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Mysterious Usenet posts

Markovian Parallax Denigrate is a series of unexplained texts posted to Usenet in 1996. The posts are often mentioned in conjunction with other bizarre and/or unsolved internet mysteries, such as Sad Satan, Cicada 3301, the Publius Enigma and Unfavorable Semicircle. Hundreds of messages were posted, and were initially dismissed as spam. It has been referred to as "the Internet’s oldest and weirdest mystery", and "one of the first great puzzles of the internet".

Cryptographers, software developers, and hackers have worked on decoding the puzzles, but have never been successful. In 2016, Susan Lindauer was mistakenly identified as a possible source of these posts, and she denied being the author. Other possible explanations include an early experimental chat bot or text generator, a troll or prankster, or a programmer experimenting with Markov chains.

It was made apparent that these messages were the work of an early spambot, outlined in article started this mystery. Near the bottom of the article, Kevin Moris provides the answer to the question all at the same time as the question itself. A direct quote from Moris himself shows that he did discover who created this bot. The mystery was created by the sole purpose of the headline being read, but the article not.

"The conspiracies about Lindauer are awfully compelling. The facts would all fit so neatly together, too—if only Susan Linduaer, the one who was born in Alaska and arrested in 2004, actually sent the Markovian Parallax Denigrate message, or had any connection to it whatsoever...

...UWSP stands for the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. And it turns out there was actually a Susan Lindauer who attended UWSP as a graduate student in physical education. She graduated in 1994. I called up her former faculty advisor at UWSP, professor Rory Suomi, with whom she published at least two papers bearing titles like “Impact of Arthritis Foundation Aquatic Program Classes on Strength and Range of Motion Measures in Women with Arthritis.”"

As well, an email archive found that a Catherine Hampton had discovered this back in 1996 when it first happened and reported it to system admins. Her email read:

"I have personally verified that the following newsgroups have been hit by the current random-text vertical spam:

news.admin.net-abuse.misc alt religion.christian alt.religion.christian.boston-church misc.education.homeschool.christian pdaxs.religion.christian rec.music.christian uk.religion.christian

No moderatored newgroups have been hit so far, and I have warned the moderator of soc.religion.christian, so he is on the lookout. None of the alt.christnet.* or christnet.* hierarchy has been hit, and several regional *.religion.christian newsgroups have also been spared.

I have also been mailbombed by this idiot. I'm not sure how heavily, since after I the first couple of messages appeared, I told procmail to send them to dev/null and informed my ISP about this. I kept copies of the first two mailbomb messages, so if someone needs them to track the idiots down, let me know."

See also

References

  1. Dewey, Caitlin (May 2, 2014). "Five of the Internet's eeriest, unsolved mysteries". Washington Post. Retrieved 10 September 2017.
  2. ^ Förtsch, Michael (November 25, 2016). "Sieben ungelöste Rätsel des Internets". Wired.de. Retrieved 10 September 2017.
  3. ^ Morris, Kevin (November 2, 2012). "The Markovian Parallax Denigrate: Unraveling the Internet's oldest and weirdest mystery". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 10 September 2017.
  4. Privalov, Alexander (August 24, 2017). "Краткий курс истории спама". Popmech.ru. Retrieved 10 September 2017.

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