The Avengers Forever: IMHO

	IMHO: 24 June 2004 Page 14 of 28

Battling the scumbags. Believe it or not, that is one of the principal reasons for the Forum overhaul.

It's sad, really, that all of this effort was needed to do battle with people who have absolutely no sense of decency, and can't keep their warped little noses out of other people's business. It is just such a pain to have to go to such lengths to deal with scumbags and weasels that I just had to vent in a major way.

(If you think my language is a bit strong, consider that there are little creeps running around out there posting profanity or links to online pharmacies and porn sites on cancer survivor guest books! Yes, really. Kasha and I must make daily checks of ours to keep them clean. So, in truth I am actually restraining myself when referring to these lowlife mental cases.)

Regulars to the forum may recall a spate of posts, supposedly from moderators and other familiar names, declaring their mutual homosexual attraction, or picking fights with one another, or whatever. Of all the problems we encountered running the Forum (and we had our share of them), this one irked me the most. The perpetrator has earned our eternal wrath, and if (s)he should ever surface again, we will show no mercy.

Spam—unsolicited, indiscriminate advertising—was a secondary concern. Mandatory registration should prevent this; however, there is no known defense from another new source of spam: lately some unethical uber-creeps have been creating "parasites," nasty variations of "spyware" or "adware" that quietly reside on a victim's machine and spring to life when they sense the host is entering text in a bulletin board—at which time they spam the board by injecting links to (usually porn) websites. (Parasites do other nasty things, too, like occasionally redirecting your browser to some strange advertising portal or whatever. If you've noticed odd behavior such as this, run a Google search for 'spyware' and download a checker/cleaner. Note that most spyware slips past antivirus radar because technically it is not a virus or worm.)

The most discouraging consequence of all this is that it makes the internet a far less welcome place for ordinary folks like you and me. Already there are measured drops in internet use, and email is such a pain these days that I am half-tempted myself to just get out of the online universe altogether. Of course, I earn my living building web apps, so I'm kind of stuck here.

Sadly, all of these things are only going to get worse, because there is more money in it than in fighting it. And it's pretty easy to do these things, too—high school kids are coding worms and viruses and blasting through almost every known form of internet security. While I place a lot of blame on Bill Gates for his Swiss cheese software, there is certainly plenty of blame to go around.

How did we reach this discouraging point so quickly? Because the internet was originally created assuming everyone was honest. Alas, the internet has lost its innocence.

And that's my humble opinion.

David K. Smith, 24 June 2004