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No inspiration today

I need to get out of this rut. [read on...]
Ransom Note Generator

Due to another project I had a bunch of scans of cutout letters lying around, thought I'd throw them together in a script to make those cliche ransom notes that appear in old episodes of McGuyver and Magnum PI. And, here it is, enjoy :-)
UPDATE: I did wonder about posting this. I mean, virtual stationary for making threats, is that something the world needs? The first submission was from a school teacher in England. Seems pretty sincere to me:
Lets keep it.[read on...]
Israel from the Sky

Sand dunes in the Negev. Click to view the full sized image, the colors are amazing. Searing heat sounds pretty good to me right now. [Google Maps Link]

Mount of Olives, with the Dome of the Rock visible on the left. Much of the New Testament is set on the Mount of Olives, some Christians believe this is where Jesus ascended to heaven. Incidentally, the Dome of the Rock is supposed to mark the spot where Muhammed (PBH) ascended to heaven, though he had a cool flying horse while Jesus presumably had to walk.
The west face of the mount is white because it is covered in tombstones, approximately 150,000 of them. According to the Book of Zecharia [Verse 14], the Mount of Olives is where God will start reclaiming the dead at the end of the world, so folks like to be buried there, so that they can be the first zombies to claw their way back to the light on Judgement Day. A good place to be dead, at least when Jordanian soldiers aren't defacing the graves. [Google Maps Link]

Floating fish farms in the sea off Eilat, just because. I have a soft spot for fish farms. [Google Maps Link] [read on...]
Lesotho Gets a New Hat

How freaking awesome is this... Lesotho has given itself a new flag and they chose for their icon: a hat. It's set on a background of green, white and blue stripes to symbolize land, peace and rain. I also like that they removed red from the flag, which previously symbolised faith, but religious nuttiness is a topic for another day. On many African flags red symbolises the bloody and protracted civil wars that produced a new flag. Compare the relative ammounts of red and white - white is peace - on the Mozambiquan flag. Where Mozambique might have a hat they've a badza and an AK-47, succinctly and tragically summing up the last 30 years of Africa's history, peasants and warlords. But not Lesotho, I know they've had their troubles, and they've decided they're going to set them aside and be the nature loving, peaceful dude at the great brawling party that is Africa, chilling in the funny hat and talking about rain while everyone else is brandishing their machetes and AK-47s. Heck, two recent kings of Lesotho were called Moshoeshoe. What a cool name. Sweet, I'm happy now...[read on...]
The Untold Story of Wilmot, Planeteer

The other Planeteers were devastated when Wilmot, with the Power of Chocolate, returned to Belgium to attend fat camp, though Gaia had come to regret giving him his ring. He would sit for hours with his fist in his mouth mumbling 'chocolate' around sticky fingers. His place would eventually be taken by Ma Ti, a whiny savage from South America, and without Wilmot's power Captain Planet lost his distinctive chocolatey smell and turned an unhealthy shade of blue. This worked out well for the show overall, as TBS would have been unlikely to broadcast it with a brown superhero in the early nineties.
Learn more about Captain Planet
Hooray! Captain Planet Coloring Book!
Ted Turner's Captain Planet Site (I think he made it himself)
Durham University Conservation Society [read on...]
New Humanist World Order
I'm studying Mind Performance Hacks by Ron Hale-Evans. Unlike more traditional brain hacking books (Brain hacking for Axe Murderers, The Zombie's Guide to Hacking Brains, Brain Hacking for Dummies) this one focuses on the needs of Mad Scientists, assuming an intelligent reader with limitless megalomania. It provides memory techniques for tasks such as quickly memorizing long strings of binary code - so you're never without your doomsday computer virus, even if the Justice League destroy your secret headquarters and all your storage media.
It provides many brilliant techniques for streamlining work processes, record keeping, brainstorming, note taking and keeping vast quantities of information in your head without forgetting any. The most interesting chapter so far covers Speedwords (Rapmotz), an auxiliary langue - similar purpose to Esperanto - that's very easy to learn and designed around simple, clear expression of ideas.
It's a lot like Newspeak in syntax and implementation, but where Newspeak was supposed to limit speakers ability to think or articulate unorthodox thoughts Speedwords focuses on the efficient processing and communication of ideas. I intend to be fluent in it in a week.
I may even make it the official language of the New Humanist World Order when I get around to taking over the world. In a similar vein, Unitarianism will be the official religion of the world government. By way of a want ad, I have already chosen my cabinet but there are many important positions to be filled. We will need, for instance, a Prelaetor of Microbiology and a Secretary for the Peoples Republic of Sark.
People sometimes ask me why I wish to take over the world, after all; dictatorships have a habit of sticky endings, often involving a lot of unpleasant shooting. Don't worry, I have most of the details worked out. [read on...]
Marmaduke is Watching You Masturbate

Saw today's Marmaduke comic and couldn't help but think of the Ceiling Cat, I've modded it to reflect what I saw. Original at Joe Mathlete Explains Marmaduke. All characters and artwork property of their creators, blah, blah, blah. [read on...]
