Archive for September, 2006
29.09.06
Today’s winner arrives in your emailbox with the title of Message ID - 20169661 and purports to be from PayPal.
Of course, you immediately know the email’s a scam by passing your mousepointer over the link in the email which — at first glance — appears to be
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run
It isn’t, of course, as you discover when your pointer is over the link:
Why, look . . . the actual link is to another site altogether. I’ll betcha a bag of cheese that PayPal has no connection whatsoever to system430a.com.
Quick Rules:
1. NEVER click a link in a suspect email.
2. If you’re curious, view the email’s source; look at the code around the fake link(s). In this case, some fancy Javascript was used. Sometimes, the code and text is entirely obfuscated; this is almost always a sign of a fraudulent sender.
3. PayPal notices aren’t the only hooks phishers use. Pseudo-e-Gold emails are popular bait, as are bank and mortgage company notices. If an email asks you to “confirm” longstanding account details — by clicking a handy link in the email, of course — send that sucker to the trash (or forward it to the institution in question . . . or the federal law enforcement folks interested in email fraud).
4. If concerned that your account might be in peril,
a) close the email window (bonus points for shutting down the mail client (Thunderbird, Outlook, etc., if you use one)),
b) bring up a new browser window by clicking on the browser’s icon on your desktop,
c) then TYPE the company’s URL into your browser. Make certain the ‘lock’ symbol . . .
. . . appears before you enter anything private.
Related reading:
28.09.06
Originally published 11/18/1996
Net Sex III
Eighteen thousand pictures.
It’s doubtful that a gallery or even a museum would care to collect 18,000 examples of a given theme, and yet a man in Kirkland Lake did: most — if not all of it — downloaded from, or traded over, the Internet. The theme was child pornography, and this last column about sex on the ‘Net will touch on this, and how to monitor and protect your children when they go online.
Why anyone would be interested in children in a prurient fashion cannot be answered here; such is the domain of psychiatrists, police, and other professionals. Abusers nonetheless exist, and — as the Kirkland Lake case attests — both they, and child pornography, are indisputably online.
Such is not news to netizens; they’ve been discussing the situation for years. A look at the Usenet newsgroup list will show some obviously illegal subject titles, and responsible Internet news providers filter their content, thus making it unavailable. A problem exists, however, in the practice of ‘cross-posting’: users posting to more than one newsgroup at a time — occasionally entirely inappropriate groups. Unfortunately, there’s little protection against this.
A pedophile cannot easily attract potential victims through newsgroups. ‘Spam’ addresses and phone numbers are unlikely to be imbedded in such postings due to their illegal nature; doing so would equate to raising billboards to policing authorities. Why such matter is nonetheless posted seems to escape logic; there’s no discernable gain to the poster.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a section of the Web which, unlike newsgroups, can be used by child predators. By ‘chatting’ over the keyboard, an abuser can gain the confidence — and possibly personal information about — victims to be.
So: How can parents protect their children from the darker side and potential dangers of the ‘Net, while still permitting them access to its benefits? A good place to start would be to view the brochure, ‘Child Safety on the Information Highway’. Its address is below.
It’s good practice to be present while your child is online, but this isn’t always convenient or possible. The ROM BIOSes of some IBM-compatible machines offer the option of a boot-up password: The computer won’t operate if the correct password isn’t entered. It’s possible to accomplish this, or deny access to certain programs, through some operating systems as well.
Another — somewhat more expensive — option exists, allowing relatively safe online use. Online blocker and filter programs, such as Cyber Patrol, Surfwatch, Net Nanny and CYBERsitter (addresses below) filter out, or prevent, access to objectionable material, sites and chat arenas. Their prices range from US$20.00 to US$50.00, and all but Surfwatch allow you to download demonstration versions from the ‘Net so you can determine the extent of their efficacy before deciding whether or not to purchase them.
Full Internet access in itself can be costly, but before balking at the cost of a blocker program, consider this: 18,000 pictures.
