One of my favorite things about wso has to be the bookmarks. Possibly my favorite recent bookmark (which I think just got bumped off of the main page) was a link to the Church of Noah.

The highlights of the website for me were the “Way of Noah” page and “The Covenant” page (which talks about the End of the World).

I’m not sure what people thought about this–is it legit or a joke? I’m tempted to write the contact address listed on the site to find out for myself. Either way, I wonder if a student has a hand in it. I know I’ve seen crazier religions (online and elsewhere).

Check it out for yourself:
http://churchofnoah.wordpress.com/

This makes me want to go do research now. I wish I were kidding. If only the library weren’t closing so soon…

…check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwCUtpbUWgk

I truly miss the extended electronic community which sprang up around Williams and Tripod in the mid-90s, and which was just as abruptly cut short by the decision to terminate alumni accounts.

In those days, I could sit in Berkeley or Paris, and communicate with Williams friends and students, just as I often did while on campus. I’ll have to tell you about that later.

Another tale from that era emerged as I was chiding an young sysadmin who took an hour out of my day today:

Mail (POP) and web were offline for about 45 seconds, but ky.net was pingable the whole time.

Some images on ky.net did not load the first time when back up, and gac.ky.net came up in the wrong fonts…

Being inside your own network can be a real pain when troubleshooting. Back in ‘94 for or so, someone hacked the SUMEX-AIM archive at Stanford (then the largest ’shareware’ archive) and uploaded a folder called “KIDDIEPORN” with just that inside.

Whoever did this was also bright enough to manipulate the servers so that, from inside the stanford.edu domain, you would see the original content of the site.

Stanford’s on-duty sysadmin was one embarrassed puppy when I called him up to let him know, and then reported the incident to CERT, with the footnote “Berkeley 1, Stanford 0.”

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[5] Comments

 

It was with some eagerness that I recently examined an opinions piece in the Record entitled “Ethics 101″ by Noah Susskind ‘07. Susskind is planning to major in Philosophy, which would hopefully make his commentary on ethics especially appropriate. My interest, of course, was that his piece dealt with file-sharing on campus.

He begins by stating the facts and offering a solution:

The average Williams student downloads songs without paying for them. Peer-to-peer file-sharing and downloading copyrighted works (without the permission of the copyright holders) is illegal (MGM et al. v. Grokster et al.) But students do it anyway. More alarming, perhaps, is that they don’t stop to consider the ethics of what they are doing.

Clearly, he’s alarmed by the lack of thought that most Ephs display through their usage of copyrighted materials. So where is his solution again?

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