OK, so stupid people on the Internet have started worming their way back into my sphere of consciousness again. I spend a lot of time keeping these people away from me, between SpamAssassin to keep the junk mail out to Snopes to point to when I Reply All to the forwarded hoax a soon-to-be-alienated friend sends me, to removing LiveJournal users from my friends list when they post song lyrics as a substitute for having an original thought. It keeps me sane.
A couple days ago my cow orker David came in to work to find 2700 emails in his personal account. Yowza. Some jerkass spammer had forged his domain name in the From: line and he was getting all the bounces. To add insult to injury, he got the first SMS spam I’ve seen on his phone that afternoon. It reminds me that SpamAssassin isn’t a solution to the problem, it’s just a tool to mitigate some of the problems.
Then I noticed in my referer logs that some site was inline linking an image off of my site. Admittedly, it’s a pretty funny picture but my bandwidth bill is 10 times higher due to them using the image. So I set up .htaccess to serve up the picture from http://goatse.cx/ (Do not click that link, your curiosity is better than what’s on the other side. NSFW for sure.) to people who were requesting it from the offending domain. I’m thinking of changing that picture to the one at http://www.tubgirl.com/ (same warning applies) just in case someone has become so jaded by the intarweb that goatse doesn’t phase them.
I was also able to set up with the above technique to mess with a cam portal that was using her webcam pic without permission (I don’t have the URL but it’s funny to see goatse in the middle of a page with desperate camwhores). So hopefully that’s be just a few less dumb people to deal with in the future for both of us.