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Markovian Parallax Denigrate

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Markovian Parallax Denigrate is a series of unexplained messages containing garbled strings of English text of various lengths posted to Usenet on August 5th, 1996 at 3:00AM. 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, anti-war activist Susan Lindauer was mistakenly purposed as the source of the posts, this being due to the email address used as a source in the titular post, however the thousands of varying email addresses on the other posts clearly exonerate her from any involvement. Other possible explanations include an early experimental chat bot or text generator, or a programmer experimenting with Markov chains.

Etymology

The name "Markovian Parallax Denigrate" comes from a message posted on alt.religion.christian.boston-church by Usenet User Chris Brokerage (Likely a pseudonym) from the partially obfuscated email address "Susan_L...@WORF.UWSP.EDU" which appears to have originated at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, however the majority of posts use randomly assembled names and addresses in order to obscure the source of the messages.

Newsgroups Affected

At least a few dozen examples of Markovian Parallax Denigrate text exist and are available to view on Google Groups, Google's archive of Usenet newsgroup posts. The following newsgroups were affected by the Markovian Parallax Denigrate spam:

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

The general consensus of contemporary users of these newsgroups was that the posts were in fact a "Mailbox Attack" or "Letterbomb", which can be loosely defined as an early DDoS attack, wherein a user sends spam text to a newsgroup causing ISPs to meter or throttle the connections of affected users due to high bandwidth usage. Each message to one of these newsgroups would be automatically downloaded to a newsgroup member's computer, so high quantities of messages would, in turn, equal high bandwidth usage for all newsgroup users.

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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