News You Can Bruise for 2002 April 2

Most of the static content and CGIs should work now; there is still some stuff I haven't fixed, though. eCow took forever to fix; bleah.

By the way, you can now email me at leonardr@crummy.com in addition to leonardr@segfault.org.

The ultimate in biometrics:

we should take advantage of cartesian dualism and make computers out of non-physical stuff that we can access only through our pineal glands

I'm spending my idle moments making my log analysis software slice and dice data in more interesting ways. One thing I just added was analysis of 404 errors. I've discovered that I'm getting a surprising number of 404s of the following strange form:

http://www.crummy.com/cgi-bin/formmail.pl?recipient=foo@bar.com&subject=http://www.crummy.com/cgi-bin/formmail.pl&email=baz@qux.com&=http://www.crummy.com/cgi-bin/formmail.pl

Now, I don't need this page to tell me someone's up to no good, started causing trouble 'round my neighborhood. There's a common CGI script called formmail.pl which lets you send mail through a web browser, and there are robots (the sinister Microsoft URL Control again) which scour the web looking for unprotected formmail.pls to use as spam relays.

My question is, is there anyone interested in getting the output of a script I would write, called formmail.pl, which grabs information about anyone who accesses it? I don't care enough to actually wreak my own revenge, but I'm happy to provide information to those who enjoy such things. John Ashcroft, are you listening?

My latest triumph is code that extracts the query strings from search engine referers so that the same query string from different search engines will be counted as the same sort of referer. Coincidentally, this also makes it much easier to look for Disturbing Search Requests (TM), such as "not keeping passover fetish porn" ("More, more!", she cried. "More leavened bread!"), "pictures of actual pimps" (damn fake pimps!) and "free cam picture girl iran Iranian picture" (act now for hot sharia babes!). However, I think it's only fair to also highlight search requests for which Crummy was probably very helpful, such as "pictures of home appliances", "are hedgehogs illegal in california?", "random pokey", and "why is steven wolfram so crazy?".

There's also an in-between category, where Crummy has something that is fun and which pertains to what you were looking for, but is not what you were really looking for. Examples of this include "michigan j. frog music full song", "mcsweeney's journal", "seinfeld music mp3", and by far the most popular search result run against Crummy: "captain planet". This is my favorite type of search result; it contains the right mixture of helpfulness and mischief.