Pauline has lockout;

June 10, 2001 8:52 PM

Pauline has lockout; attack milena, xiang until duffer done getlost after belmar merinof not isabelle, tunasand ginaster bliss get stuf.
posted by jjg (14 comments total)

Hit Reload or follow non-mailto links for more fun. See also: "Wordplay".
posted by jjg at 8:53 PM on June 10, 2001

are we *all* allowed to use it? - rcb
posted by rebeccablood at 8:58 PM on June 10, 2001

dissociated-press? spambot honeytrap?
posted by rodii at 8:58 PM on June 10, 2001

Wpoison is another version of the same thing, installable on your very own server if you so desire. I installed a copy locally, and have enjoyed watching spambots get caught in it for hours on end.
posted by delfuego at 9:20 PM on June 10, 2001

*timidly raises hand* uh..... I don't get it...
posted by gyc at 9:34 PM on June 10, 2001

Honeypots for spambots. Looks like nonsense to us, but looks just like a webpage to a robot. A robot collecting e-mail addresses for spammers.
posted by dhartung at 9:38 PM on June 10, 2001

gyc: it's a website that will generate lots of noise for spiders to fall into and spin their tires while they try to parse everything. Little do they know the website randomly generated specifically to confuse and ensare them.

A guy at my ISP has this: http://spiders.must.die.net/.
posted by perplexed at 9:41 PM on June 10, 2001

So in the denoument of the Twlight Zone episode the guy realizes he's a spambot that thinks it's a person, and all around him his "reality" erodes as he gets more and more deeply enmeshed in the honeytrap. Then the evil spammer resets him, he loses his new understanding, and the whole thing starts over. It's downright Dickian. Coming soon to a theater near you.
posted by rodii at 9:45 PM on June 10, 2001

Neeeeeeeeet!
posted by dong_resin at 9:49 PM on June 10, 2001

In a Trek episode too (plus audio)
posted by owillis at 9:53 PM on June 10, 2001

So what is the actual goal here?

Doesn't this still cost the site owner lots of money through outgoing bandwidth charges?
posted by lagado at 11:08 PM on June 10, 2001

Lagado, on 10 loads of the page, I get an average size of 5170 (5169.8) bytes -- pretty small, all things considering.

One of my favorite features of Wpoison is that it also has a built-in time lag -- before it completes rendering of each page, it pauses and wastes time for a few seconds, forcing the spambot to wait for it to finish. Genius, because it both limits the damage that the bot can do to your machine (in terms of CPU cycles and bandwidth), and limits the amount that the bot can harvest.
posted by delfuego at 12:16 AM on June 11, 2001

fair enough, thanks
posted by lagado at 12:44 AM on June 11, 2001

The secret behind clavdivs's posts is now revealed!
posted by darukaru at 3:02 AM on June 11, 2001