What is this odd website?

September 22, 2004 3:03 PM

What is this?
posted by ar0n to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

I don't know, but how did you find it?
posted by drobot at 3:04 PM on September 22, 2004

It says:

Ahhhahh,You found the most useful site on the NET at last. Enjoy our random ramblings, and our links are even better.....
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€Ì
2$g$@rpv±d1%X”•ƒT‰B”•U3! ?ƒæÝ"df 0™•1!1'f§ä8gGGes!PC6R%Q `†teBw [and so on and so forth]
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If this page makes sense to you, and reads well, you cant have it, but please save it and email it to me. If its total rubbish, its yours to do with as you wish.
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Another excelent site we can recommend is uselessword

(according to a discussion about this site from a few months ago)
posted by Jairus at 3:16 PM on September 22, 2004

It is this, but with random hex output instead. I don't know if the hex translates into ASCII characters; I am too busy to check.

Seems like someone's idea of a joke.

The site I linked looks like it's trying to poison spammer's emails lists. The other one isn't, or perhaps it's trying to see if spammers are bothering to convert hex -> ASCII to grab emails nowadays.

FYI:

0x80 = high ascii
0x0C = Form Feed (New Page)
0xCC = high ascii
0x0D = Carriage Return (End of Line)

BOCCOD could be someone's handle. That'd be my guess.
posted by shepd at 3:19 PM on September 22, 2004

Whois says the site is registered to max-hosting.net, which seems to be about trapping address harvesters. My guess is that this is something similar, looking for bots that follow links or something.
posted by Capn at 3:25 PM on September 22, 2004

remember in "The Net" where Sandra Bullock hackered her way into the bad guys intranet by clicking on the PI symbol?

my guess is this is something similar....be careful.
posted by th3ph17 at 3:49 PM on September 22, 2004

Remember on "Magnum PI" where that guy got shot, and they traced the killer by noticing that the ratio of the circumference of the bullet to the diameter was 3.14159?

yeah, you'd better be careful.
posted by sonofsamiam at 3:53 PM on September 22, 2004

I believe there was an earlier Ask.Me question about a similar site which was determined to be, as Capn says, a honeypot for spambots. There was a good deal of useful information which is why it's so goshdarn frustrating to me that I can't find the freakin' thread. Someone with better search fu might have better luck than me.
posted by stet at 4:11 PM on September 22, 2004

I always wondered if terrorists passed messages through junk sites or wikis. Now I'm not provoking any discussion on whether this is a terrorist site or not.. but it'd be, er, interesting if this method was used.
posted by wackybrit at 4:19 PM on September 22, 2004

A little more information at
http://uselessword.com/random
posted by jeremias at 4:48 PM on September 22, 2004

Setting up a website takes time and leaves a virtual paper trail of registration data and payment info. Have you ever tried to pay for webhosting with cash?

Oh come on now, terrorists could use Geocities. It's so easy!

Geocities: Tool of the Terrorist
posted by holloway at 6:13 PM on September 22, 2004

A couple of years ago (or more) I stumbled on a rather inventive spam honeypot.

I'd never seen anything like it before, and though it was pretty clearly markov-chain pseudorandom babble, it actually read enough like real English to keep me reading (well, skimming) through scores and scores of pages.

It read like some bizarre schizoid manifesto, like the most juicily hallucinogenic Hunter S. Thompson character ramblings, but peppered with links to more insane stuff and mailto links.

The really odd thing was that it was crosslinked across a few dozen (that I discovered) domain names and types of business, with the same "hidden" directory structures.

For a month or three I was convinced I'd found the HTML secretions of some totally and completely insane uberhaxor who went around hijacking hosting from unsuspecting businesses. None of the registrar data matched up from site to site.

And then finally I found a link that was always contained in the same syntax and structure, and it pointed to some consultant's site that explained the honeypot and the service(s) said consultant offered.

I was actually a tad disappointed. It was much more entertaining as a mystery. None of my ubertechy friends were really able to decipher it either. I think this was prior to emailbots being really common.
posted by loquacious at 3:23 AM on September 23, 2004

My guess is that it's some kind of trap for web-site-scanning robots, since it appears that the links on the site could be traversed forever.

The robots.txt file for the site might be a clue. It has a single entry disallowing the robot from http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/crawler. Perhaps it is a test site for that robot to make sure it obeys the robots.txt directive and doesn't crawl the site? Or maybe it is a robot trap that is set up to be nice only to that specific crawler?
posted by Khalad at 7:49 AM on September 23, 2004