zomgpwn!

ZOMG we've been busy.

We are about to move our offices to some shiny new digs, right between the Anonymous suite and a Scientology reading room - so things should be interesting!  We'll try and keep the peace but no promises... 

ZOMGPWN! promises to update as much as possible over the next few days but don't send us your whiny, crying emails about how you can't live without us and how can we do this to you and blah, blah, blah.

OK so we don't get any emails.  Still, don't start with us, chachi.

Here are the things catching our eyes and ears in the past few days, all wrap-up stylee for you.

Qtrax finally launched. (lulz).  If you don't wanna wait to get yours, just use ours!

http://qtrax-cdod-r1.vitalstreamcdn.com/Player/Qtrax_0.2beta_windows-i686.exe 

Anonymous continues the assault on CruiseCo.  Will something momentous happen on February 10th?
Maybe, maybe not.  It'll be fun to watch though.

The E.U. smacks MAFIAA in the chops.

Paul McGuinness is even stupider and/or greedy than we ever gave him credit for.  Better get a day job, Paulie boy.  It's gonna be a long, tough road for ya laddie.

Jerry Yang breaks the glass due to emergency drop in stock price, wields ax threateningly at anyone who comes too close.

Apple is the most hated company on the nettorz?!  Really?  What about puppyabuser.net or doodiepuke.fm?  No?  Well, we have to say that Mitch Wagner over at Information Week makes some very salient and reasoned points in his recent story on this very topic.  Kudos, Mitch.

Speaking of which, we have a box of Snickers Kudos* that we stole out of someone's car in a Ralph's parking lot. This would be the perfect time to enjoy our ill-gotten chocolate covered granola bars.

(*This post has been a paid for by Mars Inc.  Copyright 2008.  All rights reserved, bitches!)

Olby's @ Kos

Franky we're not huge fans of Daily Kos, and it has nothing to do with our political quirks.  It has more to do with their wonky scripting and heavy-ass page loads.  Sometimes we DO like to check who's contributing though since Markos seems to be able to tap into a certain vein of the zeitgeist that we admire to an extent. 

Turns out Keith Olbermann now as a diary page there and is putting it to good use.  We've been fans since the days of watching him deftly block Dan Patrick's errant spittle using nothing but a sheaf of AAA BBall box scores and Kwai Chang Caine-like reflexes.

You can read his thoughts here.

Qtrax is down! Qtrax is down!!

OK, so we've been there too.  We feel your pain guys and girls but... shouldn't you have been ready for this?  You've been prepping launch for quite a while now, and even though the m$m can't seem to figure out exactly what the hell you are (namely, an ad supported, client dl required, walled-in, last resort for the music industry to fight against open and free distribued p2p networks), at least you're getting an assload of press.

Funny how every single blog and site we see is simply reporting how great and revolutionary this will be, yet they haven't clicked your linkey lately or they would be reporting this same story.  Too bad nobody reads us but us.  Eh, we're pretty much over the funnay at this point anyway.

We're gonna go listen to Gratista and watch WKRP on Hulu while we eat Qtrax's lunch.

Puppy Vs. Robot! Epic Battle For Territorial Domination!

Oh man.  Screw your HTML 5, Semantic Web and your little blog too!  THIS is why 'THE INTERNET' was inventored.  To bring us vicious, territorial fights ending in complete domination by one side or the other.  Which one will win?  WIll blood be drawn?  Will children run from the room screaming as their parents faint dead away from the shock of it all?   Nah.  It's just a puppy fighting a robot... but holy crap is it awesome.

We've watched it about fifteen times already and we're still ignoring that car alarm going off in the parking lot outside out offices and the annoying stabs of hunger shooting through our guts.  We just gotta watch it ONE more time.

        

Ahhhhh... that's the good stuff.  Bet you don't see THAT on Metacafe.  We love the slums of YouTube.  We feel so at home there.  *sigh*

Oh Gratista, you're so bad!

It's time, once again, to play everybody's favorite intarwebz game - "How long can this site last?"

