Last week, when I was just lounging around the computer lab at Auraria Library, I got a really weird, inappropriate message from an AIM Fish Bot and didn’t know it. Since I was using a fresh copy of Pidgin, I don’t have the logs anymore and can’t pull up what the message said but whatever it was, it got me all riled up. I immediately felt creeped out and asked them why they were sending me such nasty messages and it turns out that the person on the other end didn’t know what I was talking about. I kept berating her until I thought to google it and found that it is an AIM bot aggregator called “Project Upstream“. A list of AIM Fish Bots has been provided by a very gracious blogger as well as information about the project itself. This has been mentioned all throughout the Internet and is unlikely to be an isolated incident of LiveJournal users (I should know, I’ve been hit by it and I rarely, if ever, use my LJ account). In the end, we had a laugh over it and enjoyed ourselves knowing that she wasn’t a pervert but rather a 14 year old girl waiting for her mum after school and I was a pissed off, creeped out tranny student from Colorado. Boy, oh boy, were our faces red (I assume)?
The project is harmless and it is quite likely that nothing has happened to your computer or IM account, so don’t worry about that. If you did however, I would advise you to read a bit into what “spyware” is and get a tool to prevent it like Spybot Search & Destroy. However, this does get your IM name from social networks such as LiveJournal, Twitter (probably where they got mine), Xanga, etc. In order to stop these damned Instant Messages, you should type $optout in a response to the bot. When you do, you will be asked to provide a confirmation code in order to confirm that you want to opt out. Respond with $optout and the confirmation code and you’ll be removed from the list of people that these AIM Fish Bots will connect.
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Tags: aclockworkcoho, allergenicsalmon, Annoyance, Auraria Campus, auraria library, Communication, creepysalmon, Disorderlysalmon, excelletsalmon, Fish Bot, glorioussalmon, Instant Message, liberatedsalmon, NanoScaleCoho, Online Security, paradoxicalsalmon, Prank, Project Upstream, Proxy, Safety, Salmon, Security
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