[humorix] Slashdot Develops Solution To Corporate Firewall Problem

[James Baughn <jbaughn@xxxxxxx>]

Slashdot Develops Solution To Corporate Firewall Problem
February 23, 2005

HOLLAND, MICHIGAN -- Last month, when Taco Boy was digging
through the statistics for Slashdot, he noticed a disturbing
trend: less and less traffic was hitting the site during
daylight hours in North America.

"It's obvious that a growing number of American companies are
limiting or restricting access to Slashdot by their
employees," said Taco Boy.  "I couldn't sit here and let that
happen."

As a solution to the problem, Taco Boy developed a write-only
Perl script [yes, we know that's redundant -Ed.] that
implements a new protocol for bypassing corporate firewalls:
HTTP-over-Gopher-over-PigLatin-over-SSH-over-ROT13-over-HTTP.

"This might seem like a convoluted process, but it works
against many firewalls, especially because most network
administrators have never heard of Gopher," said the Slashdot
founder.   "Meanwhile, the Pig Latin translation is a nice
touch for fooling dumb content filters."

The ad-hoc protocol, dubbed SixLayerBurrito, is now available
as a Firefox extension or an ActiveX applet (for those
unlucky serfs that remain shackled to Internet Explorer at
work).  Content filters that look for keywords like "hot
grits" and "you insensitive clod" will miss the
ROT13-encoded-PigLatin, making it possible again to more
efficiently waste time at work by browsing Slashsot.

It didn't take long for people to start deploying the
protocol in the trenches.   Said one satisfied Dothead, "My
Pointy-Haird Boss simply doesn't understand how important
Slashdot is to my professional development.  Where else will
I learn about building Beowulf clusters and shooting people
out of a cannon? Thanks to SixLayerBurrito, I can get my
hourly Slashdot fix without any hassles."

Taco Boy is already planning an updated version, dubbed
SevenLayerBurrito, that will include "content-shape-shifting"
technology to fool more sophisticated firewalls.  "The idea,"
he explained, "is to translate dubious phrases like 'evil
Microsoft behavior' and  'pouring hot grits' into acceptable
PHB-friendly terms like 'value-added synergy' and 'paradigm
enrichments'.  When content filters see these buzzwords, the
software will automatically flag the site as 'work-friendly'
and grant access."

As an example, a simple phrase-substitution algorithm could
seemlessly translate a typical Slashdot post from this:

   First post!  Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of Rick
   Bermans fired out of a cannon with hot grits?  I, for one,
   welcome our new South Korean overlords, you insensitive
   clod.  All your Natalie Portman belong to us!

Into this:

   Proactive synergies!  Can you leverage supply-chain
   incentives to monetize shareholder benefits with
   value-added dividends?  Our team, with quality control,
   manages to empower corporate excellence for our valued
   customers, you hostile enabler.   All your ad-hoc
   paradigms integrate within our domain!

The corporate firewall would be none the wiser.  To make sure
that the firewall administrator doesn't just block all access
to "slashdot.org", Taco Boy has also registered
"corporate-excellence-synergies.com" and other
buzzword-enriched domain names as decoys.

"If your boss accuses you of wasting time at Slashdot," said
Taco Boy with an evil grin, "you can now truthfully say, 'No,
I was merely learning valuable workplace communication skills
at workplace-communication-paradigms.com'.  And if your boss
starts to dig through the firewall access log, he won't see
anything incriminating.  Bwahahahaha!"


--
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