We just stumbled across Gratista on digg and then suddenely felt really guilty for not signing into our StumbleUpon account in ages.  So we decided distract ourselves by lacing down our Z! homies with some pimped-out late night listening.  If you're headed out, Furl this for laterz.  If you're just getting home please enjoy a fackload of easily accessible |\/|p3 flavor music stylings by your favorite artist(s).

Gratista is simple and to the point, which is why we love it - and also why there's no way it will be around for very long.  Lotta esnips redirecting going on.  Whatevs.  So far we've had about a 90% success rate with the files and it buffers up nice and quickly too.  No spyware.  Just a reasonably small GoogAds banner.  We might even click on it after we finish watching all the damn Anonymous videos on YT.

Throw your fists up if you know what's up.

The Cooper Lawrence Effect

We won't go on and on about this because it's pretty simple and can be summed up in one sentence contained in Lawrence's 'mea culpa' to the NYT. 

"I had asked somebody about what they had heard..."

That's where we stopped reading because everything else is meaningless after that doozy.  There's your journalistic integrity and commitment to professionalism folks.  Just ask SOMEBODY about what they heard.  From that point on you're golden.  Shoot your mouth off endlessly and without bothering to dig into the source of your story.  Third hand information is good enough.

Original story here.

Satellite of doom. Falling to an Earth near you!

Whenever we see 'officials' speaking on 'condition of anonymity' it always makes us a little nervous.  Such is the case with a report today that another satellite has gone 'out of control' and will come crashing back down to Earth soon.  (Stupid, stuck up satellites!  Always looking down their telemetry subsystems at us!!)

It's times like these that make us glad the surface of the Earth is approx. 70% liquid.  Still... since there's no way to control this sucker, there IS a chance it could land somewhere very undesirable.  Like.. on US for instance.

Immediate requests by the AP and Jerry Bruckheimer to "shoot a nuke at it!" were waived off brusquely by NSC spokesman Gordon Johndroe with the statement - "We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause."  Hey, thanks Gordon!  Maybe you could send up the Nostromo from Alien to nudge it over towards the Indian Ocean or the Persian Gulf.. or...   ah, hell they really SHOULD just shoot a nuke at it.  We all know that would stimulate the economy AND look totally awesome.  Kind of like blowing your whole tax rebate at Scores in an hour.

Conan Made Huckabee; We <3 Hulu

We finally got our invite to Hulu today and any lingering doubts we had about the awesomeness of their delivery, architecture and overall business model were quickly dispatched after wonking about with their controls.  There are several specific features that made us raise an eyebrow and vow to continue brushing up on our RoR knowledge, including a 'dim the lights' feature which grays out all the busyness surrounding your currently streaming vid - and the smooth transitions between popping out, full screening then going back to the original embedded version, with nary a hiccup or restart.  *knocks back a shot of single malt Glenlivet*  Smooooooth man... smoooth.  Not to mention they have quite a solid lineup of content, including NBC, Fox, Bravo, G4, Sundance, plus lots more.

The most fun we've had so far was watching Conan's recent opening monologue/on-air faux battle with Messr. Colbert over who actually MADE Mike Huckabee.  Was it Norris?  Was it Colbert?  Or did Conan actually make ALL of them?  We think you know the answer.

That was followed closely by the fun of picking our own clip, then auto generating the embed code.  YES it was fun.  We swear.  Lookit.

Not only is the embed process seriously intuitive and easy to grasp, even for non-technophilez.. it just works.  The delivered stream looks top notch, the supporting ad is non-annoying and lasts exactly as long as it should, namely a few seconds. 

Who knows where Hulu will end up in the totem pole of 2.0 but they are strong out of the gate and we'll be watching them, and their content closely.  First we're gonna go eat someone else's lunch from the company fridge though.  Anybody need anything while we're up?

Anonymous - 488 | Scientology - 716,949,386,024

We didn't wanna dip out toes in this (cess)pool until we got some reliable statistics on the DDoS ruckus laid down by Xenu and friends.  We finally have it, so let's get this party started.

If you don't know the background, shame on you.  Go read this.

Here's the part we're most interested in though.

