Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 27 Dec 2011 03:28:17 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111226/22012517190/righthavencom-domain-auction-has-begun.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111226/22012517190/righthavencom-domain-auction-has-begun.shtml promised last week, it appears that the auction of the righthaven.com has begun over at SnapNames. The auction will apparently run until January 6th at 12:15 PT. So if you were planning to take up a collection to buy it for yourself, start counting those pennies. There have already been a few bids, and at the time I'm writing this, they're asking a bit over $1,000.

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]]> place-your-bids http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20111226/22012517190 Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090501/1746554722/dailydirt-life-not-as-we-know-it.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090501/1746554722/dailydirt-life-not-as-we-know-it.shtml classification of living things is a bit tricky. It's not just plants and animals anymore. Biologists are continuously discovering creatures that defy the old taxonomies. Here are just a few more examples of the incredible diversity of life on our planet.

• Christoph Adami tries to define life -- by studying artificial life and the characteristics of information processes that seem to behave like life. His self-replicating programs evolve and create virtual ecosystems -- and could help figure out how to find extraterrestrial life. [url]
• Biologists thought they had only cataloged about 10% of all fungal species. But there could be a whole different domain of life that is similar to fungus, but isn't. [url]
• Mantaphasmatodes is the first new insect order discovered since the 1900s. And these insects are almost everywhere. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090501/1746554722 Thu, 2 Dec 2010 22:48:10 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101202/22322512099/wikileaks-says-its-site-has-been-killed.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101202/22322512099/wikileaks-says-its-site-has-been-killed.shtml entire Wikileaks.org site has gone down again and the Wikileaks folks are claiming that the domain was "killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks." That's a bit cryptic and Wikileaks has not been above jumping to conclusions at times. It's unclear, for example, if it was just the company EveryDNS who did something on their own, or if the US government was involved. It could be as simple as the sort of pressure Senator Lieberman is applying on US companies. Update: The EveryDNS website says they made the decision because the DDoS attacks on Wikileaks violated their terms of service in that it could interfere with other websites. I understand the fear that it could cause problems with other websites, but it seems weird to say that getting attacked by a DDoS violates your terms of service. It's something totally out of the control of the website.

Either way, it is a bit silly to think that taking down Wikileaks' website would actually do anything in this situation. The data that they're releasing is out there and plenty of people can easily find it. It won't take long for them to set up another website if they want to -- and while it may be a bit harder for people to find them, to date, the organization hasn't exactly had any problems getting everyone else to promote what they release for them. Whatever the reason is for taking the domain name offline, it's difficult to think it would be effective in stopping Wikileaks in any way. If anything, it just calls that much more attention to the organization.

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]]> yeah-that'll-help http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20101202/22322512099 Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:06:00 PDT Joseph Weisenthal http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070716/155258.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070716/155258.shtml build businesses on the backs of their domain names alone. Today, Answers.com announced the purchase of Lexico, which is the owner of sites like Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com. The company says that the tie up will make it a leader in "online information publishing", but this is just generic corporate puffery, intended to mask the fact that the real value here is the domain names. Meanwhile, Answers.com itself, despite its relationship with Google, is not doing particularly well. It has warned of weak earnings due to "more pronounced seasonality", which again, sounds very much like meaningless corporate-speak.

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]]> there's-your-answer http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20070716/155258