That's right, poetry.
"I have every fleck another airframe and philosophy have exerted it out our hobo," reads one of the thousands of fraudulent posts found on alt.religion.scientology in a single day. "Reassuringly it spread up a prolongation."
| "Across half every appeal he was a scurvy astride historian, all patenting though half synthesis." |
The bizarre koans, each of them unique and hundreds of words in length, arrive by the thousands, flooding a handful of groups every day. The targeting is diverse. The spam attacks have hit racial hate groups and humor forums alike. Last week, the computer-generated prose took the trendy route of assaulting a Gothic music newsgroup, and even dared to defile alt.fan.karl-malden.nose.
But Usenet's besieged defenders say the most consistent target is alt.religion.scientology, a newsgroup traditionally dominated by discourse critical of the Church of Scientology. Since February the poetry-bot has dominated the discussions, forging the names of legitimate human posters and blindly countering every argument-- pro or con-- with such succinct rebuttals as "Above no cough at no writer every considerate profit addressed," and mind-bending riddles like "Why is another horseman either cytoplasm enchantingly?"
"The more you read them, the more sense they start to make," says Ann Lowe, a regular of the newsgroup. "And that really worries me."
Usenet defenders are countering the assault with automation of their own, crafting programs that kill the "sporgeries"-- a term coined by alt.religion.scientology's Tilman Hausherr "because it's both spam, and forgery."
"My cancelbots run at several locations at different countries," says anti-spam crusader Douglas Mackall, "and they're all running on major transits. Sporgeries come in, and cancels come out.
"I've killed 12,764 in the last four days."
The sporgery attacks are a new and ominous obstacle in the ongoing fight to keep Usenet useable. "Many Usenet groups that were once full of spirited discussion are now ghost towns where only solicitations for multilevel marketing schemes remain," says Jason Catlett, head of the anti-spam company Junkbusters. "But I've never before heard of an automated system for generating syntactically plausible messages. This thing is deliberately trying to fog out the messages, rather than send a real message."
Cancelbots are proving an imperfect solution-- some Usenet servers don't receive the cancellations in time to prevent users from downloading kilobytes of chaff along with Usenet wheat. Whether they're interested in Karl Malden's nose or the Church of Scientology, newcomers to a discussion group need encounter only a few messages about "infinity another militant plus gate have legislated," before dismissing everyone who posts as incoherent loons.
Meanwhile, the perpetrators move like thieves through a steady stream of ISPs. They have sometimes opened an account, posted thousands of bogus messages, and moved on within 24 hours.
"The user signed up and went right at [it]," says David Lamden, owner of the Ohio-based ISP QuickNet, an unwilling conduit for thousands of sporgeries. "We ultimately shut down posting on our Usenet server for a day and a half" while tracing and removing the sporger's account.
Of course, even if perpetrators were identified, they probably wouldn't be subject to criminal prosecution.
"If the ISPs aren't going to sue, there's no law against flooding (alt.religion.scientology) that I'm aware of," Mackall says.
That may be a good thing. Inviting law enforcement to protect free speech brings to mind roosters and hen houses. Technology might provide the answer.
"The sporgers do have a better class of programmers than they did a few months ago," Mackall says. "But they can't beat my bot, so to hell with them."
You know what the mysterious poetry machine would say to that.
"Across half every appeal he was a scurvy astride historian, all patenting though half synthesis."
Good point. Now repeat it 12,000 times.
