April Fool's Day

The internet has been going nuts for April fools day - here are a few funny pranks I came across.

From Slashdot - practically EVERY item posted on the 1st of April :

Blizzard Shows Off Diablo III Archivist Class, WoW Dance-Off

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/2215205

It's been a busy day for the folks at Blizzard, who have released major announcements for several different games. The next Diablo III class has arrived: the Archivist. Despite their frail appearance and hunched, labored movement, they are quite deft at launching Quest Bolts at nearby foes, or conjuring a whirling Lore-nado of spinning books. Loud monsters can be silenced with a devastating Shush attack. Blizzard also put Starcraft II'slatest unit on display, the Terra-Tron, which is a giant, robot uber-weapon assembled from the buildings in your base. Finally, for World of Warcraft they announced two features that have been requested by players for years: a battle of dances, where you can show off your avatar's hippest moves, and the ability to 'p1mp' your mounts. (Not sure exactly what that means, since I don't speak elvish, but there's a Nightsaber with a cannon — holy crap!)

Warner Bros. Acquires The Pirate Bay

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/173236

mlingojones writes"TorrentFreak breaks the news of The Pirate Bay's acquisition by Warner Bros: 'After years of hostility, lawsuits, police raids and heated invective between the two groups, the Pirate Bay has today announced they have settled their differences with US media conglomerate Warner Bros. The largest BitTorrent tracker has sold out to Hollywood and the two have agreed a deal.'"

TiVo Announces DVR-SuperAdvance

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/2131236

mark0 writes"TiVo has announced the TiVo DVR-SuperAdvance. The PC World review says, 'Familiar TiVo interface; DVR can record not-yet-broadcast programming; potentially useful as a wagering aid,' though, '[it is] expensive; access to programming is limited; footage is displayed in standard definition only.'"Hopefully, TiVo will supply a review unit

Alpine Legend Revolutionizes Music Game Genre

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/1612209

Microsoft has announced the upcoming release of Alpine Legend for the Xbox 360. Building upon the established titles of the music game genre, Alpine Legend takes you to the Swiss mountaintops, where you and your friends play up to three Alpenhorns at a time while a fourth yodels along. When you're done playing, you can disassemble the 8-foot horns for easy storage. "Jam with alpine legends like Franz 'The Manz' Lang and Johann Hornbostel. Shake the mountain tops with 100 classic Alphorn tracks including, 'Whose spit is in my horn?' and 'More goat bell (It needs).'"

Interview With the Author of "Mastering Cat"

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/1211240

Shlomi Fish writes"O'Reilly is publishing a new book titled 'Mastering cat,' about the UNIX 'cat' command. Here is an interview O'Reilly-Net conducted with the author about it. Read it to see if this book should be part of your bookshelf of technical books."

Yeast-Powered Fuel Cell Feeds On Human Blood

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/1710253

holy_calamity writes"Canadian researchers have taken a sensible, if slightly creepy, step towards solving the problem of medical implant batteries running down. They've built a fuel cell powered by yeast that feed on the glucose in human blood. If this makes it into people, keeping your implants going will be as simple as eating a donut."

Microsoft Asks Fed For Bailout

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/2222227

snydeq writes"Microsoft requested on Tuesday some $20 billion in bailout funds from the federal government, claiming that as the company controls an overwhelming share of the OS market, it is too big to fail. Low adoption rates for Vista, the ensuing ad campaign trying to convince people that they really do like Vista, and the increased need for development resources to rush Windows 7 to market to make people forget about Vista have necessitated the bailout, the company said. "We want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a crisis of mismanagement," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a prepared statement. "This is simply a crisis of dollars — a crisis of not having enough dollars coming our way.""

Instant Messaging Vulnerable To New Smiley Attacks

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/1935214

titus writes"Security researchers Yoann Guillot and Julien Tinnes have found a way to encode malicious code into smileysand provided a proof of concept encoder to automate the process. The researchers said their discovery paves the way for IM malware that would be impossible to detect since the malicious code would be 'indistinguishable from genuine chat messages.' I've tested the proof of concept code which works very well. Time to panic?"

Google Launches CADIE, the First True AI

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/1518211

eldavojohn writes"Google has announced CADIE, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. 'We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity ... as a collection of interconnected evolving agents. Second — and this really cost us an arm and leg in hardware and core time — we let the system build its own heuristics, deploy them as agents and evolve them by running a set of evolutionary cascades within probabilistic Bayesian domains. The third — a piece missing in most AI reasoning work thus far — was to give the entity access to a rich, realistic world from which to learn and upon which it could act directly.' It quickly started its own blog andYouTube video. Two hours after midnight, CADIE announced independence on its blog and decided to leave Google to venture out into the world. "

And finally, My personal favourite:
CloudLeft Public License Closes User Data Loophole

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/180209

FreedomFighter writes"In a Cloud Standards breakthrough, the FSF is teaming up with major cloud computing vendors to form the Free and Open Cloud Alliance (FOCA), a trade marketing association supporting Free(TM) and Open Cloud Computing (FOCC). The new CloudLeft Public License (CPL) is based on the ideas that data wants to be Free(TM) and all your Cloud(TM) are belong to us. It closes the 'user data loophole' by requiring the release of not only the source code for a CloudLeft platform but also the data passing through it. This renders most security issues void while appropriately setting the users' expectation of privacy. 'In the past, I've said that "cloud" is complete gibberish, but while discussing fashion during my weekly squash game with Stallman he convinced me that this was a great opportunity.' said Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. RMS, who previously said that 'cloud' is worse than stupidity was also pleased about the return of the advertising clause, requiring the use of the 'GNU/Cloud' name, as he is 'tired of haranguing the GNU/Linux community about this.' Full details will be available next Monday, including the first marketing and outreach program — 'FOCC: IT in 2009.'"

EDIT: Here are some more details about what Google did - don't forget to check the comments

http://www.businessinsider.com/recession-be-damned-google-does-april-fools-twice-2009-4

Also, here's an April fools joke from Phoronix:

The WALLBUNTU Linux distribution

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzE4MQ