[wplug] Wiki Gibberish

[Bill Moran]

In response to Yaakov Nemoy <loupgaroublond at gmail.com>:

> 2009/5/4 Michael Semcheski <mhsemcheski at gmail.com>:
> > Hey Everybody,
> >
> > The WPLUG wiki has been under constant (and increasing) fire from bots
> > that seem to post utter gibberish on some pages.
> >
> > For now, anonymous users have to complete a recaptcha to edit a page.
> > We'll see how it works.
> >
> > The reason I'm writing this is to see if anyone has a good theory on
> > why they do it?  There are no links in the gibberish, some of it is
> > Cyrillic, some of it is English that doesn't make any sense.
> >
> > I've got three theories, but if anyone has any thing to add, or a
> > better theory, I'd be interested in hearing it.
> >
> > 1)  Its steganography, and the bots are controlled by a powerful
> > intelligence organization.
> >
> > 2)  The bots are part of a wave of feelers that hope to find poorly
> > maintained wikis.  The botmaster then searches for specific gibberish,
> > and the results returned are all poorly maintained wikis.
> >
> > 3)  They are poorly written bots.  The author intended for them to
> > wiki-spam, but there's a bug that causes them not to post the link.
> >
> >
> > There are a lot of similarities between the wiki spam and some of the
> > email spam that comes.  Obviously there's a connection, but the reason
> > eludes me.
> 
> A bunch of organizations that want to communicate secretly use spam as
> ways of sending messages where both the origin and target can't be
> discerned. Usually the sequence of words has some other meaning, it's
> based on some encryption algorithm i don't know too much about. Spam's
> great because you don't know who the message is intended for, even if
> you decrypt it.

Are you suggesting that the WPLUG wiki is being hijacked by terrorists?

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com
http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/