Exhibit A:

• Number of attacks measured on scientology.org: 488 in the past week
• Attacks by date: 488 on January 19, 2008
• Maximum PPS rates seen: nearly 20000 pps (packets per second), with an average attack size of 15,000 pps
• Maximum bandwidth seen per attack: 220 Mbps, with an average attack size of 168 Mbps. This is on the high side of an attack, but significantly smaller than the largest ones we commonly see nowadays
• Maximum duration of a single attack: 1.8 hours, which is on the long end of common, but the average attack lasted just under half an hour

Exhibit B:

• Site                      http://www.scientology.org
• Last reboot          28 days ago
• Domain                scientology.org
• IP address           72.52.6.28
• Netblock owner   Prolexic Technologies, Inc.  <====!!!

Well then.  Nicely played, LRH.

Translation?  Anonymous actually DID hit Scientology's Apache Linux box pretty hard a week ago.  Then the organization (we're treading lightly here) did probably the smartest thing it could have.  It signed up Prolexic to substitute one of their servers and filter down the flood to a trickle.

Now of COURSE we realize that this wasn't the ONLY denial of service dropped on Scientramopolay.  (look in your heart, hackinatorz... look in your heart!) We just wonder if it was the biggest, or what else is coming.  It's fun to see Digg gamed the right way for a change and even though we've watched and re-watched the original Anonymous YT vid enough that we now don motorcycle helmets in our meetings and only communicate with each other via text to speech tools, it has us all a twitter with what could pownceably be next from our new favorite bunch of waxxorz haxxorz.   Even lolcats are in on this one.

Our vote is that Anonymous should start their own church and possibly even take over TMZ's slot on your local Fox affiliate.  They are sooo much more entertaining than Harvey Levin, and Harvey is no slouch.  Well.. OK he's a slouch.  We still think he's pretty awesome.

Also we'd just like to point out that we value the notion of free expression in the good old U. S. of A.  People should always worship who they want to worship, or not.  Not only is the line between legality vs. illegality ONLINE a slightly blurry one, it must be taken into account that Chanologists are OPENLY declaring war.  You know what they say about that and Lllllllllove.  (puke)  While the m$m and a lot of smaller 'news' outlets are chuckling to themselves about what the 'kids' are doing on the intertubes, remember... you have been warned.

We can't endorse either side, mainly due to our lack of a solid legal team.  However we DID see an episode of Matlock in a bar last night. The sound was turned down but we're pretty sure we got the gist of it.

Qaeda don't Skype

OK, so it's a slow day.  We've started, then abandoned posts on the following topics.

Faux News Channel manages to out-stupid itself; gets smacked silly by Keighly.

HTML 5 finally here... almost.

Artificial life is real.  Wait, what?!

AT&T preps "Ministry Of Truth", readies 'thoughtcrimes' filtering online.

Then we saw THIS nugget and we couldn't resist.  al Qaeda's #2 crocktard A-a-Z is taking questions on the freaking intarwebz!  WTH?!  OK, ok... so far the questions have just been submitted but isn't that kind of ballsy, even for these guys?  It gives us a slightly queasy feeling to know that they are comfortable enough to even think about casually chewing the non-pork fat with their peeps.

Actually it almost seems innocuous, until you start to read the questions that have been submitted.  Even allowing for cultural differences, we're just a little bit unnerved - and it's not even because we're on our third cup of coffee.

The only plus we can see in this whole weird development is that there DOES seem to be a considerable LACK of communication between AQ's devotees and the official power structure.  Most of the questions we've seen are so varied and so broad in nature that it gives a picture of disarray, if not downright confusion.  Good enough for us.  As freaky as it is to see someone demanding that the jihad be spread into Egypt and Palestine immediately, it would be a lot freakier if homeboy Ayman actually started responding.

So, we'll just pretend that it's a big, early April Fool's joke for now and laugh nervously while we try not to click on any links that will get us tossed into the 'persons of interest' file we've heard so much about.

All we can say is, we reallly hope this guy jumps onto Skype or some VoIP service so an AC-130 can cruise by to weigh in on the discussion.  C'mon, fignuts!  Pick up the webcam and let's do this thing.