ASCII by Jason Scott: Freedom, Justice and a Disturbingly Gaping Ass

I'll be nice and warn you that this essay links to disturbing images. That is, THIS ENTRY LINKS TO VERY DISTURBING IMAGES SO IF YOU LIKE EVERYTHING TO BE A VARIATION OF KITTENS LICKING EACH OTHERS EARS YOU ARE GOING TO THE WRONG PLACE. PLEASE GLIDE ALONG QUIETLY TO THE NEXT OR PREVIOUS WEBLOG ENTRIES WHERE YOU WILL BE A MUCH HAPPIER PERSON.

Everyone gone? OK, good.

I mentioned in a previous entry about the happy-go-lucky adventure of the massive downloading of a single image on textfiles.com, one of a cheery Grim Reaper holding a glowing hourglass. It was quite popular, and I talked about the situation where I had seen downloading of this image go from nothing before April 2006 and it had quickly unseated all other comers by a factor of 100 to become the most downloaded file out of the millions in the textfiles.com family of websites. This was, I mused, some sort of payback for when I was a youth and a leech, and so I let it go. Incredulity was the order of the day in the comments, with a few people speculating that since my website doesn't know where the source of my files always are, I might in fact be considered compelled to do this sort of charity work to atone. Others thought that I was brave to allow hotlinking at all.

Both, it turned out, were wrong. Idly sitting around during the holiday season, I went to go check how that popular ol' Grim Reaper image was doing. The answer: very very well for Mr. Reaper. Not so well for Jason's bandwidth.

I said that in September of 2006 he was downloaded 212,000 times. For the month of December, he was downloaded 401,000 times. This was going to get a lot worse, I could see that immediately.

The problem wasn't just academic anymore, either. You see, I've been lucky enough to host with a number of good providers over the years, who have treated me well, and eventually I have outgrown them. When that happens, there's a mad scramble to find new hosting and I have to often host it locally, to the detriment of everyone. Additionally, I am scrambling for the privilege of spending lots of my own money. While this is all fine with me, the "service" I am doing by allowing the hot-linking of images by Myspace is really no service at all.

Myspace is roughly the 4th most visited English language website, according to reports. It is owned by News Corporation. News Corporation is fucking huge. My dad used to work for News Corporation, so I am very appreciative of that but not to the point of happily whistling a tune while they bleed my generous hosting company's connection dry. Everything, you see, has limits. I hope it's not like hearing there's scant evidence of Tooth Fairies to know that I have some of my own.

So, sleepy with egg nog and considering what to do next, I decided I would replace the image.

Initially, I thought an ad for Notacon or Blockparty or the documentary would be good. But the fact is, the vectors just don't line up. People who are on Myspace are hardly going to be swayed by an ad for something one way or another, and it felt icky.

So I goatse'd them.

If you don't know what I mean by "Goatse", then let me go on the record, right now, as saying this is just what Wikipedia is good for. You can go and read up on the history of what "Goatse" is. If you don't have the time or patience and yet still don't know what I mean, let me say that it is a disturbing image of a gentleman (it is clear he is a fellow) using almost yoga-like skills to display the eye-watering sight of the inside of his own rectum. If that sounds horrible, it is. It is truly, truly horrible.

This is interesting on its own levels; I don't know why we didn't think this through in the early stages of Internet, but the fact is so obvious that to hear it makes you think you always knew it: the pipes can back up sewage. The same open door that gives you a world of knowledge and communication is also a piping hot shit-gun of horror. Like looking to see if a rifle is loaded by peering down the barrel, your screen can turn from a breathtaking visage of insight into a Gatling Gun of mind-scarring infinity-pain within the literal blink of an eye.

Or, as they say: ONCE YOU CLICK, YOU CANNOT UNCLICK.

If you are truly fine with this, then go ahead: See what I replaced the Grim Reaper with.

Anyway, on with the show.

Assuming you find the idea of some errant myspace numbnut faced with a gaping ass entertaining, then you will become first giggly, and then fall aside laughing to know that within an hour I had "goatse'd" 400 people.

Within two days it was 25,000. Twenty five thousand.

We are now up to nearly a hundred thousand viewings of this file in its new ass-o-rama version. I am sure that through libraries, schools, colleges, cubicles, offices, warehouses, the sound of someone's throat reflexively making a sound not unlike "Uuuuaaaaaghhhghh" has filled the air. The amount of time lost in horrified stares and frantic jabs at the keyboard and mouse to get away, far away must be into the realm of hours by now. Maybe days! Days of slack-jawed horrified faces staring into a big square eyeball. I don't know, that gets a chortle out of me. I'm easily entertained.

But after the initial thought of this Towering Tidal Wave of Tweener Terror, I started to consider how it had gotten to be so bad in the first place.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Any entity interested in what is called "market share" must eventually expand out into regions of people far outside those would normally patronize that entity. Not to ensure survival, but to ensure growth - which eventually supplants survival as a metric of health. An excellent example of this is air travel: whereas the original passengers on a plane in the first decade of air travel had a reasonably good chance of knowing how to operate that plane (the pilot and his passenger, two air enthusasts trying out a new machine), we are now at the point that we can have 300 individuals inside a jet and less than a handful could possibly operate the thing. That is, less than 1% of the people inside a machine, whose lives depend on that machine and who are paying to use that machine, have any idea how to make it work. This is, ultimately, fine: air travel is very safe and we have lots of safeguards in place so that generally the whole shebang doesn't explode. Still, you cross a line and the trends will be for even more people packed into an airplane, not less.

