
"Asswipe," replied Yahoo's server. That's when I knew I had it - peteretep
http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms.html?display=1
======
ComputerGuru
This entry made me smile. First, the title with its language caught my eye.
Then, as I reached the end of the line and saw the domain name, my tired and
sleepy face broke into a full-bodied grin.

fish is my most-favorite tongue-in-cheek technical blogger ever. He doesn't
blog too often, but they're almost always very useful (and very witty!) gems.

(Hint: you can find out who he really is by reading far back enough.)

~~~
eliasmacpherson
or if you click the "about fish" on the top right of the kitchen roll.

~~~
experiment0
It still doesn't tell you who it is on the about page though, just that he's
on the AppKit team.

~~~
pionar
I would imagine email address corydoras@ridculousfish.com would give a hint.

~~~
aardvark
So, email corydoras@ridculousfish.com and he'll reply with a hint about his
identity?

~~~
solistice
nah, you'll have to partion the pre @ part using a reg ex into 2 parts, and
then take the one that makes the most sense. >c orydoras

>co rydoras

>cory doras

>coryd oras

>corydo ras

>corydor as

>corydora s

I'm going with coryd oras, sounds like a real name.

~~~
saraid216
Why 2 parts?

Cory D Oras.

Obviously.

------
emidln
:waves bye

Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris:1 and Hackers' Lounge:2 were the first major time
sinks of my digital life in the late 90s and early 2000s. ychat and ymsg were
my intro to network protocols. I learned Makefiles, C, C++, and Python so I
could build, understand, and modify programs like curfloo, curphoo, zinc, and
gchat+/gyach. Although I moved on to IRC, I'll never forget when someone
passed me "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" (and the implicit link to
Phrack) or the first time a bot I created logged in and took drink orders. The
pride the first time I wrote a patch for my client to handle a login change
all by myself.

A lifetime later, I know I wouldn't be where I am as a programmer if not for
the encouragement of friends (some of whom I still talk with and do business
with) I made as a teenager on yahoo chat. A lot of people I know grew up on
IRC, but Yahoo Chat was my first love. Good bye, I'll miss you!

~~~
fmela
I had a really similar experience. As a bored teenager in the late 90s, I
would sometimes log into the Yahoo chat rooms using the computers at my high
school. The chat client was a Java applet, and it was atrociously slow and
prone to crashing. I had started teaching myself to program a few years
earlier, so creating a chat client seemed like a fun project.

There was a guy that hung out in the Programming:1 chat room with the chat
handle was 127001 (he was able to create that handle before Yahoo became more
strict with the chat handles one could create) that had reverse-engineered the
protocol and posted a guide online. I wonder what happened to him. Thanks,
loopy!

Anyway, I created a Yahoo chat client in Win32/C as I was learning the API and
the language. I was the only user for quite a while, but eventually I posted
it using the free web space EarthLink gave me for being a dial-up subscriber.
It got pretty popular through word of mouth. Later, when I installed Linux for
the first time, I took that code and turned it into an ncurses-based client.
It was a lot of fun, and somehow I ended up turning the fun I had hacking on
little projects like that into a living.

------
sriramk
At Microsoft, I once wrote code for a public facing login system where you had
to make sure usernames didn't contain some banned words. I was surprised by
how many words on the list were new to me and how, err, creative people get.

I always wondered who at Microsoft was tasked with keeping that list 'up to
date'.

~~~
alokm
These lists can be very locale insensitive. A few years back my friend was
trying to get a Gmail id with his name. To his surprise he wasnt able to get
any id, no matter how long and obscure suffix he tried. Then it hit me that it
was because of his name Kshitij. Systems should take terms from other
languages and locales as white lists in these cases.

~~~
coldtea
> _These lists can be very locale insensitive._

Perhaps because english is all it matters to them. Who in Europe, for example,
even cares if a forum or chat has some swear words in his language?

We might be even more pissed off that we can't swear and leave the service,
rather than complain about it.

