Polyamory and crime on the Internet

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Note: Followups to this entry at http://tacit.livejournal.com/238112.html (part 1) and http://tacit.livejournal.com/240750.html (part 2)

UPDATED 13-December-07 10:50 EST Updates indicated in text
UPDATED2 14-December-07 1:05 PM EST Updates indicated in text
UPDATED3 14-December-07 2:00 PM EST Updates indicated in text
UPDATED4 02-January-08 2:44 PM EST Updates indicated in text

So I recently decided, like many folks do, to Google my name. I do this periodically, because it’s always fun to see how many sites are linking to me (and I’m in the process of building a list of non-English mirrors of my polyamory site — it’s been translated into Polish, Hebrew, German, and a bunch of other languages, which is cool).

And in the process, I think I’ve discovered what might be one of the largest-scale cases of Web site hacking and virus distribution I’ve ever heard of.

A little background is in order. If you’ve used Google for any length of time, you probably know that when you Google popular keywords you’ll often run into “spam pages.” These are pages that are just stuffed full of keywords at random; in the Google search results, they will have titles like “tribadism fight scenes, free tribadism porn video Britney Spears, make money fast terrorism Iran big cock” and have excerpts that look like “she shoved it in and bridal hosiery wedding cake viagra fetish smurf Bible amateur transvestite video free vacation europe nymphomaniac ipod”. These are spam pages; they are filled with hundreds of keywords, and if you click on them, you will be redirected to the spammer’s site. They exist just to intercept popular Google searches and direct traffic wherever the spammers want it.

They are also popular with virus writers. Virus writers will create thousands of fake Web pages filled with popular keywords, then use those Web pages to servers that will attempt to automatically download viruses onto the computer of anyone running Windows who’s unwary enough to click on them.

Okay, so.

Yesterday, I did a keyword search for my name. Normally, I get about nine pages of results; but yesterday, I got 56 pages of results, over 200 in all.

Most of these pages look like this:

The polyamory news franklin veaux mitt was rigid enough to prevent me from either closing them too hard or opening polyfamilies polyamory for the practical them too far. She raised my left hand and fastened it in a similar polyamory weekly podcast manner, into a similar latex mitten.society for human sexuality polyamory info “I just wondered. You were standing there with a dazed polyamory open wedding vows look on your face playing with that cucumber and I thought something might world polyamory association presentations and workshops franklin veaux. Once inside, he polyamory san diego quickly stripped off his apron and polyamory cape coral unfastened his belt and pants. It was nearly as big as Mark’s, and open relationships polyamory that pleased her. Quickly unbuttoning her blouse to reveal her tits. page personal poly polyamory web He gently squeezed them, making her moan deep in her throat.

UPDATED3: I’ve looked at some of the random text on these pages, and it’s not really random at all–it’s a short porn story with random keywords seeded throughout it. It contains a number of statistically improbable phrases. One of these is “Ashley had always wanted to go there”–doing a Google search for that exact phrase results in 13,800 hits–nearly every single one of which is a spam redirector.

You get the idea. “Oh, well, this is interesting,” thought I, “polyamory, and my name, have become popular enough Google web searches that the spammers are including them in spam pages now.”

I clicked on some of these result links, curious to see who the spammer was and what site he was trying to direct traffic to.

And that’s when things started to get weird. What I found was a very large, highly organized campaign to direct Web traffic to servers hosted in Eastern Europe that would infect visitors with a computer virus, all orchastrated by a single person or group of people and all being done by what appears to be a massive breach of hundreds and hundreds of hacked Web sites, all hosted by the same ISP–the largest single Web site security breach I’ve heard of.

If you want to keep going down the rabbit hole: Follow me! Things are about to get very technical here.

Open source will save us all!

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Or, err, perhaps not.

Consider the case of www.freehipaa.net, a Web site that advertises free, open-source HIPAA-cmpliant medical software. HIPAA is the US law that protects the privacy and security of patient medical records; it has, among other things, provisions specifying security standards for remote storage, use, and retrieval of sensitive patient information.

HIPAA compliance is a big deal; those who violate the standards can find themselves neck-deep in legal trouble, and anyone who is responsible for maintaining patient medical information is obligated to take security very seriously indeed.

Which is why it’s all the more amusing that I received a fake PayPal scam email in my mailbox today directing suckers to a phony Web page, where the hackers could steal their PayPal information. The hackers responsible for these scams first find vulnerable Web servers with outdated content management or ecommerce software, then hack these Web sites ad put up their phony phishing pages, and finally send out spam email directing the unwary to the hacked Web site for fleecing.

