I never used to read slashdot myself… as a quasi-geek I tended to really have distaste for anyone or any group I felt to be ‘eliteist bastards’ which goes some way to explain my irrational dislike of IRC channels and Mathsoc. However I’ve been at slashdot on and off for a while now, and it’s funny to see how it can sort of operate as a swarm and might actually make a difference.

There was this one story about a girl who had been molested or otherwise abused, survived, and wrote a book that was called katie.com by the publisher… without checking or without caring that a completely independent site was already at that domain (but nothing can exist without having a website these days, or at least sounding like they do, so apparently the .com was vital to the book’s success). Anyway, this had a negative impact on the owner of the actual site, and complained to Penguin books about it to no avail. Katie’s lawyer threatened her that it would be in her best interest to just donate the domain, or else things would get much worse… they wanted it for some online expansion of the themes in the book. This hit slashdot, which hit back, and at least according to the owner of the site, had an impact that eventually led to the end of the dispute. A good end at least, you can read about some of the fun at katie.com

Anyway, a more current event in sillydom is a kid who put a link on his blog to his school’s website, telling people to click it and hit F5 (which just refreshes the page) in an effort to hurt the server. Okay, a little spiteful, but the server just slowed down a bit by all accounts, didn’t crash, didn’t explode killing millions… didn’t install a rootkit on everyone’s computer who tried to listen to music… how does the school respond? They have him arrested and want to charge him with a felony… how appropriate.
But, the funny thing about this is that when the news hit slashdot, well, you can imagine. Well, perhaps not…. there is a term called the slashdot effect which can almost be thought of as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, when it’s really just lots of people all seeing a link and clicking on it for their own interest. But the effect is very much the same, it tends to bring medium to smaller servers down within minutes.

So now you can imagine what happened when the link to the school was posted. The site is down, has been for a day now I’m guessing. The kid is now in jail, they can’t blame him for this one. But it’s pretty much a joke, they school has overreacted to this one to the nth degree… I did something far worse in school (which I will not relate) that resulted in a 3 day suspension. The funny thing about that one is that normally, during a suspension, all tests and other evaluations missed are assigned a zero with no chance of making it up after the suspension is over. So when I got back, with my usual sort of luck, I had missed a major CS and Finite Math test. Both teachers allowed me to complete them anyway (kinda pointless in Finite’s case since I was so terrible at the material), the CS teacher already knew about my crimes of course, but my Finite teacher actually went out of his way to find out what had happened and rebelled against the stupidness of my suspension by allowing me to write the test.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this entry anymore… I guess, never underestimate the overreactions of school officials. Oh, and also fear ever being linked on slashdot, or worse, having the swarm against you.