Brandi`s Menses
What a yummy post title that is. So anyway, today I was going though my logs and I have some traffic from a site called brandimensions.com. It's one of those newfangled market intelligence companies that monitors the blogosphere to track what us consumers are saying about our corporate overlords, so their clients can tweak their ad campaigns and revv up the spin doctors when needed.
They also field an interesting service offering to 'generate buzz', where they'll find otherwise credible bloggers whose opinion can be bought with some cheap trinket or other to write nice things about Brand X so as to influence their readers and other bloggers. It's very simmilar in concept to the Judas Goat.
Abattoirs and slaughterhouses around the world keep goats, called Judas goats, which are trained to associate with cattle and sheep. The cattle can smell fear and death around the big machine with the smiley face on it so they won't go near it by themselves, but when their friend the Judas Goat walks through and comes out OK they follow, and then have a brief but fatal encounter with modern meat technology. What's important is that it only takes one Judas goat to lead a whole herd of animals, against every instinct they have, to sharp steely doom. And the goats can do this over and over, every day. Now imagine the blogosphere equivalent.
Of course, this supposes that consumers are sheeplike and will follow along with the Judas Goat of Brand X, but I'd say that's a fair assumption. People are intelligent and media savvy and all that, but we use our thinking brains on what's important to us, the big things, challenges in our lives, sudoku. We don't think long and intensely about every small choice we have to make, we need our brains working on more important stuff.
Thus if I'm in a supermarket deciding between green Winnie the Pooh socks and black Winnie the Pooh socks (yay! Tigger!) I'm not going to choose very carefully, it doesn't matter much to me which I get. But it matters to the guys who make green socks. Oh yes. Very much. So they have motivation to find a Judas Goat to give free green socks to because the very small influence this person has might well tip my purchasing decision.
I see this as yet another way big companies will try to control us unknowing masses, and must be resisted.
On the plus side, my first thought on entering the Brandimensions site wasn't fnegh at corporate manipulation. My first thought was ''What the hell were they thinking?'' Brandimensions? Brand Dimensions (two words) is a very good name for a company that sells brand metrics, but Brandimensions...
I don't know how it parses for you, but when I see that word my brain spits back Brandi-mensions. Far as I'm concerned, Brandi's a stripper name, and not one of the good stripper names like Tiffany or Jade. Brandi's the one who's 34 and the only reason she's still working the clubs - those that will have her - is because she needs money for her habit. That's the connotation their name brought up, the stretch marks, veins and nasty stray pubes of a past prime drug user on a stripper pole. And the 'mensions' bit? Seems vaguely like it might be to do with womens' periods. If it weren't for the formal white site design I might have assumed I was at a fetish page I didn't want to see.
But maybe that's just me being a perv. Maybe they were hoping the average user would see 'Brandy', the drink, and associate their business with that. So let's think about brandy for a second. It's made from uvas, the reproductive organ of a plant, that is then digested with bacteria or yeast to make cheap wine that doesn't sell and so has all the goodness boiled out of it in a still. That's where brandy comes from. It's an old people drink, very traditional. A good Republican drink. If there were a polar opposite to brown teenage girls doing vodka-jelly bodyshots in a nightclub it would be George Bush Senoir huffing brandy by the fire. (This can in fact be proved mathematically using Georges Gardet's 'Boisson Distribution and Analysis' method).
So they screwed up. Who'd pay for internet advice 'Brandy mentions'? The ruminations of old folk under the influence of brandy doesn't sound like the sort of tech knowledge that builds great dot.coms. It's too late now, they've registered the domain, incorporated a company and they're open for business. With a silly name. And they're going to know that I'm out here - trashing their brand and what they do - because it's their job to know stuff like that.
Haha! Suck it up. [read on...]
Hacking Dating Websites
An approach to giving yourself unfair advantages.If you read junky news media you may have the unfortunate impression that to 'hack' computers means to commit crimes on the internet, a digital equivalent of breaking and entering. Hacking is the skillful, creative use, repurposing or modification of systems. I won't answer specific 'How' questions. To teach someone to hack combination locks you might describe to them a common flaw in their design, you wouldn't just give them the series of numbers that opens one particular lock.
Let's start by considering our goal and the realistic problems we must solve to attain it. Me, I'm a little cynical about dating websites: Yahoo Personals, Match.com, the like. When I was 22 I came to the UK with a suitcase, £500 and a relative's phone number. I didn't know anyone, my social life was a blank canvas, a fresh start. It was clear that the first flowers I wished to paint into the relationships landscape would be attractive, interesting, liberal young women. So there's the goal. I placed free profiles on several dating sites. I used the search function to find members in my area and send them what I thought were witty, original emails that showed off what a 'nice guy' I was - chivalrous, romantic, with a good sense of humor. I didn't just send out one email to lots of addresses, I read the profiles, and thought about these girls, and wrote in a way that would speak meaningfully to each of them. Needless to say, I didn't get a single response. Not even a rejection. Silence. I can't remember where half of those profiles are now, but if one of them ever causes a girl to contact me I'll be most surprised. Pick-my-earwax-in-disbelief type surprised.
