Word of Nathan

Maddox doesn’t scare me, but his fans do.

I’ve been following Maddox for, I suppose, the last year and a half, ever since one of my friends sent me the “I am better than your kids” link. It was hilarious, and made me laugh my ass off (well, not quite, but it’s still damned funny). I’ve always appreciated it when people challenge taboo subjects, like making fun of kids or Christopher Reeve.

For the first time, though, I actually found something frightening on Maddox’s site. Specifically, this page.

I can understand that it’s great to see exceptionally wielded sarcasm, and that Maddox tackles a lot of topics that most people are too proper to breach. However, some of this shit scares me. Maddox apparently has a whole army of would-be lovers, mostly males, from the names under those pictures.

Lovers, you ask? Seriously - why else would you spend time in photoshop drawing up original artwork and sending it in to Maddox, mostly featuring Maddox as your hero butchering helpless weaklings? Do you really think that this is going to help you score with Maddox? Does it provide you with something to get off to? I don’t understand it.

In addition, the quality of the artwork sucks. It reminds me of stuff I used to draw in 4th grade when I was a violent little mofo with a tendency to scribble dead stick-figures on the back of my homework while I was sitting in Ms. Oyster’s English class. It’s really, truly terrible. The only two things that I can appreciate are the pumpkin carving and the beef jerky pumpkin - those truly kick ass. The rest freaks me out.

I guess what I’m getting at is that if we ever hear in the news that Maddox was gangbanged by a bunch of antisocial young males who have the artistic ability of a 3-year-old, I won’t really be surprised.

I gotta say, the internet has changed.

I remember the days of using Powwow and FreeTel, of the “chat with a random person” actually being useful on ICQ.

These days, the only time I get contacted by a random person online is if a) they’re inserting V1@GR4 spam in my email, or b) they think I’m someone they know. It occurred to me tonight that the landscape has changed, because now the only time someone contacts me randomly is if it’s the virtual equivalent of a wrong number.

I think it’s a trust thing, though. I remember the few times I tried to contact someone randomly in the last year or two, I was greeted with general suspicion. It seems like the media and the paranoid parents have finally managed to make the internet a place where any stranger is to be treated as the stranger-with-candy. Or maybe it’s the co-option of instant messaging technologies into the corporate environment; can’t have our busy worker bees bombarded with messages from potential industrial spies.

Before I move on, let me stop one line of criticism before it starts - I have plenty of offline friends, make more on a regular basis, and have no problems doing so. I have a girlfriend, am well-adjusted, and social, so just give up - I just trashed your argument before you really thought of it.:-)

Why do I care? Because I actually miss the days of chatting it up with someone I don’t know, getting a window into another culture or hearing about current events from far away first-hand. I also don’t really enjoy visiting Yahoo! chatrooms for a weak version of that experience. I’m sure it’s just nostalgia, but it feels like the internet I actually liked has disappeared.

Not that there are very many people I met back in those early days with whom I still converse. I’ve grown, and I’m sure they have as well. People grow apart, have different interests, make different friends. Still, there is that handful, the five or ten people with whom I suspect I’ll be talking even five or ten years from now. It’s that which makes me miss the old days - that suspicion that out there are people who I’d genuinely benefit from talking to. As I said earlier, it isn’t that I don’t have offline friends, but during the time that I must spend online as part of my work and research, it’s nice to feel a sense of community while in cyberspace. I read and type fast enough that it’s not a serious distraction to talk to someone intelligent and interesting, and it hardly takes any time at all to block someone I don’t like.

Take it or leave it. Things being what they are, I’m sure that the people with the open, curious mindset who actually like communicating with the world (and not just their little close circles of friends and family) have migrated elsewhere, away from ICQ and the other mainstream IM communities. My only curiosity is, where would elsewhere be?

Compare.:-)

(Image sources: http://www.tartcity.com/misspiggy4.jpg, http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/nm/20041013/lthumb.mdf727086.jpg)

Of all people out there, I’m a quite vocal opponent of spamming - that is, unsolicited emails usually advertising some product or other. I know this problem won’t go away anytime soon. Indeed, almost every day I spend 30 minutes to an hour cleaning out literally thousands of spam messages from dozens of inboxes, so obviously I don’t consider this fun.

Recently a small non-profit association I’ve helped out in the past contacted me with an interesting problem - they were unable to send messages to Cogeco users. A bit of research revealed that their SMTP server was on an IP address blocked by SORBS, a DNS blacklist service that a number of ISPs apparently use when determining what messages may or may not be spam.

Further research revealed that this non-profit was using a shared server from a US-based hosting service. The IP address in question supported at least a few dozen different sites owened by different people - standard shared hosting fare. Okay, nothing unusual, so I started looking into getting the IP address removed, since the non-profit was not a spammer and this was hampering their ability to contact members of their association.

