The Null Device

2002/4/2

The New Chapel St.: News from the Yarra Leader on what will replace the Punters Club: it will be a pizza bar named Bimbo Deluxe, with alcohol and "funky DJs" playing fashionable sounds for today's hip urban youth. One thing's for sure: it's not our place anymore; it now belongs to the trendies, wideboys and label-wearing wankers in $80 T-shirts.

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Another reason not to trust "free" proprietary software: file sharing program KaZaA contains a secret P2P application which will resell your CPU cycles and bandwidth to KaZaA's corporate clients; essentially, this will use your Windows PC as part of a distributed ad serving network. They say that they'll let users opt out of this, but that's not what the licensing agreement says (unless "opting out" involves getting rid of KaZaA altogether).

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Life imitates BonsaiKitten.com: Cats with short legs hit the market. The new breed, named "Munchkins", have legs 1/3 of the normal length, and are incapable of jumping or climbing furniture; they have been bred for owners who keep cats indoors. (via rotten.com)

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"No cat will ever go ill again in America again in obscurity." AOL buys up 200 blogs, from well-known ones to ones like ScratchMyselfRedAndYellow.org, in a deal brokered by Dave Winer. No news on how many AOLTW board positions will go to A-List bloggers.

"You can't really put figures on this," one executive told The Register , "but we think we have 78 per cent of the libertarian news blogs, 91 per cent of the ClueTrain Manifesto fan sites, and 59 per cent of all blogging female arts graduates, many of whom are Virgos," he said.

In related news, we have been unable to confirm the rumoured merger of Virulent Memes with the Albury Mail, however, we can tell you that The Null Device is not being acquired by News Corporation to become James Murdoch's new personal blog.

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Qt for your VT-100! Or rather, a compatibility library that lets you recompile some Qt applications to run in a text console. Well, I don't think this is an April Fools' joke.

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