This isn't evil, per se... it's just how this whole growth thing works. And eventually, this came to the Internet. As college students were dumped onto Internet connections, they faced, essentially, a sea of pilots; people trained to operate the craft who followed some levels of lore and rulesets to keep things running smoothly, if jarringly Libertarian. As these college students flooded the gates around the month of September, they would eventually get assimilated into the Way of Things by a month or two, or sulk away and watch things from afar. Either way, it kind of worked.

And then America On-Line dumped everybody onto the Internet at once. This phenomenon was so marked in Internet history that it even has a name: The September that Never Ended.

There's a story from that time, which I love to tell, which will have meaning in this entry shortly. Someone put up a webpage about America Online, criticizing the company and the service it provided. It advocated untoward behavior on AOL and generally represented a typical "slam site", which I myself have been known to take part in from time to time. After the time that AOL was fully loosed on the Internet and sending people willy-nilly around, this site got a letter that I think really underlines the problem with this sort of culture class. An AOL moderator, that is, a guy whose job is to look for troublemakers on the AOL service, contacted this webmastrer, and told him he was violating the AOL terms of service and to cease his website immediately. As far as this mop-head was concerned, AOL now "owned" the Internet and anyone on it, even someone running a site not in any way connected with the AOL service (except in discussing them) was under its jurisdiction. The webmaster did the logical thing: he posted the letter for all to see, garnering ridicule and some thoughtful chuckles.

Myspace, and sites like it, also have to take a tactic similar to the airlines. The somewhat large barrier-to-entry of hosting a website has already been reduced a great deal, but social websites remove it entirely; you only need an e-mail address to be able to host and provide content. And now the whole part where you have to learn enough HTML to be able to make it render in a browser is wiped clean. It is possible, very possible, to go from Tweener at Hot Topic to Webmistress of the Dark and Foreboding Webpage of Sin without ever using a single bracket.

Is this bad? On the one hand, people who would never have had a voice before are given one. On the other, that voice is occasionally droning, illiterate, and borderline schizophrenic. And multiplied by tens of thousands. However, Myspace (and News Corporation) has market share, and that's the primary goal of the whole activity.

Part of hosting a website is providing the content. While it's possible to use the internal templates to at least indicate what hobbies you have and whether you like to smoke. folks are naturally inclined to upload pictures, change the color of the background, and add design schemes that make Holly Hobbie look like Prada. To help them, a little cottage industry of templates are now around so that instead of making that huge step into markup languages, patrons can simply copy and paste designs into their own pages.

Here, then is the source of this sudden interest in my website's artscene section; someone created a "design" that directly hotlinked to the artscene.textfiles.com website and used the image as the background. The design, by the way, is absolutely horrible, and I don't know how anyone ever found it readable in the first place; the default font color was red, with a line through the text! This said, I'm sure I have a number of pieces of clothing that call into question my qualifications for a fashion police badge.

Soon after I converted the image from Grim Reaper to Grim Ripper, one of the thousands of people getting eye-lashed by the image saw the "textfiles.com" mention at the bottom, figured out how to mail me, and did so:

 Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:45:40 EST
 From: Motorjames1@wmconnect.com
 To: jason@textfiles.com
 Subject: myspace hacking

 Hello. Someone is hacking into myspace profiles and claiming to be
 "textfiles".com.If you are unaware of this, they are using your
 web-name to be quite offensive. I thought you might like to know.
 It's a pretty childish, sophmoric stunt {easily cleaned up,} but
 annoying.If it happens to actually be you doing it, You should really
 hope we never meet- you will end up looking worse than the photo you
 have been posting-

This is a fascinating character study on several levels. First of all, there's the immediate assumption that someone "hacked" myspace. The fact that I used the deadly spell "mv" to shift a few things around on a machine I own is not a possibility as far as Motorjames1 is concerned. Next, just to make sure all bases are covered, he threatens me. Ostensibly he is indicating he will punish me by doing something traumatic to my ass. Perhaps, however, he merely means he will do something to my face so that it will be as horrifyingly offensive as the Goatse ass. Either way, I question his diplomatic skills.

Communiques were quiet on my side for days, and I assumed that people were figuring out how to remove the image and replace it with something else, which is the "cleaning up" that motorjames1 had indicated. Nobody, it seems, was inspired to seek me out. So, I went on a little fact-finding mission of my own. Checking the referrer logs of my webserver, I found places where people were writing helpful notes to their friends to perhaps figure out how they too had been "hacked". Granted, a lot were in the form of "WHAT T FUK WITH U BACKGROUND??????", but the essence was clear.

Hotlinking in itself is not so bad, in my book. I certainly get people hotlinking to my textfiles and directories, skipping over my introductions and context to provide others with information that I'm hosting. I even have people link directly to images on the DIGITIZE sub-site to prove a point about catalogs or old computers or so on. But in all these cases, the hotlinking is in the course of providing knowledge. Someone is trying to inform others about a subject and my library is being utilized to share. I feel like this is right and good, and I encourage it.

