zomgpwn!

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.

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.

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.

The lunatic is on the grass!

Puff. Puff....  pass.   Oh my Goldenvoice.  You have dared to piss of the 'indie' brood on the interwhines and boy have they whined up a storm.  Fackin' punks.

Sure Coachella has had its ups and downs but they've almost always managed at least two quality headliners, regardless of your musical taste.  Meaning... even if you weren't a fan of a certain band you could understand why they landed the closing slot.  This year's lineup is a great example of just that.

You may or may not enjoy the musical stylings of Portishead or Jack Johnson but there's no denying that Roger Waters performing Dark Side Of The Moon in its entirety is a nice, nice get for G.V.   Just the fact that most of the coverage we've seen so far focuses on who's NOT playing rather than the truly remarkable lineup assembled speaks well for the diversity of acts involved.

When you first look at the list, it's easy to miss some of the details but how could you possibly get more 'indie' in the traditional sense than having Dwight Yoakam,  Turbonegro, Junkie XL and Cafe Tacuba perform inside the same three mile radius on the same night?  You can't, that's how.  Same thing goes for Sunday, with Gogol Bordello, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dimitri From Paris and Spiritualized all present and accounted for.  (Well, let's not count our Spiritualized performances before they're hatched, maybe..)  Even the first night sees The Verve, Breeders, Aesop Rock and Fatboy Slim sharing air.  (Too bad Air isn't playing this year.)   So really, who CARES if Jack Johnson is the closer. You can get the hell out of there two hours earlier, and back to your hotel room/campsite that much sooner to finish sewing that awesome Datarock patch you found in the trash onto your sufficiently vintage track jacket.  Score, you dork!

Seriously though... anyone complaining about the Coachella lineup is probably a little spoiled, or they just like to complain about stuff.  You can't have a Pixies re-up EVERY year or it will lose its specialness, special one.  Besides, B.F. will probably be wandering around the crowd during The Breeders' set.  If we see him we're going to stop him and say "Hey! When we grew up we actually BECAME debasers!  Cool huh?!"  Hurrrrr!

Press Release at coachella.com here.

FULL 2008 LINE UP:

FRIDAY, APRIL 25: Jack Johnson, The Verve, The Raconteurs, The Breeders, Fatboy Slim, Tegan and Sara, Madness, The Swell Season, The National, Slightly Stoopid, Mum, Pendulum, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, Stars, Battles, Aesop Rock, Les Savy Fav, Midnight Juggernauts, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Minus the Bear, Spank Rock, dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip, Diplo, Adam Freeland, Santogold, Jens Lekman, John Butler Trio, Vampire Weekend, Dan Deacon, Architecture in Helsinki, Sandra Collins, Busy P, Cut Copy, Black Lips, Datarock, Professor Murder, Reverend and the Makers, The Bees, Porter, Rogue Wave, Modeselektor, American Bang, Luckyiam.

SATURDAY, APRIL 26: Portishead, Kraftwerk, Death Cab for Cutie, Cafe Tacuba, Sasha & John Digweed, Rilo Kiley, Dwight Yoakam, M.I.A., Hot Chip, Cold War Kids, Animal Collective, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, DeVotchKa, Flogging Molly, Mark Ronson, Turbonegro, Scars on Broadway, Islands, Enter Shikari, Calvin Harris, Boys Noize, Junkie XL, Cinematic Orchestra, Jamie T, The Teenagers, VHS or Beta, Carbon/Silicon, Erol Alkan, Yo! Majesty, Little Brother, Bonde Do Role, St. Vincent, Akron/Family, MGMT, Institubes Paris Terror Club - Surkin, Para One and Orgasmic, James Zabiela, SebastiAn, Kavinsky, Dredg, The Bird and the Bee, Grand Ole Party, Man Man, New Young Pony Club, 120 Days, Yoav, Electric Touch, Yelle, Uffie.

SUNDAY, APRIL 27: Roger Waters (“Dark Side of the Moon”), Love And Rockets, My Morning Jacket, Spiritualized, Justice, Gogol Bordello, Chromeo, The Streets, Metric, Danny Tenaglia, Simian Mobile Disco, Booka Shade, Murs, Dimitri From Paris, Autolux, The Field, Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Cool Kids, Sons & Daughters, Sia, Holy Fuck, Black Kids, Black Mountain, Annuals, Kid Sister w/A-Trak, Duffy, I'm from Barcelona, Manchester Orchestra, Deadmau5, The Horrors, AUSTIN TV, Shout Out Louds, Plastiscines, Brett Dennen.

J.J. Abrams is the new Kid DYN-O-MITE. (Yeah, we said it!)

We keep trying to hate J.J. Abrams and we keep failing miserably.  Anybody who floats along so steadfastly through the flotsam & jetsam of network television and big budget film marketing automatically inspires both awe and ire in us.  We can't help but respect someone who breaks through the celluloid ceiling with such aplomb. But still... why haven't Fox Searchlight or Screen Gems optioned our screenplays for 'Repo Man II: Otto Gets Blotto' or  'Escape From Waukegan: Snake On A Lake'??  Huh?  When does Gil get a lick? *is bitter*

Regardless, one of the things that Abrams' seems to have a thankfully iron grip on is the viral marketing for his projects, and again... in a sea of mediocrity his team always manages to at LEAST get their chins above the water.

