Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

The daily web comic that was a joy to web developers and computer geeks for about 12 years or so, has finally been shut down. The comic started in 1997 by Illiad, J.D. Frazer, about a Canadian ISP and the people who ran it, covering all things geek and HTTP. In 2009 updates became rather sporadic, but continued looping daily with an occasional new strip and an occasional site outage.

In late February Illiad announced on the user forums that the site would be shut down in the very near future.

Well, the very near future happened a few days ago. The site is now gone.

I had a lot of fun reading those strips, even as a looping archive. The adventures of Erwin, Pitr the wannabe evil mastermind, Miranda, Smiling Man, etc. Now all gone. I was hoping Illiad might do a Kickstarter and release the entire archive as books/PDFs, but I doubt that's going to happen.

Apparently Illiad gave a complete copy of the site to two trusted people, identities undisclosed. So there is a possibility that the site could be resurrected.

The message board, which was pretty active, has been moved to
https://hedgehog.blindambitionstudios.com/index.php?board=1.0

"Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) have just sponsored a new bill, the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, which would combine the worst parts of the PRO-IP Act and the PIRATE Act. The basic idea is pretty simple: expand the Federal government to create something like the Department of Homeland Security for IP. The Copyright Czar then polices the internet and clogs the courts with thousands of civil lawsuits against individual infringers so the RIAA doesn't have to. Feel free to contact your representatives with your feelings about this bill. Right now, they believe the bill (PDF) will 'protect jobs.'"

Why evolve or die when you can litigate!

The Slashdot Thread and Some Userfriendly mockery of the above

I thought it was cool that Brian May finally completed his PhD, and conveniently, User Friendly talks about it today!

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070803