Thank you Salon for this.

It’s an article about how OPEC’s website was defaced with a message that would be shown for several seconds. Salon did a great job of choosing words, as the title of the story was Vandal defaces OPEC Web site. None of this ‘hacker’ nonsense which drives a small percentage of the population crazy.

My favorite part of the article was in this last paragraph:

The written statement disparaging the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is different from a “hack” in that it is neither technologically difficult to perform nor particularly harmful to a Web site.

Well done!

Why is it that every time Apple releases a new product their site goes down? I realize that they must have an enormous spike in traffic, but it should be completely predictable and can’t be near the kind of traffic Yahoo get’s on an average day.

While I’m picking on Apple, at last Apple expo, when Steve released the supercomputer in a 8″ by 8″ box (excluding the enourmous external power supply never shown in the media), the streaming video broadcast using QuickTime was crap. Through barely audible audio and nothing but still frames of video every 10 seconds (even on a fast DSL connection), I could barely make out Steve bragging about how he was being broadcast live to the world with QuickTime and Akamai.

Knowing I could do better, went to ZDnet.com and watched the exact same broadcast in glorious smooth full-screen streaming video using Windows Media Player.

Style + Shitty Products = Stylish Shitty Products.

Akamai, which claims to be “delivering a better internet” by mirroring popular content on their ‘bleeding-edge’ servers, seems to be a lot of non-sense to me. Sure, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but here is my anecdotal evidence: Two sites I know use Akamai, Apple.com and CNN.com. Apple.com crashes with traffic spikes and the streaming video feels like 1996. CNN.com has the worst video offerings of any significant website (in fairness to Akamai, this is partly do to poor encoding of video and audio).

I have mixed feelings about the unfortunately named Raging Search (raging.com) by AltaVista.

I like that I can choose my font and color scheme (I recommend verdana with the default colors). Other nice options include being able to turn off basically every feature (spelling suggestions, etc.) and choosing what info is displayed with the results (URL, date, size, etc.).

All in all it is quite a nice search engine with nice results. I do, however, feel a pang of guilt for using what is so obviously the result of a board meeting in which AltaVista execs decided they needed to be more like Google. I doubt they have the balls to make the enormously popular but cluttered altavista.com point to virtually advertising-free Raging Search.

May the simplest win.

re: Napster Thrives!

rob said:

I question CNN’s line:

“That made Napster the fastest-growing software application ever recorded by the Internet research company.”

CNN may have their ‘fact’ straight, but the hell is the “Internet research company.”

I know we’re all probably tired off all the Napster stuff we’re fed, but this one is a little bit rementionable. With all the court-nonsense and other free advertising Napster’s use has bloated four fold.

I question CNN’s line:

“That made Napster the fastest-growing software application ever recorded by the Internet research company.”

Napster is now a 2 gig program.

Village idiot and presidential hopeful George W. Bush is accused of using a subliminal message in an TV advertisement. After being advised on the meaning of the word “subliminal,” Bush denies the allegations.
Full story here.

Steve Martin’s third book will be hitting stores soon (yes, that Steve Martin). The novella, titled Shopgirl, follows Mirabelle through her lonely job, budding relationships – you know the sort of thing people write about. I’m not sure what I expected from a work written by Steve Martin, but from the excerpts which I have read so far, it seems quite good.

An excerpt from an excerpt:

Six days after their first date, which had cut Mirabelle’s net worth by twenty percent, she runs into Jeremy again at the Laundromat. He waves at her, gives her the thumbs-up sign, then watches her as she loads clothes into the machines. He seems unable to move, but speaks just loudly enough for his voice to carry over twelve clanking washing machines, “did you watch the game last night?” Mirabelle is shocked when she later learns that Jeremy considers this their second date. This fact comes out when at one abortive get-together, Jeremy invokes the “third date” rule, believing he should be received at second base. Mirabelle is not fooled by any such third date rule, and she explains to Jeremy that she cannot conceive of any way their Laundromat encounter, or any encounter involving the thumbs-up sign, can be considered a date.

Two excerpts from Shopgirl are available at Contentville.com and at Previewport.com.
It should be noted that Contentville is an ugly site and will require a (phony) email address before giving you access to the excerpt.

The Open Directory Project at dmoz.org is another wacky love child of the AOL-TimeWarner merger. Other bizarre offspring of the corporate mega marriage include Mozilla and Gnutella.

Basically an open-source version of the Yahoo editorial system, dmoz has the advantage of having actual human beings (of varying quality) decide which site goes in which category, without the disadvantage of possible censorship associated with a central system. Anyone can signup to be an editor.

Anyone can use the Open Directory Project data on their site. Sites using it include Google, Altavista, Netcenter, Lycos, and Hotbot.

Acts of Volition is proud to be listed under on The Open Directory Project under:

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