the great multiplier that is incompetence

[David Nicol]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Adam Shand <adam at shand.net>
Date: Jan 5, 2007 11:17 PM
Subject: [wordup] The Grim Ripper
To: wordup at lists.spack.org


This is quite long and fairly geekish but it gets better the farther
down you get.  For those that run web sites with images and have dealt
with hotlinking ... it's straight up heelarius.

Adam.

Via: Joel Sadler <null at spack...>
Source: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000278.html

January 03, 2007
Freedom, Justice and a Disturbingly Gaping Ass

I'll be nice and warn you that this essay links to disturbing images.
That is, THIS ENTRY LINKS TO VERY DISTURBING IMAGES SO IF YOU LIKE
EVERYTHING TO BE A VARIATION OF KITTENS LICKING EACH OTHERS EARS YOU ARE
GOING TO THE WRONG PLACE. PLEASE GLIDE ALONG QUIETLY TO THE NEXT OR
PREVIOUS WEBLOG ENTRIES WHERE YOU WILL BE A MUCH HAPPIER PERSON.

Everyone gone? OK, good.

I mentioned in a previous entry about the happy-go-lucky adventure of
the massive downloading of a single image on textfiles.com, one of a
cheery Grim Reaper holding a glowing hourglass. It was quite popular,
and I talked about the situation where I had seen downloading of this
image go from nothing before April 2006 and it had quickly unseated all
other comers by a factor of 100 to become the most downloaded file out
of the millions in the textfiles.com family of websites. This was, I
mused, some sort of payback for when I was a youth and a leech, and so I
let it go. Incredulity was the order of the day in the comments, with a
few people speculating that since my website doesn't know where the
source of my files always are, I might in fact be considered compelled
to do this sort of charity work to atone. Others thought that I was
brave to allow hotlinking at all.

Both, it turned out, were wrong. Idly sitting around during the holiday
season, I went to go check how that popular ol' Grim Reaper image was
doing. The answer: very very well for Mr. Reaper. Not so well for
Jason's bandwidth.

I said that in September of 2006 he was downloaded 212,000 times. For
the month of December, he was downloaded 401,000 times. This was going
to get a lot worse, I could see that immediately.

The problem wasn't just academic anymore, either. You see, I've been
lucky enough to host with a number of good providers over the years, who
have treated me well, and eventually I have outgrown them. When that
happens, there's a mad scramble to find new hosting and I have to often
host it locally, to the detriment of everyone. Additionally, I am
scrambling for the privilege of spending lots of my own money. While
this is all fine with me, the "service" I am doing by allowing the
hot-linking of images by Myspace is really no service at all.

Myspace is roughly the 4th most visited English language website,
according to reports. It is owned by News Corporation. News Corporation
is fucking huge. My dad used to work for News Corporation, so I am very
appreciative of that but not to the point of happily whistling a tune
while they bleed my generous hosting company's connection dry.
Everything, you see, has limits. I hope it's not like hearing there's
scant evidence of Tooth Fairies to know that I have some of my own.

So, sleepy with egg nog and considering what to do next, I decided I
would replace the image.

Initially, I thought an ad for Notacon or Blockparty or the documentary
would be good. But the fact is, the vectors just don't line up. People
who are on Myspace are hardly going to be swayed by an ad for something
one way or another, and it felt icky.

So I goatse'd them.

If you don't know what I mean by "Goatse", then let me go on the record,
right now, as saying this is just what Wikipedia is good for. You can go
and read up on the history of what "Goatse" is. If you don't have the
time or patience and yet still don't know what I mean, let me say that
it is a disturbing image of a gentleman (it is clear he is a fellow)
using almost yoga-like skills to display the eye-watering sight of the
inside of his own rectum. If that sounds horrible, it is. It is truly,
truly horrible.

This is interesting on its own levels; I don't know why we didn't think
this through in the early stages of Internet, but the fact is so obvious
that to hear it makes you think you always knew it: the pipes can back
up sewage. The same open door that gives you a world of knowledge and
communication is also a piping hot shit-gun of horror. Like looking to
see if a rifle is loaded by peering down the barrel, your screen can
turn from a breathtaking visage of insight into a Gatling Gun of
mind-scarring infinity-pain within the literal blink of an eye.

Or, as they say: ONCE YOU CLICK, YOU CANNOT UNCLICK.