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results may be a definition of either stupidity or insanity. And that's what I did, and I'll wager that's what some of you have done as well. Because I was naive and under the ridiculous misapprehension that hot girls would be attracted to nice guys and that the 'dating experts' writing articles on MSN about '10 ways to make a winning profile' actually held some magic key to unlocking limitless opportunities with comely nymphs. Way to think inside the box.
But maybe you still dream of writing that winning profile, and getting an email from the one special girl who's read it, who you'll meet and fall in love with and have a happy fulfilling life with forever after. If you actually want to succeed that dream dies now. The odds on dating sites are massively stacked against the average single guy and using them as they are 'supposed' to be used is an exercise in futility and mental masturbation. They are merely systems in the world which may possibly be co-opted into serving a goal that is independent of them, for which they are not designed. They don't exist because some benevolent website owner wants you to get laid. They exist to make money. No one's rooting for you to get laid, not even your own mother. This is something that you must go out into the world alone and get.
Let's consider the life of a very attractive young woman. She has a lot of options, guys hit on her in Real Life all the time, maybe ten different guys a day (conservative estimate), every day, for years. She doesn't need to use the net to find guys, they pick up on her so much it's tiresome as far as she's concerned. It may then seem counterintuitive that she would go online to meet males, she already has her pick of them. She has a following of suitors, and admirers and a bunch of poor devils she's shoved into that dark, cold, horrible place called 'just friends'. If she has a profile online it's not so she can collect more supplicating 'nice guys' who want to buy her food and flowers and drinks until they end up in a pigeonhole in her glass display cabinet marked 'Lovable Losers Im Not Having Sex With'. I know I'm belaboring this point, it's important. That cute 18yo whose profile you're spanking it to is not desperate to hear from you or 99% of males. She's looking for someone who makes her feel a certain way, she doesn't have rational qualifiers that men can understand (rational disqualifiers, yes). The feeling she wants to experience, the reason she put the profile up, is vague and intangible and men will never understand. It's an emotion we don't get, describing it to us would be like trying to describe a beautiful sunset to someone blind from birth; we won't really understand because we won't ever experience it.
But that feeling's not what she's about to get. It's not unusual for a sexy hottie to over 100 responses per day to her profile. Most will be generic emails mass copy/pasted by guys who send out swarms of them every day, the content of which whill be mostly macho swagger - like you might expect from Justin Timberlake - and the occasional photoshopped picture of the sender's penis. This is not actually a bad strategy if you're just looking for sex, because if you send out enough thousands of pictures of your penis you'll eventually hit a game wench who likes macho swagger, and you won't waste a lot of time 'getting to know' a bunch of girls who aren't in it for a shag. This is because the penis shot makes them self select by not responding to you.
But this is a crude path, and while it may eventually get you laid it won't bring you a relationship with an attractive girl who's also interesting, stable, intelligent, creative, healthy and wonderful. Compared to beauty alone, women of quality are very rare (as Mystery points out). Also this is hardly hacking. We don't want to work hard, we want to give ourselves superpowers.
Hopefully now you have an idea what you must do. When an eligible hottie signs up and creates a profile to dating site X your email should be the first one that arrives in her inbox, or at least in the first three. Imagine she gets 100 responses (mostly our Justin Timberlake impersonators) in the first day. She'll probably read the first three. After 50 or so they'll all start to look the same, and she's not even going to bother opening your email if it's number 93, and replying to an existing profile is probably useless. If it's been up there three months at a rate of 100 per day there's 9000 competitors in the inbox. That's a lottery. Which is a pity, because some guy wrote two pages of heartfelt text to this girl and she's never going to read it.
If within ten days of joining the site she goes on a date with someone she met there then maybe one in 10x100=1000 emails to her achieved its purpose. A 99.9% failure rate.
Since the site has a hairy, sweaty horde of married men watching all the time for new profiles being consistently the first to make contact would require inhuman speed and 24/7 attention, so it's not a job for humans. Some sites offer feeds (RSS or otherwise) so use them. If there's not a feed, make one. Automate a search based on your criteria and location and have a script alert you when a new match turns up. For this I would use GreaseMonkey (easy to use, harder for site operators to spot) both to create the feed and send me a rapid breakdown on a cellphone. If you don't know how to make this, learn JavaScript, then get GreaseMonkey installed and read some AJAX docs to learn how you'd bring in a cellphone picture messaging service, or alternate protocol, there's oodles of things cellphones can do nowadays. You might even be able to run your feed on your phone.
Obviously, there's no need to reinvent the wheel, if the dating site you choose has feeds and email alerts, use them. Set your email address on the site as one that forwards to your phone. Only if the site does not have features you can create will you have an advantage over that hairy, sweaty horde I mentioned.
Right, so now you know the instant a girl signs up who's within certain parameters. But there isn't time to type a response. Spend an evening with the wikipedia and come up with some interesting things to say about interests your matches will commonly have. Get these from analysis of existing search results. Now get some chick crack. Chick crack is stuff like palmistry and horoscopes that girls go moggy for when it promises some deep and meaningful explanation of life in a way that relates more to emotional thinking than rational/logical thinking. Then write/find several funny sentences about the human experience that can be used interchangeably. These will be used to convey a measure of confidence so make them as haughty/arrogant as you would ever be in real life.
