Taupe Hat Systems

Open question to the community: is there an effective, ethical, and legal way to prevent these people from doing what they do? If they aren't filling up my mail with C14L15 and V*I*A*G*R*A ads (more amusing was the one that promised that I could "Increase by one full cup size in two weeks - guaranteed!" to which my reply was "To hell with that - lots of pizza and beer would work fine on me and be a lot more fun than some stupid pill."), the spammers are screwing up my referrer stats, hijacking domain names - for example, one of the referrer spams I had was a soccer website registered in the dot-org namespace - or otherwise finding ways to piss off 99.8% of the population in the search of a fast buck.

I'm kind of wondering if there isn't a clear psychological profile developing of these people - "sociopath" comes to mind but I'm no shrink. Any shrinks out there are more than welcome to add their ideas, as well as lambasting me for using the term "shrink."

Anyhow, I guess the best solution to spammers is to wrap them in barbed wire and fire them into the Sun. Unfortunately, that's neither ethical nor legal, and hardly practical, so let's put our heads together to find a better solution, neh?

Added an Iraq Body Count banner near the bottom of the page. I'm thinking this will be my next Firefox extension.

Also, just went through the referrer spam and cleaned it up a lot. What a bunch of jackasses. Really.

So thanks to the good people at Project Honeypot, we now have a new tool to deal with S*P*A*M harvesters at a legal as well as technical level. Basically, the way it works is that I've set up an account there, they gave me a custom script, which I've installed at here: http://www.taupehat.com/pwnt/austereinboard.php which I am placing all over this thread and my site (also hidden throughout the source code) to attract the stupid bots. The bots swipe the email address (which is unique to every page hit), which is often hidden in the sourcecode of the page, do what those hosers do so much, and thus break the EULA implied in the page itself.

Looks like a lot of good clean fun, harming only a bunch of criminal nitwits who deserve nothing better than to be wrapped in barbed wire and fired into the sun. Personally, I'm sick of the barrage of "C1AL15" and "Cheap meds - our doc's are waiting on your to call!" (SIC) junk that floods my inbox, and would be happy to get some of their money for wasting my time. If you have a website, you should check it out, too =]