If you are truly fine with this, then go ahead: See what I replaced the
Grim Reaper with.

Anyway, on with the show.

Assuming you find the idea of some errant myspace numbnut faced with a
gaping ass entertaining, then you will become first giggly, and then
fall aside laughing to know that within an hour I had "goatse'd" 400 people.

Within two days it was 25,000. Twenty five thousand.

We are now up to nearly a hundred thousand viewings of this file in its
new ass-o-rama version. I am sure that through libraries, schools,
colleges, cubicles, offices, warehouses, the sound of someone's throat
reflexively making a sound not unlike "Uuuuaaaaaghhhghh" has filled the
air. The amount of time lost in horrified stares and frantic jabs at the
keyboard and mouse to get away, far away must be into the realm of hours
by now. Maybe days! Days of slack-jawed horrified faces staring into a
big square eyeball. I don't know, that gets a chortle out of me. I'm
easily entertained.

But after the initial thought of this Towering Tidal Wave of Tweener
Terror, I started to consider how it had gotten to be so bad in the
first place.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Any entity interested in what is called "market share" must eventually
expand out into regions of people far outside those would normally
patronize that entity. Not to ensure survival, but to ensure growth -
which eventually supplants survival as a metric of health. An excellent
example of this is air travel: whereas the original passengers on a
plane in the first decade of air travel had a reasonably good chance of
knowing how to operate that plane (the pilot and his passenger, two air
enthusasts trying out a new machine), we are now at the point that we
can have 300 individuals inside a jet and less than a handful could
possibly operate the thing. That is, less than 1% of the people inside a
machine, whose lives depend on that machine and who are paying to use
that machine, have any idea how to make it work. This is, ultimately,
fine: air travel is very safe and we have lots of safeguards in place so
that generally the whole shebang doesn't explode. Still, you cross a
line and the trends will be for even more people packed into an
airplane, not less.

This isn't evil, per se... it's just how this whole growth thing works.
And eventually, this came to the Internet. As college students were
dumped onto Internet connections, they faced, essentially, a sea of
pilots; people trained to operate the craft who followed some levels of
lore and rulesets to keep things running smoothly, if jarringly
Libertarian. As these college students flooded the gates around the
month of September, they would eventually get assimilated into the Way
of Things by a month or two, or sulk away and watch things from afar.
Either way, it kind of worked.

And then America On-Line dumped everybody onto the Internet at once.
This phenomenon was so marked in Internet history that it even has a
name: The September that Never Ended.

There's a story from that time, which I love to tell, which will have
meaning in this entry shortly. Someone put up a webpage about America
Online, criticizing the company and the service it provided. It
advocated untoward behavior on AOL and generally represented a typical
"slam site", which I myself have been known to take part in from time to
time. After the time that AOL was fully loosed on the Internet and
sending people willy-nilly around, this site got a letter that I think
really underlines the problem with this sort of culture class. An AOL
moderator, that is, a guy whose job is to look for troublemakers on the
AOL service, contacted this webmastrer, and told him he was violating
the AOL terms of service and to cease his website immediately. As far as
this mop-head was concerned, AOL now "owned" the Internet and anyone on
it, even someone running a site not in any way connected with the AOL
service (except in discussing them) was under its jurisdiction. The
webmaster did the logical thing: he posted the letter for all to see,
garnering ridicule and some thoughtful chuckles.

Myspace, and sites like it, also have to take a tactic similar to the
airlines. The somewhat large barrier-to-entry of hosting a website has
already been reduced a great deal, but social websites remove it
entirely; you only need an e-mail address to be able to host and provide
content. And now the whole part where you have to learn enough HTML to
be able to make it render in a browser is wiped clean. It is possible,
very possible, to go from Tweener at Hot Topic to Webmistress of the
Dark and Foreboding Webpage of Sin without ever using a single bracket.

Is this bad? On the one hand, people who would never have had a voice
before are given one. On the other, that voice is occasionally droning,
illiterate, and borderline schizophrenic. And multiplied by tens of
thousands. However, Myspace (and News Corporation) has market share, and
that's the primary goal of the whole activity.

Part of hosting a website is providing the content. While it's possible
to use the internal templates to at least indicate what hobbies you have
and whether you like to smoke. folks are naturally inclined to upload
pictures, change the color of the background, and add design schemes
that make Holly Hobbie look like Prada. To help them, a little cottage
industry of templates are now around so that instead of making that huge
step into markup languages, patrons can simply copy and paste designs
into their own pages.