Finally, make a PHP script to tie these together. The script takes a few variables provided by your greasemonkey script, returns a response note. Your cellphone beeps, you glance at it, press a button, and the greasemonkey calls the PHP script which provides an email to reply with. For example, you beep 'yes' on your phone to a new profile with interests listed as 'spirituality', 'classic rock', 'synchronized weasel dunking'.
The PHP script returns:
Hello! You know Swami Vivekananda said that learning and wisdom are superfluities, the surface glitter merely, but it is the heart that is the seat of all power. I think that's bull because octopuses have like 16 hearts and no power at all. So who are you anyway? your profile says you're into [synchronized weasel dunking]. Does that mean you're one of those annoying chicks who talks on a cell phone the whole time?
Anyway, I always say that [life is too short to spend it thinking] and [we should experience as much as makes us grow].
So if you want to go on an adventure to feed donuts to the zoo cops sometime email me back. But only if you can think of a better adventure or are willing to dress up nice.
Dave
The first paragraph is spit out anytime 'spirituality' appears in a profile, the rest is randomized combinations of a few stock sentences. Arranged by the script in milliseconds and in her inbox seconds after that. Of course none of it makes any sense, but that doesn't matter. It's unusual, and therefore more likely to be remembered, it's provocative to a degree, so it may get a response. Any response is a good response, if she calls you an asshole she's at least thinking about you and you have a much better chance than the keyboard jockeys and bulk-mailers do. It also demonstrates a confident perspective and some standards on my part, in an unwillingness to put up with chicks who are on their phones the whole time (don’t you just HATE that, grrr).
The purpose of this is to open communications with the girl. Once she knows your name and has invested time and thought replying to you, even just a little, you are in the game and can escalate it from there, with hand typed, offbeat, flirty email. Since it's a new profile she's probably not used online dating before - so she doesn't have a lot of preconceptions stemming from bad experiences with it that would otherwise need to be overcome. More importantly she's not yet tired to the deluge of penis photographs so she may still be optimistic about her chances of getting that feeling she's after. So far so good.
Of course, the majority of girls, even hot girls, will not be the one you're looking for. She may seem like everything you want to a templated profile, but when you get to meeting her she's psycho/on drugs/wanting children/vapid/religious crazy/chav or otherwise not your ideal partner. So you'll have to spend time with a lot of hot girls (things will be hard on you) to find a keeper. So think about cheap date options, like a bag of donuts to feed to the security on a cheap day at the zoo. Be happy, most of the guys on the site will never have this much choice.
Setting this up may seem like a lot of work, but it's fun work and ultimately less effort for more result than you'll get by emailing photos of your Johnson around. Some folks will be uncomfortable with the automated emailing bit, spamming doesn't sit well. It'll help if you stop thinking of this as regular human social interaction. Using a dating site isn't like talking to someone in class or at a coffee shop. It's more like sperm competition in the uterus. Millions of little packets of information swimming out of males into the void with the hope of being the first that reaches a female counterpart to bring two complimentary sets of information together. Profiles not chromosomes, relationships instead of babies. The comparison can be taken a long way. If you only have a few bad sperm you will lose, life has no mercy or compassion for slow sperm. They fail silently and are not forgotten because they were never even noticed.
That's not to say I'm suggesting this is the only way to gain leverage on computer dating systems. With imagination there are infinite possibilities. One reason your profile doesn't work so well for you is that it is a generic, defined thing. It is a dating profile, like an egg is an egg. Up on match.com or wherever it is surrounded by millions of other similar profiles all clamoring to exert themselves as unique and superior to the rest. If you're in an egg factory full of thousands of eggs you're unlikely to notice one in particular over all the rest, unless there's something obviously wrong with it. One egg is much like another. If, however, you step into an elevator and there's an egg taped to the button panel you'll notice. And wonder about it. And you might remember that one egg for quite some time.
So move your profile off the dating site. Google up secretarial colleges, modeling agencies, universities, etc in your area. Is there a nightclub in your area which always has a line outside it that goes right around the block? Print out your profile on paper, find a derelict spot on the block and glue it up with poster paste. Underneath stick a bunch of tear-off strips with your email and profile username. Hundreds of hot young girls are going to be stood around bored waiting to get into the club and not expecting to see a dating profile. Not into bouncy clubber chicks with ADD? Me either. Many colleges, shopping malls, etc often have notice boards for random stuff. Sometimes there's one that never gets checked and has a bunch of out-of-date fliers stuck up. Rave posters from last August, yellowed want-ads, etc. Take the out-of-date stuff down and put up five printouts of your profile. It's easy, cheap, and more effective than it would be gathering dust on the dating site.