But what is being done by myspace is that this data is not being used for knowledge. It's being used as decoration. Beyond that, it's being used for inefficient, meaningless, taste-lacking decoration, just to give someone's poorly-written "website" a "dark feeling" by putting a visage of death on it. Maybe that's an odd, arbitrary line to draw, but after being at the ass-end of that line, if you will, I think I have to consider drawing it.

I was idly wondering today where to go with this, whether to simply refuse to allow myspace pages to hotlink to any images whatsoever, when I received this in my inbox:

 Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 20:46:11 -0800
 From: HotFreeLayouts COM 
 To: mailbox@textfiles.com
 Subject: hardcore porn pic - take down asap please
 
 hi, you really should take down ASAP
 
 www.textfiles.com/artscene/mirrors/GRAPE-DEMO-ARCHIVE/graphism/rs/razorback/
 razorback-the_grim_reaper.png
 somebody is flodding our server with that / posting it on myspace
 etc.
 --
 HotFreeLayouts.com Abuse Team

And here we are, back full circle. "Hotfreelayouts" is one of the sites that offers up these design templates for downloads (along with ads, of course), and these fellows, the pilots of the current generation if you will, were utterly unable to do anything about my "flod". Or my flodding.

Consider, then, what was going on here. Myspace, a site which is being used by people who don't know how to host or design, ends up with a gaping ass provided by a design firm which can't understand the nature of hotlinking (or of spelling), who have written to someone who can host, design and spell but are doing so with a demand that this person take action.

And this, my friends, is ass.

Comments

Great story and the whole concept of "pilots" of the intarwebs is a fine way to make the point.

You must be very proud to think that you are personally responsible for Goatse-ing so many people! I know I would be!

Posted by: cocovan | January 4, 2007 07:20 AM

You could always re-edit the image to contain a link to this page, so that people who think their sites have been hacked could read this story (basic literacy is assumed, of course, which may be giving the li'l' scamps too much credit).

It's a beautiful story. I think I may have to change a few images on my servers as well.

Posted by: Jough Dempsey | January 4, 2007 08:24 AM

Dugg: http://digg.com/tech_news/MySpace_Gets_Goatse_d

Posted by: Flanker | January 4, 2007 09:44 AM

Haha, nice story.
It's as if some guy sees a hole and sticks his junk in it then gets hurt.
Don't blame the person who rightfully made the hole,
you're suppose to say wth were you thinking sticking yourself in there?
It's a price you pay for doing something you have no idea about and without any thought.

Posted by: manman | January 4, 2007 09:59 AM

Wonderful. Simply wonderful. Perhaps it's just as I hate myspace, but I can't help but appreciate the line.

And the record goatse-ing.

A friend of mine created a rather famous goatse in Gary's Mod, using clever headcrab placement, the G-man, and a good secondary camera.

Someone chose not only to steal this and take credit, but to hotlink the image. So he's stealing it, taking credit, and pulling it directly from my friend's site.

The image was replaced with the real Goatse, and the text "Don't steal credit for my work-The_Spaniard"

Yet that mighty act only got 2000 people, at most 2000.

I was astounded by that number until this morning, and learning of your hundred-thousand.

Congratualtions, sir, at pwning the internet.

Posted by: ZekeDMS | January 4, 2007 10:23 AM

This is by far the funniest post I've seen in a very long time. Thank you. You and your mv spell.

Posted by: zack | January 4, 2007 10:23 AM

Good job on fucking them up!!

Posted by: nitr021 | January 4, 2007 10:27 AM

"But what is being done by myspace is that this data is not being used for knowledge. It's being used as decoration. Beyond that, it's being used for inefficient, meaningless, taste-lacking decoration, just to give someone's poorly-written "website" a "dark feeling" by putting a visage of death on it. Maybe that's an odd, arbitrary line to draw, but after being at the ass-end of that line, if you will, I think I have to consider drawing it."

yes, that IS an odd arbitrary line to draw. What constitutes 'good use'? Is it for you to say?

Of course, it IS your bandwidth. So you would be entirely in your right to cut off these fucknuts at the knees, and I would probably cheer you on. And heck, I would probably just ban the entire myspace domain. But to say what is and what isn't valid information/decoration/whatever? Hmmmm.

Posted by: Eric the Red | January 4, 2007 10:53 AM

I see it as the difference between someone asking for books you've stacked up to read or show others, and someone asking for books because they want to make a little "book fort" out in the woods.

Posted by: Jason Scott | January 4, 2007 11:39 AM

Just in case you don't already have a prominent enough place in the histories of thar intarwebs, now you can be known as:
"The man who goatse'd MySpace"

nice one mate ;)

Posted by: fuzz | January 4, 2007 12:38 PM

So i had the same problem starting last summer sometime and did the same thing. EXCEPT, instead of goatse, I used the picture of David Hasselhoff and puppies.

good times.

Posted by: someone else | January 4, 2007 12:59 PM

just for clarification, motorjames1 did take into account that you changed it yourself: "If it happens to actually be you doing it,"

Posted by: anony | January 4, 2007 01:28 PM

Great stuff Jason. Well-written, good character progression (from puckered to goatse'd) and full of wholesome values.

