Technology

So, for those of you who see nothing here but a really ugly white page with text, I'd like to officially welcome you to Microsoft-Free Friday. Supposedly, there should be an informative message that tells you what's up, but somehow PHP is getting through the mod and pushing text out. Oh well.

So why am I doing this? Lots of reasons. First off, I don't have this page up to make money, so I'm not losing any by doing it. Mainly, though, I'm running this mod out of antipathy for Microsoft in general, and Internet Explorer in particular... believe me, there are plenty of better, faster, more secure, and more standards-compliant web browsers out there. By now you'd have really had to crawl out from under a rock to not know that. Oh, and to those who say, "What about websites that are IE only?" my reply is simple: when I encounter such a site, I go elsewhere, right after sending a pointed email to webmaster@ that domain telling them that I've just clicked ads/spent money at a competitor's site. Money talks, you know the rest.

This is the danger of summertime blues. I'm bored, and so I wrote code. Was it useful code? Well, I'll let you be the judge of that. It's a new cowfile, used for cowsay which, if you don't have it, is probably essential to the making of coffee at 11PM when you really ought to be getting some sleep, or otherwise annoying people on IRC. To use this Work Of Fine Art, simply download this file, and copy it to /usr/share/cowsay/cows/ or wherever your cows are kept. OH YEAH!

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 =]