I asked about this a long time ago, but didn’t have a real good example. Now, I do. Are the last 9 paragraphs of this Usenet post written in some sort of code?
Or is it just random nonsense for the sake of randon nonsense?
It sounds to me like a product of that random-text-generating software. Justhink was accused of using it, too, and for the life of me I can’t remember what it was called, and apparently his final Pit appearances, where it was referenced, have been locked away in the Administrator’s Closet.
when I go to your link, everything shows up as normally formatted text. I’m not sure which ‘random characters’ you’re referring to.
disregard my last post, I thought you meant random character’s, not random words. I realize now that the last part is just a bunch of seemingly random words. I should pay more attention before I post lol! :smack:
Yeah, DDG, it does look like that, and I’ve generated stuff like that on my own, too. But the major difference is that I would never think of posting it to a newsgroup without explaining it. Heck, I wouldn’t post it to a newsgroup unless something like “randomly-generated text” were the subject of the thread. (I did get some extra credit in English class 20 years ago for showing my teacher a print-out of some randomly-generated sentences, though.)
Since this kind of stuff has been posted (relatively) many times, and I’ve seen what appeared to be entire “conversations” going on, it seems to me that there’s more to it than just random-sentence dumps, however.
What last post, Apex Rogers? 
It looks a lot like text generated by Megahal megahal or some other conversation simulator. Though there are hundreds of them out there, so pinning it on the exact one used would be near impossible.
I think it’s random text designed to get around cancelbots - bots that some use on usenet to get rid of trolls, spammers and their ilk.
Though I’m not privy to the private workings of usenet trolls, so for all I know it’s some sort of bible-code instructions on who they’re going to slightly annoy next.
I’ve come across those in Usenet too. What’s even weirder is when they show up in binary groups, usually after the message attachment. My assumption has been that it’s a slightly disguised version of the random characters put at the end of spam messages so that the sender can’t be accused of sending out massive copies of identical messages.
When I remember to wear my tinfoil hat I realize that these are coded messages between terrorist cells of the Mole People, Grey aliens, and/or operatives of the Illuminati, using Usenet and some word->word coding to slip under ECHELON’s radar…
Ok, we have to disregard Apex’s last post, but that’s the post telling us to disregard his last post, so we can regard it, but then…<brain explodes>
I’m sure buckgully’s got it. A lot of cancelbots will trigger based on a high level of textual similarity - so if you’re a spammer (or in this case, apparently a kook, from what I can tell), adding x% of different text can beat those sort of filters. However, many other cancelbots will trigger on large blocks of artificial nonsense (since this is commonly used to get around text-matching cancellers, and rarely in other cases) - so the person in question has appended a block of text that most parsers will take as written english - it has the proper letter frequencies, word length frequencies, ocurences of a/an/and/the/if (etc.); It just happens not to make any sense, because it doesn’t need to.
I think I’m going to make a song with those random texts as the lyrics. What do you think? Folk, rap, there are infinite possibilities.
Well, yeah, you wouldn’t, but there’s a lotta marvelously clueless people out there on the Internet, ya know. 
Enabling extraction from the cognitive implementation through abstracted memory more than disproves a person’s object of internal simulation, whereas disposing of recursion as the static manifestation on the logical signature sufficiently symbolizes the collective thought-form of rudimentary pressure.
:eek: , Mangetout is sleep-posting.
That was the output from AutoHink™, a computer program I wrote a while back which, in its own words…
I’ll stop now, as I have been advised against excess use.
Dang. I thought it was just another Chomskybot, Mangetout.
buckgully, thanks for the pointer to MegaHAL. It works on basically the same principle my Garble program (written in the early 90s) does. Garble just lacks the second predictor and a user interface, but it started out with both. I was more entertained by just feeding it big text files, and reading big text-file outputs, however. (For examples, see the thread I linked to above - glad to create more if anybody has an input text they’d like to see Garbled.)
And the stuff on Usenet, especially when appended to spam or wild rantings, may very well be “filter chaff” (is that a new term?), but I’m still left wondering about the conversations I saw two or more years ago. It may have all been one person, but it really looked like three or four, posting messages with thousands of words in them in reply to each other. And all of the sentences were nonsensical, it wasn’t just a few paragraphs after a normal-text advertisement. These posts also went to just one group, no cross-posting, if I remember correctly.
Notice how the subject line in the post has a garbled text suffix, as well. This is done by the spammer to create a unique subject line for each of his spams and make it harder for the cancelbots to find it. When news-admins caught on to this, they tried to cancel spam posts by checking the body of the post, instead. They would generate a CRC code for the body of the spam and tell the cancelbot to look for that unique code instead. So the spammers countered this by adding random nonsense at the end of the spam as well (thus changing the CRC code for each spam). It’s a never-ending battle.