Rusty Foster
 | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies. (August 2012) |
Lawrence Calvin Foster III,[1] commonly known as Rusty Foster, is the founder of Kuro5hin, and the creator of Scoop, a collaborative media application used by several websites. He is widely known in the weblog community for running a donation drive which netted over US$39,500.[2][non-primary source needed] However, the Collaborative Media Foundation that Foster promised to set up with the money never materialized, and Kuro5hin.org was hosted for free by sponsors. As of mid 2016 the Kuro5hin server was taken offline and moved to a new host, and the backup was not to be found. Instead there is now a parking page for Gandhi.net in France. Some claim that Rusty Foster staged his own death [3] in an attempt to get rid of the CMF scam and hide Kuro5hin from his political career. Later it was revealed on Kuro5hin that a user named Tiber had called in the fake hoax and was instantly banned from Kuro5hin by Rusty and his diary about it edited.
Foster later entered the political arena, partnering up with left-wing weblog moguls such as Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos. Foster served as the CTO of Armstrong Zuniga, a consulting firm formed by Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong in 2004, but the firm has since been dissolved. Daily Kos operated on Foster's Scoop software until February 2011[4][non-primary source needed], as do many smaller sites.[5][non-primary source needed]. Scoop los out to Wordpress and custom Django projects
Rusty promised he would make Kuro5hin a read-only static website [6] "Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone forever, but it may be a little while before it reappears. There's a very good chance that it will reappear in the form of an archive of static html pages though, not a live community. So if you'd like to, this is probably a good time to mourn what it was, although in that sense K5 has clearly been over for years." Out of the dead website came two alternatives. Dontsuemebro.com and Kr5ddit with one using Scoop and the other one being written from scratch in Python/Django to be like a combination of Kuro5hin and Reddit. As of now, over 211 days since K5 went down, Rusty has not put it back up in any form, not even the Internet Archive.
He has a wife, Christina, a daughter, and a son.[7][non-primary source needed][8][non-primary source needed]
In 2013 Rusty Foster's Facebook account was subject to a 'prank' reporting him dead, drawing the attention of a number of major news outlets.[9][10][11]
Since 2013, Foster has written occasionally for the New Yorker magazine, including on the Healthcare.gov debacle.[12]
Foster now writes a newsletter called "Today in Tabs", which is syndicated on Fastcolabs and Newsweek.[13]
References
- ^ Search Corporate Names
- ^ The fundraiser ends, and the next stage begins || kuro5hin.org
- ^ "Rusty Foster Isn't Dead - Slashdot". tech.slashdot.org. Retrieved 2016-11-30.
- ^ http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/DK4_FAQ
- ^ http://scoop.kuro5hin.org
- ^ "RIP Kuro5hin | Hacker News". news.ycombinator.com. Retrieved 2016-11-30.
- ^ rusty (2004-12-18). "Elinor Rose Foster". Kuro5hin. Retrieved 2006-11-04.
- ^ rusty (2005-01-15). "Baby as clothing". Kuro5hin. Retrieved 2006-11-04.
- ^ Hamburger (2004-12-18). "Facebook could have a big problem on its hands with 'memorial page' vulnerability". The Verge. Retrieved 2013-01-04.
- ^ Popkin (2013-01-05). "Dead on Facebook: Pranksters kill accounts with fake death reports". NBC News. Retrieved 2013-01-05.
- ^ Timoty (2013-01-05). "Rusty Foster isn't dead". Slashdot. Retrieved 2013-01-17.
- ^ Foster (2013-10-21). "HEALTHCARE.GOV: IT COULD BE WORSE". Retrieved 2013-10-24.
- ^ Lynch, Matthew (20 March 2014). "Hate-reading with Rusty Foster". Capital New York. Retrieved 28 December 2014.