After having built several iterations of disinformation with proprietary products and having them kook out on us on various occasions, we concluded that it was time for a change. After Microsoft and its ungodly Windows NT Server 4.0 (Service Packs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6a- hey Microsoft, why don't you UPDATE your shitty products instead of making your customers do it?) and SQL Server 6.5 consistently annoyed the hell out of us for almost two years (want to annoy them back for us? Send something evil to comments@microsoft.com), and in keeping with our fuck-the-man spirit, we decided that disinformation should be based on non-proprietary software. To go even further, we decided that we should not only use Open Source software, but Free Software, which we feel is better than mere Open Source. As a result, we've built disinformation using such Free Software as defined by The Free Software Foundation. We would like to give praise to all of the hard-working people who have made these excellent software packages available and, more importantly, the best products on the market.

Disinformation has always used Apache as our webserver, because, overall, it's just the best on the market. We are consistently floored by how elegant it is. We have always used ht://Dig as our search engine. We've found that it scales surprisingly well. We use MySQL as our database, PHP as our middleware, and GNU/Linux as our operating system. We have also made extensive use of GNU tools to finish the project, such as gcc, make, sort, uniq, and grep.

Because we don't really feel it's all that great to take without giving back, and because none of us here are necessarily kernel hackers, we've decided to release the code we wrote to build disinformation as Free Software licensed under the GNU General Public License (sometimes called the GPL). We host our software development site at the excellent SourceForge.

Disinformation is optimized for 4.0-browsers or above. If you haven't upgraded yet, walk with us through the time portal into the year 2000 and GET A NEW BROWSER, for god's sake. It is also best viewed at 800x600 or larger resolutions.

Caveats: There really are no non-proprietary, high-quality, cross-platform streaming video products available, so we've chosen to use RealPlayer. We like QuickTime a lot, but there's no player for Linux. DivX (we refuse to put the damned emoticon after that title) is an emerging alternative, and when MPEG4 is complete, it will also be up for consideration. We also use patented GIF images in our pages; once we have a few hours to spare we'll try to convert everything over to the patent-free PNGs, since Unisys is trying to enforce its LZW image-compression patent because they have nothing better to do.

In a tribute to Richard Metzger, we've called our product "Kind," and not because he's a nice guy. It will be undergoing continuous upgrades and improvements as we hack away at it and as (hopefully) other programmers hack away at it.

If you have any questions about our technology, please feel free to send questions or comments here. Thanks for visiting disinformation!