I ran across a discussion in a newsgroup concerning an incident involving a woman in Louisiana who was brutally beaten by a police officer during a DUI stop. It ended up evolving into a discussion about the characteristics of fascist regimes, and whether the story in question was something of a bellwether for things to come in the realm of human rights violations in this country, especially considering the Bush administration’s unabashed hostility toward certain constitutional rights (read: the Patriot Act’s infringement on privacy rights, as well as controversies concerning torture).
I used to spend late nights browsing the Usenet back in middle school and early in my high school career, but until tonight I hadn’t been on it in years. Like most Usenet users, I came to loathe so-called “trolls.” According to the Straight Dope, Trolls are individuals who bait other users by posting highly controversial and often pointlessly offensive material in the hopes of evoking a heated response. Obviously, the term is a pretty direct reference to the act of fishing, as in fishing for a response. True trolls earn their keep by intentionally misleading others, detracting from the overall health of discussion boards. There are two schools of thought in regards to how people should deal with internet trolls. The first is to simply ignore them. The second is to contradict any false information the troll provides in such a way as to provide little–if any–fuel to his/her fire. Both can be effective, depending on the troll (Straight Dope 1).
As far as the role that Usenet will play in further development of the online community, I think things will remain pretty much status quo. If only because, save the development of access systems like Google Groups, things haven’t changed that much on Usenet since I stopped logging on several years ago. Nevertheless, I’d love to get back into the swing of things in the Usenet community. But I know the kind of time sinkhole that it can be, so I’d have to be careful.
Adams, Cecil. What Is a Troll? Retrieved February 21, 2008 from StraightDope.com.
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mtroll.html
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Sunday, February 10, 2008
For Lack of a Clever Title: Internet Hoaxes
Any techno savvy individual is likely confounded by virus hoaxes and their ability to proliferate amongst internet users at such astounding rates. The vast majority of hoaxes are completely implausible and seem relatively harmless. Snopes.com provides a fairly definitive database of common hoax e-mails, even ranking them in terms of distribution or “popularity.” Among the most popular hoaxes circulating at the moment are rumors of Barack Obama’s radical Islamism (allegedly, he was sworn into office on the Qu’ran and belongs to a church that specifically excludes non-black membership), a warning that entering one’s PIN into an ATM backwards will issue a call to the local police, and a caveat against Starbucks (apparently they refused to send free coffee to G.I.’s in Iraq) (Snopes 1).
While a pretty clear-cut violation of the Boulder Pledge (Ebert 1), for the most part it appears virus hoaxes are toothless. Sure, they take up space. Sure, they end up getting recycled to the point of being infuriating. But if there’s anything genuinely frustrating about virus hoaxes it’s that people are actually craven and stupid enough to bother forwarding them. Beyond that, they’re little more than an annoyance.
Or at least, they were. However, over the past couple years, a trend has begun to form wherein hackers actually turn hoaxes into reality. The jdbgmgr.exe hoax is a prime example. In April of 2002, an e-mail instructing recipients to locate and delete a file titled “jdbgmgr.exe” began to propagate rapidly across the internet. Jdbgmgr.exe is, in actuality, Windows’ very own Java Debugger Manager, and is present on all Windows machines. While not necessarily integral to that OS’s proper functioning, jdbgmgr.exe certainly does not need to be deleted. Over the proceeding months, the hoax’s circulation numbers became astronomical. Fortunately, its actual effects in terms of inconveniencing users were negligible. That is, until a programmer decided to exploit public knowledge of the e-mail to distribute an actual virus. Like the hoax, it instructed users to search out the jdbgmgr executable. But instead of deleting it, the e-mail informed users that the file was vital to certain system operations, and instructed them to instead inspect its properties. If it appeared with a grey teddy bear icon (as it normally should) the e-mail instructed users to replace the file with an attachment to the e-mail, thus infecting their computers. Known as the Recory worm, this virus inflicted inestimable damages to thousands of users (Hoaxbusters 1).
It’s imperative that internet users become more aware of these sorts of issues. Spam and hoaxes may not seem particularly insidious, but they have a way of transmuting if ignored and allowed to fester, as exemplified by the jdbgmgr.exe fiasco.
Ebert, Roger. The Boulder Pledge. Retrieved February 10, 2008 from Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder_Pledge
Unkown Author. 25 Hottest Internet Legends. Retrieved February 10, 2008 from Snopes.com
http://www.snopes.com/info/top25uls.asp
Unknown Author. CIAC Malicious Code Hoax Warnings. Retrieved February 10, 2008 from the Computer Incident Advisory Capability Home Page
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/HBMalCode.shtml
While a pretty clear-cut violation of the Boulder Pledge (Ebert 1), for the most part it appears virus hoaxes are toothless. Sure, they take up space. Sure, they end up getting recycled to the point of being infuriating. But if there’s anything genuinely frustrating about virus hoaxes it’s that people are actually craven and stupid enough to bother forwarding them. Beyond that, they’re little more than an annoyance.
