redfloatplane

I think you miss the point of the series.

Also, consider that some children are incredibly intelligent and may in fact act this way.

Something else to note, though, is that a large number of twitter users use twitter clients. This means that the traffic looks direct when it is, in fact, from twitter.

I don't think that the parody account in question and the popular Fake Steve Jobs blog are related (though this doesn't detract from your point).

I think that most other parody accounts have "This is a parody account" or something resembling that in their publicly visible descriptions. As the letter the fake account's operator got only said to mark the account as fake, that may do.

The @ceoSteveJobs account does, at time of writing, have this in its description, but that may have been added after the letter or this article was written.

  for writing Harry Potter fanfiction

Well, in fairness, it is extremely high-quality fanfiction.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

<EDIT> Huh, guess that must have been a typo, as the date at the top says Wednesday, January 5, 2011. Colour me embarrassed. </EDIT>

Ahh... FTA:

> Students who are taking EE380 for credit and cannot attend the class live may view (and comment upon) another talk by the same speaker given in EE380 on Feb 13, 2008.

The talk took place almost two years ago, so it's a shame that Microsoft think that any information about Kinect is still under wraps, especially when you consider that it has several open source libraries and drivers now (iirc).

I'm pretty sure that "squiggly sign" refers to @. :)

That would have been enough. I neither own a TV nor live in the USA (where I imagine he's more well-known?), and while I do spend the greater part of my life on the internet, I had never come across his name before.

Thanks for clearing that up. =]

Exactly. Right now I'm stuck on ~10 kilobytes per second (yes, in 2011). With the loading times, the time it takes me to decide whether or not something is pertinent to me and my goals is far greater with videos than with text.

Then again, I suppose I am an edge case. I mean, most people on HN wouldn't have such substandard connections.

I hate sites that don't tell me what they are at first glance. I don't know what this is and I'm not going to watch a video to find out. I am an average user with a short attention span, and I'd give you advice on targeting people like me, only I'm not sure what it is you do and whether average users are your target audience.

Please. All it takes is a paragraph. Hell, you don't even have an "About" page.

Edit: I'm sorry that this sounds unnecessarily harsh, but it bugs me to hell that I have no idea about what I'm looking at. =]

Looks like someone needs to do some leaking down at the Wired office.

That would be interesting, particularly if the chat logs were "leaked" to Wikileaks. Would they still publish the logs, even if the logs meant life imprisonment for Bradley Manning? Would that then be a breach of trust between Wikileaks and Manning?

Anyway, besides all my ridiculous speculation and getting ahead of things; The title is in no way an exaggeration, and Poulson should think rather hard about what he's going to do about it.

I'm reminded of the old adage: Science. If you aren't pissing someone off, you aren't doing it right.

Here's the thing: Sure. "Old people" exist. They are often in charge of things. Many of them read blogs and surf the internet. Do you really, honestly think that somebody who surfs the internet and reads blogs, especially blogs about video encoding, won't be aware of the current meaning of the word?

Honestly?

You see the word "sucks", in the context of something not being very good, everywhere. Literally everywhere. I bet that if you googled any tech-related keyword, somewhere in the first ten results, "sucks" would be employed in the context of "is not so good".

My point is this: People that read that blog post _will_ know what "sucks" means in that context and will not infer anything sexual from it - and even if they did, it's hardly the end of the world. Surely nobody who spends any reasonable amount of time reading blogs about video encoding will be in the slightest offended by fellatio. After all, "old people" are no different to "young people" except they have more experiences under their belt (hyuk hyuk).

That's truly fantastic. I don't have much use for Spanish->English, but I'm going to buy it anyway for the sheer "wow" factor. Congratulations.

By "pirates", I mean an average /b/tard who downloads software just because it's there to steal. I didn't make the point clear at all. If I were to pirate a piece of software, I wouldn't consider myself a "pirate" - mostly because I'd pay for it if I found it extremely useful.

I guess I should work on making my points clear, eh?

No, I mean that that particular method wouldn't work for me at all. Were I to pirate something, I wouldn't need the reminder. Sorry that that's unclear.

EDIT: And yes, it's definitely an interesting experiment. I'd like to see some sort of results from it - implicit A/B testing numbers, for example.

Honestly, I don't think this approach would work at all. Taking for example myself (which is a bit of a debating faux pas, but whatever):

If I see some software that I think would be useful, but don't have €14.99 to spend on it, I'll download it and google for a cracked serial number. Easy-peasy. I then copy-paste the number. I hit return enough times to get to the main window of the software. I use the software. If I use the software an awful lot - say more than once a week - my own guilt will start to hit me, and I'll pay for it - perhaps more than they ask, if the option is available.

