Internet Freakshow

Markovian Parallax Denigrate

Internet Freakshow - Markovian Parallax Denigrate

This season on Internet Freakshow, we’ve focused a lot on Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube. We’ve covered GPS coordinates and video compression algorithms and embedded messages. But let’s go back to a simpler time of the internet. Before we even knew what a social network was, back in the days of Usenet.

Before we go much further, let’s talk a bit about what Usenet is or was. Usenet is a very early internet technology, established in 1980. Think of it as an old-school internet forum, where forum topics are broken up into something called newsgroups.

Usenet boards are typically navigated with an email program, and interacting with the newsgroups by posting new topics or replying to them was done in an interface that looked similar to email. Because there were no traditional “accounts” in the sense of a YouTube account or a Facebook account, topics and replies typically used the poster’s real name and email address obtained from the email client itself. In these early days of the internet, anonymity and security were afterthoughts, and posting to these Usenet newsgroups is a lot more primitive than Facebook Groups or Subreddits of today.

Usenet newsgroups were divided by topic, sort of like URLs of today. Newsgroups existed on just about every topic imaginable, from music to movies to TV, to religion and relationships. Even regional newsgroups covered local news or information.

Usenet is still in use today, although just as most things have moved into the world of the web, so have newsgroups. Conversation still happens there, although the major use of Usenet these days is for pirating movies and TV shows.

Enough with the boring technical details of what Usenet is, and on with our mystery of Markovian Parallax Denigrate.

On August 5th, 1996, at 3AM a user started posting hundreds of messages to various newsgroups across Usenet. User’s names and email addresses were random and partially obscured typically, and the messages were posted to at least a dozen newsgroups including alt.religion.christian, alt.religion.christian.boston-church, misc.education.homeschool.christian, rec.music.christian, uk.religion.christian, and news.admin.net-abuse.misc.

All these messages that were posted were just sort of random jibberish. For example: jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate shadflower Debby Stirling pathogenesis novo ITT most chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion refrigerate morphine napkin inland

Most of these jibberish messages are lost to the ages, however Google did save a few of the posts to its “Groups” archive and they are still available to this day.

One of the first messages posted was attributed to a partially obfuscated email address, “susan_l…@worf.uwsp.edu”. These kind of partially obscured email addresses were not uncommon and by itself, the obfuscation doesn’t mean anything at all. So this may seem obvious, but maybe this email address and name is a clue as to who posted these messages and why they posted them.

A woman named Susan Lindauer attended the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point and graduated in 1994, right around the time that these messages were posted. The email address associated with the newsgroup posting was from that school, and of course the “susan_l” is a good clue that this may, indeed, be the woman who posted this to the newsgroup.

And here is where this internet mystery gets even weirder. Susan Lindauer eventually became a US Congressional staffer, holding various positions as press secretary and speech writer for several US Representatives and Senators. She had other connections to government as well. Her father was a nominee to be the governor of Alaska, however he lost his election. Later in her career, she believed herself to be a CIA asset and subscribed to various conspiracy theories, like the bombing of Pan Am 103 and various conspiracies involving 9/11.

In 2004, she was arrested for acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, but she was released just 2 years later on the basis of being unable to stand trial based on mental disorders and delusions of grandeur.

With this knowledge of a politically-connected and maybe delusional powerful person in government, this mystery just got a little more mysterious right? There is only 1 problem… the political Susan Lindauer is a different woman than the Susan Lindauer who attended the University of Wisconsin, and whose email was connected to these strange Usenet postings. In fact, the woman who attended the University of Wisconsin went on who live a pretty modest life in comparison, she works for a school district and keeps a low profile. In 2012 when interest in this mystery lit up again, she was contacted about her potential involvement. Not only did she deny it, she also mentioned that it was the first she’d ever heard of it.

The other Susan Lindauer had similar comments. Neither is willing to take responsibility for the postings, and the email address and name lining up with a delusional politician is just a very strange coincidence I guess.

So with all that out of the way, what is the point of these posts?

In 2019, chat bots are sophisticated and relatively common. That was not the case in 1996, obviously. Was this a very early attempt at a chat bot? Was this a simple computer program designed to start conversations, reply to people, learn how to communicate online? Maybe, but the system didn’t seem too interested in forming a coherent sentence. The words seem completely random, and normal sentence structure is ignored. There’s no periods, commas, or question marks for example. In fact, common words are typically ignored completely. If this was an attempt at a chat bot that could resemble a human being, it was a pretty significant failure.

Could this be a spam bypass system? Even in these early days of the internet and email, clever marketers were trying to figure out how to use these new technologies to turn a profit. Could these bots just be collecting email addresses of people who replied? Could the random assortment of words and phrases be a simple attempt at bypassing early spam filters? This explanation seems likely to me. It wasn’t that long ago that you could open a piece of spam email and see similar chunks of nonsense at the end of the message. This was because email programs were smart enough to filter out emails with no substance, but not quite smart enough to figure out the substance yet. So random long words were enough to make the spam filter think it was a legitimate email.

Is it some random cypher? Probably not. People much smarter than me have worked to decode this, only to figure out that there’s nothing to decode. The messages are exactly what they appear to be: random words printed out randomly. Any attempt at a pattern or a cypher have to be attributed to an overactive imagination, or a person who wants to believe in a deeper meaning. If people want to communicate in secret over the internet, there’s much better channels to do that than random and public Usenet groups.

At over 20 years old, it’s pretty unlikely this mystery will ever be solved. Most of the messages posted are lost to the ages, and even if they were recovered I don’t believe they’d offer any additional clues to their origins. Every potential person associated with the mystery denies their involvement completely.

The only reason we’re still talking about it today is that it happened so early in the history of the internet and no one had seen anything like it. Today, however, we know there’s chat bots, and Reddit bots that start and reply to topics, and bots that peruse the internet constantly indexing websites for searching or posting ads to message boards. But in 1996, this was a bizarre and difficult to understand technology. I think the most likely explanation here is also the least interesting: this was an early attempt at a bot to collect user’s email addresses and bypass their spam filters for the purposes of advertising. I don’t have any way to prove this however, just as there’s no way to prove any of the other theories. And ultimately, that’s what makes this Internet Freakshow live on.