Child Safety on the Information Highway: http://www.missingkids.org/information_superhighway.html
Cyber Patrol v3.1: http://www.microsys.com/cyber/default.htm
Spyglass Surfwatch: http://www.spyglass.com/products/surfwatch/index.html
Net Nanny v2.1: http://www.netnanny.com/netnanny/home.html
CYBERsitter v2.1: http://www.solidoak.com/cysitter.htm
. . .
Copyright © 1996, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .
Related reading:
28.09.06
Originally published 11/21/1996
Net Sex II
Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion — at least until one’s credit limit is reached.
In New York City, as no doubt in other locations, there exist businesses which provide plexiglas-enclosed rooms with opaque sliding doors. Surrounding these rooms are dark, private booths with benches and token boxes. By seating one’s self and feeding the token box, the opaque door slides upwards, allowing full view of a gyrating nude woman. After a period of time, the sliding door falls, awaiting either another token or the next token-laden voyeur.
A similar scheme exists on the Internet, but instead of tokens, the coin of the realm is either one’s telephone bill or credit card — a scheme not dissimilar to that of phone sex, except live-action pictures are involved.
Real-time sound and photo animation is called multimedia — the backbone of most instructional computer CD-ROMs. The animation is no mystery: photos taken seconds apart are ‘drawn’ in the same place onto the computer screen. ‘Seamless’ animation is provided when a photo following the one being viewed is drawn on a video memory ‘page’ not yet being displayed.
For reasons that are difficult to discern, separate or combined erotic multimedia video and sound clips are regularly posted to the ‘Net, usually in newsgroups. They’re usually less than a half-minute long (compressed and encoded graphics take up considerable space, especially when animation is involved), and their content varies from soft-porn to subject matter that far transcends that within the Kama Sutra. ‘Live-action’ video is similar, but cannot be had in newsgroups; for this, several adult ‘Net sites have come online.
Last week, I mentioned ’spam’, forms of unsolicited advertising that plague the ‘Net; this shouldn’t be confused here with the canned meat product that originated the word. ‘Spam’ is a major conduit for the advertising of adult sites, and consists of Internet addresses and/or ‘900′ or international phone numbers. It’s contained in many photos in the adult newsgroups, and its purpose is to direct adult netsurfers to the advertising sites.
Adult sites vary, of course. Some are repositories of erotic pictures and stories; some contain pre-recorded animated multimedia files; some, however, are the electronic equivalent to the aforementioned dank token-booths of New York City. By hooking up a video recording source to a frame-capturing card, for instance, one has the means — with appropriate software — to broadcast over an Internet server whatever the recorder’s lens is pointing at. Seated and lit by their monitors, those accessing these sites are little removed from token-booth denizens, save for one important factor: The cost of ‘live’ ‘Net sex at these sites is most likely considerably more than that of a booth token.
. . .
A few unrelated but interesting sites:
The U.S. Navy’s up-to-the-second clock: http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/estclock.html
NoNags — Share/freeware without hassles: http://ded.com/nonags/main.html
. . .
Copyright © 1996, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .
Related reading:
28.09.06
Originally published 11/14/1996Net Sex I
Back in the good ol’ days when COBOL and Fortran were the programming languages of note, computer professionals giggled over text files — comprised of seemingly random Xs and #s — which formed into nude women when printed out and viewed from an appropriate distance. Some time ago, before the Internet spread forth from the U.S. military and North American universities, 16-colour low resolution pictures could be downloaded from BBSes, the majority of which — if they had files to download at all — supplied only public domain and Shareware programs. Some of the pictures were popular, however, and a number of BBSes charged subscription fees to access them. Surely, scenes of natural settings, automobiles and historical stills were among those pictures, but what people paid for was pornography.
When 256-colour scanning became available, varied subscription BBSes offered prurient files whose visual quality rivalled onscreen what top-shelf variety store magazines offered. For the most part, the BBSes offered little the magazines did not, but even before 256-colour scans, a disturbing trend toward hard-core pictures was evident. The mid- to late 1980s proliferation of subscription-only BBSes seemed to exacerbate the problem; competition between them seemed to up the immoral ante.
