[humorix] Prepare To Be Jashcrofted

[James Baughn <jbaughn@xxxxxxx>]

Prepare To Be Jashcrofted
By ultravioletu [at] hotmail [dot] com

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Back when Congress passed the US
PATRIOT Act, they also quietly enacted another piece of
legislation that went unnoticed: The Screwing the
Terrorists who Use Packets of Internet Datagrams (STUPID)
Act. As the name suggests, this law will have absolutely no
impact on terrorism while it jashcrofts innocent Internet
users [1].

For instance, new rules go into effect this week to
regulate Internet traffic. All foreign data packets which
traverse at least one router based in any American state
must obtain, in advance, a valid US transit visa, following
the regular procedures, even if both the source and
destinations addresses reside outside the country.

According to current procedure, as a prerequisite for a
transit visa, a data packet must have the following flags
set: I_SOLD_MY_FIRST_BORN_SON_TO_SCO, I_LOVE_DMCA, and
I_RUN_ONLY_WINDOWS. Furthermore, the application is
forwarded to the GESTAPO (Global Enterprise to Stop
Terrorism by Analyzing Packets & Operators), a new
government bureaucracy created from the unholy alliance of
Microsoft, Verisign, the RIAA, and CIA. This department
will then issue a unique 32,768-byte activation key that
must be manually introduced by the user.

Details about all the information actually required to
compute this key are not disclosed, of course, because that
would only help the terrorists.  However, on the
department's website, it states very clearly: "Please shut
down your firewall, change your system's administrator
password to 'i will vote for dubya', and have your credit
card ready."

Mr. Peter Aranoid, spokesman for a government security
agency (whose name must be kept secret), declared
yesterday: "Last month we successfully beta-tested the visa
requirement for TCP/IP traffic originating from certain
countries the US doesn't like. At that time, this measure,
which any patriotic American should consider as rational
and prudent, drastically reduced the volume of spam,
malware and other terrorist acts from 100% to 99.9997%."

"Once the visa requirement is enforced for all foreign
countries, we expect an even more dramatic reduction in
malware, from 99.9997% to 99.9991%.  This will potentially
save the lives of billions of people, especially innocent
children.  While we experienced some minor problems during
testing, mostly due to a slight 14000% increase of Internet
traffic required by the activation tasks, we think we can
overcome them by confiscating bandwidth from inside
enemies, such as Humorix."

He continued, "Lately, however, we have discovered that
patented features, such as buffer overflows [2], can occur
in hardware routing equipment, thus allowing all those
long-hair commie terrorists the ability to circumvent our
checks and access valuable intellectual property they are
not worthy of."

Mr. P. Aranoid was speaking about an incident last month in
which two Serbian young men were kidn... err, arrested,
given a fair trial lasting three minutes in front of a
Redmond judge, and then immediately deported to the bottom
of the Pacific Ocean. They were accused of "first degree
cybertrespassing": By crafting a special IP packet,
apparently designated for a server in Botswana, they
triggered a buffer overflow in a router located in Pasadena
and redirected the HTTP request, thus obtaining illegal
access to their Yahoo mailbox.

"This is unacceptable," Aranoid said. "If we don't act now,
the terrorists will have won.  Congress has appropriated
$1.9 billion to GESTAPO to research new ways to stop
illegal terrorist activity on the Internet, all in the name
of freedom.  We will prevail."

As expected, not everybody is happy with this measure.
"After two hours of brainwashing, I can understand that I
need a visa to access the Microsoft or SCO Group website --
I take this humiliating procedure as a punishment for
wanting to go there in the first place," declared a
Romanian Linux zealot. "But I cannot deal with the fact
that I have to undergo the same [expletive] when trying to
access my favourite German open source newsgroup, just
because my [expletive] ISP bought bandwidth from Verizon."

We wanted to contact Mr. Linus Torvalds for an opinion, but
apparently his response was rejected for lack of an entry
visa. We are trying to use the only protocol not yet
regulated by such demen... err, enhanced security
procedures, namely the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol.
We will publish Mr. Torvalds' answer as soon as our
transport medium returns. If it does [3].


[1] http://humorix.org/articles/jan04/dictionary.shtml#jashcroft
[2] http://humorix.org/articles/sep03/patent.shtml
[3] http://humorix.org/articles/may01/carnivore.shtml



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