Now that the new hardware is in place, I'm happy to announce the first new section on Slashdot: Your Rights Online [YRO] is a place where we can go into greater depth on the issues surrounding freedoms and liberties on the Net, and really in the world at large. So much happens in this area that the Slashdot Homepage just doesn't have enough room to host it all, so while YRO will appear on Slashdot when I think its relevant to everyone, it will largely stand alone. Read on to learn more about the section.

saurus asks: "A fellow *nix person says I probably get scanned everyday. I say, "No way -- I'd know!" Uhm, actually, if I sat on my box all day running sniffit+netstat+iptraf I might. Could you share a low maintenance monitoring [Open Source] solution ? How would it fare against stealth probes? "

As the dust is settling around my recent coding frenzy, here is a bunch of updates to the system:I've added a field for users to store their Public Keys on their User Info page. The M2 page is now linked into the system (if you have access anyway). The Comments on the M2 page also link the story that the comment is attached to (and please read the notes on the page: duplicate comments are not a bug!). I removed the sig from Logged in AC previews (it only affected previews, but it was scaring people). Both the FAQ and the Moderation Guidelines have been updated. And the grand Slashbox Poo-Bah CowboyNeal reports that AuctionBeagle, Security Focus, TheNextLevel, Gnotices, and WomenGamers are the latest additions to the SlashBoxes. Enjoy.

The 7th Seal has been opened-yes, that's right it's time for the most-weekly Geeks in Space. We talk about Mark Hamill's lack of career, sock Athlons, the new super-palmtops, with almost nary a mention of the Krull Invasion.

Occasionally comments get posted on Slashdot that hurt everyone. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes someone with a bug up their butt decides to make a nuisance of themselves by posting floods of messages into a board. These comments are almost immediately nailed as 'offtopic' or 'flamebait' by the moderators, but at the expense of many points that could have been better used promoting good comments. Its not quite the same as an ICMP flood, but its still very much a denial of service attack. Click below to read more about the problem, and how I'm tryingt to solve it here.

Welcome to the new server guys. We made the switch late last night, and at this point, it appears that most of your DNS servers have caught up. (For those of you who haven't, hang in there, it should sort out before the day is out). We're sorting out the kinks as they show up, but for the most part, besides the DNS not being all here, we're pretty much set. As a minor system note, for those of you running scripts on Slashdot, please be careful. A couple of you are abusing Slashdot by running scripts that load the backend files (and please note that ultramode is deprecated: see the the code page for info on the new xml backends) excessively (2 people are loading the files more than 20 times a minute, when the files only update every half hour or so. I'm gonna ban IPs if you don't chill out! Anyway, hit the link below for some info on the new setup.

Load testing the new boxes is going well: I've actually flushed out a pair of really bizarre bugs. If you're up for more load testing, feel free to visit the new box but let me remind you that we're trying to simulate normal activity- just lots of it, so writing a script that tries to submit the same comment a few thousand times in a few minutes just isn't gonna help (for that matter, just reloading the same page doesn't help either really) And thanks to the guy from 209.80.X.X (I'm sure you know who you are) who must have been running something really smart 'cuz (except for the fact that it was all coming from one IP) it was pulling down like 20 different pages a second! Anyway, the new setup was handling ~3x the usual Slashdot load for awhile there. I wanna try to get to 4x and see how that goes. Then we just gotta change the DNS, and there shall be faster Slashdot for everyone!

As many of you have noticed, Slashdot has been pretty bogged as of late, but the end of that is at hand. The new setup has a dedicated SQL box and 3 load balanced http servers. We've been spending the last few months getting everything ready, and now its time for the final check. I'd like to ask you help testing the load balancing stuff: You can access the new system at this address. Its a slightly out of date mirror of Slashdot, but it should be more than enough for us to determine if the new setup can cleanly handle the load. Thanks for you help: If this all goes well, we'll transition to the new setup in the next few days. (And just in time, Slashdot was kicking out like a thousand pages (pages, not hits) a minute earlier today and stuff was really bogging down)

Rolan was the first one to write with the heads-up about Wired's story about Slashdot-things are in much the same vein as other stories, but give it a gander if you'd like. And stop submitting the story *grin*.

Well, we've done it again. Yes, we 've made another Geeks in Space, this time bringing critical attention to the Krull Invasion force, as well as the possibility of being an Internet addict. Tune in, and make sure you're up to date-because the Krull wait for no one.

Well, we've done it again. Yes, Geeks in Space, Episode 5 has been released. In it, we lament the lack of good news, talk about anti-matter, and the hiring of hacks by companies. You can also become...educated in my long-term plan for the hostile takeover of a certain Redmond-based company.

