SlashNOT

matthew writes: Roomba, by iRobot, is marketed as the first useful robotic device for the home market. The diminutive robot, 3″ tall and 12″ in diameter, performed poorly in our series of tests. In fact, it performed well only in the “vacuum the floor” and “terrorize cats” test suites, which we added to our standard robot testing battery specifically for this device. In those tests, it performed remarkably well despite the fact that it moved about the room as if it had just come off a weeklong bender on Bourbon Street.
SlashNOT standardized Robot Test Battery:

matthew writes: Hilary Rosen, former president of RIAA, was recently sued as part of RIAA’s anti-piracy campaign. She received a letter notifying her of the suit based on the presence of a Kazaa file share on her computer containing 2,110 downloaded songs.

According to current RIAA president Mitch Bainwol, the lawsuit was filed automatically, and would be retracted, since past RIAA Presidents are automatically granted amnesty. “In order to process the 60 million or so lawsuits RIAA will be filing, we’ve created an automated system we call ’scan-n-sue’ that automatically detects the presence of Kazaa or Gnutella on a computers attached to the Internet, subpoenas their ISP to determine their identity information, and files a lawsuit based on the information received from the subpoena. Of course, with completely automated systems, this sort of thing can happen.”

“Now that I think about it, Hilary had become somewhat furtive when people walked into her office in the weeks before she left. I naturally assumed she was browsing for porn.”

Michael writes: In the largest ever attack of its kind, a mysterious hacker group calling itself “V3R1S1GN” has taken control of the nameservers at the root of the .COM and .NET top-level domains. On Monday, users who mistyped the names of popular Web sites were surprised to find a cryptic message from the hackers instead of an error message: “W3 4r3 V3r1s1gn 4nd w3 0wn th3 1nt3rn3t! 4ll y0ur d0m41ns 4r3 b3l0ng t0 us!”

Federal authorities are investigating but have not yet determined the source of the attack. “It’s probably the work of spammers,” said one source at the FBI. “This is similar to the crimes Zuccarini was arrested for earlier this year, but he at least had the decency to pay for his mistyped domain names.” While the servers are still corrupted, technical solutions are being deployed to minimize the effects of the attack.

Matthew writes: Apple Computer today announced that it has filed a trademark violation lawsuit against Richard Stallman, the original author of Emacs and founder of the Free Software Foundation, for infringing the plural form of their trademark “eMac“.

“Richard Stallman is intentionally infringing the plural form of our popular eMac trademark with his text editing software. Apple vigorously pursues all parties who infringe our brands and marks, including parties that don’t.”

“Some might argue that Emacs was written in 1976, predating the eMac, the Macintosh, and Apple, and that our trademark should not apply. But, like Emacs, an eMac can be used to edit text, so there’s clearly a deliberate attempt to mislead the text editing public, who might think that by installing Emacs, they’re getting the design aesthetic and user interface that Apple popularized. Our critics fail to realize that Mr. Stallman made a conscious and deliberate decision to continue distributing his product without changing the name even after he found out that we had registered a similar mark. It is this deliberate act that is the basis of our suit.”

Apple has also indicated that it will be suing the Beatles label Apple Records for trademark infringement now that the company is in the business of distributing recordings of music.

fsck_you and SIGSLAP write: Sources deep inside Sun Microsystems say an enraged Scott McNealy, President/CEO, fired several senior “business development” executives after a recent trip to Circuit City failed to produce a single JINI(tm)-enabled appliance.

According to our sources, McNealy had been assured several times by senior Sun execs that “all those kitchen things are now fully connected by JINI(tm). As soon as the coffee is brewed, the toaster starts the Pop Tarts, and 1 hour later the dish washer starts up!” A furious McNealy reportedly asked several times, “if that stuff’s not actually shipping, what the hell was Bill Joy demonstrating at the Sun One conference? Next you’re going to tell me that was all just mock ups for marketing!”

To the best of our knowledge as many as 10 senior executives were let go. In possibly related news, Sun announced today that projections for Q4 are looking strong due to drastic cuts in overhead.