Enter the Internet. As a text-only medium, the ‘Net didn’t initially lend itself easily to the publication of binary files — executable programs, as well as the GIFs and JPGs obtained from BBSes. This problem was solved through encoding and decoding files in a number of ways: today, UUencoding and Base-64 encoding are the most popular forms used, and most Web browsers and newsreaders decode files with ease. Indeed, without the en/decoding process, the graphical nature of many newsgroups wouldn’t be uniform — or possible — across the varied computer platforms.
The chief method of disseminating pictures of questionable content over the ‘Net is through the Usenet newsgroups, specifically through the alt.sex and alt.binaries categories. The question of why these categories — at least up until recently — saw immense posting traffic is difficult to answer; the posters, scanning magazine stills or even Polaroids of their own exploits, neither requested nor received remuneration for their efforts. Over the past year or so, however, this has changed.
In the heyday of pornographic BBSes, a bulletin board originating scans would advertise its name and phone number on its files in order to attract more customers. To the angst of those who frequent the seedier parts of the ‘Net, ’spam’ has replaced the non-commercial postings in newsgroups.
‘Spam’ is ‘Net slang for advertising, and the ads inevitably cover more screen than the downloaded picture. What the ads offer — and the implications thereof — will be discussed in next week’s column.
. . .
Copyright © 1996, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .
Related reading:
27.09.06
There are two others, but I’m uncertain what the interest level is. For now, this is the last cartoon reprint from hennhaus:
Somalia Cover-up
This information appeared on this cartoon when it was originally reprinted on hennhaus in 1997:
Copyright (c) 1996 John Rudzinski, all rights reserved. Petawawa Messenger, v1#51, April 25, 1996.
(The duck sez, “Y’know, shredded documents make great nests!”)
The Somalia Affair involved a Somali teen, two members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment who beat him to death in 1993, and a Canadian military that tried to cover it up.
More on the ‘Somalia Affair’:
25.09.06
Originally published 10/24/96
Tabloid Internetism
‘Baby Smothered By Killer Fungus!’
Well, the poor child choked on a mushroom, but the facts don’t carry the impact that a tabloid headline does. Supermarket tabloid titles each carry circulation numbers in the millions, and they dutifully inform their readers of such critical social issues as flying saucer coverups,
celebrity faux-pas, startling psychic predictions and gruesome crimes. More telling, perhaps, are the ads within: pieces of the ‘True Cross,’ ancient talismans that protect one against double chins … you
get the idea: It takes more brainstrain to believe these ‘newspapers’ than to read them.
It’s been estimated that roughly 60 per cent of Internet users are college (Americanese for ‘university’) educated. Surely, then, one might expect more from what may be the greatest agglomeration of human knowledge yet assembled. One may be surprised.
Ufomind (www.ufomind.com/area51/) has had almost 415,000 ‘hits’, primarily by those interested in the U.S. government’s test facility at Groom Lake (aka ‘Area 51′). What draws visitors to the Nevada military site are not the testing aircraft inherent within, but rumours of downed and dismantled UFOs. The Skeptical Inquirer (www.csicop.org) informs us that Area 51 fans believe that Hungarian-speaking aliens reside at the facility and bathe in bacteria. The Inquirer, I should point out, harbours no such beliefs. Usenet newsgroups alt.alien.research and alt.alien.visitors are available for the faithful, and, for a Canadian slant on UFOs, look up Stan Friedman’s UFO Page
(medianet.nbnet.nb.ca/ufo/index.htm).
What of celebrities? The latest friend-of-a-friend gossip can be had in alt.fan.InsertCelebrityNameHere newsgroups, of course, but are you romantically compatible with your favourite star? The Lifestyles International Astrological Foundation (www.lifeintl.com/celeb.html) has psychological and astrological profiles of over 30,000 famed names — including serial killers — whom they’ll compare you to . . . for a fee.
If you’ve encountered a celebrity while, say, cleaning gum from your shoe soles — and haven’t we all? — The Celebrity Chronicle (www.polaris.net/~merlin/fame.html) wants to hear your story. Possibly the most tackiest site, Celebrities for Whom the Bell Tolls (www.users.fast.net/~elron/), asks its viewers to vote for nominees to its ‘Top Ten List of Impending Dead Celebrities.’ Yakkk.
