slashdot

The rise of cloud computing over the past few years has been incredible. Unfortunately, many still do not see the interest or do not comprehend its importance.

This is not a post about cloud computing and its benefits, but rather a refresher about understanding some basic rules of scalability and how to get started with building scalable apps while keeping in mind that most people and companies have limited budgets.

After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it's finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college.

Since then it has grown to be read by more than a million people, and has served Billions and Billions of Pages...

We've discussed multiple times how police have been increasingly abusing wiretapping laws to arrest and charge people who film them in public.

The arrests are simply an intimidation technique against those who wish to provide public oversight of law enforcement.

One of the first high profile cases of such an arrest came back in 2006 when Michael Gannon was arrested under wiretapping charges for filming police with a security camera.

Via Slashdot, we learn that spammers have discovered the ability to publish cheap "ebooks":

Thousands of digital books, called ebooks, are being published through Amazon’s self-publishing system each month.

Slashdot points us to the news of a somewhat surprising ruling out of the Netherlands.

Apparently, a Dutch court has ruled that hacking into an encrypted WiFi router to use the connection is legal.

I'll have to remember that next time I'm searching for WiFi in the Netherlands.

Slashdot points us to a report out of Zimbabwe, claiming that a guy has been arrested for a Facebook comment.

Apparently he commented on the Facebook page that supposedly belongs to the country's Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, where he said:

"I am overwhelmed, I don't want to say Mr. or PM what happened in Egypt is sending shockwaves to dictators around the world.

IT Wire: "Geeknet, the owner of the American technology news accumulation site, Slashdot, has reported a net loss of $US4.4 million for the year 2010."

You would think that Sony, of all companies, would know better than to overreact to a DRM issue -- given its experience with the infamous CD rootkit a few years back.

However, the company can't seem to resist making itself look foolish.

We recently wrote about how Swedish ISP Banhof had announced plans to use a VPN to encrypt all traffic running over its network, thus making any log files it was required to store under data retention rules useless.

Slashdot points us to a somewhat odd lawsuit in which a court determined that the game Dungeons & Dragons could lead to gang activity, and thus could be banned in prisons.