Ah, sorry. did not know that.

I'd appreciate it if someone explained how it worked to me. whether here or in a PM. I swear I would never do that and have absolutely no interest in doing it, but I am quite curious as to how it (the bot) works.

Well, take a look at the user profile of empegbot, the source is listed there.

I didn't look at it intensively and I don't know JavaScript anyway, but it seems to basically post a reply using the the normal web interface for replies of the BBS to inject its random texts to the BBS.
If you want to know how he could change the original posters BBS name with the "eb does not reply to anyone" text, just take a look at the HTML code of the normal reply page. All necessary input is right in there.

BTW: This could also (and pretty easily AFAICT) be used for a nice add on to the UEBBS: It could be used to provide a mail interface to the BBS with some lines of perl, leading to an immediate (bi-directional) link between the BBS and a mailinglist. Another TODO on my list, I guess.

cu,
sven

One of the things you said made me stop and think. You said I'm on a witch hunt. This is an interesting analogy, and I hope it's not true.

Well, you get to decide if it's true, both by your intent and your actions.

It does remind me of an off-topic thing. We have a digital message sign on one of the buildings here which faces a major street about a hundred feet away. It's used for announcements, as well as for "artistic purposes", like poetry. Pictures exist as do movies.

Just after it happened, a university vice president was quoted as saying they were attempting to find and deal with the culprits. I sent a pissy email to the university president (as an alumni, not as an employee, of course) accusing them of being on a witch hunt, and saying it was one of the reasons this school paled to certain others.

A month later I got a piece of mail which proved to me that our president reads his own email. It said, in its entirety, literally:
"there was and is no witch hunt"

To think I actually felt guilty the last time for starting crap with him. It sucks that he got banned... but it was his stupidity that did it... not the powers that be. I think a lot of toleration was dished out in his case. I don't blame Tony or any other admin in his position. Then again I butted heads with him on more than one occasion so can I vote twice?

Sorry to take this totally off topic, but this is one of my most significant pet peeves:

... as an alumni, not as an employee ...

That's ``as an alumnus'' (or ``alumna'', if you were a woman). ``Alumni'' is plural (as is ``alumnae'', which can be used if all of the people referenced are female).

Which leads me to may most significant pet peeve (of which you are most definitely not guilty): the singular of ``alumnus'' is not ``alum''. This has been showing up all over the place, even in nominally well-edited journalistic papers. ``Alum'' is an aluminum salt. (Remember those old Tweety and Sylvester cartoons where Sylvester's mouth shrank down to nothing?)

And again, sorry.

Don't be sorry, you're right, and I should (and did) know better.

Say you see a guy with a gun in a holster. Sure there exists the possibility that he might get bored and just decide to deliberately shoot you, but it isn't that likely

The likelihood depends on the history of his actions in the past. Is he Jesse James, out to shoot people just for kicks? Is he Wyatt Earp, sworn to uphold the law and protect the innocent? Is he Robert Morris*, armed with a different sort of "weapon" out to experiment and play a small prank that gets out of hand and causes untold damage?

Paul, based on the PMs we've exchanged, you're a bright kid and I like you personally. But the thought of you loose on this bbs armed with just enough html knowledge to be really dangerous, combined with your past history of irresponsibility and uninformed contentiousness, frankly scares the hell out of me.

tanstaafl.

*You won't know who Robert Morris is, of course, and you won't bother to look him up either as you won't consider him to be important to you any time in the next 10 minutes or so. Your loss.

"You won't know who Robert Morris is, of course, and you won't bother to look him up either as you won't consider him to be important to you any time in the next 10 minutes or so. Your loss."

Well, I did look it up and I know who R. Morris is now....

"On November 2, 1988, Robert Morris, Jr., a graduate student in Computer Science at Cornell, wrote an experimental, self-replicating, self-propagating program called a worm and injected it into the Internet. He chose to release it from MIT, to disguise the fact that the worm came from Cornell. Morris soon discovered that the program was replicating and reinfecting machines at a much faster rate than he had anticipated---there was a bug. Ultimately, many machines at locations around the country either crashed or became ``catatonic.'' When Morris realized what was happening, he contacted a friend at Harvard to discuss a solution. Eventually, they sent an anonymous message from Harvard over the network, instructing programmers how to kill the worm and prevent reinfection. However, because the network route was clogged, this message did not get through until it was too late.

