I hadn’t heard of anything like this happening before, but it is rather interesting. I don’t know if Dow Chemical is a male-centric company, but they have canned 50 people and disciplined 200 more for porn emails. Those who opened and deleted the mails were let off, but those who re-distributed it were disciplined or canned.

I’ve worked at a company were this stuff was rampant. Needless to say, this company which shall remain nameless, was dominated by men. I always thought this, combined with other interesting factors, contributed to one of these “hostile work environments” we hear about. So, i think that Dow is right for doing this. After all, these folks were distributing porn from Dow Chemicals email accounts.

Check it out! It’s the abridged X-Men: The Movie script. Can’t wait to go and see it? Up for a laugh or three? Go there.

That’s right folks, Napster is being forced to shut down it’s service at midnight, Friday. Wow. Well, i guess you should go get Gnutella, so your craving for MP3s can be satiated during the trial. Oh, BTW, you can’t “shut down” Gnutella.

What follows is a bit of an interesting story. While a lot of people have been saying that the internet doesn’t provide any sort of community, the following shows otherwise.

First off, we have Slashdot, an extremely popular “weblog” (slang, i guess, for an internet news site) that catered to Linux/Unix users, and basically just geeks in general. Second, we have Kuro5hin, another weblog, but with an open submission policy for stories. If you submitted a story, the other users would vote on it to either post it or toast it. Truly revolutionary, i thought when i first saw it. I was a user at both Slashdot and Kuro5hin, and found them to both be founts of good stories, insight, and perhaps best of all, user input. Really intelligent stuff here, folks. Albeit, the signal/noise ratio was higher on Slashdot, they both offered differing, well substantiated views on everything from the future of the net to potato-powered web servers. But anyway, on with the story.

Over the past weekend, Kuro5hin was hit with a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, that essentially crippled their servers. This DoS attack came in the form of someone, from many different compromised servers (servers with weak security who had been subsequently hacked), automatically posting garbage to Kuro5hin‘s submission service. Well, Rusty, the sysadmin there, and his gang of developers tracked this down to not allow anonymous submissions anymore. So, the DoS stopped. For the moment. They had blocked the original machines that the attacks had originated from, and thought everything was OK. Well, they were wrong. The DoS started up again, this time overloading the commenting function (also something that was anonymously available). Well, K5 (short-form) decided to go down last night/this morning.

Where does the community part come in, eh? Well, there has been a HUGE outpouring from the community of folks who read Kuro5hin, Slashdot and the others. Originally, Rusty the sysadmin had planned on shutting it down permanently. However, this tide of hope from the rest of the community, everything from free server space from VA Linux Systems, to a free pizza from Hemos, an editor at Slashdot, to offers from hackers to take this guy(s) out.

I mean, this sort of thing, however tragic and appaling it is, does bring a renewed sense of community back to computing for me, anyway. I haven’t seen this sort of thing since my BBSing days oh-so-many-years ago. Personally, i hope Kuro5hin gets back on that horse, and rights their toppled monument to open/free speech. I mean, of all the things to destroy, why destroy this? Just to prove it can be done? Kuro5hin was/is a great experiment, but then again, freedom does have its price and its drawbacks. It only takes one fool to ruin something beatiful.

Links:
Slashdot
Kuro5hin
Slashdot: Kuro5hin taken down by DoS
Slashdot: Kuro5hin, Bitter and Hopeful

Don’t call it a comeback, but The Onion, America’s Finest News Source, has a NEW Herbert Kornfeld Editorial up titled What Y’all Heard About Tha CPA Convention Be LIES. For those of you unaware of Mr. Kornfeld’s editorial genious, check out pasts nuggets like West-Wing Tech-Support Crew Be A Buncha Wack Bitches, and a personal favorite, Tha Autobiography Of Herbert K.

Hey all, Gary and Hunter have been slaving away again (on their vacations!) on their website. Now, i haven’t been over there yet (THAT IS JUST HOW HOT THIS NEWS IS!), but i’m sure it’s spectacular (as long as you use IE tee-hee). So, go on over and check that shit out.

What happens when you mix kids toys, grandma’s recipes, and a 20,000 V power supply? Well, you guessed right if you guessed either Cooking with High Voltage, High-Voltage Stress Testing of Computer Equipment, or my personal favorite, Furby Stress Testing.

Whew! That’s a lot of voltage, and a lot of charred remains. The greatest thing are the Quicktime movies of the carnage! (Check out the Jacob’s Ladder Shish-kabobs).

Well, this was originally plucked from TheForce.net, and no one was *really* sure if it was a fan trailer or the real thing. Well, upon some serious scrutiny, it turns out to be fake, but DAMN if it doesn’t look real. More Braveheart footage with the lightsabers and all, but this is a fine testament to the LUDICROUS amounts of time fanboys put into their obsession.

Check out the pseudo-teaser here

A King puts it “My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing’s worst nightmare. Not only are we going glueless, look Ma, no e-Book! No tiresome encryption! Want to print it and show it to a friend? Go ahead!”.

This is absolutely wonderful. I’m glad someone, especially someone of the caliber of Stephen King has the bollocks to pull this off. Another truly COOL thing is that all of this is on the “honor system” as King puts it. To quote him more directly “Pay and the story rolls. Steal and the story folds. No stealing from the blind newsboy!”.

This is the first part of the story, and it is only $1. That’s it. However, if King doesn’t receive 75% of payments for the first part, the second part will not be released. This could set a precedent for future downloads of literature and/or music on the web. Frankly, i think this is GREAT. Absolutely wonderful. Kudos to King on this one.

Consider this “Hit the Road… Part Deux”. Gary and Hunter have posted more photos from their trip (now viewable in BOTH browsers! hehe), including them building sandcastles on the beach, and taking moon-lit strolls, too!

What do you want to bet that they both re-enacted Senator Kelly (freshly-mutantized) popping out of the water as jelly-fish man? If i were a bettin’ man.

Anywho, go here to check it out.