Scads of psychics permeate the ‘Net and, not surprisingly, virtually all of them want you to cross their palms with major credit cards. Free samplings can be had, however, if you’re inclined to meddle with
mumbo-mystery. Facade (www.facade.com) provides free tarot readings in your choice of decks, as well as biorhythm forecasting, I-Ching, runes and other prophetic dabblings. Another site with free tarot readings is Matrix Tarot (205.186.189.2/root/ms/tarot/tarot.html). Alas, no matter which way
I cut it, my future bites cheese.
As you might expect, given the above, the talismans and fetishes advertised in the tabloids are well represented online. Examples? From various sites: a $46.00 German Mummy of Fortune ‘made from magical earth,’ $30.00 ‘thrown clay’ angel talismans, and, for only $11.99, a vial of Holy Jordan Water ‘with blessings from the Holyland!’
Just how popular is this stuff? I couldn’t tell you, but I’m almost certain that somewhere inquiring minds want to know.
. . .
Copyright © 1996, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the
column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .
| Related videos and reading: |
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24.09.06
Originally published 10/17/96
Mail Call
It’s not that I’m particularly popular; I’ve no idea how many ‘hits’ my Web page gets, f’rinstance, nor am I curious enough to set up a counter. The ‘Necropolis Bodybag & Smoke Shoppe’ exists primarily as a place to give my Messenger cartoons — and a few more peculiar drawings — a bit of exposure. It’s served that purpose for well over a year, but it’s had an unexpected bonus: unsoliticed email.
Consider, if you will, a gentleman from Buffalo. My page, he stated, is a “[v]ery interesting practice.” The purpose of his email, however, was not to praise Caesar, but bury him in metaphysical obfuscation.
“I have recently completed a book based on my own spiritual journey from being the worst of humanity,” he writes, “and then returned to life spiritually enlightened, and given a message to deliver to the people of the world.”
Perhaps he was given the Colonel’s Secret Recipe for ‘extra crispy’. I chose not to answer, though I was invited to critique the online version of his book, and offer my august advice in “how best to promote it.”
Promotion? Another email, this time from somewhere in the bowels of Kansas. “Is your web site the best kept secret on the Internet?” asks a Ms Smith. “We’ll promote it to 50 search engines/indexes for $85 and complete the job in two business days.”
This may explain why search engines these days are pushing sites at best vaguely relevant to the search criteria given. As the ‘Shoppe generates no income, and cost me only a few hours of keyboard-pounding to set up, Ms Smith is clearly barking up the wrong cartoonist.
She’s not alone. A Mr Joseph gleefully stated he “noticed that you have placed your animation and resume on-line” and “wanted to inform you about how our company can greatly increase your exposure. For FREE!!!!!!” Hm. The only time my drawing moves is on deadline, when I hurl sketchbook and self to the Messenger.
Not all the email is unrelated to what I do; heck, some tickles the ego. “. . . I checked out your cartoons,” writes a Mr Littleton from ‘way down under, “and, lo and behold, liked what I saw. Particularly liked the “Generation X Board Game” - things aren’t so different down here in the backwoods of Tasmania.”
Tasmania . . . Japan . . . email rolls in from all over. Unexpectedly, a classmate from OCA — with whom I used to sightsee along Yonge Street — re-established contact with me after 16 years when he chanced upon my page. He’s in Newfoundland, now, drawing a graphic novel about World War I.
Setting up a home page isn’t particularly difficult, and — virtually unbidden — people from hither and yon will actually drop by to see and read what’s important to you.
Given the nature of the beast, you’ll certainly get some exposure . . . but prepare yourself for some whacked-out mail.
. . .
Copyright © 1996, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the
column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .
24.09.06
Originally published 9/26/96
Online Hate
“We must have no non-Whites in our living space, and we must have open space around us for expansion.”
