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“Moot” Working On Reboot of 4chan Platform

timothy — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:22:00 +0000

Hugh Pickens writes “Nick Bilton has an interesting interview with Christopher Poole, known online as ‘Moot,’ founder 4chan, a jumble of content, hosting anything from pictures of cute kittens to wildly disturbing images and language. Poole, now 22, started 4chan when he was 15 after he discovered a Japanese image-board Web forum called 2chan dedicated to anime. ‘The code for 2chan was publicly available and I took it and translated it from Japanese to English using tools online and I threw it up on the Web and sent it out to 20 people,’ says Poole. ‘I wanted to keep with the 2chan naming and the URL for 3chan was taken at the time so I just jumped to the next number.’ Although 4chan gets 8.2 million unique visitors every month, 600 million page loads per month, and 800,000 new posts a day, Poole is working on a new project to reimagine what an image board should be today using the current technologies available.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ISC Releases the First Look At BIND 10

timothy — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 02:10:00 +0000

Ethanol writes “Internet Systems Consortium, producers of BIND 9 (the most popular DNS implementation on the internet), have spent the past year working on a successor, BIND 10. It’s entirely new code, redesigned and rewritten from the ground up, and now the first glimpse of what it will eventually look like has been released. ‘This code is not intended for general use, and is known to be inefficient, difficult to work with, and riddled with bugs. These problems will all be fixed over the next couple of years, as functionality is added and refined, and the software matures. However, the codebase has a good framework for moving forward, and the software is capable of serving as a DNS server with significant functionality.’ (Full disclosure: I work for ISC and I’m one of the engineers on the project.)”

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Scientists Use Sex-Crazed Bugs As Pesticide

samzenpus — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:41:00 +0000

ByronScott writes “In today’s ‘gross news’ category, some female insects just might be getting lucky. As an alternative to toxic pesticides, scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have created ’super-sexed’ sterilized male leafhoppers to knock bug boots with females in the wild, resulting in decreased populations. Yes, that means that the female bugs will miss out on the joys of motherhood, but the idea that the insects will be having some fun instead of being gassed to death by poisons is pretty cool.”

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Federal Judge Bars Instant Publishing of Analysts’ Stock Tips

timothy — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:24:00 +0000

An anonymous reader writes “Big Banking firms Barclay’s Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch successfully obtained an injunction against theflyonthewall.com, Inc., preventing them from immediately publishing the firms’ stock upgrades and downgrades. This case could have far-reaching consequences concerning internet communication and publication of news.” Here’s some interesting analysis from Paul Levy, via Dave Farber’s Interesting People list.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube Was Evil, and Google Knew It

kdawson — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:34:00 +0000

pcause writes “Silicon Alley Insider has the most damning evidence released in the Viacom/YouTube suit. It seems clear from these snippets that YouTube knew it was pirating content, and did it to grow fast and sell for a lot of money. It also seems clear that Google knew the site contained pirated content and bought it and continued the pirating.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oracle Shuttering OpenSSO

kdawson — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:48:00 +0000

mdm42 writes “OpenSSO is one of the best open source web Single Sign On projects out there. Sun Microsystems made OpenSSO open source in 2008, so it’s sad to see how, after absorbing Sun, Oracle is shutting down this amazing project, labelling it ‘not strategic’ and dismembering the few parts they think are worthwhile for their own SSO effort. They started by freezing the next express release, and during the last few weeks they have been removing all the open source downloads from the OpenSSO website and removing content from the wiki. Fortunately, a Norwegian company called ForgeRock has stepped up to the plate in an attempt to salvage the project under the new name OpenAM.”

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Nielsen: Time Spent On Social Networks Up ~60% YOY

Doug Caverly — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:23:10 +0000

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other such sites are – in general, anyway – doing quite well on a global basis, according to new stats from Nielsen. Nielsen revealed this afternoon that people all over the world are dedicating a lot more time to social networks.