Today’s cracked Web site du jour? None other than http://www.freehipaa.net/icons/us/webscr.htm — yep, that’s right. The creators of HIPAA-complaint medical billing software can’t even secure their own Web server.

Hmm. I wonder if their software is any better…

The house on the rock

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When I was last in Chicago, dayo and I drove about three hours into Wisconsin to see a house.

Not just any house. To understand this particular house, imagine that you were a space alien. Imagine that you came from a strange culture that did not build buildings. Maybe you lived in caves, or, I dunno, burrowed parasitically into the flesh of gigantic alien space walruses or something. Or maybe you lived in trees like the elves in The Lord of the Rings, and went everywhere barefoot because your fantastically advanced magic hadn’t ever got so far as to develop shoes.

Anyway, the point is that you don’t build buildings. And then, let’s suppose you’d heard of a thing called a “house,” which was an enclosed structure divided into “rooms.” Armed with this knowledge, you set out to design and build a house, but you weren’t quite clear on what exactly a “room” was.

If you were this space alien, the house that you built would probably be The House on the Rock. The Web site and the brochures describe it as the “grand vision” of a guy named Alex Jordan, but I’d say it’s not so much a “grand vision” as it is a study in ad-hoc chaos and arguably the world’s greatest monument to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It’s an enclosed structure. It’s probably about a hundred thousand square feet or so, and it’s three stories tall, more or less. I say “more or less” because it wasn’t so much “designed” as it was thrown together over time by a man whose grasp of architecture and construction was theoretical at best, and the result is…um, well, it’s hard to actually call it a building, really.

You go in, and you find that it’s a hallway. It’s kind of like being inside a living organism, like the organic space ship on that science fiction TV series whose name I can’t remember with the one chick who’s really hot and shoots lots of people, only more so. The hallway winds and twists and ascends and descends more or less at random, and occasionally it widens out into a place with a bed, or a table, or some other object of furniture you might expect to find in a domicile. It’s hard to say how many rooms there are in this house, because the house doesn’t really do “rooms.” Wide spots in the hallway-tunnel-alien-innards-thing pass for rooms, for the most part, and going from one place to another sometimes involves taking a route that’s…unexpected.

I took many pictures, and they’re very large. For those of you who don’t mind the crushing bandwidth: onward!

Things I learned last night

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“Ow!” is not a safeword.
“Oooooohhhh FUUUUCK!!!” is not a safeword.
“Oh my God YAAAAAAAAAAGH!” is not a safeword.
“EEEEEEEIIIGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!” is not a safeword.
A “cardigan” is a type of sweater.

BDSM: Theory and Practice of Figging

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Note: This is part 6 of an occasional ongoing "how to" series on BDSM.

Part 1 of the series, How to Tie a Rope Harness Part I, is here.
Part 2 of the series, How to Tie a Frog Tie, is here.
Part 3 of the series, How to Tie a Shinju, is here.
Part 4 of the series, How to Make a Custom Dildo out of Ice, is here.

Part 5 of the series, How to Make a Spikey Decorative Collar, is here.

As you can probably figure out, most of these tutorials are really, really not work-safe.

This particular tutorial is work-safe, at least photographically (the text is probably not very work-safe, though!). It describes the practice of figging, which is making a butt plug out of ginger for an interesting warm tingle sensation. It’s particularly good for disciplining those naughty subs for whom an old-fashioned paddling has become humdrum. I recently had an opportunity to explore this with one of my sweeties, to great effect. If it sounds like it’s up your alley, clicky the link!

Show me! Show me!

Remembering the Reason for the Season

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So now that Thanksgiving’s over and the leftovers in the fridge are slowly dwindling, it’s time to turn our attention to the upcoming holiday season. And I’d just like to take a minute to remind each of us to remember the *true* reason for this holiday.

With commercialization, and vacation scheduling, and all those other things, it can be easy for us to forget. Even the carols we listen to quickly become mere words, and we no longer remember their true import.

Think about it. Really. Those carols are not just empty words:

Up from the sea, from underground
Down from the sky, they’re all around
They will return: mankind will learn
New kinds of fear when they are here

The traditions we enjoy have a much deeper meaning, and one that we lose far too easily, I fear. The twinkling lights on the Christmas tree were originally there to remind us of the stars, and of the threat that looms like an ominous shadow over everything we love: on that winter solstice night when the stars are right, the Great Old Ones will awake from the slumber of death once more, to wreak destruction and terror on all mankind, exposing our existence for the hollow and purposeless shell it is.

We have no hope on that day but to pledge our souls in service to the Elder Gods, so that we may be devoured first, spared the long slow spiral down into gibbering madness.

