SlashNOT

Matthew writes: SAIC today announced that it has received an NAIP Common Criteria certificate for successfully performing a security evaluation of Windows 2000.

“SAIC is proud to have contributed to this Common Criteria milestone event and congratulates Microsoft for attaining this significant achievement in computer security,” said Duane Andrews, SAIC corporate executive vice president. This is the first time that any operating system has acheived Assurance Level 4, making Windows 2000 the most secure commercially available operating system.

In related news, Microsoft today released a hotfix for a vulnerability in PPTP that allows denial of service attacks, and a cumulative patch for IIS, the Microsoft web server, that eliminates two buffer overruns that could be exploited to give hackers administrative access.

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: Slashnot staffer Matthew was recently placed on suspension by his wife after she found playboy.com in the history list of his computer’s web browser.

Failing to buy into his claim that he was researching a story for Slashnot about playboy.com, she announced a zero tolerance policy for bullshit and relegated him to the couch for an undisclosed period. Matthew considered appealing to a higher court, but decided to settle after counsel predicted a low probability of the court buying the story, either, citing as “contemptable and frankly, not very funny” the staffer’s attempt at a cover up by actually posting a satirical piece about the web site in question.

As a paragon of Internet editorial style, Slashnot is leading the way towards cleaning up the fetid linguistic trashpile that is the World Wide Web. Accordingly, we are releasing a series of !style notes in the form of negative examples. We occasionally receive submissions that don’t meet our strict editorial standards. Sometimes, they miss the mark by such a wide margin that they become funny in their own right. On those occasions, we’ve decided to publish them as negative examples of style. The following submission (click Continued) illustrates the following errors of style:

1. Be funny, at least to yourself.
2. Don’t create your submission as a thinly veiled attempt to include your own link. But feel free to do this on other sites using a link to Slashnot.
3. Use a spell checker, a grammar checker, and a reality checker.
4. Don’t use Micro$oft. It’s just not funny anymore.
5. Never misuse the term “unpresidented”.
6. Never refer to “God” as “Gaud”, unless that’s actually the name of your deity.
7. Have at least a passing familiarity with the process that you are satirizing, or plagiarize an article that seems to.
8. Don’t try to include every cliched stereotype you can think of in a single story.

Remember that Slashnot edits all submissions, and that we reserve the right to make fun of you along with everyone else.

Matthew writes: Pilot Pen company, owner of the trademark term “Pilot” for anything that is long, reasonably straight, and pointed at one end, has appealed to consumers to please stop referring to all PDA devices as “Pilots”.

“We asserted our trademark rights to any product that included anything long, reasonably straight, and pointed at one end when we threatened to sue USRobotics to force them to change the name of the Palm Pilot to the Palm Device.” said a company spokesman. “At that time, there were 1/10th as many palm users as there are now.”

“But for some reason, consumers latched onto the term Pilot to refer to any handheld device. Even PocketPC users call their devices Pilots. It’s damning. They haven’t been sold as Pilots for over five years now, but we’re in danger of loosing our trademark rights to anything long, reasonably straight, and pointed at one end due to common usage. We don’t want to wind up like Band-Aid, Jello, or PC.”

The spokesman did not answer questions about how something flat, reasonably square, and not pointed at one end could have infringed their rights originally.

Ghoti writes: Microsoft has announced a new support policy for customers who are unhappy with the new “three plus one” support policy. The software giant has announced a “one minus three” support policy last week specifically designed for customers that complain about the new support policy.

The new optional support policy means that software buyers expecting three years of full support followed by one year of limited, fee-only support would get one year of limited, fee-only support, preceded by three years of full support. The new policy is expected to go into effect fourth quarter of 2001, but free support will be backdated to Q4 1998.

Furious Farquad writes: Long time fashion adviser to Gates, his Grandmother, has been relieved of her position. Grandmother Gates is reportedly ‘disappointed in Billy’. “What will I do with all these sweaters that I knitted?” said a bewildered Grandma. “I know I’m cool“, says Bill when asked about the decision, “I have more mony than anyone. That’s cool. But what is the use of being really cool if I don’t look like it? I mean Granny’s cardigans are comfortable, but they just don’t cut it with our new target market, generation X” Microsoft has already deployed a team of experts to search the globe for a replacement. An interview with the team leader, Harry McNoodlehausen, revealed their strategy - “As soon as we find someone who is cool and willing to hang out with Gates, we will offer a contract immediately”. Talks are said to be underway with the guy who dresses Steve Jobs.

Squid writes: Intel announced today that, in an effort to reduce production costs, they have signed a multimillion dollar deal with Frito-Lay to handle the fabrication of the new low-cost Celeron models. “Their plants are already experienced in larger-diameter wafer production, and at much lower costs than our existing fabrication plants,” said an Intel representative.

Industry analysts are uncertain whether the new production techniques will produce reliable chips, and there is some concern that consumers will be confused by the many variations of the new chips. “I’m not sure if the world is ready for the new BBQ and Cheddar Celeron,” said one source.

We’ve added a new rating system for stories. To rate any story from 1 (bad) to 5 (good), just click on the 1 2 3 4 5 links below the story. There’s also a “Top Rated” sidebar on the Home page that displays the top-rated stories. (Even a story rated ‘1′ by several people is considered higher-rated than one that didn’t get rated at all. Any attention is good attention.)

I’ll eventually add a display of rankings to the Archive page so you can quickly find the ‘best’ stories. Currently we allow one rating vote per story per IP address. Eventually we’ll fix it to be a bit more sophisticated, so all you AOL users on the same proxy address will have separate votes.

Squid writes: Concerned about a law that allows Xbox mod chips to be sold in Australia, Steve Ballmer said last week that Microsoft may have to pull the Xbox from the Australian market if the law did not change. Fortunately, it now appears that Microsoft and the Australian government have reached a peaceful resolution to this issue.

In a landmark deal, Microsoft announced this week that it will purchase Australia for approximately 8.5 billion dollars. “This will allow us to bring the Xbox to the Australian market full scale, without being hindered by piracy or competition,” said a Microsoft representative. After the sale is complete, Microsoft intends to change Australian law to outlaw piracy-enabling devices as well as the open-source software menace.

Sources report that Microsoft may also use this as an opportunity to turn Bill Gates’s vision of a computer in every home, running Microsoft software into a government-mandated reality.