The Three Horrors of the Internet
Do you remember the good old days of the internet? I don't mean the bubble economy where someone could rake in the big bucks just by running or being in the general vicinity of a web page. Heck, I missed that boat entirely. I'm talking about the days when you could hop onto the internet, check your mail, read some pages, and talk to your friends, and the only aggravation you'd encounter would be that you were probably stuck on an unreliable dialup.
Those days are gone, and the sad thing is, we're never going to get them back. Why you ask? Because of the Three Horrors of the Internet.
The First Horror: Spam. Spam has been around forever really. Heck, it actually predates the internet. It used to be though that you'd just get a few little 1k money making schemes. No big deal, you delete it and move on. The spam of today though is just plain hideous. I probably get a bit more than you do since I have a bit of a spotlight on my address, but the problem is really universal. Not all that much tries to sell you stuff anymore, and the ones that do are just plain sick. It seems not only am I in dire need to have my breasts and/or penis enlarged, but I have a dire need to see young gay Japanese children sleeping with farm animals. Can you imagine if you were walking down the street and a mob of people ran up and tried to hard sell you on this sort of filth? No.
Again though, that sort of thing doesn't compose the bulk of my spam. That would be viri. Way back when, if your computer was infected with a virus, it would do something like delete every file on your hard drive, and you'd learn a valuable lesson about opening random files from people you don't know. Not anymore though. The (relatively) new trend in viri is that when you're enough of an idiot to infect yourself with one, it mails a copy of itself, along with a meg or so of random data off your computer, to every single person you've ever sent mail to before. It might go and kill your drive too after that, but quite frankly I don't care. Because you see, while I am not stupid enough to get myself infected by these things, a thousand or so people who have me in their address books are. So every time a new virus rolls along, I get copies of it sent to me, along with very large file attachments.
The newest trend in viri though is a little number called Klez. It works just like all these others, but it forges its headers. So It sends a copy of itself to one person in your address book, which pretends it's being sent by another person in there. First of all, this doubles the headaches for innocent bystanders like me, because I've got a thousand copies of klez coming in from morons on one side, and a thousand bouncebacks from virus scanners coming at me from the other, because while they were smart enough to realize this random attachment with the forged headers was a virus, they were too stupid to realize that those forged headers mean it wasn't sent from my address. Heck, most of my addies CAN'T send mail. Second of all, Klez will NEVER GO AWAY. With a regular virus, odds are someone will mail you back saying "Hey Einstein! You've got a virus that just sent itself to everyone you know. Clean it off your drive and warn morons." With Klez though, that letter comes to me instead, and I can't do anything with it.
The worst part of this though is how stupid the delivery systems are. I know the name of Klez as you most commonly see it calling itself a "vaccine" against itself. That's on the sophisticated side of the spectrum. Here's a sample I get so often I can recite it from memory.
Subject: Fw: goldfish
hi dear check the atach
see u
File attachment: document.pif.doc.jpg
I don't know what sickens me more. The fact that there's people so stupid they think people will open that file, or the fact that there's people out there so stupid they actually do. And oh yes. people make money off all this.
Yikes... didn't mean to dwell so long on that first point. They won't all be that long, honest!
The Second Horror: Ads. Websites have advertisements. That's a fact of life. Server bandwidth costs money, and you don't pay anything to read a page, so you need ads in there. That's fine. I have a little banner at the top of every page I look at, it's somewhat annoying, but I know someone might be intrigued, and patronize it, making it worth someone's wile to put it there, so they pay the owner of the page, they can afford their bandwidth, I can keep looking at the page, and the circle of life is complete. Everyone wins.
Now here's the annoying part. People realize that there aren't a whole lot of people buying their products thanks to that little banner. They assume, falsely it should be stressed, that they just don't see it. So they devise an ad that's harder to miss, and offer to pay a bit more money to get that one up instead. The costs of hosting pages increase faster than ad money increases, so the person running the server feels this is acceptable, and tada, up goes the bigger ad. To a point, this still works, but again, the problem isn't that people don't see the ads, the advertisers think people just aren't noticing them, and they pay extra to get more in your face ads out there.
