Wikipedia articles; old ATT flamewars
I spent nearly the whole day Saturday browsing Wikipedia articles from their list of unusual articles. It is an excellent diversion. Some of my personal favorites, in the order they appear on the list:
So, Usenet flamewars -- ATT was invaded a couple times by the Hell Flame Wars group, with the main posting names appearing being Big Daddy Zeus, Tim Thorne / Skippy, Pinkkky, and Rob Cypher. Although, the Cypher invasion was later I think, and he may not have been associated with them. (Also, Cypher appeared more than once but it was clearly not the same guy using that nick every time.)
For one thing, the "justification" for the meow war is... so amazingly stupid. It actually gets ten times stupider if you read the Meowers' own account of why they did it. Granted, the story itself is a troll, but I suspect the self-satisfaction is genuine. They, and the HFW, and anyone using Hipcrime's news agent to wreak havoc on Usenet, intentionally ruined the leisure time of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of other people, often permanently destroying the communities that had formed in targeted newsgroups. I haven't spent more than thirty seconds thinking about it since it all went down, but now that I do... I am seriously at a loss for words. It's mind-boggling that anybody could be so mean, and that they could get so much enjoyment out of doing it.
Hipcrime's own website (hipcrime.com, naturally), where you can still get his newsagent lists his reasoning for creating and releasing the agent, and it's completely self-contradictory to my mind. He says that he made it *both* so users could get back at people who are trying to maintain order by taking control yourself *and* so if people are spreading chaos you can take control and restore order. I guess that almost makes sense if he's an anarchist, and just wants everybody to have equal capabilities, but... still, it's hard to wrap my head around the idea of supporting both censoring others who you disagree with *and* fighting against censorship by people who disagree with you.
I was also surprised to see that Altopia, the newsgroup provider who all of the miscreants used to perform their abuse, is still functioning and still seems to have almost exactly the same Terms of Service it did back then. I actually respect a lot of the policies Chris Caputo has set up there, but I can't comprehend his stance on what counts as net abuse and what doesn't. He says they don't allow cascading, excessive multi-posting or flooding, but also says "Readers inconvenienced by numerous off-topic or inappropriate postings does not constitute a flood..." The actions of the Meowers and HFW crew could hardly be described as anything but cascades, EMPs and floods. Yet Caputo/Altopia is infamous for completely ignoring complaints about the behavior of his users.
When the HFW attack on ATT finally stopped (in 1999 or 2000 probably) I got the impression from this post that it was due to the actions of William Levinson, a guy from alt.animals.dolphins that had also been on their attack list. He created his own account at Altopia -- Arioch -- and abused the policies in a way that forced Caputo to change them, thus neutering HFW. Or, at least, that's what I thought happened. Thorne tells it differently, but most of the story seems the same. I had forgotten about de Silva's cancelbot, though.
Interestingly, in casually looking through the Google ATT archive the number of posts from the flamers doesn't seem all that high. They may have had an X-No-Archive:Yes header in a lot of their posts, I suppose, or they may have been filtered by some mechanism before appearing in the archive. I would guess that the supercedes that plagued us for a while aren't archived, either, but I don't recall what their content was (I think it was just random characters a lot of the time) so I'm not sure how to search for them.
- Illegal prime: A prime number which is also computer code for software that cracks the copy protection of DVDs, software which is illegal to possess or distribute under the DMCA. Does that make this number itself illegal?
- Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.: What about that don't you understand?
- Dord: Arguably a synonym for "density" now thanks to mistakenly appearing in a dictionary.
- Voynich manuscript: A mysterious, indecipherable European manuscript.
- Cosmic latte: The color of the universe.
- Lenna: The name of a standard photograph used to test image compression algorithms. It's the top third (with no naughty bits) of a 1970's Playboy centerfold. In the late 90s, the model attended an image processing conference as an honored guest. (The sonnet linked to at the end is cute.)
- Meow Wars: An infamous Usenet flamewar. The Meowers never spent that much time in alt.toys.transformers -- it was normally the "Hell Flame Wars" group bugging us -- but this article was part of a large tangent in my reading yesterday (on and off Wikipedia) where I tried to piece together why all of that shit happened and why it stopped. See below for a little discussion on this.
- List of problems solved by MacGyver: In order of their solving.
- Pen spinning: Articles like this are one of the reasons that I think Wikipedia is way better than any "real" encyclopedia could ever dream to be.
- Walking like an Egyptian: In case you wondered, "The 'Egyptian' walk has no basis in fact."
- World Famous Bushman: A busker in SF who holds a fake bush in front of himself and then scares people who walk by.
- Atlanta Nights: A purposely-terrible novel written by a group of authors to prove that a particular vanity press was actually a vanity press, despite its claims to the contrary.
- Suicide Squid: A comic book character that doesn't exist.