I had a similar problem with an image I did of Janet Jackson and her bizarre breast adornment for b3ta and I believe I used the tubgirl gambit before feeling a small frisson of guilt.

Never got on myspace (not around back then) or 'the public lavatory wall of the internet' as I like to call it.

Kudos, my friend.

Posted by: Ged | January 4, 2007 01:30 PM

Haha that last comment by Jason reminded me of this: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=13680

Posted by: IC | January 4, 2007 01:37 PM

Brilliant!

I'm not sure what is worse to goatse someone or tubgirl them. Either way it's a quick lesson on where to get your content.

Posted by: Jake D. | January 4, 2007 01:38 PM

I'm no prude, but I think there is an element of "knowingly distributing pornography to a minor" here. You know Myspace is full of kids, and you know that's where your image is being used.

I'd have gone with something equally embarrassing but less offensive. I like the Hasslehoff and kittens idea... or simply one of those "image stolen from xyz.com" images.

Posted by: Frac | January 4, 2007 01:42 PM

while a bit more work, you could have replaced it with a script that would send either the original image or the goatse image. probably base it off of a hash of the IP and maybe the week or something. maybe the referrer too. keep the population steady while making as many viewers continue to see a picture of an ass as possible. or maybe you just wanted your bandwith back

Posted by: _mind | January 4, 2007 01:45 PM

I wonder if your "Enter 'ascii' here" bot protection will thwart the thousands of mouth breathers that came here via Digg..

Anyway, wonderful story, Jason! I hope the bump in traffic results in some documentary sales for you.

Posted by: Some Call Me Tim | January 4, 2007 01:52 PM

I feel your pain, man. I miss the old Internet. (I say this as I continue to maintain both AOL and Myspace accounts, but hey, it's the new world order. At least AOL deletes my messages automatically after 30 days.)

Posted by: Omar | January 4, 2007 01:54 PM

Damn that was funny. Made my day. Instant classic!

Posted by: Will | January 4, 2007 01:55 PM

Hey, 25,000! I am impressed. That's a lot of ass.

Richard

Posted by: Richard | January 4, 2007 01:57 PM

Well played sir, well played indeed.

Posted by: Sam | January 4, 2007 02:01 PM

Jason ... good for you. I had the same problem a while back and used an image with text in it to let people know what is going on.

Your appended text is fine.

As for distributing porn to a minor, come on. No way.

Posted by: Patrick Grote | January 4, 2007 02:02 PM

You, Sir, are an internet hero; and I would let you have me if you wanted. Barring that, I take my hat off to you, sir.

Posted by: n. nescio | January 4, 2007 02:13 PM

blame google images - the idiots at hotlayouts probably just googled skeleton and found your site and image. You can get around this with an htaccess file or you can add a robots.txt file to stop google image bot from indexing your images (your content will still get indexed thankfully).

hotlayouts should get what it reaps for stealing!

Posted by: TV Online | January 4, 2007 02:14 PM

I probably would have used a 400x400 block of bright red with the "blink" attribute set "on". Instead of sending an obscene picture, which, while I admit made me giggle my ass off, may well be breaking some obscure liberal-candy-ass "for the chilllldrunnnn" law, just send 'em something gruesomely inconvenient and potentially epilepsy-triggering.

Posted by: gwen | January 4, 2007 02:15 PM

Heh. I ran into that very same problem from my own site's wallpaper page (If you're interested, feel free to read the whole story here, just click back a few posts: http://www.livejournal.com/users/glych/. So what I did was discontinue hotlinking through changing my .htaccess file.

^_^

-glych

Posted by: glych | January 4, 2007 02:20 PM

You, sir, are t3h r0Xx0r5. Kudos.

Posted by: Michael Brutsch | January 4, 2007 02:21 PM

Congrats Jason! Too damn funny.
As for clicking the link, I wish I hadn't.. that's very disturbing.

Posted by: Mini Appler | January 4, 2007 02:31 PM

I am speechless, both with awe and uncontrollable laughter. I've goatse'd a few people in my time, but 25,000! You are, as has been said, an internet hero.

Posted by: corwin | January 4, 2007 02:31 PM

awesome, just awesome... reading that made my day !

Posted by: Liam | January 4, 2007 02:37 PM

I did the same thing about six months ago, except I just used a .htaccess file to redirect any image hotlink attempts from myspace/livejournal/xanga/etc to variations of goatse and the "Pain" series of pictures.

Posted by: Bill Bradford | January 4, 2007 02:39 PM

that is quite awesome!

Posted by: krux | January 4, 2007 02:39 PM

I don't know why some of you commenting creeps keep insisting that goatse is porn. Does it somehow qualify as erotic to you?

Posted by: protocol | January 4, 2007 02:43 PM

Excellent, Jason. Keep sticking it to the pinheads and myspace kiddies.

Posted by: Jacob | January 4, 2007 02:48 PM

you just made my morning, good show!

Posted by: Tashi | January 4, 2007 02:49 PM

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Marry me?

Posted by: A. Katch | January 4, 2007 02:54 PM

i love it, and if it continues, one up with the mighty tubgirl.. (www tubgirl com) i'm sure it will stir more of a reaction.

