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  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

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When the ForeverGeek blogger MacGyver noticed that two stories on the Digg front page were dugg by the same 16 people in the exact same order, he got curious. After all, Digg is supposed to be a social and user-driven technology news website, with no editorial control. Digg is one of the poster boys of the Web2.0 buzz, right up there along with Flickr, del.icio.us and the various AJAX application services. So, what does a blogger like MacGyver do if he suspects the system is rigged? Naturally, he blogs about it.

Uh-oh, wrong move. All of a sudden, strange things started happening on Digg, as described on McGyver’s blog entry from the next day. This of course is just his side of the story, but others have taken into investigating the matter as well. Roblomoso posted about the matter on Google Blogoscoped and was banned from Digg. Naturally, ForeverGeek in its entirety was banned as well.

I’d say this is editorial control, and not very "user-driven". If users don’t like ForeverGeek’s stories, they wouldn’t digg them and all would be well, no? That’s how the social web is supposed to work, and that’s definitely how Digg claims to work. Digg founder Kevin Rose sort-of responed to the mess, but didn’t really succeed in explained anything, as illustrated by McGyver’s reply. What does matter is that ForeverGeek stories are suddenly starting to appear on Digg again.

People and communities do fight in real life all the time of course, so why wouldn’t they do the same on the internet (let alone the chaos that makes up the "Web2.0"?) Nothing new in that. I guess my point is that it’s just as sad in both cases.

Noticed that the fastest growing blog on wordpress.com is “Linux for human beings?” by Danny. The blog is a report of Danny’s real-life experiment of replacing Windows with Linux. He honestly tells us the good and the bad stuff a new user faces trying to use Ubuntu without geek help around. Hang in there Danny, lots of people have gotten their Ubuntu boxen working beautifully in the end!

Update: I completely missed this: the second fastest growing blog is “Ubuntu newbie” by Cornell :)

In the middle of a technical debate about virtual memory in different kernels, Linus Torvalds showed again his charm and tact by claiming that "Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots." After Slashdot reported this, Linus wrote a nice, friendly response on his own medium (the lkml), not on Slashdot of course, pointing out that the Slashdot people "usually are smelly and eat their boogers, and have an IQ slightly lower than my daughters pet hamster". He is in a position to say this because not only is he "the smartest person around" but also "incredibly good-looking".

This flamebait is a worthy continuation of a long tradition of Linus’ communication, starting back in 1992 with his own master when it comes to operating system programming, and a more recent evaluation of the competence of the makers of the world’s premiere business Unix desktop.

All this is well in line with the fact that he is so smart he knows free software licensing matters better than the FSF which enabled him to write Linux in the first place, and its lawyers when it comes to the upcoming version of the GPL, the license which he licensed Linux under.

Kaspersky Lab‘s announcement of a Windows/Linux cross-platform virus was the scoop of last week (source code available of course).

Now, there are obvious difficulties to spreading viruses on Linux and other properly designed systems, as demonstrated the lack of Linux viruses despite the availability of the ELF Virus Writing HOWTO since 2002. But the saddest part is that the virus didn’t actually work on Linux kernels later than 2.6.16, as demonstrated by the testing and analysis published by Hans-Werner Hilse.

Linus Torvalds agreed with Hilse’s analysis but was left wondering why the virus worked on older kernels but not the post-2.6.16 ones. He examined the situation and found a bug in GCC (the GNU C compiler) which was triggered by some code in the new kernels (I’m not going to pretend I understand any of this). Naturally he was intrigued by a program which could run natively on both Windows and Linux platforms.

Linus’s explanation about the bug was published today on Newsforge. The funniest thing is, Linux has fixed the flaw and made the virus work on all versions of Linux. This might come as an embarrassment to Kaspersky, who obviously was going to cash in on the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt triggered by a Linux virus and the users’ need to suddenly buy Linux anti-virus software from them. Fortunately the free software hackers were again more than happy to help make broken code work again.

Let’s see if anybody will buy anti-virus software for Linux now, or Kaspersky’s software for any platform.

Warning: Easter Egg spoilers ahead!

Celebrating Easter, Jonathan has gone egg hunting. He first exposes a known liar, aptitude. We all know of APT’s Super Cow Powers because they’re documented (type “apt-get” with no arguments and hit ENTER), but aptitude keeps its powers hidden. The key to finding aptitude’s Super Cow Powers is endurance and liberal use of the -v switch.

Firefox’s secret message from the Book of Mozilla is well known as well, but the really great OpenOffice.org Easter Egg that Jonathan unveils was news to me. Of course, Jonathan sees such an elaborate Easter Egg as “proof that OpenOffice.org is bloated”. Not that we would need further proof of that! :) I didn’t know about the funny release names in the Ubuntu kernel documentation either.

Here are a couple of GNOME eggs I’m aware of. Open the “Run” dialog (press alt+F2). Type “gegls from outer space” as the command. You get to play a game that “will change the way you think of your desktop forever.” It features GEGLs (Genetically Engineered Goat, Large). GEGL is a mythical creature in GIMP and GNOME lore, and the unofficial secret logo of the GNOME project.

The other GNOME egg i know about features Wanda, the fortune telling fish from the Fish Applet. Type “free the fish” into the Run dialog and Wanda will swim around your desktop occasionally. (You can accomplish the same thing by hitting the ‘f’ key three times after opening the “About” box of a panel.) If you click it with your mouse, it will flee, only to return later. You cannot kill this process because it’s hidden in the gnome-panel process (or one of its children – killiing gnome-panel does help).

Of course, Easter Eggs in free software have given rise to some complaints as well. An OpenOffice.org user argues that a piece of free software should work as advertised and only in that manner. There are bug reports demanding the removal of Easter Eggs from OO.o, or at least an easy method for sysadmins to disable them. Issue 61685 has extensively discursive comments for and against eggs.

This must be the smallest news of the weekend, but weekends are slow on news anyway. So, having enjoyed Lokheed’s lovely gPerfection theme for a long time (see my screenshots page), I decided i need a refreshing change. I changed to the Graphite suite by the same Lokheed, and I really like the results! Here’s the screenshot:

With the new theme and a less insane layout, I’m willing to declare this site version 1.0, meaning there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, and improvements are not necessary. As everything I do is always perfect, I don’t really expect to find many bugs or typos either. Thank you for your patience.

t0rbad> so there i was in this hallway right
BlackAdder> i believe i speak for all of us when i say…
BlackAdder> WRONG BTICH
BlackAdder> IM SICK OF YOU
BlackAdder> AND YOUR LAME STORIES
BlackAdder> NOBODY HERE THINKS YOURE FUNNY
BlackAdder> NOBODY HERE WANTS TO HEAR YOUR STORIES
BlackAdder> IN FACT
BlackAdder> IF YOU DIED RIGHT NOW
BlackAdder> I DON“T THINK NOBODY WOULD CARE
BlackAdder> SO WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THAT FAG
*** t0rbad sets mode: +b BlackAdder*!*@*.*
*** BlackAdder has been kicked my t0rbad ( )
t0rbad> so there i was in this hallway right
CRCError> right
heartless> Right.
r3v> right

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