Fun-da-Mental/Playing with spam

[hirez]

As mentioned here, Lycos seem to have taken Paul Graham's idea for reactive spam-filters and built them into a screensaver.

You'll need Flash to navigate the site, but I certainly found it impossible not to press the big friendly button marked 'Annoy a spammer now'. (Ok, I had a mental image of a Heath-Robinson arrangement of rope, planks and sprockets that repeatedly walloped yon spammer with a cricket bat, but then I'm simple like that.) The screensaver's pretty smart, too. It pulls its data live from one or more SURBLs so you're always sure that you're costing the right people money.

Elsewhere, I discover that the joke about the overly-religious taking the BSD daemon slightly too seriously isn't a joke after all. Though to be fair to the original poster, he's polite in his objection and the fix is simple. It's just... You what? Especially when we discover that some fundies object to Mozilla because the mascot is a dinosaur...

Comments

[dr-atheist.livejournal.com]

I object to the Windows logo as I work in a basement with no windows. It's like they're taking the piss or something

[quercus.livejournal.com]

It's M$oft, they are.

[dr-atheist.livejournal.com]

Well yes, fortunately I only use windows at work for basic functions (email, docs etc) and a way of connecting via telnet to VMS sessions.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I don't know about this BSD thing. Imagine for a second that there was an operating system you really liked but when it booted up there was a picture of Mrs. Thatcher.

[dr-atheist.livejournal.com]

this is probably just me, but I find it hard to read BSD withouth my head making it BDSM for some reason! The mix of that and Mrs. Thatcher is truly excurciating :S

[steer.livejournal.com]

Y'see -- that's even better. If the OS booted with a picture of Normo Tebbs in a GIMP suit being whipped by Mrs Thatcher in PVC then you'd certainly have a religious conviction you wanted that picture set to off.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. But I'd just go fix it and get on with my life. Or arrange for the thing to never be rebooted or run it headless.

Although I'd spend quiet moments wondering about the architecture of Tebbix. Instead of the processes terminating when they finished, would they get on wee bicycles and beetle about looking for work? Would the scheduler then award the next free job to the lowest bidder, but then hand it system resources out the back door? If the printer driver stopped working, would the rest of the OS send in the polis and persuade the cd-rom driver to take up the slack?

[steer.livejournal.com]

There would be no central job scheduler -- if you really wanted a job you would get on your bike and sort it out yourself. As for system resources, none would be allocated. The efficiency of the market should take care of these things, we don't want a culture of dependency you know. If the printer driver stopped working it would be sent to the poor house.

[redcountess]

So did I when I was new to the interweb and had friends that frequented newsgroups for both! :-)

[reddragdiva]

Oh dear fucking God. And they GAVE IN TO THE FUCKWIT.

Now if it was Mozilla, they'd keep communist imagery all through the website and product for four or five years.

[redcountess]

He gave a reasonable explanation (he does systems for his church group) and an easily implemented fix - I gather it was other complaints that caused them to pull it completely from the loader.

Don't underestimate superstition - remember, my mother burnt my Black Sabbath cross lapel pin and a Venom t-shirt, and it is still so deeply ingrained that I got a horrible fright the first time I saw the Bob of the Churh of the Sub-Genius in flames screensaver on your machine!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

TBH, they've probably only bothered with a splash-screen because Winders has got one. That was the only reason the Linux mob bothered. (2.1.x kernel, IIRC. There was much stropping about it)

On any box where I need to watch the console, all I want to see is the OS coming up right, and if it's not coming up, enough information to make a start on fixing the problem.

I'm more fascinated in the story behind the refusal to use Mozilla. Do people really find depictions of dinosaurs and other non-biblical objects disturbing/blasphemous?

slippery slope

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

Wonder how long it'll be before there's nastier versions of said screensaver that claim to be annoying spammers but are really DDOSing the innocent.

Re: slippery slope

[hirez.livejournal.com]

They're already there. Great botnets of trojaned Winders boxes vomiting spam, 419s and more trojans at any server that'll listen.

Those can be fixed near-instantly by transparently routing port 25 to the ISP swervers a la Freeserve.

(Ok, the AV and despamming load on said swervers would become an interesting back-of-envelope problem, but certainly not terribly difficult to fix.)

Re: slippery slope

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

I know, but making it elective doesn't strike me as all that bright. Gets around all those pesky attempts at securing machines, raises the spectre of, say, fundies downloading screensavers that block up anti-creationism sites. It's all a bit law of the jungle.

Re: slippery slope

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Perhaps because it's gone a lot jungle-like in the last few years.

I'd really like a sensible, thoughtful, Guardian-reading internet where one could discuss one's differences and come to a mutually satisfactory compromise. Like the one we used to have. Like people used to pretend Usenet could be if only everyone would play nicely.

No fucking chance. The only thing the spam-types care about is money. If their bandwidth gets caned and they have to pay the hosting charges, then it becomes quickly uneconomic.

That's a huge 'if' admittedly. I'd like to see documentary evidence of the thing working, but the only way to find out is to participate.

If, as has been mentioned elsewhere, the spam sites moved to servers on trojaned DSL-connected machines, then it becomes the cable-provider's problem.