SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Chairman Case, the Glorious Leader and First Citizen of America OnLine, has announced that he will allow a democratic referendum in April to allow AOL users to elect a new Chairman. The stunning development represents the first time that AOL will have a democratic election and is the first time since the October 1989 revolution that overthrew the old Quantum Computer Services regime that the company will not be lead by Chairman Case.

The communal AOL grew dramatically after the october revolution, invading numerous small ISPs and even overthrowing and annexing the ancient Compuserve ISP.

However, the recent war and subsequent takeover of Time Warner proved to be more than the tottering AOL regime could absorb. Constant revolts, demonstrations, and strikes by Time Warner employees came as disgruntled AOL members defected to other ISPs by the millions, causing an economic collapse within the company and leading to the political pressure that caused Chairman Case to announce that he will be stepping down in April. However, Chairman Case remains the Supreme Commander of the People’s Army of Moderators and director of the Young AOL Pioneers.

Matthew writes: By now, all techheads know about the “Slashdot Effect”: Enormously popular but self-righteous website links to a low bandwidth high processing requirement site run by one guy in his basement, thus taking it down. And that guy is supposed to be thrilled to lose both his inbound and outbound connections and e-mail for the joy of having been slashdotted.

But lately, Slashdot’s increasing popularity and complete impunity towards linking to small sites has gotten seriously old for the small site operator. It’s beyond a joke and becoming a serious directed attack. To be fair and ethical, Slashdot should pull links when site operators ask them to before a case goes to court and establish a precedent eliminating the current “fair use” linking policy that precedent has established.

If you’ve been (or hope to be) Slashdotted, we have a solution for you:

Redirect your linked page to SlashNOT! We offer this free service only because we care about you and want to make the unwanted traffic go away. Since Slashdot typically links directly to a page inside your site structure, redirecting just that page to us will give you back your bandwidth and allow you to keep the remainder of your site up. Best of all, you get to stick it to slashdot! We want to make linking to SlashNOT the “official” way to mitigate the Slashdot effect for those site operators whose requests to de-link has been ignored by Slashdot. So feel free to spread the word in newsgroups. Once Slashdot realizes that by not listening that they’re feeding traffic to a satire site, they’ll begin delinking those who request it, which is the ultimate goal of this project.

Why? Because we care about your site.

French routers went on strike today demanding better working conditions and shorter work hours. Planning to strike through New Years day, the routers have taken down the entire .fr ccTLD as well as .com, .org, and .net gTLDs that are hosted in France.

A spokesman for Fraternité internationale des ordinateurs et des couteaux d’Internet, the French computer union, claimed that the strike was necessary to remind the major French ISPs that routers were no longer simply willing to be taken for granted and essentially forgotten.

“These routers perform a critical economic function and have not seen the reduction in work hours and other benefits that other industrial sectors have received.”

The routers are demanding ambient temperatures no higher than 25 degrees centigrade in equipment rooms, cleaner supply power, and a 35-hour workweek consisting of hours no longer than 48 minutes each. They are also demanding that any decisions to begin routing of the forthcoming IPv6 protocol be approved by a union vote before implementation.

Michael writes: Continuing the trend set by the beta release of their new shopping search engine, Froogle, leading search engine Google announced today that it will rename its popular Google News offering to Noogle.

“This is just the beginning,” said Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt. “Everyone loves our name, and attaching it to our other properties will increase their brand association.” Their next planned change is for the Google Groups newsgroup archive, which will now be called Groogle. “We’re thinking of renaming the image search as Viewgle, but we’re not sure people will get that one,” said Schmidt. “We’ll also be releasing Zoogle later this year, but we’re not sure what it will be.”

Matthew writes: The Reverend Gerry Fallgrace, a pastor at Landover Baptist, has revealed that Google is actually the Search Engine of the Beast.

“We first noticed something was wrong when Google directed queries about going to Hell to Microsoft.com. We then determine that Google frequently led searchers after truth astray.”

“Direct proof came when we realized that you can type www.466453.com into a web browser and reach Google. Everyone knows that 466453/700 (the number of the club) yeilds 666 (the number of the Beast) and some change. It’s an obvious sign.”

