Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. "Tinfoil Hat Program" was originally published on 2005-05-24...
I had a pretty good post lined up today about (surprise, surprise) a rather peculiar abuse of HTML SELECTs. However, after reading the Tinfoil Hat House article posted at Slashdot, I knew I just had to share this project request that Mincus came across on one of those IT Project Portal sites (which I've certainly covered before).
A cursory read of the project request (which also happens to be the longest run on sentence ever written), might lead you to believe that it's a lame hoax ... but after looking through the provided evidence I'm pretty convinced myself ...
Project Request (translated to English)
I have discovered that highly fanatical, criminally psychopathic entities have developed techniques for computer hacking with modulated radio, ultra-long wave radio, carrier, and piezoelectric sonics. This hacking has caused file corruption, deletion, privacy invasion, program crashes, hangs, freezes, and automatic restarts of computers at several sites using various Windows operating systems (98SE, 2000, XP).
This is happening at a higher rate than all other crime in the United States (I've personally experienced over 2,000,000 incidents). I've read of many other problems like this happening around the world, caused by this very same criminal entity. This hacking has caused computers to become useless to many companies who depend on computers for record keeping and verification.
I want designed a program that could neutralize, or, at least, warn and document, such attacks. I intend to distribute this program for free, or at low cost, so please keep the public service nature of this project in mind.
And, no, the problem is not computer malfunction, virus/trojan/spyware, power surges, hallucinations, etc. I can provide much documentation of the hacking: its nature, effects, technologies involved, and the names of the people using it. I have provided samples of this evidence attached.
Thank you for your careful consideration of this proposal. If you write and I don't answer in five days, please try again (see the above).
Exhibit A: Save Funny 'name invalid' (15 Nov 03)
Exhibit B: Crosslink, All Electronics Catalog on to use this day (24 Nov 03)
Exhibit C: Chinese and Pipes added in 2xExplorer (17 Nov 03)
Exhibit D: Look 'n' Stop capabilities hacked away (23 Nov 03)
If you're so inclined, you can find the other 65 exhibits in this 1MB Zip File (guaranteed to be hack-safe).