Anonymous Coward writes "Arcades may be a dying breed, so it's a good thing the crusty hotels around the world haven't put the axe to their old game rooms. An article at X-Entertainment provides a lighthearted review of one of the worst hotel arcades out there, featuring broken video games and enough stains to make every joystick in the place off limits."

theodp writes "According to an SFGate.com article, PCs were supposed to kill off the mainframe, but Big Blue's big boxes are still crunching numbers, posting sales of $4.2 billion in 2003. First unveiled on April 7, 1964, the IBM mainframe computer celebrates its 40th birthday this week with a sold-out party at the Computer History Museum." The SFGate article also reveals: "Doug Balog, an IBM vice president, noted that 70 percent of the world's data are still housed in mainframe computers."

theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO granted Amazon.com a patent for the Use of browser cookies to store structured data, which covers the storing of data structures and non-character data within browser cookies. In a February SEC filing (pdf), Amazon reiterated that they expect that they may license certain patents to third parties in the future."

gaurab writes "Anti-Spammers would love this. In this news piece, the BBC reports that AOL is putting up a Porsche it seized from a spammer last year in a sweepstakes. What next -- 'Spammer's House' in another sweepstakes? Is this the sign of things to come? From the story: 'Internet giant AOL has ratcheted up the war against unsolicited e-mail with a publicity-grabbing coup -- an online raffle of a spammer's seized Porsche. AOL won the car -- a $47,000 Boxster S -- as part of a court settlement against an unnamed e-mailer last year.'"

Steeda95GT writes "A Reuters story reprinted at Forbes.com is an interesting read, saying that 'The gaming industry will shrink unless we start to see new games'. It talks about how the ratio of original titles to sequels is dropping dramatically, but it also goes on to say that upcoming sequels (Doom 3, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, GTA: San Andreas) will be successful only because their predecessors were."

CanadianMikey asks: "The debate with the business side of computing rages on about the validity of Open Source. Is it good or bad? What is the future of computing? Could it have been different, and where will the 21st century take us? Is Microsoft just the big nail that always gets hammered first and will someone step in to take their place when they are finally taken down? If Microsoft were to close up shop, who do the readers of Slashdot think would be tomorrow's Microsoft? What about the forgotten windows?"

Fluidic Binary writes "Now instant messenging can waste our time in exciting 'new' ways, according to Wired News, who reveal that an improved unofficial AIM bot has been created to play Infocom games via AOL's messenging client. According to the article: 'The bot, designed by 26-year-old Web programmer Andy Baio, is a Perl script that acts as an intermediary between the games, which are hosted on his server, and AOL's network.'"

aohell-guy asks: "I handle the mail servers for a business that has 20% of our members using AOL. We regularly send out email that our members have agreed to receive. In AOL 8.0, it was possible to click a single message and report it as spam. You would be prompted to confirm the spam report, although no details explaining what happens with the report are given to the user. Through AOL's Postmaster site, it is possible to get in on the spam 'Feedback Loop,' where AOL will send you the spam reports it receives for mail sent from your servers. When you receive a report, you are supposed to immediately cease the sending of email to that AOL address. The only problem is, we have found that most of the time the AOL users are reporting our email as spam on accident! These complaints can negatively impact your ability to send email to AOL members. How are you handling the false reports?"

Milanek writes "Apple has released final version of iChat AV 2.1. It's available on Apple's iChat site or via Software Update. It adds support for video conferencing with the new AOL Instant Messenger 5.5 for Microsoft Windows." Also available this week is an update to iPhoto, to version 4.0.1. Apple says it has performance, stability, and organization enhancements, including faster importing, smoother image viewing, easier Rendezvous sharing, and improved thumbnails.

fbform writes "Mark Maughan, an accountant, searched Google for his name on March 25 2003 and found some 'alarming, false, misleading and injurious' information about himself and his firm. Therefore, he is now suing Google, Yahoo (which used Google as its search engine at the time), AOL (for using Google to enhance its search results) and Time Warner (because they're the same company as AOL) for libel. Specifically, his lawyer John Girardi believes that Google's PageRank algorithm takes known good information and twists its context when displaying search results."