Hopefully this article has started a little lateral thinking for some of you who are frustrated with dating sites. The ideas here are not necessarily what will bring you to your goal; it's the way of analyzing systems that creates such ideas which matters. I wish you luck. I won't be joining you on this quest as I'm smitten right now, but I'll be very interested to hear your results and ideas if you feel like adding them in the comments. Oh, and may the force be with you.
Trackbacks: I'm uninteresting and objectionable. Whee![read on...]
Germany Stinks of Onions Today
Breaking news today concerning online privacy in the EU. The situation was already bleak, what with the raft of bad laws lobbied for (the cynical might say bought) by media giants and others. This is worse. German police have raided a string of servers running as TOR nodes. TOR is an anonymous internet communication system developed by the venerable Electronic Frontier Foundation to allow very secure, private communication using multiple encryped links between random points on a network of servers. This is to allow those with limited means and expertise a free, reliable, safe connection. Cyberdissidents in China, those who wish to break information to the media without the NSA knowing, people like that. By design, anyone can use it for any purpose, and all are free to contribute resources to the network. It's A Good Thing.
But it has opponents, the Chinese Government for instance is probably not keen on cyberdissidents being so well tooled. Any government, for that matter, may have issues with secure anonymous communication because it allows absolute freedom of speech. Not legally defined, can-say-things-within-certain-limits type freedom of speech, real freedom of speech, being able to say anything you want without consequence, and to watch without being observed.
There are some poor arguments against TOR. Politicians say ˝What if criminals use the net, we can't evesdrop?˝ (since 9/11 replace with 'terrorists'). People say ˝What if what is said is a lie˝, or worse ˝What if we dislike what is said, how will we stop them saying it?˝. In reality terror networks and organised crime can already communicate under the radar of law enforcement, they have sophisticated methods, TOR won't change that. TOR is for ordinary people, and that's what gives authority the willies, ordinary people not being controlled. No censorship, no imposed moderation, no way to tie an avatar to a person in the real world.
The reason given by German authorities is the absolute worst. They say TOR helps child porn distribution. Probably it does, and that's entriely beside the damn point. For one thing, TOR nodes don't keep logs, so there's no information to be siezed that could possibly help an investigation. TOR is a worldwide network, so siezing German servers won't affect the network as a whole, but will intimidate German admins trying to advance online privacy. Sure, kiddie porn may have something to do with TOR, but TOR has nothing to do with kiddie porn.
Let me explain. Suppose you make photocopiers. Someone could conceivably buy one and use it to make copies of illegal images in the process of distributing child porn. They are then resposible for a crime and it's up to the police to do something about it. You don't go having a crackdown on photocopier manufacturers and technicians. Its not their fault. The kiddie porn was reproduced with a copier, but the copier technology is neutral to it. Likewise email and fax machines are used to distribute illegal images. That doesn't mean we should ban email, or that the role of the police has changed. The role of the police is still to bring criminals to justice, doing forensics on said illegal images, detective work, sting operations, undercover agents, all that cop stuff. Once upon a time, before modems, kiddie porn was distributed by postal mail and cops would intercept it. That's not the world anymore. Not being able to waylay the postman loses the cops a trick, but that doesn't substantially alter the work of the police.
In short, there's nothing to be gained by the police in shutting down these nodes, and they know it. The phrase kiddie porn is bandied around because it's a convenient moral panic. Something the general public is so passionately upset about that it's mere mention drives all rational thoughts from their brains and they take to the streets baying and howling, pitchforks in hand. Anyone with a shred of sane reservation about all this attracts facile accusations of not caring about the children or being 'one of them'.
And that's how I think it's going to go. Supermarket newspapers will run headlines about ˝internet perverts˝ running systems ˝to spread kiddie porn˝, and rouse people up. And politicians will rouse them up further and say ˝This TOR thing is about kiddie porn and it should be illegal˝. And John Q Public won't understand, because he doesn't care for learning about things like cryptographic networks, he's just some guy in a bar watching some suit on TV talk about ˝family values˝. And there goes a shining hope for empowering citizens towards democracy, flushed down a toilet of ignorance and politics. And it pisses me off.
Dammit.
And shutting down TOR won't do a damn thing to stop kiddie porn.
Dammit.
Link to English News Article
Via BoingBoing
UPDATE: Good news, apparently the German police are not pressing charges against the TOR operators, they were following some kind of procedure to do with a larger kiddie porn sting, but not directed against privacy services directly. Detail [read on...]
PS22 Choir - Tori Amos

TurbidBlue writes:
Ever wonder what a 5th grade choir singing Tori songs would be like?
* Purple People
* Carbon
* That’s What I Like Mick (The Sandwich Song)
* Flying Dutchman (Deon/Solo)
* Wednesday
Link to MP3s[read on...]
PhuxOred - UCLA spambot
Happy Friday Everyone. Apparently we have only four more days to live before the nucular war [sic].
In actual news: the rise of the machines. Regular visitors may have noticed a few changes hereabouts. For one, the captchas are gone, enticing spambots to leave their little electronic bowel movements on the blog.
There is a *very* passive-agressive bot trap lurking behind the form. Ordinary comments pass as usual, any that fail a battery of tests get rerouted to a script that tries a number of methods to catch or kill the bot.
