The Clever Badger To add insult to injury, the platypus is leading.

The Most Dangerous Names on the Internet

In the last few days I've been pointed (a couple of times, actually) to some articles like this one pointing out who the most dangerous celebrities on the internet are.

More specifically, the articles are discussing which celebrities have the most dangerous search results associated with their names.  Jessica Biel apparently tops the list (about the only film that she starred in that I recall was The Illusionist, which was a good, if under-promoted, film).

According to these articles, searches for things like "Jessica Biel wallpaper" are likely to turn up results with spyware, viruses, and other sorts of on-line nastiness.

When I read these articles, I had to laugh.

I laughed because anyone that's spent any significant amount of time on the internet knows a couple of things.

1. This is old news.
2. People are not searching for Jessica Biel wallpaper. At least not without some extra qualifying words.

Way back in the early 1990s, when the internet was young, there was an internet service available at my school called Usenet.  Usenet was the conceptual forerunner of more modern discussion board platforms like vBulletin or Ikonboard, which are, in turn, sort of conceptual forerunners of platforms like WordPress, Blogger, and other blogging frameworks.

Usenet was something of a free for all.  I spent a fair amount of time on Usenet, mostly in movie, science, and religion related newsgroups, and it was impossible not to notice the huge, dare I say astronomical, number of newsgroups with names like alt.binaries.<hot actress of the day>.nude. It was fairly common knowledge that if you really wanted to wreck your computer (viruses were the threat of the day - more sophisticated things like spyware and phishing hadn't yet emerged), the best way to do it was to hang about in the binaries newsgroups.

The funny thing was that in the early days, you actually had to work to infect your computer.  Binary files, like pictures, had to be converted to ASCII text and chunked up into manageable sized pieces in order to be posted.  The lucky viewer had to jump through the hurdle of finding all the pieces of the file, then download them and reassemble them into a complete file, then run them through a decoder.  Then, after all of this, if you were lucky, you might get a poorly focused paparazzi shot of some actress sunbathing topless.  Or you might get a virus.  (If you were a home-based user, you had the additional hoop of having to wait a Really Long Time to download everything over your 14.4K modem...)

The thing was that internet-based miscreants figured out pretty quickly that if they wanted to cause trouble, one of the easiest ways to do it was to aim low.

That, apparently, hasn't changed.

CB