Just the simple yet important details like what URL to register can signal to potential participants in a viral campaign whether they should or shouldn't bother.  Being able to secure the domain ncc-1701.com for the upcoming Star Trek film is a minor stroke of near genius.  It's instantly recognizable by the existing fan base, yet retains an air of mystery for even those who aren't mad Trek dorks.

Additionally, the site itself functions intuitively but doesn't make things TOO easy to figure out right away. To start off, try adjusting all the sliders to 100%.  Even the flash UI is fun to fiddle around with, so you never feel like you're not 'getting' something or missing a trick. 

The balance between achieving some sort of real retention of your marketing message and not beating people over the head with 'It's a viralz dude!!  Pass it on!!" is a delicate one.  Even though we're really not fans of the Star Trek properties, this should be a fun one to watch.

What took you so long Taser Tag?

Netflix rules your face off with pure awesomeness

OK, so we're a little biased here.  But bear with us. 

Have you ever put your Netflix account on hold?  We just did since the ZOMGPWN! offices are moving soon and we didn't want any of our VIDs (Very Important Discs) to get waylaid in the murky depths of the USPS sorting centers.  God forbid we were delayed from watching History Channel documentaries or UFC 55-71 for one extra second.

So, when we pumped the virtual brakes, we noticed that surprisingly kind dev team over at Da Flix threw up a message on the thank you page mentioning we'd still have 'full access' to the Netflix website.  "Hmmmm.." we muttered out loud to no one in particular.  The office armadillo "Ballmer" surely took no notice of our musing.  Then we got distracted by a kick ass hummingbird flying around the courtyard and totally forgot about the whole thing.  Seriously, hummingbirds are damn cool.

Anyway, later on, we remembered that vague, leading promise and decided to see how FULL our access really was.  Would Netflix still let us stream their rapidly growing catalog of 'Instant' selections even though we weren't paying for physical DVD rentals?  That would just make way too much sense to possibly be possible.

So, we dialed up Doug Stanhope's 'No Refunds' just to be mega ironic about the whole thing.. and damn if their sniffer didn't start sniffing us.  Works like a champ, chippie.

This MIGHT be cause for the creation of the PWNIES, our very own web awards and Netflix is gonna get the very first one.  Regular readers of this site know that we're very, very hard on any corporate entity seeking to aggressively lace down their own virtual coffers since most of the time that involves putting cost considerations over customer considerations.  We get the basic tenants of capitalism, the free market economy and cutthroat competition in the DVD rental space.   But we also get common sense.

Netflix just blasted us in the face with a double barrel full of it and we're still reeling like Clubber Lang at the end of Rocky III.   ZOMGPWN! openly admits that it has no experience with any of the other major rental services but if Netflix keeps this stuff up we might just ask our Grandma to buy us some NFLX shares as our reward for making it all the way through bartender's school.

Who wants a Tom Collins with WAY too much sweet & sour mix?  Anybody?

Sometimes I doubt your commitment to SPARQL Motion

We've been cogitating on a big ol' anti 'Web 2.0' rant for a while, but we're still not done linguistically eviscerating the concept yet, so we thought a better idea might be to start talking more about what's coming next.  Specifically the Semantic Web.

If you aren't super familiar with the concept, it can be (clumsily) summed up thusly.

"...an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily." - Wiki

Anyone who has attempted to send queries across data stores that are even slightly divergent in the way they are constructed, called and/or parsed has experienced the brain crushing difficulty that can sometimes ensue.  There are ways to skin that cat but they all involve you losing a fair share of your epidermis simultaneously.

RIGHT?  That's where 'semantics' comes into play.  What if you could design a way to query across multiple data sources and pull back results that mash those non-uniform data sources together easily so you could actually utilize multiple sources quickly and effectively?

Well, Chachi... now you can. 

Meet SPARQL.  It runs on top of HTTP or SOAP and provides what amounts to a standard web service for any incoming query.  Freakin yay!

HOW does it work, EXACTLY you say?  Well to be honest we don't understand a lot of the web voodoo that W3C do's, but if you want to read up to your hearts content, you can dig in here.

Here is a quick rundown of how it's being used so far, with extensive documentation for all you extra smart people.

Personally we can't wait `til you geeks get this poppin' because we just KNOW that there's going to be some way that this will help us get better porn faster, which is of course the benchmark of all new advancements in technology.

Full PR at LinuxElectrons.com here

Don't Blinkx twice? It's alright.

ZOMGPWN! are unabashed fans of everything Blinkx does so we thought we'd cover what they've been up to lately.  We'd love to see them hooking up with some partners who have fatter pockets... and pipes.  (Get your mind out of the gutter, pervy!)

But now that the WGA and broadcast TV are sticking to each other's wickets, original online video content should theoretically get a bump in quantity and quality.  Then again that's what they said about, that.. um... other thing that they said that about.  Remember?  You totally do, dude.

Anyway, the list of new partners we just read about is pretty exciting because it means that there's plenty of life left in the Blinkxters.  WE LOVE that Blinkx pimps the Indies and shares out revenue properly.

Jumping on board the Blinkx bandwagon are the following entities: Calon TV, ChannelFlip.com, Channel X, Foothill Entertainment, Future Shorts, jeko.tv, Journeyman Pictures, Looking Glass International, MoMedia, Monster Distributes, Reelport, Wysiwyg Films and YoungCuts.

Big ups, Suranga.