So... if you have a comment to make about, say, viagara and mortgages email it to me rather than using the form. The script is intended to total web browsers (legally, no funny business with viruses), please accept genuine apologies if affects anyone commenting in good faith.
Enough disclaimer, let's look at the log :-)
Comment name: Simon
Comment email: [email protected]
Comment http: http://return2india.com/HyperNews/get/forums/shipping/1760/31.html
Comment text: Well done!
Mysql_time: 2006-09-7 11:24:02
REMOTE_IP: 219.37.206.21
REMOTE_HOST: 219.37.206.21
HTTP_HOST: strix.org.uk
HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE: en
HTTP_HTTP_CONNECTION: close
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Comment name: Andy
Comment email: [email protected]
Comment http: http://bioinfo.mbi.ucla.edu/Members/shawnpamel/buy-viagra-online.html
Comment text: Nice site!
Mysql_time: 2006-09-7 11:28:20
REMOTE_IP: 72.232.67.243
REMOTE_HOST: 72.232.67.243
HTTP_HOST: strix.org.uk
HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE: en
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING: identity
HTTP_HTTP_CONNECTION: keep-alive
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Each dot represents one minute of bot time spent receiving image tags pointing to huge jpegs courtesy of google. Check out the URL in the second spam comment, from the bioinformatics server at UCLA (fascinating course, btw). I emailed their admin about it but the contact email bounces. Curious that.
Nuclear war will begin September 12th 2006. Or not. link: BoingBoing
[read on...]
The Sugar Dudes
And then, one afternoon I found myself face to face with the Cupcake Statue of Liberty.

How beautiful she is. All that is American virtue shines serenely from her regal countenance. Welcome, sanctuary and freedom from opression. The downtrodden and persecuted, blessed by her runny sugar eyes as they start new lives in the land of the free. Her mad, foamy mouth whispering promises of opportunity and shigella.
Sing with me. Everyone.
O say, can you seeeeeeeee, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro'the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of brave.
On the shore dimly seen thro' the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, (tenor: CUPCAKES!)
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? (tenor: CUPCAKES!)
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream: (tenor: YUMMY SNACKS!)
'Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Link: Sugar Dude Liberation Front
Ruby Mae kicks teh bottom. [read on...]
Grownups
A panel from xkcd, one of my favorite webcomics. Click to enlarge.
[read on...]
The Gospel According to Joe
One can imagine the internet as a great muddy sea that we surf with our keyboards, skimming it in erratic arcs and bursts, leaving yellow foamy wakes that spread out in a big V behind us, disturbing the lumps and bits. Floating rubbish and plastic bottecaps bob over the wake and it tips up an ancient condom wrapper suspended just below the surface, bouyed by tiny bubbles on it's foil underside, the logo still barely visible.
As I was surfing today a small white object caught my eye. I cut the power and slid the keyboard to a halt, the wake taking me over as I did and pushing the board the last meter to the white square. It was a page of scripture, sodden and stained, but holding together. It's from the Book of Joe, and made me smile:
Chapter I
1. In the beginning was the Invisible, and the Invisible was with the Unicorn, and the Invisible was the Unicorn.
2. The same was in the beginning with the Unicorn.
3. All things were blessed by Her; and without Her was not any thing blessed that was not blessed.
4. In Her was a life; and the hedonistic life was the Pinkness of women and men.¹
5. And the Pinkness shineth in the dark evil atheist conspiracy; and the darkness comprehended it not.
6. There was a man sent from the Unicorn, whose name was George.
7. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Pinkness, that all women and men through Her
might believe.
8. He was that Pinkness, but was sent to bear witness of that Pinkness.
9. That was the true Pinkness, which lighteth every woman and man that cometh into the world.
PDF link to scriptures *whee* strix.org.uk, bludgeoning metaphors to death since 2001.[read on...]
Spambot 1723

With every circuit in its battered robot sphincter screaming in complaint, Spambot No. 1723 squeezes another impossibly sized load into the blogosphere. [read on...]
To Pwn a Spambot
Ah, comment spam, how do I love thee. Let me count the ways... I actually haven't had too much comment spam of late, the captchas and blocklist seem to have kept it out, but maybe I should. This blog should have more comment spam. Why? Because I want to mess with the spambots. I've been reading about the state of the spambot arms race and there's a fair bit of inventiveness on both sides. For one thing, they're getting smarter. Well equipped comment-spambots can now read captchas, operate off botnets parse javascript, convincingly emulate humans and sidestep a whole raft of systems designed to stop them. They're no longer simple little script-kiddie things that make HTTP posts to predictable pages.
If I were to set about making a spambot today, I would not be looking at a script (like most comment-spambots of the last several years), it would be a browser add-on. To convincingly emulate a human the bot should use the same tools and surf similarly to a human. It must produce unique, relevant text in its comments and field a set of working email addresses to reply to verification forms. It should use bugmenot or similar to bypass registration where required. It should use a large number of proxy servers or zombie machines and never the home IP, working gradually and returning often, keeping track of it's progress and regularly checking up on comments posted. It should post *one* comment per site, not thousands, and do so very discreetly. Where possible it should analyse comment and posting trends on a site (time of day, comment length, grammar, etc) to blend in. It would be formidable, and fortunately I have no interest in making it.
