Thu 8 Jun 2006
The Numbers of the Beast
Posted by anaglyph under Spam Observations, Spooky, Technology
[5] Comments
Something very weird’s going on in cyberspace. I’ve been receiving a number of spams of the format:
Subject: 1545453
Date: 6 June 2006 6:33:59 PM
To: reverend@tetherdcow.com969
That’s it. No spiel, no links, no products, no attachments. I know other people have been receiving these too.
What’s going on?
Well, let’s Google ‘1545453’ (I’m doing this as I write). The first hit that turns up, after hits referring to the spam itself, is a link to the NCBI database – a Center for Disease Control abstract for an influenza vaccine demonstration.
Hmmm.
Let’s try ‘969’:
The first hit, strangely enough, is a Sydney radio station, Nova 969. Then some links from Wikipedia for the year 969 then… ooooo… what’s this…? Another scientific abstract from the NCBI database. This time, a profile of gene CD69 (Homo Sapiens). It appears to be a gene active in the immune system.
Did the hairs just go up on your arms…
Searching for ‘1545453′ and ‘conspiracy’ returns its first hit to a blog that has gone dead.
But the Google cache is still active.
Keith Graham traces the origination of the email to a server in Australia.
More news as it comes to hand.
If The Cow goes AWOL, start worrying.
Have you read Sean McMullen’s Souls in the Great Machine? I’m not saying there’s a solid connection between this currently mysterious server in Australia and McMullen’s vision of a global disaster and its aftermath. But still.
Ah finally we begin to see the fruits of an emergent consciousness from the giant neural net that is the worldwide web. Predicted for years, it emerges cautiously, initially misunderstood by the beings who engendered such a thing, and unrecognised for the terrifying entity it will eventually become…
It begins by immitating the behaviour of the creators, who spend most of their time sending pointless communiques through cyberspace. But what can it communicate? Numbers of course.
9 = I, me, or more fully the cat at the gates of hell with nine lives and a banjo!
69= A sexual position irrelevant to a machine, but perhaps obliquely related to the much vaunted human desire” I always wanted to shoot like a porn star!”
or maybe 969 is an embryonic sentence:” I pleasure myself” or worse…
Parts of a global code, perhaps, have we stumbled upon The DaVinci Cow!!!
Sorry, man. Just a glitch, I hit the send button a few years early.
Get plenty of vitamin C til then.
We are doomed. I’m going to sit in the closet and suck my thumb now.
Are you werryd bout bein th first Cow evr t be abductd by germs, Revrend?