This report recommends that policy makers
proceed with caution in the evolving, dynamic industry of broadband Internet access, which generally is moving
toward more — not less — competition. In the absence of significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm,
policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area."

To read on, visit http://www.networkoptimizationnews.com/"
Link to Original Source

There's so much to say but your eyes keep interrupting me.