strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive

Adventures with an unreliable narrator.

Dec 14 03: noise/signal

My webhost’s reporting system provides me with, among other things, a list of sites who have been directing traffic into this website. I was looking at my site’s statistics this evening and was intrigued to discover that this weblog was suddenly the focus of all kinds of new attention. Or something. A number of the referring URLs I’d seen before—largely flash-mob reporting sites (remember those?) and weblog trackers. But then there were these others: All kinds of domains I’d never heard of. Who were these people? I started checking them out.

Shortly, I realized that I’d been baited. There was nothing to be seen anywhere about my own site. On the other hand, I got an eyeful of all kinds of other material.

Welcome to the latest frontier of spam. It’s not enough that they fill your email inbox. It’s not enough to use webcrawlers to plaster your blog’s comment threads with ads for hott barely legal teenz n0w!! Now they’re filling your server’s traffic analyzers with bogus information about who’s linking to you—purely so you’ll become curious and follow the trail back to yet another cartload of advertising for animated lolitas, physiological enhancements, mortgage providers, nude celebrities, and pirated software. What had been a useful tool for webmasters is now just another frelling billboard, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Soon, it would seem, they will be everywhere. All aspects of human civilization will become lost behind a drifting field of pop-up ads. They’ll meander across your computer screens, your televisions, the insides of your eyelids. They’ll be embossed upon your bedsheets by nanotech built into the laundry detergent. The fillings in your teeth will ring with jingles and whispered come-ons. Cut open an eggplant and the seeds will spell out slogans and URLs. The reflection in your bathroom mirror will critique your anatomy as you step out of the shower.

Any information on how to set up filters in my traffic analyzer can be left in the comment threads and will be accepted with great joy and gratitude. In the meantime, I’ll be plotting a firebombing campaign against a number of entrepreneurial types. Anybody who wants to join that can leave me a note as well.

Commentary

Bring on the information war! We will surpress your pop-ups, reject your packets and deny your DOS attacks.

It has begun …

posted by Bob, Dec 14 03 10:34 PM

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