Posted by: EvilBunnyFuFu | January 4, 2007 02:58 PM

That's simply amazing.

I imagine you going around with a satisfied smile on your face. For weeks.

Posted by: Folletto Malefico | January 4, 2007 03:15 PM

booo ya! thats all i gotta say to the leechers.

http://www.socalspaces.com

Posted by: the angry gnome | January 4, 2007 03:17 PM

I curious as to how quickly the bandwidth sucking problem is resolved. I'd guess you may have just traded a hot-link-vortex clog for a scorn-of-the-lame spam clog.

All The Best

Posted by: Paul Hixson | January 4, 2007 03:22 PM

Eric the Red said: "And heck, I would probably just ban the entire myspace domain".

What good would that do, Eric? Are you sure that your pilot's license is up-to-date? ;-)

Great read Jason. Well played.

Posted by: rrl | January 4, 2007 03:25 PM

Very well done :)
A true 'shock and awe' - counterfight :):)
(and extremely well written too :)

*deep bow*

r@dix

Posted by: r@dix | January 4, 2007 03:27 PM

Wow -- blink and miss an exciting moment in the life of Jason Scott. I agree -- an ad for the demoparty or the documentary would have been tacky and missed the point entirely.

It reminds me free tech support; I don't mind (much) providing free computer support for friend, it's when my friends loan me out to their friends where the shotgun pattern begins to reveal itself. Like you, I don't mind someone hotlinking to a picture on my site for the right reasons, but designing a template that hotlinks? Wow -- cajones grande, mi amigos.

I'm a bit more patient though -- I think I might have string these people along for a ride. You know, put a Christmas hat on the 'reaper for Christmas, Easter Eggs around him for Easter, etc.

Posted by: Flack | January 4, 2007 03:30 PM

I give this troll a 10 out of 10. Bravo, sir.

Posted by: LilDebbie | January 4, 2007 03:30 PM

Personally I think you should discuss Theft of Service with HotFreeLayouts.com. They're stealing your bandwidth for their own profit.

Posted by: Bill | January 4, 2007 03:32 PM

Your story is absolutely awesome. I hope you update us on any more interesting emails or events concerning your great feat.

All the best,
freddy

Posted by: Frederick Xor | January 4, 2007 03:43 PM

Speaking as someone who remembers the days before "The September that never ends" I have to say this is a unique solution to an age old problem. The internet gods bow to you sir! As do the rest of the webmaster who know what its like to get shafted.

Posted by: Bill | January 4, 2007 03:55 PM

Saw this on DIGG. Awesome work. I giggled myself silly thinking of the people diving for their browser's back button. I've had sites steal our technology articles verbatim and steal our images as well, but they usually went through the trouble of downloading/moving the image to their own server first - not stupid enough to link to the images directly. We have taken to putting little "watermarks" into our images now, but these do detract from the image.

Anyway, congrats. Good work and may you live to goatse another day!

Posted by: Chris Boylan | January 4, 2007 04:10 PM

I think I threw up in my mouth a little after learning what goatse'd means and seeing that pic. Awesome, you rule.

Posted by: Jimmy | January 4, 2007 04:30 PM

I've been looking for a new hero. You just got the job.

Posted by: eno | January 4, 2007 04:31 PM

You've just inspired me to use a similar technique to blast people stealing our images. And I really wish I hadn't clicked on the link to that picture.

Posted by: Camille | January 4, 2007 04:34 PM

Suggestion:

1. Speaking of retards, we need a way to DIGG that image!
2. How about serving up the replacement image only to only the first visit by each IP address with an animated non-looping png for the FightClub effect.

Posted by: Anonymous Howard | January 4, 2007 04:35 PM

Best story I have read lately! Great job sticking it to those jackasses. Not only did they use an image you had created without your permission for their own commercial profit but then they have the nerve to tell you to take that down because they are to inept to do something about it themselves. I believe a big F U is due as a response. The plane analogy was awesome btw !!

Posted by: adrian | January 4, 2007 04:39 PM

All this because replacing it with "This image has been linked from my site and is wasting my bandwidth" - Please change" would have been, what too humane an action?

You reference the Usenet influx from AOL and the new users apparent lack of social graces to justify your amazing act of social disgracefulness. I doubt this will teach anyone.

However, all the 13yr olds on MySpace now have a new education thanks to you!

You are a real "hero".

Posted by: Greg | January 4, 2007 05:30 PM

You sir, are an absolute genius. Not just the image removal and replacement but your story.

Brilliance.

Posted by: smurf | January 4, 2007 05:40 PM

Hehe... I am hoping that someone I know now has a gaping a$$ on thier myspace. It is about time we take back the inter-tubes from the noobs! I can't wait to read about some person who thought they were OMFGHAXXORZ and got the rude awakening that they don't know squat... and now have to look at a dude's nether hole!! Haha.