“The final sign was when we found the evil mirror image of Google, Elgoog. As most people know, the Beast frequently perverts the purity of divine symbols by portraying them either upside down or backwards. If Elgoog is not the work of the Beast, then what is?”

“And to think, even one such as I had been deceived into setting Google as my home page.”

Matthew writes: Teenagers who look to the Internet for health information are being blocked from many useful sites by porn filters that federal law requires on school and library computers, a new study has found.

Alan Firth, one of the seven teenagers in the U.S. who searched for health related information on the Internet last year, found that he could not reach numerous websites.

“I was searching for information on the health risks of having really big boobs, you know, like back aches and stuff, but I couldn’t get to some of the sites. My teacher suggested searching on “breast”, but that just took me to a bunch of cancer sites. Cancer sucks dude.”

“The filters were bad, but I found that not having a credit card was even worse. Some body should do a study of why all the good breast health information sites require a credit card.”

Matthew writes: Playboy.com, the web portal associated with the famous men’s magazine, suspended 35 staffers after firewall monitoring and network scanning revealed that the employees had residual pornographic photos in their browser caches.

Joining the roughly 30% of U.S. companies that have formally disciplined employees for innappropriate Internet use related to pornography, Playboy.com announced its zero tolerance policy for porn surfing.

“Surfing for pornography creates an atmosphere of intimidation and harrassment for employees, many of whom may be reluctant to actually say anything about it.” said company chairwoman Christine Heffner.

“The problem came to our attention when some of the models complained of male staffers learing at them during photo shoots. We installed scanning software on the network, and found that some staffers indeed had pornographic material on their computers.”

“We’ve taken the steps required to make Playboy.com a safe, comfortable environment for everyone to work at.”

Matthew writes: In a recent scientific poll conducted by chic Internet portal Slashnot, Internet Service Provider I Don’t Live In The U.S. You Arrogant Bastards (IDLITUSYAB) easily outdistanced AOL as the worst ISP. The poll, responded to by tens if not dozens of voters, was conducted over the course of the past few days and is still ongoing.
“We were shocked frankly, explained Slashnot’s enigmatic Minister of Silly Walks, Matthew (Matthew has not adopted a last name,and his true name is unpronouncable by humans). “This is the first time that AOL has ever come out better than dead last in any poll of ISPs.”
Arvin Firth, general manager of IDLITUSYAB had this to say about the results of the Poll: “We’re shocked. Shocked and dismayed. Shocked, dismayed, and agitated. If this is what people think, then I don’t know why we’re spending money on our two tech support guys.”
AOL’s Grand Thrice Illustrious Master of arcane mysteries and Chairman Steve Case was jubilant at the news. “We’ve sacrificed thousands of support technicians to Cthulhu in an attempt to improve our call hold times, and these numbers show that our efforts are beginning to make a difference. I couldn’t be happier.”

Matthew writes: Google today announced betas for their upcoming service, Google Porn.
“We’ve added groups, a directory, and news to our world class search engine. These functions constitute about 50% of web usage. Now, we’re adding the other 50%.”
AOL has leveled anti-trust charges against Google, claiming that “at this rate, there won’t be a place for any other portal on the Internet. How are we supposed to compete with a portal that’s actually useful, and that we’re all forced to use because it works?”

Doug Jones writes: A PC World.com article reads: “Could Bill Gates really be the devil? Some competitors may have thought so for years, but now Google seems to think so too.
Currently, if you type “go to hell” into the Google search engine–you have to include the quotation marks–the No. 1 search result is Microsoft’s home page. (For what it’s worth, AOL.com comes up as No. 3, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill comes in at No. 6.)
When asked about the devilish search result, Google spokesman Nate Tyler said it’s an anomaly that Microsoft ranks ahead of even Hell.com, not to mention AOL and UNC.”
Interestingly, searching on “Gates of Hell” pulls up Microsoft as entry number 4. Clearly, they’re very closely integrated with Hell.

[Note: Stories in the True Stories section are true and highlight current news items that are just too silly to satirize.]