A Very Disappointing Animation Experiment

A website called Xtranormal claims that you can make short animated films using typed text you provide. They then use synthesized voices, and extremely basic movement cues, to render a sort of... thing.

Admittedly, the results are slightly artistically better than Family Guy, but quite a bit less entertaining than a Blingee.

Alas, this Xtranormal service only allows you to render one of your creations without payment, so you are likely witnessing both the Alpha and Omega of Film Dilaceratus. Savor it while you may.

Gawker Probably Crediting Themselves for Getting Wikileaks a New DNS Service

(If everybody already thinks you have, you might as well.)

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/easydns/

A DNS provider that suffered backlash last week after it was wrongly identified as supplying and then dropping DNS service to WikiLeaks has decided to support the secret-spilling site, offering DNS service to two domains distributing WikiLeaks content.

EasyDNS, a Canadian firm that had been attacked last Friday after media outlets mistakenly reported it had terminated its service for WikiLeaks, sent an e-mail to customers Thursday morning letting them know that it had begun providing DNS service for WikiLeaks.ch and WikiLeaks.nl, two of the primary domain names to which WikiLeaks relocated after WikiLeaks.org stopped resolving.

“We’ve already done the time, we might as well do the crime,” Mark Jeftovic, president and CEO of EasyDNS, told Threat Level about his decision.

Gawker were the ones who managed to get EasyDNS confused with EveryDNS, and then acted like total jerks when asked to make a correction of their obvious mistake:

http://www.reddit.com/comments/efyxj/gawker_threaten_bad_press_towards_easydns_due_to/

The Financial Times, and then The New York Times, copied the mistake, and then more and more news services copied their errors. The EasyDNS timeline of the events is an interesting series of snapshots of how fast erroneous information can spread:

http://blog.easydns.org/2010/12/07/timeline-of-an-epic-fail-the-wikileaks-takedown-fiasco/