Phasor Burn

… believe me, I am seriously considering it, as there are some people around here trying to use JMS that really don’t understand it, or networks, at all.

Get out of my way, I’ll implement our message queues as UUCP over TCP with modem backup and we’ll be done with it…

I wonder if there is an ActiveMQ to UUCP bridge? Then their pretty code wouldn’t even know the difference.

Ahh, this brings tears to my eyes of joyful memories, getting shitfaced and playing against Zarquil and losing, mostly.

It was affectionately known to us as “fuckerball” as in “you fucker! you killed me again!”

S: Let’s back up a second. Why did you write adware?

M: I was utterly and grindingly broke for a little while. I started working on SPAM filtering software. That work got noticed by [Direct Revenue], who hired me to analyze their distribution chain. For a little while, the site through which all their ads ran was something like top 20 in Alexa. Monstrous, really huge traffic. Maybe 4 or 5 months into my tenure there, a virus came out that was disabling some of the machines that we had adware on. I said, “I know enough C that I could kick the virus off the machines,” and I did. They said “Wow, that was really cool. Why don’t you do that again?” Then I started kicking off other viruses, and they said, “That’s pretty cool that you kicked all the viruses off. Why don’t you kick the competitors off, too?”

It was funny. It really showed me the power of gradualism. It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

Eventually, instead of writing individual executables every time a worm came out, I would just write some Scheme code, put that up on the server, and then immediately all sorts of things would go dark. It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network.

Interview with an adware author

I would have found this intriguing once upon a time.

Now I just see red.

… That’s right, Ken Rockwell has written a short article on micro stock photography and mentioned iStockPhoto.

Congratulations on making it onto Ken’s radar. ;-p

OK, I suppose I understand why this might be but it sure seems a bit dumb.

With the redesign of the Monster site comes something a bit odd.

Go punch in monster.ca or similar into your browser. Assuming you don’t have any cookies from them, you get… drumroll…. a country selection screen.

Umm, isn’t that what I just did, by tacking on .ca instead of .us or .com or whatever?