Mark my words, bots as I have described already exist and will become common, perhaps in the next two years. And they'll just keep getting smarter. AI will eventually be employed to this end. There's a lot of money in spam and with the blogosphere continuing to double every six months the potential markets become enormous. So long as dumb people continue to buy dumb stuff off the internet (honestly, who are these retards buying all those penis pills, I dont know *anyone* that stupid), this form of spam will increase.
So, as a webmaster, what do you do about bots like that? The thing that struck me most when reading about the development of systems like SpamKarma is their focus on blocking either the bots or the comments, using Baysian filters, P2P systems, etc. The focus is very much a 'close the door on them' approach. It won't work. They'll come through the windows, or dress up as your creepy Aunt Gladys. Baysian filters can be poisoned, and P2P systems can be joined and co-opted (like Kazaa - served!).
My approach is different. Next time a telemarketer calls dont just hang up the phone, try this:
- talk at length about your problems, and how depressing the world is
- say 'No honey, get away from there.. sorry, my 3 year old is playing by the pool/at the top of the stairs/with my gun, be right back...' and see how long they'll hold.
- try to gently initiate phone sex (bonus: with a member of the same sex)
- ask questions. What does this person think about Sex and the City? Low rise jeans? It's really easy to do. They'll start asking questions about you, just respond with something like 'Yes, I could use some home insurance. Seems like a sensible, almost cosmopolitan thing to do. I bet Carrie has home insurance, do you think Sex and The City promotes things like that? What do you think about Carrie? Really, I've always liked Miranda better...'
Savour the fun you have with these poor people, because it won't last. In no time at all you'll be put on *their* do-not-call list, which is shared between companies, and you wont have any more phone marketers to play with. Likewise if you get Jehovas Witnesses every Sunday, answer the door in your underwear and say 'Hey, can't chat, we're playing strip twister. Wanna come join us?'. People mention stuff like that to one another. Pretty soon a whole bunch of JWs will be praying for your wretched soul. But I digress, back to comment spambots.
The approach I want to take with them is basically to invite them in, and have some fun. The majority of these bots are still the older, dumber, script based type that make a lot of HTTP posts and little else. Many methods to detect them already exist, so I'll skip over that. Once one is identified, there's a few things we could do. We can send the standard error/blocked/go away page, but that's boring. Things I'm considering
- Redirect the bot to a blog you don't like with a HTTP 302 response, let some wingnut/racist/evangelical deal with it. Use the bot as a tool to some other end. The site you redirect to should run on the same blogging software as yours for best results.
- send a normal, correct HTTP header, XML document descriptor, and then an endless stream of invalid characters. If implemented as a shell script this will make the terminal it's running on beep endlessly at the user, as well as holding up the bot. It may continue to download indefinitely, halting it's run and if we're lucky crashing the program when it runs out of memory.
- three words: buffer overflow exploit :-) a computer virus, padded a certain way, can sometimes be run by overflowing the memory assigned to some data with JUMP instructions to the beginning of the virus code. As these instructions flow into code memory a process may hit one and launch the virus, possibly giving you control over the spammer's computer. Then the fun begins in earnest. Well written programs are usually immune to this, but I'll bet my hat that most spambots are not very well written.
- 302 (temporary redirect) to another port on the next page viewed by the bot, see if it follows. This is to mess with bots using unsecured HTTP proxies, many of which won't go to some random, high number port. If badly coded the bot may interpret this as non-functioning-proxy, causing it to remove that proxy from its list, making it think it has less resources than it does. Overall, a hindrance and also useful information on how a particular bot works.
And I'm sure there's more. Now, for the current generation of bots, the smart ones that load a page completely, images and all, and parse the javascript. First we'll want to tell actual browsers from browser emulators. This I think can be done best by giving the bot octal or DWORD URLs to follow. Most people have never heard of octal URLs, their use a forgotten memory of the dark ages of the internet, but Internet Explorer and other browsers still understand them. More on this. There is very little chance that a kiddie programmer writing a browser emulator will have included code to handle these, no-one uses them anymore, which lets us know if we've got a bot using an actual browser to load the pages.
If it is, perhaps its vulnerable to a browser exploit? Maybe we can install us a trojan. Another option is to include on a page a huuuuuge image or ten and kill the browser by using all its memory (and make windows machines grind to a halt when we use up all the swap file). A PHP script could generate such an image on the fly without loading it into memory, just writing a picture file to the bot from a predefined jpeg header, so it's no work for our server but a huge load for the bot as it tries to draw the thing. The bot may have a maximum size for stuff it downloads so we'll leave off the Content-Length HTTP header field and let it guess how much data we're going to be sending.
