This news website seems to be the worst of a breed, or perhaps simply a colossal tounge-in-cheek troll perpretrated on the world. Adequacy's primary writers have no problems with ad hominem attacks, atrocious fact-checking and gratuitous obscenities. Stories range widely in their topics, from conspiracies to religion to animals. Their categorical story icon for "Animals" is a raccoon having sex with a dog. The root purpose of the site is to offend, misinform and laugh at others. It falls squarely in with The Stile Project as horrible Internet pariah site, with less porn but more cursing and bullshit, and definitely as much hatred of the greater world.

Despite an avowed emnity of open-source software, adequacy uses Scoop, an Perland MySQL-based open-source weblog package and Apache to serve their dynamic content. Adequacy has apparently gotten a little more exposure than usual lately, as one writer submitted a story which claimed, among other things, that Microsoft Windows was free because it came with their computer. This article has been linked to in discussion forums and the like. The same article contained the truly subhuman and abusive IRC excerpt. Ostensibly it's true:

(jsm) Congratulations on wasting half an hour of my life, you fucking loser. And stop pretending to be a fucking woman. Your advice is useless. You, and the other hundred members of the so called fucking Linux community for which you stand, have broken my computer, wasted my time, patronised me senseless, revealed your lack of real knowledge, patronised me again and you *still* can't get something as simple as a fucking laptop computer to fucking work. Your so called free fucking software....
Another article about Linux told us of its developer, "Linux Torvalds," and why Linux will never be successful. "A brief perusal of the features of Linux Mandrake reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many crucial productivity applications. For example, why isn't the industry standard web browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the best efforts of the experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force to encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer standard, the creators of Linux seem to think that they know better." Yeah, the standard is a proprietary Microsoft program, not HTML as specified by IETF and the W3C.

Adequacy.org can safely be ignored, I think, for the future, without much loss. In a sense I feel a bit bad that kuro5hin's Scoop engine is used for this crass and pointless site, but it is a free country, and we are free to ignore them.


Update September 2002: Generic-man informs me that adequacy.org now redirects to kuro5hin. Seems the trolls got bored and went away, what a surprise.

Adequacy.org is a site written by trolls for trolls (and the unsuspecting). Indeed, many of the founders have had their day trolling Slashdot. For the uninitiated, Adequacy.org will confound whoever stumbles into the site; the subtitle of the site is "News for Grown-ups", although the actual content is far from that.

Adequacy's moment in the spotlight came when TechTV linked to one of Adequacy's stories - "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?" by T. Reginald Gibbons. Posted in December 2001, the article was a masterpiece, taking everything associated with the hacker culture and demonizing it. Dozens upon dozens of people linked to the article in disbelief, wondering if anyone could possibly believe the article. Briefly stated, T. Reginald Gibbon's story claimed that:

  • Quake is a training ground for hackers
  • AOL is the safest, most family-friendly ISP
  • Flash, Comet Cursor, and Bonzi Buddy are hacker tools
  • Asking for hardware is a sure sign of being a hacker - and "AMD" is a knockoff company that steals Intel's legitimate research; AMD also operates third-world sweatshops

This troll was a smashing success; as of today, nearly 5,000 comments have been posted refuting this troll, which is truly impressive. For comparison, Slashdot only got 2,549 comments on the war in Afghanistan. Even today, people still fall for it.

The site's editors portray an alarming lack of computer literacy; when confronted with the fact that the site runs BSD, various excuses have been offered. Netcraft has been asked not to report on www.adequacy.org - interesting. Linus Torvalds' name has been corrupted to amusing knockoffs, the most absurd being "Leenus Torvaltyos", the evil Armenian hacker

Adequacy specialises in controversy. Generally, the stories that attract the most comments are of a Right Wing Maniac nature; the following examples of some recent controversial (100+ comments) stories only prove how this meme can be used.:

Take everything the site says with a boulder-sized grain of salt - if you find yourself hitting the "Reply" button to defend your beliefs, you've probably been trolled.

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