- ABC-DEF-GHI: Big Bird's song/reading of the entire alphabet as a single word. This song was on one of the Sesame Street records we had when I was a kid, and I can still pronounce the word efortlessly. (Ab-ca-def-gy-jeck-el-ma-nop-quer-stu-vix-iz.)
- As Slow As Possible: A song by John Cage which is being performed on a church organ until the year 2640.
- Michael Larson: A contestant on the game show Press Your Luck who won huge amounts of money by memorizing the patterns of the electronic prize board. I totally remember watching these two episodes with my brother; we were amazed. I had no idea that he had figured out a pattern, and thought the amazing event was lost to history. Guess not. It's kind of infamous now. Also, apparently the guy was a huge loser. Kinda sad.
- Tommy Westphall: A mentally retarded boy on the TV show St. Elsewhere. Apparently most of the television shows produced in America in the last several decades all exist only within his imagination.
- Mike the Headless Chicken: Lived for 18 months after having his head removed. I'd heard of him before, but nothing more than that.
- Owen and Mzee: A hippo and a tortoise who, apparently, have become friends.
- McMartin preschool trial: A lovely illustration of false memory and the unreliability of personal testimony, especially in children. Hundreds of kids claimed to have been abused... and to have seen witches, giraffe-beatings, and secret underground tunnels. And somehow it was all taken seriously for a long time. The trial stretched from 1983 to 1990, and the prosecution actually claimed that it was a case of ritualized Satanic practices. I'm still amazed that sort of hysteria existed in modern America, even though I was old enough that I remember some media discussion of it.
- Sergeant Stubby: The US army's highest-ranking dog.
- Boston molasses disaster: This has long been my favorite disaster. Wonderfully satirized by the Onion: Pudding-Factory Disaster Brings Slow, Creamy Death To Town Below.
- Fan death: South Koreans believe that leaving the fan on in a closed room overnight will kill you.
- Snowclone: Not directly on the list of unusual articles, but found through it. It's the name for idioms with replaceable "variables" like "X is the new Y".
So, Usenet flamewars -- ATT was invaded a couple times by the Hell Flame Wars group, with the main posting names appearing being Big Daddy Zeus, Tim Thorne / Skippy, Pinkkky, and Rob Cypher. Although, the Cypher invasion was later I think, and he may not have been associated with them. (Also, Cypher appeared more than once but it was clearly not the same guy using that nick every time.)
For one thing, the "justification" for the meow war is... so amazingly stupid. It actually gets ten times stupider if you read the Meowers' own account of why they did it. Granted, the story itself is a troll, but I suspect the self-satisfaction is genuine. They, and the HFW, and anyone using Hipcrime's news agent to wreak havoc on Usenet, intentionally ruined the leisure time of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of other people, often permanently destroying the communities that had formed in targeted newsgroups. I haven't spent more than thirty seconds thinking about it since it all went down, but now that I do... I am seriously at a loss for words. It's mind-boggling that anybody could be so mean, and that they could get so much enjoyment out of doing it.
Hipcrime's own website (hipcrime.com, naturally), where you can still get his newsagent lists his reasoning for creating and releasing the agent, and it's completely self-contradictory to my mind. He says that he made it *both* so users could get back at people who are trying to maintain order by taking control yourself *and* so if people are spreading chaos you can take control and restore order. I guess that almost makes sense if he's an anarchist, and just wants everybody to have equal capabilities, but... still, it's hard to wrap my head around the idea of supporting both censoring others who you disagree with *and* fighting against censorship by people who disagree with you.
I was also surprised to see that Altopia, the newsgroup provider who all of the miscreants used to perform their abuse, is still functioning and still seems to have almost exactly the same Terms of Service it did back then. I actually respect a lot of the policies Chris Caputo has set up there, but I can't comprehend his stance on what counts as net abuse and what doesn't. He says they don't allow cascading, excessive multi-posting or flooding, but also says "Readers inconvenienced by numerous off-topic or inappropriate postings does not constitute a flood..." The actions of the Meowers and HFW crew could hardly be described as anything but cascades, EMPs and floods. Yet Caputo/Altopia is infamous for completely ignoring complaints about the behavior of his users.
When the HFW attack on ATT finally stopped (in 1999 or 2000 probably) I got the impression from this post that it was due to the actions of William Levinson, a guy from alt.animals.dolphins that had also been on their attack list. He created his own account at Altopia -- Arioch -- and abused the policies in a way that forced Caputo to change them, thus neutering HFW. Or, at least, that's what I thought happened. Thorne tells it differently, but most of the story seems the same. I had forgotten about de Silva's cancelbot, though.
Interestingly, in casually looking through the Google ATT archive the number of posts from the flamers doesn't seem all that high. They may have had an X-No-Archive:Yes header in a lot of their posts, I suppose, or they may have been filtered by some mechanism before appearing in the archive. I would guess that the supercedes that plagued us for a while aren't archived, either, but I don't recall what their content was (I think it was just random characters a lot of the time) so I'm not sure how to search for them.