Computers were affected at many sites, including universities, military sites, and medical research facilities. The estimated cost of dealing with the worm at each installation ranged from $200 to more than $53,000. The program took advantage of a hole in the debug mode of the Unix sendmail program, which runs on a system and waits for other systems to connect to it and give it email, and a hole in the finger daemon fingerd, which serves finger requests (see Finger). People at the University of California at Berkeley and MIT had copies of the program and were actively disassembling it (returning the program back into its source form) to try to figure out how it worked.

Teams of programmers worked non-stop to come up with at least a temporary fix, to prevent the continued spread of the worm. After about twelve hours, the team at Berkeley came up with steps that would help retard the spread of the virus. Another method was also discovered at Purdue and widely published. The information didn't get out as quickly as it could have, however, since so many sites had completely disconnected themselves from the network.

After a few days, things slowly began to return to normalcy and everyone wanted to know who had done it all. Morris was later named in The New York Times as the author (though this hadn't yet been officially proven, there was a substantial body of evidence pointing to Morris).

Robert T. Morris was convicted of violating the computer Fraud and Abuse Act (Title 18), and sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, a fine of $10,050, and the costs of his supervision. His appeal, filed in December, 1990, was rejected the following March"

Apologies for the length but it is interesting stuff...

OK then. I am sorry. I didn't think making the few attachments were harmful, in the sense of them actually hurting the BBS, and ditto with the BOT. But if it makes things any better then I apologize. No, I didn't think it was a big deal and I still don't, but it obviously is to you guys, so I am sorry.

For anyone interested in how it works, it opens up, say you have it set to 3, 3 random threads from an internal list. Then it picks a random number of sentences, say from 1 to 8, then for each of those sentences it picks a random sentence format. I only had made 3 different formats so far. For example: plural noun + plural verb + propositional phrase + plural noun. So it would pick a random plural noun from a list in the program, a random verb appropiate for plural nouns, and random propositional phrase, and then another random plural noun. So you might get something like "dogs eat with empegs." You could make lists for every type of word - singular nouns, articles, gerands, whatever. And you could make very complex sentence srtuctures. Anyways, then it would write the sentences to the corresponding text box on each reply page, then it would change the value 'replyto' to 'eb replies to noone' and the preview value to 0 then it would submit them. That's it. You had to open it up every time you wanted to make your 3 random posts. If you wanted to have it automatically post, then you'd have to add some code that makes it reply at a certain time of day and leave it open all the time.

Anyways, I attached (don't worry, it's not too big, I don't think it'll crash the BBS) a program that'll change the reply message for you if anyone is interested.

Well the most damage the empegbot could have done was make a shitload of posts, but in that case you could just modify the program to automatically delete the posts.

In reply to:

---

the singular of ``alumnus'' is not ``alum''. This has been showing up all over the place, even in nominally well-edited journalistic papers. ``Alum'' is an aluminum salt.

---

I disagree. According to my dictionary (Random House Second Edition) and in my understanding, "alum" is an accepted informal abbreviation for "alumna" or "alumnus." Certainly it does not have a place in "journalistic papers," but its use is not restricted to references to an aluminum salt.

Stu

You could probably modify it to do PM's too.

This post right here proves a few things to me. One is that you are actually very much like I was just a few years ago. The reason I wrote the posts I did here to you was not to insult you in any way, but try to steer you towards the right direction at a dangerous point of your life.

As I talked about earlier, my curiosity still gets me from time to time, and causes major incidents (the Code Red incident). As I said before, I have my job because I was sorry for what was done, and I moved on. I spent enough time showing the IT folks that I never had the complete virus, and couldn't have spread it. What I did do though had the potential to lock up an IIS thread for a while. The rest of the time was spent apologizing and convincing them that I would be more careful in the future.

The path I have taken has led to an awesome paying job, and great computer experience at age 22. I've been in the field since I was 16, and have only had one fast food job for a period of 9 months. Hitting the "adult" work force at that early age did force some things into me, and one was realizing how the world works. You don't walk up to your boss and say that you are right, he is wrong, and argue the fact for 30 minutes. You accept that the world is not perfect and move on. If you don't, you create a hostile work environment, or worse, a loss of a job.

As Doug mentioned, even an innocent program like the worm Robert Morris made can land some brutal penalties. Learn to tread lightly in life, and things will go much better for you. Use your talents properly, and your likely to impress someone who will make your life even better. I can tell you have the ability and the needed enthusiasm, just tweak your attitude a bit and things will go much smoother.

I hope to see you stick around here and try to add something to the community. I learned my lesson quickly here that this community wasn't like most others out there, when I started one of the early hot threads. Things have changed quite a bit for me since then, and I think the community would agree that my contributions have far outweighed the "trouble" I started early on.

I do think this is the last chance the community is really willing to give you though. Better make good use of it.