So without a doubt, the best time for the power supply in your server to die is when you're out of town. Oh, and the line to your boxes at home should die too. And the only machine with a working modem in your hotel room should be an NT box (without ssh installed) and then the connection you dial through should be 19 hops away from anything (routing from San Jose to NY, DC, Boston, and back to Frisco and conveniently losing almost all of the packets) Anyway, we're back up and kinda hobbling now, (thanks to Jesse & Dan and UP Networks for being jonny's-on-the-spot) but I'm trying to fix some stuff as fast as I can. In the meantime, things are gonna be a bit zany, so don't flame me to loud. And don't worry, we've been working for the last month to build a new system with redundancy and stuff so that this won't happen again (knock on wood).

So if you're in the Bay Area tonight, you definitely need to show up tonight at the Park Side Hall (across the street from the conference hall) at 7:30 (until 10) for the Slashdot/Freshmeat/Andover shindig. Free beer, and loud music (from San "Single White Female" Mehat), good times shall be had or your money back! You're all invited. It ought to be a rip roarin' good time. At least, after Guinness #3 ;)

Mr Poet would like to start a discussion on the following: "I am an AVID user of Postgresql, over the past 6 months I have seen more and more about MySQL. I have done a little research and outside of MySQL being extremely fast I have not seen any reason why people are so excited about it. This is not a slam on MySQL. I just don't understand the reasons. Could we have a technical discussion as to why?" That's a good question. What are the strengths and weaknesses of both programs. Are there areas of deployment where one is more appropriate than the other, or are these programs fairly interchangeable?

Andover.Net is springing for a party for Slashdot readers at LinuxWorld next week Tuesday. The shindig will be held at the Park Side Hall accross the street from the conference center immediately following Linus' keynote. Tunes will be provided by VAs San "NeTTwerk" Mehat, and the Beer will be provided by Andover. (Let me just say that it is super wierd throwing your own bash at a conference instead of just leaching off everyone else's, but hey, free beer, right?).

Ah yes the fun of debugging.. you might have noticed strange behavior today, but hopefully its all fixed now. Most of the changes were fixes of longstanding bugs, but I added one new feature that might matter to some of you: "Max Comment Size" is a limit for (surprise!) the size of comments. If a comment exceeds that size, it is truncated and you can click a link to read the rest. Sidesteps several of the more childish system abuses quite nicely. SQL optimizations and a new version of mysql will hopefully speed stuff up. I've also been slowly but surely fixing the bug where you get logged out when you visit 'Ask Slashdot' or the Book Reviews pages. Lots of other backend changes that won't matter much to anyone. Oh, and the Geeks in Space section demonstrates some of the new custom section code. I can redefine colors on a section-by-section basis. No big deal right now, but as we bring new sections online, it'll add some variety. CowboyNeal also reports that we now have Slashboxes for PDA Buzz, and Jack Stowage's Useful Links. Now methinks its time to microwave a pizza and have a nice glass of whiskey.

Alan J. Wylie sent us Andrew Leonard's article running on Linux.com on "The Three Stages of Free Software Cluefulness". The most clueless part of conferences is (as always) the PR firms. Mine has apparently made up some story about me herding media tycoons about LinuxWorld (I'm not sure if they mean physically or through Slashdot). Anyway, for me personally its a case study in why PR firms don't work in the era of the Internet.I mean, PR companies always screw up (you should see the comically erred press releases I get every day). The difference is that the Internet already has people (relatively) in touch with each other without the help of a PR firm. Their primary function is obsolete. As always, my email address is malda@slashdot.org, and while I don't reply to everything, I do read it. What a sucky way to start of the day.

Well, the fine folks over at The Sync have informed me that episode two of Geeks in Space is ready for listening-with Nate, Rob and I's commentary, and featuring a live report from CowboyNeal from Martha's Vineyard, concering JFK Jr. Honest! *grin*

MrP- writes "Please visit Hashsnot. Hashsnot is a simple one page parody of Slashdot, I'm almost sure you will find this amusing!

We've been working on this for awhile and we're excited to announce that the premiere broadcast of Slashdot Radio: Geeks in Space is officially online. We plan to do this weekly at first and pick up steam depending on demand. Essentially, hemos, nate & I sit in a bedroom at the Geek Compound and babble about whatever we think is interesting on Slashdot. Its available in Real Audio or as an MP3. Thanks to The Sync for setting us up with this. The link below has a few comments about what we're planning on doing.