Posted by: Joe | January 4, 2007 05:42 PM

I'm rather proud that I have managed to avoid goatse for so many years now 8)

Kudos on this, and thank you for giving me a reason to definitely not go on myspace anytime soon. (Not that I have lately)

Posted by: Allison | January 4, 2007 05:44 PM

gwen:

You stupid twat, he's not sending a pornographic image, he has merely changed an image which resides on HIS server -- which, get this (and I dunno how those darn liberals could let this happen *rolls eyes*), he has every right to do. You are every bit as clueless as the drooling halfwits he was quoting in his blog. No... actually you're worse than they are, because he has taken the time to educate you as to what, why, and how he did it, and you're STILL completely clueless.

Posted by: Wheezy | January 4, 2007 05:47 PM

Marry me and have my babies.

Posted by: jesus_ | January 4, 2007 05:50 PM

Dead solid perfect.

Posted by: sandman | January 4, 2007 05:54 PM

Man, that is the best story i've ever read on the entire internets, and i've read all the internets man. I tell you what, your idea deserves applause. *clap* *clap* *clap*

Great work. I love making stupid fucking idiot americans look like even bigger fucking idiots by making them try to figure out how someone hacked there myspace page and put up the goatse guy. You should now put the old image back, hope that people start linking it again, then this time, use the "giver" image. hahahha

Posted by: Dave | January 4, 2007 06:04 PM

This article is a whole lot of fun to read. I call this "cinema in your head" - great cinema of course.

But there's also some deeper meaning:
I suggest to name a new social disease and call it the pilot-passenger-syndrome.
And the whole internet is suffering from this disease. In Jason's example you can still fight back and have some fun, but when you are faced with stubborn wanna-be-admins at major online-service providers like AOL, T-online, web.de (Germany), who are not able to configure their MTAs RFC compliant, arbitrarily rejecting all your e-mail and patronizing their customers by denying them legitimate e-mail, then it's no fun at all.

This article confirms me once more that we have more and more admin-passengers, who think because they fly 1st class they know how to fly an airplane. In fact they have no idea how the internet works. They regard the internet as their property. Together with the Spammers they destroy the internet from the front and the rear end.

Posted by: cassiel | January 4, 2007 06:12 PM

I obviously don't hate MySpace enough, because apart from a mild chuckle all I'm thinking is that you missed a great opportunity to advertise something worthy, say your BBS Documentary. You could have edited the image to contain information about the nature of its source and your work, rather than just going for the gross-out.

Posted by: Krisjohn | January 4, 2007 06:12 PM

Jason, I hereby declare you from this point forth a true hero of the intarwebs. You deserve the finest cheeses and wines, my friend. As of this moment, you shall be referred to as "Jason the Goatse'd MySpace hero". Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? =p

Posted by: DominicanZero | January 4, 2007 06:24 PM

Criminally hilarious. You, sir, pwn.

Posted by: Red Machine D | January 4, 2007 06:42 PM

How hard is it to just steal the image, you know right click, save as... put it on your site? Instead people are so lame that they feel they must steal the image and the bandwidth.

What ever happened to creativity? Screw the kiddies who got themself goatse'd. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I thought someone was hotlinking my images.

Posted by: Shadus | January 4, 2007 06:45 PM

I'm most certain that aforementioned image contributed to many white powdered mascara tear streaked faces that had "thought" how elegant feeling "pain" must be...

Most excellent Sir!

Posted by: John S. | January 4, 2007 06:51 PM

I haven't got a good laugh like that in a long time. I haven't seen the image and I don't think I want to if it's anything comparable to the "tubgirl" image that I'm still trying to forget.

Posted by: Brock | January 4, 2007 07:13 PM

Jason, this is marvelous. I can't believe you've been on waxy, Dugg, and other sites and I didn't know it until now! As kids these days say, you are teh awsum, and an hero.

I have to confess that I remember that AOL story. I just heard about it and wasn't directly involved, of course, but it was posted far and wide on Usenet, and resulted in many hearty chuckles. IIRC, it took a long time for AOL to live down.

And Bill, with all due respect, Jason's goatse'ing isn't a "unique" solution, it's simply the most amazingly perfect execution of an old-school solution I've ever seen. I, too, was here before the Eternal September, and learned quickly you saved photos you wanted on your own shell account, you didn't hotlink. (This was, of course, before Photobucket and the like.) People (especially on alt.religion.kibology) kept track of the bandwidth and would replace hotlinked pics with gag ones to teach hotlinkers a lesson, just like Jason did.

As such, I erroneously thought for years that very few people hotlinked; it took me a long while to realize that "hotlinking" meant what it did and that it was a serious problem. I'm shocked that people think it's okay, that they have such little knowledge of how the Internet and bandwidth works that they think Jason is somehow in the wrong for hosting whatever photos he wants on his own server on his own dime.

The idea that Jason "sent" goatse to those poor innocent myspacers? I can't even comprehend the ignorance behind that claim.

Posted by: Stacia | January 4, 2007 07:31 PM

I had the same thing happen to me a few times - in one instance someone was using a football team badge image on my server as their avatar in loads of forums. It was nice to see that avatar on all his postings change to a pic of a guy masturbating.

I wonder if you could sell the "400,000 hits a month" url to someone who wants to advertise on Myspace? Maybe a business opening there - "enter your URL here, and the number of hits you get, and we'll find someone who'll pay you to host their banner"

Posted by: Milhouse | January 4, 2007 07:38 PM

I want to have your babies. At least I would, if I was a leidee.

