Paging Hagbard Celine...
This may be a “grab yer ankles” post.
If the conspiracy theories hold true - seconds after I hit “Publish” on this sucker, the entire blog will go dark and sallow men in bad sunglasses will show up at my door.
But what the hell...
Back at the beginning of June, I came across a post at Jim Flanagan's blog about a particular example of impenetrable web weirdness going on over at yuppiechat.com.
Some kind of deep, many-layered cyphertext, it seems, which Jim suggested might be the work of a Markov babbler. I blogged about it at the time, here.
Wandering through Google yesterday, in search of a certain obscure literary quotation, I stumbled into another very similar site – one that also looks a lot like some kind of covert channel or something. The site URL is: http://psychoflubber.com
(Update: apologies for not linking directly. This post seems to be drawing a lot of traffic since it went up last night, and I'm not sure how I feel about my blog popping up high in their referrer logs).
This second site has the same sort of layout, same recursive links, just as much weirdness...
Then I decided to dig a little deeper. Checking the Whois record for this site revealed nothing useful:
Domain Name: PSYCHOFLUBBER.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: http://www.opensrs.org
Name Server: NS1.ZONEEDIT.COM
Name Server: NS5.ZONEEDIT.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 09-jun-2003
Creation Date: 21-aug-2001
Expiration Date: 21-aug-2004
In fact, it’s more than a little puzzling that the record in Whois is so vague. Is that normal? No address, no name, no nothing...
So I Googled again, and came across this UseNet thread.
Oh crap. It looks like it might be some kind of Scientology thing. These guys scare me.
The registrant’s address listed within this original UseNet post (now, as noted, curiously missing from the database) is the same address as that of the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition in LA. So whatever it is, it appears to be owned by, or at least clearly linked to the Church of Scientology.
As if this wasn’t puzzling enough – there’s even more curious stuff going on in here.
For example the registered domain owner, according to that post, shares the same name as an infamous Pentecostal Evangelist: Aimee Semple McPherson (lots to be found on Google, including this), founder of the Foursquare Gospel Church. Perhaps this is the Church of Scientology's idea of a joke...?
Which fact then starts me off wondering whether there’s any kind of a link between this legendary Ms. McPherson and another McPherson linked to Scientology (and not in a good way).
I would have dug a little deeper than this, but I started hearing the X-Files theme music in the background, so I figured it’s time to grab a coffee and a think.
Going back to Google today, I've found two other very similar sites - same layout, same crypto-babble. Recognizable selections from various obscure works of literature - some Sinclair Lewis, some E. Phillips Oppenheim, the odd snatch of Lewis & Clark - and the occasional better-known pieces.
Yikes.
I’m sure the dark underbelly of the Net is thickly lined with stuff like this, but it’s not often that it pops so close to the surface. There must be fissures appearing in the Matrix.
Whatever the hell is going on here, it's a little worrying to note that the sheer volume of semi-random text buried deep into these sites is causing them to float fairly high up in (admittedly somewhat obscure) Google searches. It was a hunt for a certain half-remembered line of Shakespeare that first led me to the "psychoflubber" site ("The fresh and yet unbruised Greeks do pitch Their brave pavilions" from Troilus & Cressida)
I see the fnords!
(Oh, and Happy Canada Day, btw).
If the conspiracy theories hold true - seconds after I hit “Publish” on this sucker, the entire blog will go dark and sallow men in bad sunglasses will show up at my door.
But what the hell...
Back at the beginning of June, I came across a post at Jim Flanagan's blog about a particular example of impenetrable web weirdness going on over at yuppiechat.com.
Some kind of deep, many-layered cyphertext, it seems, which Jim suggested might be the work of a Markov babbler. I blogged about it at the time, here.
Wandering through Google yesterday, in search of a certain obscure literary quotation, I stumbled into another very similar site – one that also looks a lot like some kind of covert channel or something. The site URL is: http://psychoflubber.com
(Update: apologies for not linking directly. This post seems to be drawing a lot of traffic since it went up last night, and I'm not sure how I feel about my blog popping up high in their referrer logs).
This second site has the same sort of layout, same recursive links, just as much weirdness...
Then I decided to dig a little deeper. Checking the Whois record for this site revealed nothing useful:
Domain Name: PSYCHOFLUBBER.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: http://www.opensrs.org
Name Server: NS1.ZONEEDIT.COM
Name Server: NS5.ZONEEDIT.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 09-jun-2003
Creation Date: 21-aug-2001
Expiration Date: 21-aug-2004
In fact, it’s more than a little puzzling that the record in Whois is so vague. Is that normal? No address, no name, no nothing...
So I Googled again, and came across this UseNet thread.
Oh crap. It looks like it might be some kind of Scientology thing. These guys scare me.
The registrant’s address listed within this original UseNet post (now, as noted, curiously missing from the database) is the same address as that of the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition in LA. So whatever it is, it appears to be owned by, or at least clearly linked to the Church of Scientology.
As if this wasn’t puzzling enough – there’s even more curious stuff going on in here.
For example the registered domain owner, according to that post, shares the same name as an infamous Pentecostal Evangelist: Aimee Semple McPherson (lots to be found on Google, including this), founder of the Foursquare Gospel Church. Perhaps this is the Church of Scientology's idea of a joke...?
Which fact then starts me off wondering whether there’s any kind of a link between this legendary Ms. McPherson and another McPherson linked to Scientology (and not in a good way).
I would have dug a little deeper than this, but I started hearing the X-Files theme music in the background, so I figured it’s time to grab a coffee and a think.
Going back to Google today, I've found two other very similar sites - same layout, same crypto-babble. Recognizable selections from various obscure works of literature - some Sinclair Lewis, some E. Phillips Oppenheim, the odd snatch of Lewis & Clark - and the occasional better-known pieces.
Yikes.
I’m sure the dark underbelly of the Net is thickly lined with stuff like this, but it’s not often that it pops so close to the surface. There must be fissures appearing in the Matrix.
Whatever the hell is going on here, it's a little worrying to note that the sheer volume of semi-random text buried deep into these sites is causing them to float fairly high up in (admittedly somewhat obscure) Google searches. It was a hunt for a certain half-remembered line of Shakespeare that first led me to the "psychoflubber" site ("The fresh and yet unbruised Greeks do pitch Their brave pavilions" from Troilus & Cressida)
I see the fnords!
(Oh, and Happy Canada Day, btw).
