What's with the gibberish guys on usenet?

Factual Questions
1

A quick google usenet search using two semi-random words ‘wombat’ and ‘marmalade’ brings up (in addition to many genuine posts about how to marmalade your wombat) a succession of emails with text similar to the following:

flutter Ferber weatherbeaten breve sicken inequality Wallace Seneca jure fry trench Ashley ahoy agreeable windsurf armful botulism rotten embolden decision told Pareto tyrannic pediatric external workplace Callaghan capo cinema Rensselaer terminate bereft chairman teaspoon disjunct indisposition showcase coltish marmalade Aubrey Jeffersonian etc. etc.

I’ve noticed these on quite a few newsgroups, but I have no idea what’s with these guys. Do they just sit in front of the computer all day with their thesauruses (thesauri?) Is it some mysterious hacker thing? Is it a secret code? Are they trolls? Wouldn’t it wear really, really thin after a while? Any ideas? Anyone?

2

It’s a hacker thing. There’s a guy out there who gets his jollies by substituting gibberish for message bodies. He’s been doing it for years.

You can read about him here:

http://www.ganesha.org/ptb/hipcrime.html

3

I think the real question here is: why are you searching for ‘wombat’ and ‘marmalade’ on google?

4

Oh, just looking for a recipe. You know how it is when you’ve got a dinner party to prepare for and all you’ve got in the house are a couple of wombat steaks and a jar of marmalade.

5

Some kids also run scripts that post randomly generated stuff. Some of the more sophisticated scripts post replies to messages containing certain keywords, randomize the body of the original message, etc.

Quite silly, really.

6

Larry, most of the scripts aren’t that sophisticated, they’re usually a variant on the Chomsky-bot

http://language.home.sprynet.com/lingdex/chombot.htm

7

That’s precisely the sort of script I was thinking of. I didn’t mean that the scripting itself was particularly sophisticated, only that the output was more sophisticated relative to the stuff referred to above.
The Chomsky-bot produces stuff that people may actually spend some time trying to make sense of:

You might read half of it before you realize that it is meaningless, because it’s recognizable as english based on the lexicon and grammatical rules.[sub]Do colourless green ideas sleep furiously?*[/sub]
If you get of flood of messages like the ones refered to above, eg:

You’re not likely to spend a lot of time trying to decipher it.

8

Yeah, in some attacks, they load the bot with snippets of common jargon from the messages in the newsgroup, names of prominent posters, etc. It sometimes looks very real.

9

To be honest, that sounds like about half the stuff I have to edit.

10

The interesting thing is that Chomsky’s writings make no more sense than the output produced by the Chomsky-bot.

11

I disagree. His semiotic texts in particular are stunning.

12

First, Chomsky never wrote anything about semiotics. His writings in linguistics are about syntax, semantics, child language development, and the history of linguistics. Second, he’s frequently a terrible writer. I was a grad student in linguistics and had to read several of his books. Third, his poor argumentation has been a bad influence on linguistics. Read The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris and Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction by Pieter A. M. Seuren for a discussion of how badly he acted during the generative semantics/generative syntax battles.

13

Whoops. The impressive book I was thinking of was Sign, Symbol, Code, ny Umberto Eco. Funny I should should confuse them. Well, maybe not so funny. Have only read Chomsky, Benjamin Lee Whorf, & Eco. Tried to read Korzybski but found it too obtuse. Thanks for the refs… They sound juicy.
[sub]Is this off-topic, or not?[/sub] :wink:

14

Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, and Benjamin Lee Whorf are all reasonably important authors, although perhaps controversial ones. There are those who don’t much like them (I don’t like Chomsky’s writings, for instance), but they’re generally considered worth reading. On the other hand, most experts on language think that Alfred Korzybski isn’t worth the trouble to read.

15

Those are interesting references, but I would have trouble taking a book seriously with a title that included the phrase “An Historical”. :slight_smile:

16

Chas.E’s link to the Chomsky-bot had a link to Eliza on it. I’ve always been amused by the idea of Eliza, so I went there and decided to play along.
http://www.parnasse.com/drwww.shtml

It was awesome. First I started complaining about my job, and the computer responded “There is no such thing as the perfect job.” We chatted about that for a while, and then I started joking about how I really need a transorbital lobotomy. I don’t think Eliza was laughing. Finally, I said, “I am starting to think that you are just a simple computer program” just for laughs. The reply:

That is about the loudest I’ve laughed in a week.

17

Okay, so I’m easily amused. I started copying Chomskybot phrases into Eliza. I tried

Eliza’s response was

More big laughs. So said

At that point the big E fell back to her “Let’s not talk about me” standby, which is when I lost interest.

18

Boris B writes:

> Those are interesting references, but I would have
> trouble taking a book seriously with a title that
> included the phrase “An Historical”.

Check a dictionary. It’s acceptable (although not the most common usage) to put “an” before “historical”. It seems to be more common in British than in American English.

19

Now the weird stuff I’ve seen is like nothing described in this thread so far. Normal, everyday-type sentences, in random-length paragraphs. And those posts got replies in the same almost-but-not-quite sensible language. Making some up:

This went on for hundreds of lines at times.

Googling around for a few minutes, I failed to find anything similar to what I’ve seen, but I only saw it in newsgroups I never frequented, so I don’t remember where I saw this kind of thing. However, a look at alt.flame.net-abuse shows a whole slew of messages on July 25, 2001, which look sorta like what I’m talking about, except they’ve all got encryption headers on them, and are full of obviously “techie” words.

So, were the older messages I’d seen also encrypted, or were they something else?

By the way, the Chomskybot could get a boost from an old program I wrote, called Garble, which I’ve since seen in a couple of different forms on the Web, but have lost my links to. It took a text, created a huge database of all the word triplets, and randomly generated an output text based on the triplets. It kept track of the original punctuation, too, so it could toss in commas and quotes and suchlike. Anyway, feed the program Chomsky, and what would come out would read like Chomsky, but would be decidely random. Feed it Shakespeare, and you’d get garbled Shakespeare. Actually, the last time I ran into this stuff on the Web, someone had a form in which you could specify two authors from a list, and you’d get a page of text which “garbled” the two together.

Dang, now I’ve gotta go find my old source code…

20

Is this possibly the scientology sporgeries?

http://www.modemac.com/cos/cos6.html

What types of newsgroups was google returning these gibberish messages from?