Here's an idea of identifying the source of comment spam. If we suspect a bot, we can include an image in the page that's served off an FTP URL. Bots using HTTP proxies might not also have an FTP proxy set up, so while you can't tell where the webpage requests are originating from, the FTP connection of the browser getting the image might yield the IP address (and thus ISP and geographic location) of the spammer, a good clue to finding the actual person responsible. Then we cook up some mischief for them... a monkey for their back, if you will.
[read on...]
Extracto de Rana
What follows is the most lamentable comedie of Carlos (pictured in the poster below, top right) and his magic frog juice. From an early age Carlos was widely renowned in Barcelona as big dumb galoot. Truly, the boy was dumber than buttered toast, but possessed great physical strength of which he was very proud. By age ten his favorite game was to run up behind small, elderly people and scoop them into the air, shaking them around with joyful cries of ’’Look Mama! Look at Carlos!’’

The many difficulties Carlos faced growing up were only made worse in adolescence when his obsession with bodybuilding led to heavy steroid use. The side effects included roid rage, asthma, and that dreaded Spanish sexual malaise: impotencia. Carlos became violent and depressed. Due to his dim wit he was mostly unaware of his medical problems, but he'd noticed that Carlos Jr no longer wanted to come out and play, which he had attributed to his growing paranoid fear of cats in his bedroom ceiling.
Then, just before his 21st birthday, Carlos met the man who would turn his life around. A wandering Chinese immigrant advised Carlos that all his ills could be cured if he would prepare and consume Extracto de Rana, the juice of frogs. Though it began as a private joke between two asian hobos along the lines of ’’Lets make the crazy Spanish eat stuff’’, our hero soon realised great improvements in his life. His asthma cleared up, he finally graduated seventh grade and found a stable job in the clergy. His sucesses culminated one humid Thursday afternoon when he finally brought the beautiful young Maria del Pescados del Oro to his apartment.
As he laid her down on his gubby single bed he realized with crushing certainty that Carlos Jr wasn’t with the program. Impotencia! Desperate not to lose the moment, Carlos leapt from the bed and banged a blue plastic box of frogs down on his dresser next to the blender.
Maria’s blissful gaze turned to surprise and then shock as he began skinning the frogs, each in one fluid, practised movement and throwing them in the blender. ’’C.. Carlos...’’ she murmured. But Carlos wasn’t listening. He’d never been with a woman before and knew how urgently he must get his magic fix before the moment passed.
’’brerBRBRBRRRBRBRBRRBRBRBRR!!!’’ The blender rattled to life, a deafening, frightening sound in the quiet room. One long burst, and the blades had hardly stopped spinning as Carlos lifted it to his face, greedily gulping down the mashed frogs, with bits spilling round the corners of his mouth and splashing on the floor at his feet. He lifted the blender right over his head to let the last gulp fall into his mouth, the rim leaving a muddy crescent on his forehead.
As he placed it back down on the dresser he felt a rushing, tingling in his loins and knew the cure had worked. His panic turned to triumph and he turned around to face Maria, thrusting with his hips and fists in celebration, ’’vroom-vroom’’ motorcycle noises bursting enthusiastically from his frog-flecked grin.
Maria was backed into a corner of the bed, a sheet clutched tightly across her breasts, her eyes wide with terror, focused on a mangled frog’s leg clinging with tiny dead claws to Carlos’ thrusting member, swinging with the movement of his body. This was not the strong young shepherd she had met at the Iglesia de la Espátula. Still making his ’’vroom vroom’’ noises, Carlos advanced towards the bed. Maria hesitated one moment more, then screamed and ran naked from the room, out the apartment by the front door. She kept running until finally caught and subdued by police.
News of the event spread far and wide throughout Spain, first as a comic headline then as unverified reports as the gullible and desperate tried this remedy for themselves. A following grew and sought Carlos out, helping him to finance his very first sala del milkshake de la rana, or frog milkshake parlour, and soon it was a chain with locations as far away as Madrid and Sevilla, where you can try extracto de rana out for yourself.
What you have just read is a true story, which I made up. Visit the Red Spot to watch the process of frog juice making. It’s horrible but you... can't... look... away. Until you see the dude drinking it, that is.
And remember the Ceiling Cat.
[read on...]
Idiotarod 2006
This priceless photo is from the Idiotarod 2006, New York's annual running of the idiots which I hope to take part in someday. It's like the Iditarod raced with shopping carts instead of dog sleds and teams of homeless people volunteers for huskies. More details from precisionaccidents.com:
Best in Show: Team COBRA (Carts of Brooklyn Racing Association)
1st Place: Double Down Red Squad
2nd Place: Running With Scissors
3rd Place: Hawaii 5 - 0
Best Sabotage: Scout Troop 666
Last Place: The Burned Out Burners
Special Judges Awards:
Best Bribe: Barrel O' Monkekyz
Purple Heart Award: Bar Back Mountain.
Most Disgusting: Mayo Clinic/Chum Buckets
Best Weaponry: Five Horses of the Apocolypse [sic]
Best Shopping Cart Liberation Story: Team Jack Ass
Link
More Pictures[read on...]
Gannet - Just Because

This is a Northern Gannet, Morus bassanus. Gannets are a species of boobie. Yay! Boobies! [read on...]
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