Re: Does anyone know ...
From Matthew Thomas <mpt...@student.canterbury.ac.nz>
· alt.ascii-art
· 16 Aug 1999 00:00 · View full thread
· report
[Groups trimmed to a.a-a] Adam Richardson wrote: > > WTF is this >... > Mark V. Deany <mar...@alcyone.com> wrote in message > news:7p3ui4$1u5ui$1...@rn.area.com... > | Blind? Deaf? You'd be Tim's idea in a few ex-cons, a crowd of > | all for Nasa. > | > | Sure I did it -- Ayse, Geoff, Vinnie, and claiming I'm just a > | company of course certain cowardly Brit because Japanese-Americans > | are being a "law enforcement agencies. Peace officers are doing >... Ah, that's the output of a sporge-bot. It's a computer program designed to output text which is vaguely meaningful on the phrase or sentence level, but completely incomprehensible on the paragraph level. Because sporge-bot messages have innocent-looking From: and Subject: lines, and text which resembles ordinary English, they're hard to filter out; so they're one of the more effective tactics for trying to chase everyone away from a particular Usenet group -- why stay in a group if every second message is a huge amount of rubbish which you have to pay to download? Apparently, sporge-bots are used a lot in this way by Scientologists in alt.religion.scientology; trying to kill the group because it's dominated by anti-Scientologists. Or so I've been told. Sporge-bots are also, incidentally, a challenge: a challenge to people's intelligence. If you make the mistake of following-up or replying to a sporge-bot message, under the impression that it comes from a human and wondering aloud what it all means, you tend to make a fool of yourself rather quickly. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, you failed the challenge. HTH. HAND. -- Matthew `mpt' Thomas ASCII ART FAQ: http://cantua.canterbury.ac.nz/~mpt26/art/ascii/faq/
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X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f996b,795ed437ae6c893a,start X-Google-Attributes: gidf996b,public From: Matthew Thomas <mpt...@student.canterbury.ac.nz> Subject: Re: Does anyone know ... Date: 1999/08/16 Message-ID: <37B...@student.canterbury.ac.nz>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 513092971 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <7p3ui4$1u5ui$1...@rn.area.com> <4jyt3.4598$wC.114078@stones> X-Accept-Language: en Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: University of Canterbury (opinions expressed are my own) Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art
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