Good to see things evolve years after years, this is probably the first year that this day has not been a struggle to love someone in particular, but a peaceful moment when to medidate about love and to feel its presence all around us.

After a new EU directive, this kind of behavior will be forbidden at the end of the year.

It’s the last happy year for companies using this technique, and I wonder if it would be possible to counter-attack them at their own game: creating fake-fake-blog, praising a product so much that it obviously appears as a marketing campaign.

• What would be the needs for this kind of attack?
• How would it be efficient, and how to mesure its effectiveness?
• Would it be possible to create a win-win situation using this strategy?

Basicly, it was a small trojan horse with really simple commands to connect to infected computers on internet. All you needed is a range of ip - national ISP networks were working well - to scan for any open connection and start playing with it. Really useless, but so much fun
Today, CCC has released a documentary about this piece of history:

• Download it [MPEG-4 H.264]
• See information page [german]

require 'rubygems'
require 'rio'

rio("http://www.remote.com/file.jpg") > rio("#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/images/")

Rio gem RDoc

From Wikipedia:

The word “beam” in BEAM robotics is an acronym for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics. This is a term that refers to a style of robotics that primarily uses simple analog circuits instead of a microprocessor in order to produce an unusually simple design (in comparison to traditional mobile robots) that trades flexibility for robustness and efficiency in performing the task for which it was designed. Exceptions to the convention of using only analog electronics do exist and these are often colloquially referred to as “mutants“.

Interesting links:

• Howto: Build BEAM Vibrobot
• Solarbotics: BEAM Shop
• BEAM Yahoo! Group