Notice the part where I said "hit return enough times to get to the main window of the software". Pirates don't give a shit about the developers. If they did, they'd pay for the software in the first place. Furthermore, by the time anyone reads that guilt-trip paragraph, the decision has already been made to pirate the app, and all it takes is for me to hit return, and hey presto, no more guilt-tripping. This is why very few pay for software like winzip (or is it winrar? You know the one, anyway). By the time you hit the "You should pay for this software!", you don't care anymore, and it takes no more than a keypress or mouseclick until it's gone.

Disclaimer: I'm a pillar of society who wouldn't pirate something if a gun was to my head, and all situations described above are purely hypothetical.

Mike, doing this does not mean that Google is evil or anything of the sort. That's linkbait and you know it.

They're protecting themselves from what might be automated queries. There's likely nothing you or they can do about it, as lowering the rate is probably opening them to attacks/system gaming.

Here's a thought: switch your results-per-page to a higher number so you can pull more before they get suspicious. With luck, that would mean you take longer to get through a page so that they also stop thinking you're a robot.

EDIT: Also, if this was a joke, ha-ha, you got me, etc.

Some observations:

* I checked one of the sites they blocked at random, and they're using Google Analytics to track views. GA can be used to track a hell of a lot of things, as I'm sure every reader of this site knows, including location of views. They're also using Pikwik analytics. <speculation>Pikwik is OSS, so they could have modified the code to do some thing GA doesn't.</speculation>

* Torrent-Finder.com had about 1.7million page views a day[0], so I suppose it seemed like a good target. However, many of the other sites blocked don't even register. In fact, they all seem like those extremely shady sites that very few people would ever actually visit. Torrent-Finder.com seems to have been the only properly popular site on the list (onsmash.com has rather high pageviews also, ~610,000 pv/d) <speculation>My question is why the hell did they hit torrent-finder.com when virtually every other site on the list probably couldn't have kicked up a media storm?</speculation>

* Every site is now hosted in Charlotte, North Carolina. DHS ICE seem to have some sort of facility there, but I've not been able to find much info on it at all. <speculation>Torrent-finder.com seems to have been hosted in Egypt beforehand. Does this affect the legality at all?</speculation>

* The two (as far I as i saw) most popular sites, onsmash.com and torrent-finder.com, had their traffic peaks during the second half of 2009[1]. Furthermore, the majority of traffic for Torrent-Finder.com was well outside the USA - eastern Europe, mostly[2].

* The sites that have been seized seem to mostly have been sites to buy knockoffs of designer clothing/accessories/what have you. Not as many seemed to be file-sharing websites.

[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=torrent-finder.com [1] http://www.google.com/trends?q=torrent-finder.com%2C+onsmash... [2] http://www.google.com/trends?q=torrent-finder.com&ctab=0...

<hyperbole><opinion>To me, it seems the only real answer is to use alternate DNS roots. This one's been compromised.</opinion></hyperbole>

It took me two hours to solve it (though that's a reflection on me, not the problem. ;) ), which is where that number came from.

This is brilliant. If a picture speaks more than a thousand words, an awesome tech demo shouts louder than a CV, for sure.

Think about teaching, perhaps. Certainly for me, if I know something well enough to teach it, I've gotten bored with what I can do with it. However, if I actually then _teach_ someone, there's a constant barrage of questions, from a completely new perspective. Plus, there's always the feel-good initiative, and the money in teaching or grinds isn't bad either. Just my €0.02. :)

Nope. I actually bought the soundtrack. Only $5 for a lossless download. €3.59, you can't exactly go wrong. http://www.nullco.com/TSN/

Right now, The Social Network soundtrack. Before I bought that, M83 or 65daysofstatic. Postrock, mostly, with no goddamn lyrics.

With the MacBook Air refresh, Apple made "No optical drive" a feature. The OS X Install USB key is an omen of things to come, too. I think you're right, and it's really just a matter of time until they bring it across almost all of their laptop lines.

Can you elaborate? I could do with some free drinks…

This is great, a great learning tool. Thank you for sharing (or even making?) this!

Well, a small correction. Certain ones, most notably iStat Menus, can be moved with command-click.

In the old days, a hack was used to make this work by tricking the system into thinking it was a built-in, but unused, menubar item, often the drawing tablet's status item. I believe this was done through a "haxie", from Unsanity. I'm not sure how iStat Menus does it, but I'd hazard a guess at the same way.

Disclaimer: I'm working off shaky knowledge that I learned three or four years ago, before I was even a dev.

Hasn't picked up on any of the router MAC addresses I gave it. Guess it's not reached Ireland yet…

Thank you for the links, they're brilliant. Especially the first one, really gives you an insight into the man who's getting me (and thousands more around the world) through college. :)