Posted by: John | January 4, 2007 07:43 PM

quoting from Jake D.
I'm no prude, but I think there is an element of "knowingly distributing pornography to a minor" here. You know Myspace is full of kids, and you know that's where your image is being used.

---------
That's pretty much the problem of any site stealing bandwidth. If you hotlink to another site's images, you'd better realize that you can't control the result. The thieves are stealing the bandwidth and presenting it as their site, which means they are presenting the image to children, not textfiles.com.

Posted by: Jim | January 4, 2007 07:52 PM

Sir, I take back every untoward thing I have ever said about you anywhere.

Posted by: David Gerard | January 4, 2007 07:53 PM

Don't ever take the image down or change it or anything...

...and save tubgirl for next time someone pulls that sorta thing!

Posted by: juan | January 4, 2007 08:03 PM

you mention you can design, but then you run a horrid colour scheme like a black background and blazing white text that blurrs and shines like a light bulb. I don't like reading light bulbs.

Posted by: mark | January 4, 2007 08:18 PM

I loved the blog man, what you did was fucking awesome! I laughed so hard reading the whole thing. I think you should have taken the HotFreeLayouts thing further though... those guys are telling you to take down a picture ASAP and saying it's "abuse". However the real abuse is them stealing your bandwith and pictures, especially without crediting you. It would have been great if you threatened them for it =D

I wish that would have happened to one of my friend's profiles... I would have laughed my ass off. I've spent enough time on the internet to be desnsitized to 99% of the stuff ou tthere... I think I just woulda burst out laughin.

Posted by: Jordan | January 4, 2007 08:23 PM

you mention you can design, but then you run a horrid colour scheme like a black background and blazing white text that blurrs and shines like a light bulb. I don't like reading light bulbs.
----------------------------------------------

Well, Mark, it's in keeping with how people used to read textfiles and BBS's back in the early 90's, black background/white or green text.

Posted by: fishmech | January 4, 2007 08:30 PM

"The idea that Jason "sent" goatse to those poor innocent myspacers? I can't even comprehend the ignorance behind that claim."

Well, you seem to have trouble comprehending the law too. The anti-porn laws the do-gooders have passed recently make it illegal to transmit naughty images to minors. He'd have a whole lot of trouble claiming he didn't. He knows minors are the main MySpace demographic. He intentionally caused them to receive obscene images (we can all agree that goatse is obscene, right?). He's running the risk that just one of the 25,000 people who got goatse'd tells their parents, who complain to myspace, who sell the guy out to the cops. At that point, this is the kind of case that DA's dream of, and explaining the intricacies of hotlinking to a jury with my freedom at stake wouldn't be fun. Not to mention, he very well may have violated the original intent of the law in the first place.

That said, I loved it. Serves the little thieves right.

Posted by: NoxiousGas | January 4, 2007 08:38 PM

absolutely great!
enjoyed it tremendously, will come back for more..
count me as a fan ;)

Posted by: axx | January 4, 2007 08:42 PM

WHAT T FUK WITH U BACKGROUND?????? U SARDINED IT MAN!!!!

Posted by: RaD Man | January 4, 2007 09:05 PM

He could always explain hotlinking to the jury like this:

His image and the internet lie at the opposite ends of a bridge. In order for anyone using the internet to access his image they have to cross the bridge. If he wants people to view anything (like his site) that he has on his side of the bridge, he has to pay the tolls for those people. When people are not viewing his content as he intended, he still has no choice but to pay their tolls. In order to discourage them from crossing his bridge and forcing them to pay tolls, he put the offensive image up. The only people who happen to look at the image are the people who he doesn't want to visit.

Of course, my explanation might need a little adaptation and clarification, but I think the jury might understand it if you make it clearer.

Posted by: Frederick Xor | January 4, 2007 09:17 PM

I feel your pain - I get forum weenies linking to my images and chewing many megs of bandwidth. I solved it with Rewrite engine in apache, and direct them to another image. At various points I've used porn, but I realised it was still chewing my bandwidth, so I switched to a 10000*1 white png. That didn't help much, so now its a 200*200 animated gif of /pain/.

Posted by: eccles | January 4, 2007 09:31 PM

I think those speaking to some obscure porn law are incorrect. The man is mearly changing the content on his server. He isn't intentionally distributing anything. The MeatSpacers and layout people are the ones linking to the image.

Posted by: Reed | January 4, 2007 09:59 PM

This could be the greatest thing I've ever read on the Internet.

Well, maybe not, but it's the best example of "justice served" I've seen in a very long time.

My wife pointed out something that I think is totally true - your little substitution caused the goatseing of the one group of people who probably most needed to be goatsed.

Posted by: Admiral ZEX | January 4, 2007 10:00 PM

Excellent post, my friend -- and a hilarious story. I once did a similar thing a few years ago when several discussion forums were linking directly to custom user rank images which I had created specifically for an old site of mine. In my case, I used hardcore gay porn instead of Goatse, with the same intention as you. The bandwidth thieves got the message quickly and changed the images within a day...but your story is especially hilarious because nobody knows how to change it!