~~~
solistice
Analogous to that, in Germany don't beep out any swearwords on television,
which is why American celebrities appearing on TV here swear vedammt oft. For
example this eminem interview

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x98y4u_eminem-interview-
on-...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x98y4u_eminem-interview-on-german-
tv_music#.UXALNH0gjw0)

It's at 2:30 where he talks about it. And swears a "little".

~~~
hfsktr
That brightened my day considerably.

When I watch Misfits (UK show) they say some things that I never hear on
American shows. It only happens on shows that are after the watershed[1]
though. Before then I don't know which parts are censored.

It always amuses me a little how Americans seem to be more strict than the
Europeans for media censoring.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watershed_(television)>

------
MichaelApproved
If you're going to spam the system, why not just use Win32 API's and control
their client like a zombie instead of trying to play the cat and mouse game
reverse engineering their protocol?

You can send instructions to manipulate the client and have it do what you
want almost as easily as you could if you knew their protocol. And that's
without all the cat and mouse headaches.

~~~
memoryfault
I'm not familiar with Win32 APIs. Could you elaborate more as to how they
would enable you to control the client like a zombie?

~~~
swatkat
AutoIt is a popular software to automate GUI applications.

<http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/>

~~~
mkopinsky
Boston Workstation[0] is another, that I used quite a bit at work for a while.
Pretty powerful, although I have no more desire to touch VB ever again.

[0]: <http://www.bostonsoftwaresystems.com/>

------
leephillips
What a charming and informative website! So refreshing to see an original
design instead of another Wordpress, etc. site. Check out this fascinating
note on how grep manages to be so fast by being secretly slow:

[http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-
treachery.h...](http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-
treachery.html)

------
ilitirit
I had to work on implementing fairly well-known advertiser's banned-words list
into our system recently. Their system is incredibly stupid. For example,
they'll ban the word "Dimethltryptamine", but "Dimethyltryptamine" (the
correct spelling) is allowed. You're not allowed to use the word "bulldog"
under the Pets category. You can't use the word "dragon" under Jobs. It seems
like they just have a form that visitors to the site can use to link ads
containing "offensive" words and the system will automatically add it to a
list.

------
miles_matthias
Awesome! Network sniffing and analyzing is one of my favorite hobbies since
being introduced to it as a security analyst for an MSSP and then writing
Wireshark plugins at Sandia. If anyone is looking for a fun Saturday, I highly
recommend <http://forensicscontest.com/>.

------
peter_l_downs
Seems to be down -- nyud cache here
[http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms.html?dis...](http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms.html?display=1.nyud.net)

~~~
dbaupp
I think the .nyud.net has to go straight after the domain name:
[http://ridiculousfish.com.nyud.net/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms...](http://ridiculousfish.com.nyud.net/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms.html?display=1)

~~~
swinglock
That it does.

Visiting <http://example.com/index.html.nyud.net> would send a request to
"example.com" for the path "/index.html.nyud.net". That's not what you want.

------
tantalor
Der, why did they filter naughty words in the client?

~~~
vwinsyee
They didn't -- the list was sent from the server, because "this list might
need to be updated dynamically, in case someone on the Internet managed to
think up a new word for sex."

~~~
sgarman
The list sent was supposed to be used by the client to filter. What I think
the OP is suggesting is that they should have just filtered server side not
client side.

------
FuzzyDunlop
I suppose British people never really used the chat to talk about paedophiles.
At least they looked for actual words rather than any occurrence in the
string.

~~~
jrabone
We'd also spell it "pædophile" just to make sure you understand Unicode...

------
charlieok
Obligatory SNL reference:

<http://www.hulu.com/watch/285711>

------
pondababa
I'm surprised that "phag" is blocked but "fag" isn't.

------
Cacti
and all this time I thought "shat" was being polite

~~~
smcl
Not sure about elsewhere in the world but in the UK "shat" is a sort-of fun
past tense for "shit", e.g. "Ian shat in his pants"

~~~
illuminate
It's not used very often in the US, but it's still a perfectly understood
term.