And if you need help, feel free to contact me, I have quite a bit of HTML and Javascript experience, webmaster is one of my previous jobs before I headed down the IT path.

OK then. I am sorry.

Apology accepted.

Well the most damage the empegbot could have done was make a sh*tload of posts

Right. I think it might have been a little extreme to compare your program to that first Morris worm, I don't think it could have done that kind of damage. If you chose to let it run rampant, though, it could have made the BBS a complete, unavigable mess.

Here's another analogy that might help...

A friend of mine once said that, as a prank, instead of TP'ing someone's house, it was better just to leave the roll of toilet paper on their front porch. Indicating that if you'd wanted to, you COULD have TP'd the house, but you didn't.

Although you probably didn't mean it as a threat of vandalism, the impression that the bot gave was the same as leaving the roll of TP on the front porch. That's why everyone is so upset about it.

I get the feeling that you're beginning to understand what's going on here and why we're so protective over this online community.

Hey, I have an idea...

One of the reasons that people online feel that they can get away with pissing other people off is anonymity. If someone can hide behind a screen name, without people knowing who they really are, they're more likely to behave in an antisocial fashion. This is one of the reasons Usenet is filled with so much crap and flame wars these days.

What would you say to actually filling out your BBS profile? Real name, real email address (spam-proofed of course), ICQ number, everything. I'm not asking you to enter your address and phone number, but just enough information so that people could reach you outside of the BBS if they had to.

What do you say?

v'nice

You are within your rights to disagree, but you're still wrong.

You'll find that some dictionaries are more conciliatory than others, and the Random House folks seem to lean in that direction, possibly more than most. Personally, I find that ``alum'', assuming that you're placing the emphasis on the second syllable, to make it simply an abbreviation of ``alumnus'', breaks the rhythm of the language.

I would also argue that ``accepted informal'' is exceedingly close to an oxymoron, but that's a different story.

close to an oxymoron,

I always thought that an oxymoron was some sort of stupid cow.

tanstaafl.

With the exception of Merriam-Webster, all the dictionaries I have come across side with me. Perhaps you and Webster should just accept the evolution (devolution?) of the English language .

Stu

I always thought that an oxymoron was some sort of stupid cow.

No, no, no...That's not an oxymoron...This is an oxymoron: Microsoft Works.

Military intilligence
Council worker
Fun Run
Transparent police investigation

He obviously has too much time on his hands, why not put him to good use? Are there any programming jobs which would be really helpful? Maybe a few features for Jemplode? if he published the source to be checked before compliation, we'd all win.
How bout it Yz33d? You up to some constructive programming?

I'd just like to say what a very good and informative post this was, Drakino. I think everybody could learn something from it. This was my favorite part:

Hitting the "adult" work force at that early age did force some things into me, and one was realizing how the world works. You don't walk up to your boss and say that you are right, he is wrong, and argue the fact for 30 minutes. You accept that the world is not perfect and move on.

I too have learned (and am still learning) this. You don't walk up to your boss or other superior and tell them you're right, at least not right away. Once you've earned the respect of your co-workers and boss, then you might be able to get away with more things. But the important thing is to earn their respect. This really applies to all aspects of life.

This is exactly why (as mentioned earlier), if say tfabris or mlord had done something like this, we probably would have laughed and asked them nicely to stop. But, Yz33d has had numerous incidents with people, and has thus not earned their respect. Therefore, he received a harsher treatment.

So, Yz33d (and everybody else)...learn to respect your peers and they'll respect you.

Touché

Hey good plan - if we can't ban him then let's patronise him to death!

Rob

You sure picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue.

Oh lord, lets not go starting Airplane quotes in this thread

Anyway, do what you want, Tony. Whether yz33d is here or not it doesn't change the fact that we all enjoy this community.

Hey good plan - if we can't ban him then let's patronise him to death!

Hey, if the shoe fits.

Reminds me of an old "Cheers" episode. Couldn't find the exact text on the 'net, but as I recall, the exchange went something like this:

Sam (to departing customer): Thank you for patronizing me.

Frasier: Sam, I know you were trying to use a big word there, but I think what you meant was, "thank you for your patronage". See, 'patronage' means they're your customer. 'Patronizing' is the way you might speak to a small, dull child.

Sam: You mean, like right now?

Frasier: Aren't you a clever boy.

It'd be a crying shame if this thread actually got longer than the tuner thread...

I think it's run its course and everyone has had a chance to blow off some steam. Just a suggestion, Tony, but maybe you should just lock it up and let it die.

Sure looks like it's on its way

Word.

(Last Post?)