SlashNOT

Matthew writes: The U.S. government stepped up the pressure in it’s efforts force Microsoft to become more open today, ordering the company to ship Java within 120 days or “face serious consequences.”

“We’re sick and tired of the delaying tactics, the lack of cooperation, and the deception coming from Redmond.” Said U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz.

Microsoft has been under pressure from the U.S. and a coalition of governments to provide more openness by sharing Windows code and by including Sun’s Java environment that allows programs to run on any platform.

“While we’re happy that Microsoft has agreed to allow widespread code inspection, they have not been forthcoming about declarations of unannounced security vulnerabilities known to them. Microsoft Update contains only declarations for vulnerabilities we knew about days or even weeks ago. Frankly, the odds of us finding security vulnerabilities without help from Microsoft computer scientists are slim. We need to get these computer scientists and their families out of Redmond and interview them in a safe location, and they should be offered employment with other companies if they feel that there will be retaliation from Microsoft when they return.”

Matthew writes: According to this article in the New York Times, The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has convinced the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) not to pursue legislation to force technology companies to include Digital Rights Management Technology in their products, causing wide spread confusion amongst geeks, who now have to admit that the BSA may somehow not be 100% evil.

The BSA (the software industry’s anti-piracy bulldog known for invading the offices of companies whose disgruntled former employees have cried piracy) has long been considered equally as evil as RIAA and the MPAA (all 100% evil as measured by the SlashNOT Evilometer, which is calibrated to the NIST Evilometric standard). Current measurements show that the BSA has dropped down to 80% Evil–just 5% more Evil than Microsoft. And because the RIAA agreed to drop DRM demands, they are currently measuring 90% Evil. The MPAA still measures 100% Evil.

Matthew writes: Friends of Mozilla have reported that the browser’s recent seclusion and binge browsing is due to Apple’s selection of the Konquerer engine for their Safari web browser.

“I just don’t know what happened.” Sobbed an inconsolable Mozilla to close friend NetScape Navigator. “I mean, things were going so well in the evaluation phase. I’m so stupid–I didn’t even know Apple was testing Konquerer behind my back. What is so wrong with me? I know I’m bloated and a bit slower than Konquerer, but I’ve got real depth and a lot more personality.”

When questioned about Mozilla, Apple stated that Mozilla was a great friend and would always be invited to run on the platform, and that Apple was always there to help with compatibility problems. “Hey, who knows, with the serious profiling maybe Mozilla could trim down a bit and we’d give things a second chance. But for now, we’re with Konquerer.”

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.

Matthew writes: In a bizarre statement that’s just too hysterical to be true (but is), FCC Chairman Michael Powell confirmed that his new TiVo was his favorite Christmas present, and that it is “God’s Machine”. His statements seem to confirm that he has joined the TiVo faithful, and more importantly, that SlashNOT was right about TiVo all along.

As reported numerous times in Slashnot, TiVo faithful (or TiVotees) have shown increasingly bizarre behavior recently. But the conversion of the most important person in television industry regulation to the Cult of TiVo has dire implications for the Cult’s enemies. Powell has already stated publicly that he would like to share TiVo recordings with family members. In related news, MPAA chairman Jack Valenti was found curled up in the fetal position in his office and was unresponsive to co-workers.

Matthew writes: Linus Torvalds has reached a settlement in a series of coordinated class-action lawsuits from competitors who alleged the company violated the state’s antitrust and unfair competition laws.

The lawsuits were brought by Novell, Sun, HP, IBM, Microsoft, SCO, QNX, and Group Bull. The plaintiffs contend that their versions of UNIX have been completely marginalized by Linux which has grown faster than any other operating system in its adoption rate in the last three years and threatens to displace all other commercial versions of UNIX. The plaintiffs also contend that offering the product at no cost is a violation of fair trade practices. A recent survey shows that more than 70% of UNIX installations now run Linux, and another 12% run FreeBSD.

The settlement, which is subject to court approval, benefits consumers and businesses that downloaded or purchased distributions of the Linux operating system, between August 25, 1991 and January 1, 2003 for use in California.

To settle the antitrust case and without admitting guilt, Mr. Torvalds will issue vouchers for free downloads of Linux from various distributors’ websites. The vouchers can be used to download any distribution of Linux at no cost.

“This settlement allows us to focus on the future and building great software, and avoids the cost and uncertainty of a lengthy trial,” said Linus.

Matthew writes: Apple sends OS 9 to the Disney Vault for 10 years

Steve Jobs announced today that Apple would be sending OS 9 into the Disney Vault for 10 years.

“Mac Addicts who want to purchase OS 9 have only a limited time until OS 9 goes into the Disney Vault for 10 years. This will be the last chance for a generation to purchase OS 9.”

Apple’s unusual announcement apparently comes from Jobs’ experience with Disney’s marketing strategies as the CEO of Pixar, the producer of four of Disney’s biggest hits in the last five years. Jobs also announced the new lil’ Mac boot’n'toot computer targeting the 18 to 36 month consumer, a market with over twelve billion dollars in discretionary spending power.

Matthew writes: Microsoft has changed the name of the forthcoming server version of their operating system this week for the fourth time, in what they are calling an effort to reduce customer confusion.

Originally referred to in beta as Whistler, the operating system’s first production name was Windows 2002 Server. Microsoft then changed the name to Windows .NET server in order to increase customer confusion. Three release candidates shipped to beta testers with this name. Early this week, Microsoft decided to subsequently reduce customer confusion by rererenaming the operating system to Windows 2003 Server, as a tribute to its slipping release date.

We at SlashNOT believe that renaming products is the probably the most effective way to reduce customer confusion, and we laud Microsoft for their efforts. A fifth name change (to Windows 2004 Server) would probably further reduce the number of confused customers. Other (admittedly less effective) methods would be to produce software that operates according to a coherent theory of operation rather than a mixed bag of feature requests generated by the marketing department. Producing well-tested and secure software that is unlikely to crash during normal operation might also serve to further reduce the number of confusing customers.

/* Stories that appear with the SlashAsterisk heading are true stories with SlashNOT editorial or reader commentary included */

Michael writes: Salon has an interview with Justin Timberlake of boy band *NSYNC, who complains that nobody has written a computer virus to honor his band, or his more recent solo career.

“Girl singers seem to get all of the attention from computer viruses,” said Timberlake. “Britney has one, J-Lo has one, and now even Avril Lavigne has one that sends people to her Web site. I don’t see any *NSYNC virus out there giving us free publicity.”

The Virus Writers’ Union released a statement denying their responsibility for this problem. “We aren’t obligated to publicize any particular musicians, it’s up to the individual virus writers, and right now our members do tend to be teenage boys. Anyway, *NSYNC is one of several bands mentioned in the GWV virus.”