Cloaking

I will go against the grain (and good sense) and start with a tangent today.

Our office's elevators have two lights beside them to indicate whether they are headed up or down, as all elevators anywhere do. When the elevator is going up, the top light shines white, but when the elevator is going down, the bottom light shines red (just like they did at my old office). Does anyone else find this eerie at all? It's like going up to heaven or down to hell, and we always start in hell, and after we've reached heaven, we descend back to hell just a few hours later.

Ahem, back to relevance and sense...

So, for the past few days I've been learning a lot about spam sites. This has involved learning the tons of techniques that these rapacious fellows use when they create their bogus sites, learning how to spot spam sites quickly, and understanding the various ways to treat these sites. I won't go into too much depth here, cos it's a lot of info and I'd probably bore most of you.

But one of the techniques that these people use is called "cloaking." Basically, search engines send out spiders to crawl the Internet and relay information about Web sites back to the search engine's database. The sly site creators out there will come up with a way to tell if a spider is checking out their site, and if they know that a search engine's spider is looking at their site, they'll respond by automatically showing them a fake site, in order to trick them into thinking that their page is legitimate.

My mentor put it this way: it's like a cop (the spider) is knocking on the criminal's (spammer's) door. The criminal will look through the peep hole to see the cop standing at the door. Since the criminal doesn't want to reveal his identity, he'll put on a mask and then open the door to make it seem like he's just a regular guy, and can say "No, I'm not a criminal. I'm legit." (My mentor actually got up and acted this scenario out with the conference room door, which was very funny.)

Why am I telling you this? Do I want you all to learn how to become a spammer and add to the already ridiculous number of spam sites out there on the Web? No!

I just thought that there was some hidden significance in this, and I wanted to share this seed with you. I hope that if you think on this just for a moment or two, that the seed will blossom into something more, and that fruit will be born from it.

I'd usually expound on this, but for some reason (and I don't think it's laziness or lack of words) I feel like refraining tonight. Though I will say this: after I pondered the idea behind this idea, I realized that the real pain and the real work doesn't happen with the initial recognition and resonance with it, but instead with the dread and horror that comes with digging out the "why" of the matter.

I don't expect my excavation to be finished until I am done with this life, but I deem the task to be more than worthy of my efforts, and I hope that you will join with me.

Grab a shovel. Let's find our true selves.