A report stated, "On average, global web users across 10 countries spent roughly five and a half hours on social networks in February 2010, up more than two hours from the same time last year." Italians and Australians actually took the lead, too, beating the U.S. average of 6 hours and 3 minutes by 25 minutes and 22 minutes, respectively.

Then here are a couple more interesting findings: "Overall, the active unique audience to social networks grew nearly 30%, from 244.2M to 314.5M in the last year. In the U.S., the average active unique audience grew to 149.M from 115M in February 2009" (which also works out to 30 percent).

Facebook made Nielsen’s last points of comparison anything but close calls, though. It beat the other social networks by wide margins in terms of "% Reach of Active Social Users," "Sessions per Person," and "Time per Person."

Facebook, then, would appear best positioned to find advertisers and generate revenue outside the U.S.

March Madness On Demand Player Sets Record

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:14:56 +0000

CBS and the NCAA said Friday their March Madness on Demand (MMOD) live-streaming video player attracted record traffic for the first day of the men’s basketball tournament.

In total, there were 3.4 million hours of live streaming video and audio consumed, over 20 percent growth compared to 2009, with 3 million more unique visitors to the MMOD video player. Both figures represent the largest single day of traffic for a live sporting event on the Internet.

The MMOD "Boss Button" was clicked over 1.7 million times on the first day of the first round of the tournament. The "Boss Button" was redesigned for the 2010 tournament, it hides the live video on the screen and mutes the audio replacing it with a flow chart image. The 2010 Boss Button was designed by cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic.

"NCAA March Madness on Demand continues to regularly exceed our expectations," said Sean McManus, President, CBS News and Sports.

"It is the perfect combination of programming and the Internet. Our ability to successfully develop the product alongside steady growth in streaming programming for the Internet and wireless content provides many options and truly maximizes the Network’s NCAA bundled rights agreement."

Other highlights from MMOD traffic include:

*The most watched game on 3-18 was the double overtime Florida vs. BYU game with 521k hours of streaming audio and video. That’s up 50 prcent over 2009’s most watched game from the first day of the first round (Washington vs. Mississippi State) which had 348 hours of streaming.

*The most watch hour yesterday day waas 2:00-2:59 ET with 533k streaming hours (16% of the total for the day).

The MMOD is also available on CNN.com, ESPN.com, Facebook, TV.com and CNET

Company Sued, Loses For Not Using Patented Tech

kdawson — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:06:00 +0000

bdcrazy writes “A man was recently awarded $1.5M in a jury trial after his hand was injured by a Ryobi table saw. The saw did not include the patented ‘Saw Stop’ technology that the plaintiff argued would have prevented all the problems.” 60 similar cases have now been filed nationwide. TechDirt makes the argument that this jury decision is completely crazy: “If the government is going to require companies to use a patented technology, it seems that the only reasonable solution is to remove the patent on it and allow competition in the market place.” If the decision stands, not only will the price of table saws go way up, but other hungry patent-holders will probably get a gleam in their eye.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Free Software To Save Us From Social Networks

kdawson — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Glyn Moody writes “Here’s a problem for free software: most social networks are built using it, yet through their constant monitoring of users they do little to promote freedom. Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and the legal brains behind several versions of the GNU GPL, thinks that the free software world needs to fix this with a major new hardware+software project. ‘The most attractive hardware is the ultra-small, ARM-based, plug it into the wall, wall-wart server. [Such] an object can be sold to people at a very low one-time price, and brought home and plugged into an electrical outlet and plugged into a wall jack for the Ethernet, and you’re done. It comes up, it gets configured through your Web browser on whatever machine you want to have in the apartment with it, and it goes and fetches all your social networking data from all the social networking applications, closing all your accounts. It backs itself up in an encrypted way to your friends’ plugs, so that everybody is secure in the way that would be best for them, by having their friends holding the secure version of their data.’ Could such a plan work, or is it simply too late to get people to give up their Facebook accounts for something that gives them more freedom?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.