...:: Hacking World Cup Tickets for Germany 06 ::...

Australia was a late qualifier for the tournament. The ticket submission was via email. Tickets were allocated on a first email received basis after 09:00. There was a countdown webpage which advertised the time.

--- Preparation

* I telneted to port 25 of the destination and saw via EHLO that the mail server clock was 1 minute faster than advertised on the webpage, giving a start time advantage

* I pre crafted the SMTP message into a text file. This had the sending time as 09:00:01

* Before the day I checked out how long the mail server would keep open any connections without any input (10 minutes)

---

Cometh the day:

* I opened up several telnet sessions to port 25 , 10 minutes before.

* when the time came, I did several EHLO messages to check my session was alive

* I cut'n'pasted my SMTP message into the server

* I closed all my connections (other people were bouncing at this point as the server connection pool was exhausted)

---

I got my tickets.

I'm impressed with how quickly the FCC is responding (and that it's responding at all). The questions are thorough and well thought-out too. There's still hope...

Nice try, FBI.

It seems to me the only reason to join MENSA is to brag about the fact that you got in.

Maybe it's neither. Maybe it's just that some people consider their device as a hybrid personal computer / phone. Then it becomes rather annoying that you can't control what's installed at it.

Java is painful after experiencing .NET. I'm not sure this is really news though.

I think Gruber makes a lot of great points here and I agree with most of what he says. However, I think he's missing one important point.

Microsoft doesn't think "it is sitting pretty because Best Buy has a 17-inch Dell for $650." I can assure you that internal talks at Microsoft include very worried discussions about how they're going to deal with Apple's quickly growing market share.

Microsoft's response to "Macs are better" is "PCs are cheaper", not because they think more PCs will sell because of these ads, per se, but because they want computers to be cheaper. They want to frame the buying decision in terms of price so they can drive prices down further. Oddly enough, this kind of worked. Apple lowered their prices.

As Joel Spolsky says, "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements... Microsoft's goal was to commoditize the PC market." (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html)

Microsoft does not think that it's OK to be inferior to Apple as long as they're cheaper. They just really really want computers to be cheaper. They always have. That's how they've made billions of dollars over the years. They tie the success of their software business directly to falling prices in the computer hardware industry. If they see any hint of that trend reversing (rising prices in hardware), they're going to fight it tooth and nail.

I think what they really need to understand is that the race to the bottom in the computer hardware market is generally over. We've arrived at (or near) the bottom. People can afford just about as many computers as they could possibly want now. If they want to further commoditize the personal computer, they should be doing what Google is doing and writing a stripped-down OS that runs on much weaker hardware but relies on the web for processing power. Insisting on machines that are both cheaper and more powerful than the PCs of yesteryear has reached the point of diminishing returns.

Gosh, I'm sorry to post a contentless comment, but watching this just made me so happy.

OK, so let's say I own a retail store and I see that my company is on here. No problem, I just sign up, have an employee buy some stuff for me so I can find out who they are, and fire them.

I bet that this violates the agreements most employees sign for discounts, which probably says they can only buy for themselves (or maybe family/friends), and that they can't resell the items. So this is fraud, basically.

Perhaps I'll start a site called "EmployeeOfficeSupplies.com" that hooks up people in need of office supplies with people working in offices who are happy to steal them. Or maybe one where I help people "share" their health insurance benefits.

This is stupid.

I also see a lot of office furniture when I look inside a business. But nobody cares much about office furniture. For most of the market, it's a boring commodity that is bought by professional office managers who care a lot about the price. It lasts a relatively long time and doesn't change very often.

It's also an intensely cyclical business, which is no doubt a big reason why Microsoft's financials are so screwed.

The moral of this story is that the notion of Apple vs Microsoft is more stale than it has ever been. They aren't even in the same industry anymore. You could imagine investing in both of them at once and calling it diversification.

I think it's kind of gone the other way now too. If someone "brags" about having joined MENSA I'd pretty much roll my eyes.

The first rule of Mensa is you have to talk about Mensa.

The 38mph result was from 11 years ago, the title of this (2007) article is "Light and matter united" and it's far more startling...

> She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light.

I can't help but feel that if you consider your phone just a phone, rather than a defining characteristic of your personality, you're less likely to be so outraged at its shortcomings.

Ok, I'll take a stab at this. I know basically nothing about Arrington. I don't know what he's invested in or who he's friends with, nor do I care.

What I do know is that TechCrunch publishes utter trash. It's a tabloid that caters to the geek crowd. The articles are poorly written and even more poorly researched. Some of them are based on sources as flimsy as a single sentence fragment of a tweet if not a complete fabrication or speculation.

What is purported to be news is heavily editorialized. What is purported to be analysis is the kind of tin foil hat stuff one could expect to see in the typical Slashdot comment. Simply put, the TechCrunch writers are lousy journalists- if you can even use the word "journalist" at all.

In my opinion, some of the people at TechCrunch have questionable ethics. Revealing a company's internal documents in piecemeal over the course of a week to give readers some little voyeuristic thrill while raking in the advertising dollars is wrong. It would be one thing if they were blowing the whistle on something illegal or immoral that was going on there, but those documents revealed nothing of real value. It was simply a peek behind the curtains.

TechCrunch is not in the business of information and certainly is not the "paper of record" for startups and entrepreneurs. They are in the business of selling controversy where it doesn't necessarily exist. It is for this exact reason that they often have a headline designed to stoke the nerd rage fire on top of an article that is little more than some asshole's opinion or wild guess about how something is going to play out. When TechCrunch actually does publish something newsworthy there are usually several other sources with better coverage and better writing.

I will continue to flag TechCrunch submissions.

Don't worry, be happy ;)