Fun_People Archive
14 Jul
NEW STUDY: Marketing Death on the Information Superhighway

Date: Fri, 14 Jul 95 17:48:54 -0700
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: NEW STUDY: Marketing Death on the Information Superhighway

Forwarded-by: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: guy@netapp.com (Guy Harris)
From: paulp@nic.cerf.net (Paul Phillips)

MARKETING DEATH ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY:

A Survey of 3,195,759 Insults, Veiled Yet Ominous Insinuations, and Possible
Crimes Perpetrated 193,771,023,581,932 Times in Over 3152 Cities in 81.3
Countries, Provinces and Territories.

  by Paul Phillips
  Intellectual heir to Marty Rimm

I. Casual conversation -- or MURDER?

A conspiracy of spectacular proportions has been brewing in cyberspace.
The Internet BBS, known to the techno-elite as the USENET, is riddled with
serious discussions of murder and mayhem.  In this study, we invested
INTENSIVE and EXHAUSTIVE effort into cataloguing the contents of
571,412 USENET messages.  We didn't actually read the posts themselves,
but classifying them by subject will clearly demonstrate the trends
in these "bboards".

2. Killers on the USENET

We chose several bboards at random to investigate.  The results
were terrifying.  Large groups of people casually discuss the most
heinous of activities, without a hint of hesitancy.  One bboard called
"comp.unix.programmer", which is obviously a code of some sort, contained
over *200* messages about "How to kill a parent and all its children"!!!
The mechanistic way in which the killers portray the parent as "it"
clearly shows the baselessness of their characters.  They also spoke
extensively of killing "processes", which we believe to be a euphemism
for abortion (ending the "process of life.")

C. Who lives -- and WHO DIES

On another bboard, code-named "news.software.readers", people
casually discussed their "killfiles", obviously lists of people they
want killed! It is rumored that they are devising methods of sharing
killfiles with one another.  Based on the data available to us, we
believe that the criminals on "news.software.readers" choose who will
live and who will die, and then the thugs on "comp.unix.programmer"
execute their desire.  How this apparent symbiosis functions on a
deeper level is an excellent subject for future study.

iv. YOUR CHILDREN AT RISK???

This twisted web of evil beckons to your children to join it.  The
people on USENET, aptly called "users", will use any sort of enticement
to draw your children into their sick, sick world.  "Come on kid, try
a little UNIX, it won't hurt you" is a common saying among these perverts.
It is time for the government to step in.  It is time for human decency
to win out and the terrible KILLFILES to be cast out, forever.

Five. Legitimizing this Study

Despite our obviously huge effort in unmasking these villians, we fear
that this study will not be taken seriously by the world at large.  So,
we ask for your help in getting it portrayed on the cover of a major
newsmagazine.  If you're a writer, editor, or just a gopher for any
periodical at all, please publish this! The life you save may be YOUR
OWN CHILD'S.  Think about that.

We would like to extend our most sincere thanks to Marty Rimm of CMU,
without whom we would never have learned the proper methodology for a
study such as this one.

© 1995 Peter Langston