Hitler called this Lebensraum . . . living room . . . and he figured eastern Europe and Russia would be a good start. The quote above isn’t from Mein Kampf, though: it’s from the National Alliance — a site on the World Wide Web.
It’s not the only site that holds Hitleresque views. Perhaps this sounds familiar: “Non-Aryans, in particular Jews, regularly engage in activities which inhibit the life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness of Aryans . . .”
Such is one of the many views held by today’s White Nationalists — views that haven’t changed markedly since the National Socialists of the 1930s, but are expounded anew with “white pride world wide.”
The ideas are old — as old as hate is — and they aren’t necessarily foreign imports. Consider the Zundelsite, which publishes the revisionist Holocaust views of Ernst Zundel. According to the site, “It is deceptive to portray them [Jews] as prime ‘victims’ of a non-existent German genocidal policy.” The deception here, it would seem, lies in the site’s attempts to negate Nazi attrocities in the Second World War. There is no shortage of these sites on the Web, and virtually every one that pops up lists links to like-minded sites. Heritage Front, Aryan Nations, Skin-net, New Dawn . . . the names are legion, but the message is essentially the same: hate in the guise of ‘protecting’ the white race.
Other forms of hate abound, too. Religion ‘x’ vs. religion ‘y’, country vs. country . . . it’s enough to give an optimist the shakes.
The World Wide Web is an inter-connection of countless points of view, and attempts to police it often come to naught. For the most part, hate Web sites are made manifiest only before those who are specifically looking for them; their numbers are small in comparision to the sheer magnitude of other extant sites. Chance contacts are certainly feasible, however.
The best protection against hate is education, and the perhaps-humbling realization that no-one is inherently superior to anyone else.
Teach your children well.
. . .
Copyright © 1996, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .
Related videos and reading:
Cartoon Scandals / Bannned From Tv / a Study of Violence, Racism, Sex, & War in Cartoons
23.09.06
More from the ex-hennhaus.com.
Bankrupt
In the mid-1990s, bankruptcies in Canada had hit an all-time high. I have a sneaking suspicion that the record numbers then have since been surpassed. There was that Tech bubble, f’rinstance . . .
Bre-X Screensaver
Much like the ‘Tech bubble’ in microcosm, the Bre-X fiasco caught a lot of well-heeled investors in their pocketbooks. People got the correct impression that something was wrong when a Bre-X geologist face-planted from a helicopter prior to its landing, and Indonesian gold mysteriously vanished from core samples. There’s a great write-up here
if you’re not into the CBC’s video archives.
This was the biggest gold fraud ever. It made millionaires from paupers, and — when the other shoe (and geologist) fell — turned millionaires into paupers.
. . .
And, if gold wasn’t your bag, there was always oil:
Will Lube for Food
(The duck sez, ‘Crude.’)
The cartoon above was in reference to the UN Security Council Food for Oil resolution after the first US-Iraq war.
23.09.06
A few posts ago, I noted that my son had dug up an old sketchbook containing political cartoons I’d drawn awhile back. I had sporadic use of a scanner back then, so hennhaus.com — a site I started in the late ’90s to replace the Necropolis Bodybag & Smoke Shoppe (don’t ask) — displayed only a few of my cartoons.
I drew an homage to Sir John Tenneil’s caterpillar
. . . after exams in ‘94. I initially used it as the Necropolis Bodybag & Smoke Shoppe’s home page, then later modified it slightly for hennhaus’ home page:
While a certain domain name registrar is still hanging on to ‘hennhaus.com’ (’cause Lord knows, they need the pennies they’re getting from the idiotic search links they’ve pointed the domain to), I recently discovered that I had a backup of the site’s content.
Example:
Rapper Wrapper
This cartoon’s 10 years old, as is most content from the site; I was a heckuva lot more prolific, then. This particular cartoon noted the East coast / West coast rapper rivalry extant in the mid-1990s.
Some other bits:
Dumb & Dumber-er
At different points in 1996, two rapscallions of an unsavory nature actually attempted to hold up a bank and a doughnut shop using wildlife weaponry. The third incident noted in the cartoon didn’t happen, though.
More in a subsequent post.
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