At this point in time, the only ads that really pay enough to get you buy are frelling clusterbombs that start with a flash animation popping up on your screen playing a loud annoying midi, and hiding behind your main browser window when you try to close it, then when you do, it opens up three more copies of itself. Oh yeah, and it's probably for a porn site with a similar ad bundle. OK, granted I'm exaggerating a little. Only a little though. Just give it a few months and it won't be an exaggeration anymore.
Oh, and I realize that this page you're reading has no ads, which goes rather contrary to my point. The thing with that is that this page is hosted on the server of a friend of mine who pays all the costs of running it out of her own pocket, out of the goodness of her heart. Will either that or it's some sort of front for a cheesy fight of the week show villain organization, and she's secretly siphoning off my life force energy through here, but that's still a very good deal and I am most thankful for her hospitality.
The Third Horror: Angry stupid people. There are a lot of angry stupid people out there on the internet. An awful awful lot. Generally, they have absolutely no grip on proper grammar, or even a vague approximation of it. They tend to think everyone in the world exists solely to provide them with whatever it is they're looking for (heck, they generally don't even use real words), and of course they get their computers infected with $%@#ing Klez in my general direction. They also manage to make your life miserable in other ways.
I'll give you an example. The other day, I'm just sitting around, minding my own business, with various chat programs open on my computer while I'm off making a plate of nachos or cleaning off the floor or something. When I come back to the computer, I work my way through the pile of instant messages that popped up, and I find the following.
XXXX Viri XXXX:googleshng!
XXXX Viri XXXX:'ello
XXXX Viri XXXX:...must be busy...
XXXX Viri XXXX:bla
XXXX Viri XXXX:rtbgfg
XXXX Viri XXXX:googleshng!
XXXX Viri XXXX:bastard...
I get something like this pretty much every day, usually when I'm not even looking at the screen, usually from someone with profanity in their nick, and usually with much fouler language after they're left hanging for more than five seconds. Oh yes, and a little note on social etiquette by the way. When striking up a conversation with a total stranger, screaming their name at them is not the way to go about it. You're much better off if you introduce yourself politely and get straight to the point, all in one line. Barring that, there's always the old standby of "Hi, are you busy?"
Occasionally one of these things comes in when I'm actually paying attention and not doing anything particularly important, so I'll talk to the person. At this point, I either get a long string of profanity, likely due to taking more than 10 seconds to reply, an interrogation on whether I'm actually me, or the sort of questions I have to answer all every at RPGamer. That last one I honestly don't mind too much, but you're a whole lot more likely to get an answer out of me if you mail it, and you'll also brighten my day by letting me see a non-spam e-mail.
Occasionally one of these things comes in when I'm actually paying attention and not doing anything particularly important, so I'll talk to the person. At this point, I either get a long string of profanity, likely due to taking more than 10 seconds to reply, an interrogation on whether I'm actually me, or the sort of questions I have to answer all every at RPGamer. That last one I honestly don't mind too much, but you're a whole lot more likely to get an answer out of me if you mail it, and you'll also brighten my day by letting me see a non-spam e-mail.
The "Are you REALLY Googleshng?" ones get old fast though. First of all, that's like walking down the street, looking at the name on someone's mailbox, walking up to their door, interrupting them while they eat dinner, and insist that they provide proof that it is indeed their house. You just don't DO that sort of thing. Incidentally, the interrupting dinner part of the analogy is rude no matter what you do, so as a general rule, you shouldn't try to get ahold of me via chat program. Anyway though, back to what I was saying, when I finally prove to these people that I am indeed me, usually by just uploading a text file to this server that says "Yes, I am Googleshng, now shoo." they will often take this little nugget of proof and use it to impersonate me, annoying those around them, who then nag me. Quick tip: If you're wondering if person X is me, here's three ways to tell: Is this person named Googleshng? Is this person generally keeping to themself? Was this person ever involved in you getting a job at RPGamer? The answer to all three questions should be yes if it's really me.
Wow. You're still reading this? Wish I had something to give you in exchange for sitting through all that. I suppose I can link you to this message board here and actually pay attention to what you say on it or something. Be warned though, that server has some sort of future sense and tends to go down for 24 hours just prior to me posting a link to it.