So as the nights grow longer and the days grow shorter, take some time out of your hectic schedule to meditate on the coming of the Great Old Ones. Should the stars not align properly in the heavens this year, and humanity be granted yet another year of our tiny, meaningless existance before the Crawling Chaos covers us all, breathe a sigh and exchange presents with those close to you in thanks.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Ftaghn!

Whispers: Now available on LiveJournal!

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So thanks to the awesomeness of nilesta, Whispers, the journal of anonymous sexual fantasies, now has a LiveJournal feed. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you whispers_rss.

And as always, new anonymous submissions are always appreciated.

Chocolate!

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Back from Chicago. While I was there, dayo took me to a place that sells hot chocolate.

Now, this was not any ordinary place selling hot chocolate, mind you. Many places sell hot chocolate–Starbuck’s, grocery stores, even Amazon.com. But this place offered hot chocolate that was different. Better. Beyond the ordinary. I knew something as up when I saw the sign outside the door. It proclaimed, in neon green dry erase marker on shiny blackness, “Our chocolate kicks more ass than Chuck Norris.”

The place was Coco Rouge.

More Steve Jobs than Steve Jobs, more ass-kicking than Chuck Norris

At some time in the past, the place now called Coco Rouge was an alleyway. The sort of alleyway a careless traveller might get rolled in. The building was tall and very narrow, lit by crystal chandeliers and red neon, very BladeRunner-esque. One wall was rough stone, the others polished concrete like the floor. The decor might be described as Late Twentieth Century Pretentious meets Postmodern Gone Mad…very minimalist, very chic, very Apple. Down, even, to the black mock turtlenecks worn by the vaguely pretty, vaguely multicultural but in a non-threatening sorta way staff who took my order, and rung it up on an enormous antique mechanical cash register polished ’til it gleamed like a Terminator exoskeleton.

This was a hot chocolate place from an alternate future, a place like what Starbuck’s might have been in a version of reality where Apple, not Microsoft, ruled the earth.

I chose the house special. Select dark chocolates, it said, bitter and only slightly sweet, blended together to perfection.

Now, from that description, and the reference to Chuck Norris outside, I expected a well and good ass-kicking. You know, the chocolate equivalent of being hit over the head with blunt object and dragged off into some dark corner somewhere. I expected to wake up in an alleyway with a concussion and my wallet missing. That seemed reasonable, I thought, from dark chocolate, bitter and only slightly sweet, delivered in an insulated glass mug that looked solid enough to hit someone.

What I got was something else entirely.

The first sip didn’t blast me with Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate! and also, Chocolate! The first taste was surprisingly subtle, complicated, with several distinct chocolate notes and none of the cloying sweetness and slightly burnt flavor you get from cheap hot chocolate powder. It was, in other words, very good hot chocolate.

Another sip. Definitely dark chocolate, heavy and brooding, with an understated hint of mayhem. This hot chocolate did not hit me over the head and rifle through my pockets; it seduced me, charmed me, lured me out into the alley on my own. Less work, you see, if you don’t have to drag your victim.

By the time I was nearly finished, I realized that I had been sacked by chocolate, so deftly and so subtly I didn’t even see it coming. No, this was not the chocolate equivalent of blunt-force trauma; this chocolate was more like the experience you get when you meet an exotic stranger in a bar, share a deep and intoxicating kiss, and before you know it you’re waking up in an alley with your pants down around your ankles and your wallet nowhere to be found. No concussion–that’s much to declassé–but you still have no idea how you got there, or how you’re going to explain it to your partner back home.

All in all, a mighty fine hot chocolate.

Calling upon the community for help…

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So, as many of you folks know, I have a number of different Web sites, one of which is aw SymToys. That’s the Web site where I have Onyx, the sex game I’ve developed, and I also have a bunch of BDSM tutorials and that kind of stuff there as well.

One part of the site I thought would be an interesting experiment is Whispers, which is a place that people can talk about sexual fantasies. I’ll admit to a small, teensy bit of an ulterior motive for putting it up; if it gets enough content, it might act as a way to keep people coming back to the site. But more than that, I thought it might be an interesting experiment in applied sociology.

It got some content early on, but it’s not received many postings recently, even though it does get a fairly high number of page views (typically a few hundred visitors a day). I suspect that part of the reason it doesn’t get a lot of contributors is a kind of chicken-or-egg thing; if folks don’t see a lot of other people contributing, they’re less likely to contribute themselves. And the things that have been submitted so far tend to follow the same general theme, probably because people go with stuff similar to what’s already there.

So, I’m calling on the combined creativity of my friends list. If you’d like, visit the Whispers submission page and contribute something yourself! When i say it’s anonymous, I mean it’s really anonymous–I don’t even track visitor IP addresses in the submissions form.