On the State of the World

A quick little rant about the shit we have to put up with these days. I just want to know why it is that we/I/the consumer is always on the defense.


We have to install spam filters so that we don’t get a flood of porn spam and virii every day.


We have to keep ourselves updated so that malicious worms don’t use our computers to knock out other computers.


We have to fuck around with our referrer logs because sites like tranny-sex-shemales .com are flooding us (website runners) with fake referrers in what is lovely called “referrer spam” (which I had to deal with recently and Kasia has been dealing with) and create rewrite rules and whatnot.


To see how bad the referrer spam is I did a ‘tail -10000 access.log | grep “GET / ” > file’ (look at the last 10000 hits to my website and grab any that are requests for the main page (hardly used)). Of the 1486 hits, they broke down like this: 25 bots and crawlers, 65 other “valid” requests, and the rest (that’d be 1396 for you keeping score) were referrer spam.


People are now using challenge response and whitelists for email simply because the relatively simple act of sending and recieving email is now dangerous enough to create an exclusive club for it.


You have to run programs like ad-aware to clean your system from spy-ware that is installed by unscrupulous websites flaunting shit like gator and whatnot (while crying “we can’t survive with out this advertising revenue) which infects your system with a bad click of the mouse while surfing.


The internet is going to hell in a handbasket I think. I remember when I first started, hell, even a couple of years ago none of this was a concern, now it feels like every day someone else starts chasing you around with a car and then blaming you for not running fast enough. What the hell is going on? Can it be stopped? Reversed? Or are we (the normal people) going to simply keep on this escalating war up with them (the advertisers, spammers, gator assholes, virus writers) until the entire thing melts down?


I can honestly see people starting to move away from the “web” as we know it and back to the old protocols like NNTP (usenet), gopher, etc, or even using things like RSS for email and communiction simply because they’ve been forced out from using the web as we know it. That isn’t right.


Thank god I’m going away from the computer this weekend.

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Category: Rants

6 Comments on “On the State of the World”

  2. I agree with what your saying Arc’. Thankfully, right now, its only a nuisance to me (thanks to spamassasin, konqueror, linux), but its only a matter of time and……
    I. Cringley had a very interesting view on this a little while ago that has really stuck with me. He wrote this over 2 years ago, but its just as applicable.
    http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802.html
    Basically he talks about how the internet is becoming unusable and mainly because of buggy M$ software (I know….out comes the Linux zealot in me). His idea though, is that this is somewhat intentional. Microsoft, with cooperation from big media, could implement a new network protocol that wouldn’t need any approval by the IETF or whomever. It could immediately become a defacto standard simply based on the number of windows boxes out there. It would be “secure” because M$ would be behind it. Give it a read if you haven’t or are interested. Sometimes Cringley’s off his rocker. This time I’m not so sure.

  3. Shaggy, this is true, I’m relatively untouched because of spamassassin, bogofilter, a firewall to block port 80 requests from referrer spammers, etc. My point is that we shouldn’t have to go through that, and whatever is coming in the future.
    I remember Cringely’s article actually, and it’s got a lot of good points. I think it’s not so much buggy MS software that gets me, but the advertising bastards that exploit anything (see hotmail for a nice example of an MS controlled system that sucks) to push their message in your face. Free speach and all that shit, but there’s a certain point where you want to jam a large panther up these guys’ ass and light it on fire ya know?

  4. What you are seeing is not a product of bad code or a malicious multinational company… it is the product of human nature.
    Humans not only shit in their own house, they shit on the own furniture and then fling it at others.
    Which is why we have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with regards to the internet.