Saturday’s post about some kind of mysterious message showing up on my instant messenger just kind of weirded me out a little bit, but I thought very little of it and decided to move on. Today, though, I get a different, yet similar message in my IM window:
At this point, I’m getting a little annoyed, so I decide to dig a little bit deeper, and what I found isn’t so much unsettling as it is just plain annoying.
These ‘troutbots’, as it seems, are robots that trawl the Internet looking for screen names. They then act as sort of a middle-man and relay both sides of the conversation to the victims, obscuring their names. So, when I was talking to OrbitingTrout the other day, the poor sap on the other end of the line was also talking to OrbitingTrout.
I can’t actually fathom why such a thing exists other than to momentarily confuse random pairs of people for a few minutes. But now that it’s happened to me twice in two days, it’s having the effect of making me very irritated.
There is more information to be found in the following places:
- Wikipedia
- Saalon Muyo
- Livejournal community based on the concept
In short, if you get some message from someone with ‘trout’ or ‘salmon’ in their username, it’s a bot designed to annoy you and someone else for as long as the two of you keep bickering back and forth figuring out who IM’d who first. The best thing to do is to not respond to any of it and close your browser window, or better yet, disallow IMs from folks that aren’t in your buddy list, though that may be infeasible for some.
Oh, and please pass a link around to this page to spread the word to educate people about this completely ridiculous waste of time.