freemode.net

Imminent Death of the 'Net, part MCLVIII    [ Rants ]

So I opened up Ye Olde Blogging Interface this afternoon to post a new article, and I see:

FREEMODE.NET
unix, security, news, rants and geekiness
Entries: 135 Comments: 6067 Authors: 1
New Entry | Manage Weblog | Delete Weblog

Errrgh!   I mean, I get email notifications when people post comments, so I knew there were more than a few comment-spams waiting in the submission queue, but ye gods, over six thousand?   Screw this, I'm turning comments off.   It's not worth the hassle, and I'm not going to sit here and hit "delete" on 6000-some comment spams, or spend the time to automate it.   The few people who actually want to contact me about the articles can email me. It's (username at domain), in case anyone needs a hint; I'm convinced from the volume of spam I get that everyone who wants to reach me already knows my email address, since I've had it for 5 years and it's plastered all over mailing list archives, USENET, website registrations I signed up for three and a half years ago which I can't even remember now and the whole rest of the 'Net.

Between crap like this, and spam in general, I'm convinced that the Internet is far less useful now in mid-2004 than it was 3 or 4 years ago.   Sure, I can still download game demos (more annoying now than then, thanks to "Please click through seventy ad-soaked pages to find out that the public FTP mirrors we have listed are overloaded, would you like to pay money to use the S00P3R 53CR37 3733LT authenticated mirrors we provide?" crap), read the news (once you filter out the pop-ups, pop-unders, inline ads and ignore the generally declining quality of news reporting), mess around on bulletin boards (which now require about fifteen steps to prove that you're really a human who wants to register on this board and validate your email address and then finally post your carefully researched wisdom on "omfg LOL gr8 p0st!" or whatever the hell you care about), experience the beauty of Internet Chat (still filled with the usual cadre of 12-year-old pyromaniacs, geeks who have not dated since the Reagan administration, fiercely emotional zealots who NEED TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS and distant AFK'ers who wield their away messages as finely honed weapons), buy stuff online (after searching through ninety-seven different merchants and figuring out from third-party review sites who's going to do me a favor by simply taking my money and disappearing, and who will turn my point-click-and-ship experience into another entertaining "Gee, I'd really like this widget that I paid for over a year ago" 120K worth of email soap opera and eventually receiving a busted out-of-warranty piece of crap after 5-hour phone calls with half of the state and Federal law enforcement agencies on this continent and being ignored via email by the other half) and actually program something useful to interface with it, except it now has to survive this whirling manic Darwinian maelstrom of maliciousness, calumny and evil intent if I don't want my PHP pages XSS'd, my database queries SQL injected, or my CGI scripts to auto-remotely-r00t my poor webhosting account and make it traipse through the shell-trading channels on IRC like a drunk hooker at 2am on Saturday night and then invite over 22GB worth of pr0n, w4r3z and spam traffic that gets billed to my account at the low low rate of only $10/MB over my monthly quota of half a gig.

And on top of this you've got spam-bot armies, DDoS attacks, virii/worm/trojan of the week, advertising and stupid crap everywhere and well, who really wants to use this shit anyway?

Goddamn it, I'm taking my boxes and going home.

Scripting guidelines    [ Software ]

One of the junior admins at work just hacked up a MySQL/PostgreSQL backup script, and was looking for some feedback on it.   I probably wrote up 10x more than needed, but it's stuff worth saying about shell scripting on Unix-style systems.