Imagine my surprise when I discover this delisting process:

” The effected IPs (the ones used to send the spam) will only be delisted when US$50 is donated to a SORBS nominated charity or good cause. The charities and good causes SORBS approves will not have any connection with any member of the SORBS administrators either past or present. ”

Now, this immediately disturbed me, so I did a google search for the definition of ‘extortion’ and came up with this. “Extortion is a criminal offense, which occurs when a person obtains money, behaviour, or other goods and/or services from another by wrongfully threatening or inflicting harm to his person, reputation, or property. Euphemistically, refraining from doing harm is sometimes called “protection”.”

Now, some people online have argued that it isn’t exactly extortion because SORBS isn’t actually blocking your emails; rather, it’s the particular ISPs that decide to use SORBS as a guideline for mail-blocking.

This, to me, is bullshit. If extortion does include the reputation element, then SORBS is definitely damaging your reputation by implying you are a spammer, and then requiring you to pay money in order to remove the spot on your reputation. The fact that SORBS doesn’t get the money is irrelevant. This is a bit like the mob not trashing your business so long as you support a political party they approve of, or some other thing. What if for whatever reason you disagree with the SORBS-handpicked charities?

In addition, this particular blacklist service is totally unfair to small organizations and individuals who can’t afford dedicated servers of their own. Most teenagers, and probably a lot of adults, run websites totally out of a sense of community, and if they’re unable to use some of the resources of their website such as the SMTP server because of some asshole spammer using shared space, it’s hardly their fault. The same applies to the masses of computer-illiterates who get backdoored and zombified for the purposes of spam - sure, they’re hard on the community at large, but the problem isn’t the computer user, it’s the spammer. $50 may not be a lot of money to a big corporation but for a minimum-wage working person, that’s a quarter of a week’s wages.

To sorta sum up, I think SORBS took a good idea and a motive of protecting the community, and ran WAY too far with it. I’m sure the charities listed by SORBS are quite happy, but I doubt anyone else is. By basically extorting money in exchange for reputation, SORBS is revealing itself to be the selfish bully of the anti-spam battle, hurting anyone who happens to get in the way in its zeal to be seen as a leader in anti-spam technology and DNSBLs. To those fighting the spam battle on the ISP and hosting ends, I say fuck SORBS and use something a little more fair to the small guys caught in the crossfire.

I was torturing myself earlier today by spending a few minutes listening to the appallingly mindless shit pouring from the mouths of Bush and Kerry in their recent first debate. At the same time, there were a few other thoughts turning in the back of my head, and the debate, as it were, brought things to a bit of a head.

I counted the use of a few terms in the debate. Granted, my count might be off, but a bit of an underlying theme emerges.
- secure: ~7 times
- protect ~15 times
- safe: ~15 times

Why the hell are Americans so obsessed with being safe? Seriously, people. Whatever happened to the America that produced the old West, those kickass pioneers who duked it out with the kickass natives, everybody kicking each others’ asses until nobody could sit down anymore? Now, it seems like both Bush and Kerry are more concerned with finding the softest pillows in the world to place under their fat, stinking butts.

Both Bush and Kerry go on about killing terrorists, protecting America, making America great, blah blah blah. I have a bit of a curiosity. See, if it was up to me, I just want guns. Big guns. If I see a terrorist on my way to work doing something heinous, like giving old ladies wedgies instead of helping them cross the street, I will use my big guns to paint the sidewalk with terrorist brains. So what happened to the rest of Americans? You’d think with us producing stuff like gangsta rap and the Matrix, we must still have a collective national grip on what it means to be badass. Instead, the military can’t keep enough soldiers and mothers hide their childrens’ faces when grainy videos of Osama Bin Laden in his bedsheets pop onto the television screen. Indeed, sales of air freshener have recently gone through the roof due to Americans shitting their pants every time the President decides to play with his little terrorism alert scale.

One of my friends asked me recently, what’s with Americans being so willing to bend over and lube up every time Big Brother says “National Security?” See, it’s the safety thing. What I think happened is this. In 1776, America kicked off the training pants and said “I’m a big boy now.” In 1860, America was doing its teenage rebellion thing. In 1914 and 1942, America was in its prime. Now? America is at the geriatric stage, having to pin hugeass diapers on with fucking safety pins because they can’t control their bowel movements every time someone says “terrorist.”

In his speech, Bush said that September 11 changed the way America must look at the world. I have a different suspicion. I think September 11 revealed that Americans can no longer roll with the punches. Instead, we cower in the corners, create departments of homeland security, make our borders so tight that even our friends can’t get in, and now we’re so fucking scared that we bury our heads in the sand and pray for strong leadership to protect our vulnerable asses from terrorist rapists. What do I think needs to be done?

Easy. I think Americans should get over it. ‘Terrorists’ are mostly pissed at us because we have troops in their countries interfering in their business. As long as we do that, they pretty much have every right to try to hit us where it hurts, and we should stand up and take it instead of trying to reshape the world into some sort of fascist wet dream where everything is perfectly secure for us. I know if it were the other way around, I’d be out there with whatever firearms I could find taking potshots at invading soldiers. So call me a terrorist. No, I think we should try to do more useful things…maybe develop space ships that don’t blow apart, or perhaps try to make sure that a quarter of our children are not growing up in poverty. Is it a pipe dream to think that the first duty of a state is to take care of its people?