Here, then is the source of this sudden interest in my website's
artscene section; someone created a "design" that directly hotlinked to
the artscene.textfiles.com website and used the image as the background.
The design, by the way, is absolutely horrible, and I don't know how
anyone ever found it readable in the first place; the default font color
was red, with a line through the text! This said, I'm sure I have a
number of pieces of clothing that call into question my qualifications
for a fashion police badge.

Soon after I converted the image from Grim Reaper to Grim Ripper, one of
the thousands of people getting eye-lashed by the image saw the
"textfiles.com" mention at the bottom, figured out how to mail me, and
did so:

 Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:45:40 EST
 From: Motorjames1 at wmconnect.com
 To: jason at textfiles.com
 Subject: myspace hacking

 Hello. Someone is hacking into myspace profiles and claiming to be
 "textfiles".com.If you are unaware of this, they are using your
 web-name to be quite offensive. I thought you might like to know.
 It's a pretty childish, sophmoric stunt {easily cleaned up,} but
 annoying.If it happens to actually be you doing it, You should really
 hope we never meet- you will end up looking worse than the photo you
 have been posting-

This is a fascinating character study on several levels. First of all,
there's the immediate assumption that someone "hacked" myspace. The fact
that I used the deadly spell "mv" to shift a few things around on a
machine I own is not a possibility as far as Motorjames1 is concerned.
Next, just to make sure all bases are covered, he threatens me.
Ostensibly he is indicating he will punish me by doing something
traumatic to my ass. Perhaps, however, he merely means he will do
something to my face so that it will be as horrifyingly offensive as the
Goatse ass. Either way, I question his diplomatic skills.

Communiques were quiet on my side for days, and I assumed that people
were figuring out how to remove the image and replace it with something
else, which is the "cleaning up" that motorjames1 had indicated. Nobody,
it seems, was inspired to seek me out. So, I went on a little
fact-finding mission of my own. Checking the referrer logs of my
webserver, I found places where people were writing helpful notes to
their friends to perhaps figure out how they too had been "hacked".
Granted, a lot were in the form of "WHAT T FUK WITH U BACKGROUND??????",
but the essence was clear.

Hotlinking in itself is not so bad, in my book. I certainly get people
hotlinking to my textfiles and directories, skipping over my
introductions and context to provide others with information that I'm
hosting. I even have people link directly to images on the DIGITIZE
sub-site to prove a point about catalogs or old computers or so on. But
in all these cases, the hotlinking is in the course of providing
knowledge. Someone is trying to inform others about a subject and my
library is being utilized to share. I feel like this is right and good,
and I encourage it.

But what is being done by myspace is that this data is not being used
for knowledge. It's being used as decoration. Beyond that, it's being
used for inefficient, meaningless, taste-lacking decoration, just to
give someone's poorly-written "website" a "dark feeling" by putting a
visage of death on it. Maybe that's an odd, arbitrary line to draw, but
after being at the ass-end of that line, if you will, I think I have to
consider drawing it.

I was idly wondering today where to go with this, whether to simply
refuse to allow myspace pages to hotlink to any images whatsoever, when
I recieved this in my inbox:

 Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 20:46:11 -0800
 From: HotFreeLayouts COM
 To: mailbox at textfiles.com
 Subject: hardcore porn pic - take down asap please

 hi, you really should take down ASAP

 www.textfiles.com/artscene/mirrors/GRAPE-DEMO-ARCHIVE/graphism/rs/razorback/
 razorback-the_grim_reaper.png
 somebody is flodding our server with that / posting it on myspace
 etc.
 --
 HotFreeLayouts.com Abuse Team

And here we are, back full circle. "Hotfreelayouts" is one of the sites
that offers up these design templates for downloads (along with ads, of
course), and these fellows, the pilots of the current generation if you
will, were utterly unable to do anything about my "flod". Or my flodding.

Consider, then, what was going on here. Myspace, a site which is being
used by people who don't know how to host or design, ends up with a
gaping ass provided by a design firm which can't understand the nature
of hotlinking (or of spelling), who have written to someone who can
host, design and spell but are doing so with a demand that this person
take action.

And this, my friends, is ass.

Posted by Jason Scott at January 3, 2007 12:24 AM

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