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.