Speaking of Goatse, I wrote and recorded a song about it (called "Traumatized by Goatse") back in 2003 which you might enjoy:

http://www.request-a-song.com/songs/viewsong.php?songid=30

Then again, you might not. But this story just made me remember it myself.

Posted by: RedWolf | January 4, 2007 10:27 PM

You should not do magic you do not understand!!!

Posted by: bobSharpe | January 4, 2007 10:29 PM

Why is taking technology for grated bad? OT1H, I think people should be able to rely on a link to remain stable, or atleast non-offensive.
OTOH, if it becomes a problem, (bandwidth...etc.) why not just break the link?

Posted by: Anonymous | January 4, 2007 10:32 PM

As much as I hate Myspace and its users, what you did was cruel. Sure it was an amusing prank (a good read) but I know children as young as 10 who use Myspace frequently. These kids don't understand that what they copy from layout sites may contain hotlinked images, and that's understandable. Your issue was with the site offering your image in their layouts, not with the users. If you wanted to shock people using your image, maybe something a little less obscene like the pumpkin goatse would have been a better choice?

Posted by: Chip | January 4, 2007 10:34 PM

So, you reconsidered my question about why you didn't goatse them.

And now you've got the digg crowd posting all over your journal. Ah, full circle. ;)

Posted by: Ryan Russell | January 4, 2007 10:47 PM

There should be a tutorial on myspace that warns about hotlinking. Really, that's what photobucket was made for, so that everyone could host their own images for free and not steal bandwidth. That being said, I am really curious what this picture of the reaper looked like.

Posted by: Teresa | January 4, 2007 11:04 PM

flippin' brilliant man

[mostly the article...but also renaming hello.jpg]

8-)

Posted by: vlekk | January 4, 2007 11:10 PM

wahahaha! Brilliant Jason! 'Gorifying' 25,000 kids is hilarious. You sir have just made my Friday morning great. Those myspace kids can have their own intarweb but not this one ;-)

Ubergeekness forever. The Internet would be better without lusers.

Posted by: Shaw Starr | January 4, 2007 11:18 PM

It is pretty funny...

But then I have to wonder how many poor innocent 13 year old goth girls who only wanted a cute picture of the grim reaper on their myspace are now scarred for life. Yes, you probably shouldn't hotlink to images you have no control, and this is most definitely a known risk, but perhaps teaching the lesson by goatseing them is not the best way of going about things. And how many teenage boys are now in scalding hot water (or very awkward conversations) with their mothers because they caught their boys unintentionally looking at a gaping ass and dangling cock. Seems an awfully harsh punishment for some bandwidth consumption and tastelessly decorated websites.

Posted by: David | January 5, 2007 12:21 AM

Perfection.

Posted by: Dan | January 5, 2007 12:39 AM

Scott Sensei:

I bow thrice in thy honored direction!

You have won the Internet.

Posted by: THE NIGHTSTALKER | January 5, 2007 01:00 AM

This reminds me of a signature of one slashdot user:

In the beginning the Internet was a bunch of smart users with dumb terminals. Now...

Posted by: Mark Crocker | January 5, 2007 01:03 AM

Great post!

Simply amazing the reactions that you got from the myspacer and the design "organization."

Keep up the great work!

Posted by: Josh | January 5, 2007 01:22 AM

You, sir, qualify as BOFH. Superb.

Posted by: Carl Brewer | January 5, 2007 01:53 AM

I ROFLcoptered.

Posted by: Legion | January 5, 2007 01:57 AM

Hahah, good for you for doing that! I can't believe what idiots those people are, who emailed you. Geez! By the way, your writing and sense of humor is great, I love the way you wrote this up. :D

Posted by: Mia | January 5, 2007 02:08 AM

I first started making custom images for each deep-linker with context-appropriate text like,"Bob sucks underaged monkey shlong," but I got lazy and started using Mr. Goatse.

It's tremendously gratifying to look at goatse referrers after the switch and seeing people's comments.

Posted by: reeses | January 5, 2007 02:11 AM

Dude, at least use some BMEzine stuff to really shock them, goatse is tame.

Posted by: Daft | January 5, 2007 03:28 AM

What a fantastic goatse-ing. Over a hundred thousand people, t'is a sight to behold no less.

"OMG I've ben hacked!!!111"

*grins*

I loved the airplane analogy.

For a really disturbing goatse experience try printing it out on an inkjet. We did that once to send to someone that kept spamming us with invoices we hadn't put orders in for. I thought I'd got used to Goatse by that time and no longer found it shocking, that's until I saw it in the full glory of shining wet inkjet!

Posted by: Iain Norman | January 5, 2007 04:26 AM

Great post. The responses you published certainly say a lot about the users and distributors of content at places like MySpace.

Posted by: Leon | January 5, 2007 04:36 AM

For all of you people weeping over kids seeing the goatse'd image, it's HotFreeLayouts fault NOT textfiles fault. These kids got their layout from HotFreeLayouts NOT textfiles.

If you bought stolen merchandise from a retailer who knew it was stolen, is it the retailers fault, or is it the fault of the guy from whom the merchandise was stolen?

Continuing in this vein, could he have linked to a more tame version, or redirected the hotlinked image to an article on the social mores of such a practice? Yeah, he could've. Would it have been as effective, no it wouldn't.

If you swap out an image with something m