Or at least, they were. However, over the past couple years, a trend has begun to form wherein hackers actually turn hoaxes into reality. The jdbgmgr.exe hoax is a prime example. In April of 2002, an e-mail instructing recipients to locate and delete a file titled “jdbgmgr.exe” began to propagate rapidly across the internet. Jdbgmgr.exe is, in actuality, Windows’ very own Java Debugger Manager, and is present on all Windows machines. While not necessarily integral to that OS’s proper functioning, jdbgmgr.exe certainly does not need to be deleted. Over the proceeding months, the hoax’s circulation numbers became astronomical. Fortunately, its actual effects in terms of inconveniencing users were negligible. That is, until a programmer decided to exploit public knowledge of the e-mail to distribute an actual virus. Like the hoax, it instructed users to search out the jdbgmgr executable. But instead of deleting it, the e-mail informed users that the file was vital to certain system operations, and instructed them to instead inspect its properties. If it appeared with a grey teddy bear icon (as it normally should) the e-mail instructed users to replace the file with an attachment to the e-mail, thus infecting their computers. Known as the Recory worm, this virus inflicted inestimable damages to thousands of users (Hoaxbusters 1).
It’s imperative that internet users become more aware of these sorts of issues. Spam and hoaxes may not seem particularly insidious, but they have a way of transmuting if ignored and allowed to fester, as exemplified by the jdbgmgr.exe fiasco.
Ebert, Roger. The Boulder Pledge. Retrieved February 10, 2008 from Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder_Pledge
Unkown Author. 25 Hottest Internet Legends. Retrieved February 10, 2008 from Snopes.com
http://www.snopes.com/info/top25uls.asp
Unknown Author. CIAC Malicious Code Hoax Warnings. Retrieved February 10, 2008 from the Computer Incident Advisory Capability Home Page
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/HBMalCode.shtml
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Spam, Spam, Lovely Spam!
There is absolutely nothing interesting about Spam. As the name implies, it’s completely bereft of any nutritious (read: substantive) value. In a strictly definitional sense, Spam is “flooding the internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise want to receive it.” Most people are well-acquainted with Spam in the form of e-mails advertising prescription medications, penis enlargement, and a whole litany of products whose legitimacy is, at best, questionable. Without exception, Spam is pretty vapid stuff. In fact, the most interesting aspect of Spam is probably the term’s etymological history.
It’s frequently assumed that people began referring to mass-distributed junk e-mails as Spam as a simple homage to the Hormel lunchmeat, the intimation being that you essentially get nothing of value from either. Brad Templeton of ClariNet.org begs to differ. According to his detailed history of the origin of “Spam” in the internet vernacular, the term is in fact a nod to a Monty Python sketch involving several Vikings singing about Spam (really they just repeat the word over and over) until they’re told to desist. Such an explanation makes a lot of sense: both the song and internet Spam are obnoxiously repetitious.
Templeton also gives in interesting and seemingly accurate account of the communities and incidents that made Spam a household colloquialism. Spam was originally coined amongst so-called “MUDders” (users of multi-user dungeon programs, essentially early incarnations of programs like Second Life) who used it to describe a) flooding servers with data or b) bothering others by typing nonsense into a chat.
Of course, MUDders didn’t comprise a sizable portion of the general populace, and it took the actions of two lawyers and a rogue programmer to establish “Spam” as a staple of the American lexicon. According to Wikipedia, a husband-and-wife team of lawyers–Lawrence Canter and Martha Siegel–won their place in history as the first commercial Usenet spammers when they contracted a programmer to write a Perl script which distributed an advertisement for their services in an upcoming “Green card lottery” to upwards of 6,000 Usenet discussion groups. During the subsequent outcry from users, the advertisement was commonly referred to as “Spam,” and the term has continued to proliferate ever since.
Works Cited
Templeton, Brad. Origin of the Term “Spam” to Mean Net Abuse. Retrieved February 3, 2008 from the Brad Templeton Home Page.
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html
Unknown Author. Canter & Siegel. Retrieved February 3, 2008 from Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canter_&_Siegel
Mueller, S.H. Information About Spam. Retrieved February 3, 2008 from
http://spam.abuse.net
It’s frequently assumed that people began referring to mass-distributed junk e-mails as Spam as a simple homage to the Hormel lunchmeat, the intimation being that you essentially get nothing of value from either. Brad Templeton of ClariNet.org begs to differ. According to his detailed history of the origin of “Spam” in the internet vernacular, the term is in fact a nod to a Monty Python sketch involving several Vikings singing about Spam (really they just repeat the word over and over) until they’re told to desist. Such an explanation makes a lot of sense: both the song and internet Spam are obnoxiously repetitious.
Templeton also gives in interesting and seemingly accurate account of the communities and incidents that made Spam a household colloquialism. Spam was originally coined amongst so-called “MUDders” (users of multi-user dungeon programs, essentially early incarnations of programs like Second Life) who used it to describe a) flooding servers with data or b) bothering others by typing nonsense into a chat.
Of course, MUDders didn’t comprise a sizable portion of the general populace, and it took the actions of two lawyers and a rogue programmer to establish “Spam” as a staple of the American lexicon. According to Wikipedia, a husband-and-wife team of lawyers–Lawrence Canter and Martha Siegel–won their place in history as the first commercial Usenet spammers when they contracted a programmer to write a Perl script which distributed an advertisement for their services in an upcoming “Green card lottery” to upwards of 6,000 Usenet discussion groups. During the subsequent outcry from users, the advertisement was commonly referred to as “Spam,” and the term has continued to proliferate ever since.
Works Cited
Templeton, Brad. Origin of the Term “Spam” to Mean Net Abuse. Retrieved February 3, 2008 from the Brad Templeton Home Page.
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html
Unknown Author. Canter & Siegel. Retrieved February 3, 2008 from Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canter_&_Siegel
Mueller, S.H. Information About Spam. Retrieved February 3, 2008 from
http://spam.abuse.net
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