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Well, it’s Halloween and a couple of new kids on the corporate block are definately treats this holiday.

First up, Wired (actually, it’s publishing parent Conde Nast) bought Reddit (recap via GigaOM). The four member (!) social networking crew will be packing up and moving out to Wired Digital’s west coast offices.

Also up: JotSpot, the wiki folks, are the latest arrow in Google’s quiver. JotSpot, much like Reddit, has been promised much freedom in the day to day operations despite being the part of a large corporate behemoth.

So those are the treats - who got tricked?

Get up and vote people - and let’s just hope that our techie brothern at Diebold are as smart as their marketing department says they are (link is to an audio copy of the Diane Rehm show on NPR in which Diebold gets its intellectual ass handed to it - wait for her gasps of horror when it is revealed the smudges can foul results about 2/3rds of the way in).

Image via apophenia:

Despite being Netizens first and foremost there are some members of the Militant Geek Army who still get some news in dead tree format. A disturbing trend that we’ve noticed (besides the lack of a technology section) is that the only place escort ads appear is in the business section.

Two questions:

1) Does this hold true nationwide for other newpapers or is this just a coincidence?
2) If it is a trend can we infer anything about the moral character of the money men?

Last week the Firefox team ’shipped’ the 2.0 version of their popular web browser. Apparently, to celebrate, the IE team (who themselves released IE7 the week prior) sent a cake.

What you can’t see, however, is that the IE Cake came embedded in an extremely large box (which required a larger door). The icing also needed an update applied and could only be cut with a proprietary Microsoft knife.

Oh my. I thought I knew what the lack of corporate hubris looked like until I saw this video. It shamelessly proclaims Dell as the savior for proprietary software ills. I can’t begin to describe the number of grating things about the presentation. However, particularly grotesque is the guest appearance of Larry Ellison (the better-than-thou CEO and grand czar of Oracle himself). Last time I checked you couldn’t pick up a copy of Oracle on SourceForge.

Via ValleyWag
Video on YouTube

I’ve previously compared legislative add-ons to feature creap - the bane of any geek developer. Declan McCullagh, in a CNET article, goes in depth on the practice. It’s an insightful (and infuriating) look into how way too much technology policy is created in the US. From the piece:

• The Real ID Act, which creates a national ID card starting in 2008, was glommed onto an $82 billion “emergency” military spending bill (HR1268) last year. Unless Americans are outfitted with these federalized ID cards, they won’t be able to do things like board airplanes or enter national parks and some government buildings.

Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Texas Republican, warned at the time that the Real ID Act “offers us a false sense of greater security at the cost of taking a gigantic step toward making America a police state.” But the spending bill sailed through the Senate unanimously and met with only a few dissenting votes in the House.

• Slapping a $15 taxon .com, .net and .org domain names in 1998 was part of an “emergency supplemental appropriations” bill (HR3579) to fund the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. The cash went to politically-savvy Network Solutions, now part of VeriSign.

• Enacting a controversial proposal to punish Web masters with six months in prison if they publicly post anything that’s “harmful to minors.” Instead of holding an honest, up-or-down vote on the Child Online Protection Act, politicians slipped it into an “omnibus” bill (HR4328) to fund the bulk of the federal government, including the Treasury Department. COPA is being challenged in court by the American Civil Liberties Union.

• Coercing libraries and schools into filtering Internet connections was done through the simple expedient of attaching it to an unrelated spending bill (HR4577) to fund the Treasury Department, Labor Department and Congress itself. A divided Supreme Court upheld the restrictions as constitutional.

Upset now? You should be. Loopholes in the process are being exploited to support potentially harmful technology legislation. But what can be done?

Call us late to the party but Militant Geek just read about Friendster and the greed therein (article is behind a NYTimes walled garden but Michael Arrington does do a wrap up). There are so many slights I’m not even sure where to start.

Friendster turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google in 2003.

Everything went downhill from there.
…
Key points of failure seem to be a disastrous initial architecture that just couldn’t scale, a succession of high profile but out of touch CEOs (Tim Koogle, then Scott Sassa, then Taek Kwan), infighting at the executive level (particularly between the VP Product and VP Engineering) and a general level of arrogance at the board and executive level. No one is spared in the article, including Kleiner Perkins Partner John Doerr and former partner Russ Siegelman.

Hmmm…. Fiendster? Fraudster? Greedster? Too many options… Which is why it would make a great poll! Take a moment and vote for the most appropriate name for everyone’s favorite social networking also-ran.

Update
From Geek and Poke (what a ca-wink-a-dink!)

In conjunction with the International Day Against DRM the FreeCulture.org site held a competition for the best ‘Down with DRM’ video. The results were released today. Nothing like a little righteous indignation to get your day started, huh?

Watch more videos on the FreeCulture.org finalists page.

I really enjoy a good corporate skewering. Almost as fun is a dead on major marketing message being manipulated (say that five times fast). In some entirely wholesome Hatch approved surfing of the web I came across the incredible iRaq anti-war campaign images. They take the inexplicable exuberance of the original and turn it inside out. The end result is something that makes mince meat of the mindless consumer eye candy. Incredible work. Sobering conclusions.

Image hosted on the NotInOurName website.

Ah, there’s something beautiful about the simplicity of the power icon. It would be a mistake to just think of it as a little glowing symbol. It is a beacon letting geek and geekette alike know that there is something warm and wonderful inside. Day in and day out it radiates its preparedness to create at the drop of a hat. It knows no race, or creed, or even platform. It’s about time people were able to take that symbol with them.

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