Amazon.com was one of the first (if not THE first) online booksellers, and in many terms, defined what made a good e-commerce site. They keep in contact with their customers, charge decent prices, and in general make things pretty easy for Joe Schmo to buy a book (and now movies, music, toys, etc) online.

Well, a while back, they got a patent for 1-click shopping (which in my mind is a bunch of hooey), which also raised some eyebrows. Well, now they have gone yet another step further, and are charging different users different prices, for DVDs, anyway. According to the article, prices for the same DVD changed based upon browser type (higher for Internet Explorer users than Netscape).

This, in my humble opine, is pretty damned brave. They say they are just conducting an experiment on consumer trends, etc. Well, one could also assume from their test cases that people who use IE are stupid, too. Or Netscape users are cheap. Or Amazon likes Netscape better. Is this all some anti-Microsoft ploy? Well, all of those are probably completely false, but to make my point, this could turn out badly for Amazon, unless they cough up some answers.

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.

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

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.

Wow. John Katz, author of _Geeks_, and frequent Slashdot writer, has posted a very interesting story about his “Showdown with the Pinkertons” over a program called WAVE, which promotes a “thoughcrime” sort of system, where students can “inform” administrators about possible “threats” at school. John Katz has written at length on the subject of the ostracization of outsiders in todays schools, not to mention todays society. The article is a bit long, but it is well worth the read. And feel free to comment. I’m tired of seeing 0 replies :)

Yee-ha! Netscape 6 is out. Now, I know what you are thinking… what’s the big deal, eh? Well, Netscape 6 is built around a completely different core, it’s fast, small and is standardized, so no need for multiple browsers! This thing is only a 5.5 meg download, too! So, go here. If you want the small download, go through the Custom setup and uncheck all that extraneous crap like the Instant Messenger and Composer. I’m so happy! If that makes me a geek, the so be it! (I’m so lonely… hehe)

Finally! You twist a mans arm long enough, and eventually he’ll cry uncle. George Lucas has finally apologized for Jar Jar Binks. Check it out here.

That’s right, oh mah BROTHERS and SISTERS! CAST out your DEMONS! Let Demon Buster save your WRETCHED soul! Check the Alphabetical Index of Deliverance for Salvation!

Eve sez: “For all you mildly-interested-in-engineering geek-os this is pretty cool:”

It’s a 2D wire frame constructor, and you can animate you creations! Gravity, Friction, Force, it’s all tweakable, and VERY addictive.

It’s from a British site called Soda who do artsy web-development stuff. The Constructor it is called. Check it out, waste some time.

Slashdot is running a story about the Secret Service and a raid on Steve Jackson Games ten years ago. SJ Games’ account of it is here. It is an interesting read into how paranoid the government was (is) about technology it had (has) no control or information about.