Nuclear Elephant writes "According to this article, AOL has decided to take a fresh approach to fighting spam and is now blocking the spammer's web address. The philosophy is, if the customers can't visit spammers sites, spammers will not be able to make any money. On a side note, I suggested this concept about six months ago but nobody thought ISPs would adopt it. Now perhaps we can get a group like NANOG interested in sponsoring a blacklist for spammer addresses?"

meriksen writes "This article on the CNN website suggests that Microsoft is looking to acquire AOL. What are the chances and do /. readers think this will ever happen?" The NY Post story is slightly more informative.

theodp writes "According to MediaPost.com: 'Some of the Web's leading content and technology providers have taken action to lobby against Utah's controversial Spyware Control Act, which is awaiting the governor's signature. Web publishers and businesses including AOL, Amazon, Cnet, eBay, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! signed a letter to the bill's sponsors arguing that the bill could create serious repercussions for the entire online community. The parties to the letter warned that the bill could interfere with computer security and would also impair the delivery of local, targeted ads'."

scubacuda writes "PC World: ICQ Universe (now owned by AOL) will soon be the first to offer social networking services on an IM platform. One has to wonder what types of legal issues might surface as social networks (particularly those unsecured) become more popular. For example, could being an IM buddy with someone later come back and haunt you?"

Robotech_Master writes "An appeals court has issued a decision reversing the summary judgment of a lower court that AOL qualified as a "safe harbor" under the DMCA. At issue is the fact that Ellison sent his notification of copyright violation to an email address at AOL, which AOL never received because the abuse submission address had been changed." The complete decision is available here as a PDF file; read below for an excerpt.

theodp writes "The USPTO has issued a preliminary decision invalidating Eolas' claim to Web browser technology central to a case against Microsoft, which could save the software giant more than half a billion dollars in damages. If upheld, this also means Microsoft will not be required to make changes that would have crippled IE's ability to work with plug-ins like QuickTime and Flash. Eolas has 60 days to respond to the decision. The USPTO has only invalidated 151 patents out of nearly 4 million patents awarded since 1988."

dmf writes "News.com is running a little piece about Microsoft's forays into researching aspects of social computing. With AOL Buddy Lists, Yahoo Messenger, Friendster, and other mappable relationship environments, is it possible the information will soon be used against you? Scenarios such as governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links, political groups finding potential donor lists, marketing departments finding affinity groups, and other easily imagined data mining opportunities could open the doors for information abuse and misinterpretation of individual ties. What implications can it bring in the future of the personal life?"

Peacefire writes "Thomas Shaddack spotted this on http://www.root.cz/ (in Czech) -- if you go to http://search.msn.com/ and search for 'XFree86', it tells you that you've 'entered a search term that is likely to return adult content', and directs you to the porn search engine NightSurf.com, which lists a bunch of porn sites that ostensibly match the term 'XFree86'. If you search for 'XFree86' on Google, however, it's clear that the top matching terms returned by a normal search, are XFree86 sites, are not a bunch of porn sites. MSN is apparently blocking the specific term 'XFree86' and not just filtering on something stupid like the 'X' or the 'Free', since you can search for 'XFree85' and 'XFree87' with no problem. And search terms like 'Linux', 'AOL' and 'Macintosh' are allowed, so at least MSN hasn't simply blacklisted all competitors' keywords as 'porn', but why would they be blocking 'XFree86'?"

lisa langsdorf writes "There's an interesting article on BusinessWeek.com today about Napster's race to gain greater market share in the music download business. According to a recent study, Apple has 75% of the pay for music download market, but Napster could soon gain more market share due to a new upcoming market push. BusinessWeek says: 'Napster could start to increase market share in the more profitable business of selling monthly subscriptions, where customers can listen to -- but not own -- as many songs as they want each month for $9.95. While Napster is far behind RealNetworks' Rhapsody service, AOL's MusicNet, and others, it's taking the lead again in the old Napster's stomping ground: college campuses.'"

theodp writes "Cubby from New Jersey has a passion for peanut butter. Dedeaux from Baton Rouge likes to suck his brother's ear. Spike from the East Bay just wants to kiss pretty girls. Two months after computer and canine geeks in San Francisco launched a social networking site for dogs, 8,000+ pooches have their own Web page on Dogster.com, complete with mug shots, personal stories and listings of likes and pet peeves."