I consider myself fairly knowledgable in the world of comment spam, but this one leaves me completely baffled… Two comments were posted right after each other to two different entries, with two different e-mail addresses but identical text. Here it is:

IP Address: 85.65.41.131

Name: yellow antelope

Email Address: [email protected]

Comments:

Think of every yellow antelope you know – they do not match! Enchanted experience of betting and gambling with yellow antelope http://spaces.msn.com/members/rear-animels/ yellow antelope is what I was looking for.

The MSN Spaces blog linked in the comment has only two entries, and they’re complete nonsense. The text files they link to on 50webs.com make even less sense, since they have no hidden links and no apparent purpose.

Theoretically, they could be driving up the pagerank of these seemingly benign pages, and then replace them en masse with advertising pages… But why inflate the search engine ranking of the pages for terms like “purple clown” and “yellow antelope”?

June 22, 2005: More bizarre animal spam today, apparently from the same people as the antelope spam. This one uses Blogspot instead of MSN Spaces:

IP Address: 85.64.46.113

Name: protected animals

Email Address: [email protected]

Comments:

The best protected animals in the world. protected animals tournaments are now available.

This recent Jon Udell entry about Wikipedia wars mentioned a great idea, but I don’t have the time to code it.

I’d love to see a tool for animating Wikipedia history for a given entry or block of text (see Udell’s screencast for an example). Bonus points for highlighting what changed in each version, and extra special bonus points for a way to scrub backwards and forwards through time. I don’t care if it’s a Greasemonkey extension, Flash or Ajax, as long as it does the job.

Lazyweb, hear my plea! $50 $250 (and a free Flickr Pro account) to the best implementation, ruthlessly decided by me in about a week. If anyone else wants to kick in money for the bounty, feel free to post a comment. (If your application meets Jason Scott’s criteria in the comments below, you’ll earn an additional $50.)

Update: Two amazing entries were submitted so far, both using the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. Dan Phiffer’s Wikipedia Animate and Corey’s WikiDiff. Others are still in development, and a winner will be announced on Tuesday.

June 21, 2005: Two more entries! John Resig’s AniWiki and Colin Hill’s BetterHistory. Also, note that the first two submissions have had big changes… Give them all a try, and stay tuned for the winner later today.

June 27, 2005: The winners!

My baby boy turns one year old today. Wow, what a difference a year makes:

Happy birthday, Eliot!

E3 isn’t the best place to find innovative new games, largely because it’s a massive marketing event driven by “sure-thing” multimillion dollar blockbusters and movie/TV franchises. But every year, there are a few underdogs that somehow make it onto the show floor, along with a couple inspiring big-name titles.

Last year, Namco gave an obscure Japanese title called Katamari Damacy a tiny space in the back of their booth. I fell in love, and dubbed it the Best of Show in my 2004 Oddball Roundup. Katamari ended up being the biggest cult hit of the year.

With that in mind, a little late, here’s a roundup of my favorite underdogs from this year’s E3. (G4TV has their own video underdog roundup. For a more mainstream roundup, try 1UP’s detailed list of the best games at E3.)

Continue reading “E3 Underdogs 2005” →

Though the original rumors of screener copies of Star Wars Episode III spreading via BitTorrent turned out to be fakes, a new workprint of the film was leaked online yesterday. Watermarked with timecodes on every frame, the workprint was made available as a DVD-R by a pirate group named VISA by Wednesday afternoon.

To get an idea of the quality of this workprint, the video below is a 19 second sample excerpt, posted along with the complete film to Usenet newsgroups. (Thanks for mirroring, Leonard.)

Download: starwars_ep3_leaked_workprint_sample.avi (7.3 MB, XViD)

Mirror #1: starwars_ep3_leaked_workprint_sample.avi

(Note: I don’t have the movie and have no plans to download it, so please don’t ask me how to download it. Also, please don’t post torrent links in the comments.)

Update: This entry is linked in a new Reuters article and many media outlets that use the Reuters feeds, like CNN Money, News.com, and ZDNet. The story is also on the front page of Yahoo right now. In the blog world, it was linked by Boing Boing, Fark (indirectly), and Kottke, among others.

The results? My bandwidth is going through the roof. Downloads of the sample video are pushing 82 Mb/s. That’s pretty insane, and it’s a testament to EV1 Servers that the site is still online and speedy.