AmericanThumbs and PornGraph.com

Shitting in the Swimming Pool- A Metaphor for life.

One of the most important concepts I ever learned, I learned at 16. It is the story of a group of people who will destroy something valuable for everyone, if they cannot use it themselves. Unfortunately, there seems to be logic to their perverse activity of wanton destruction, so if you search for the logic and find it you get a deeper understanding of the problem.

While I was lifeguard at a pool, somebody would shit in the swimming pool almost every day at exactly 12 Noon. Since there were hundreds of kids in the pool, we couldn’t initially isolate a source. The result of finding the turds in the pool was to shock the pool with chlorine and keep everybody out of the pool for an hour. We probably would have never solved the problem if it weren’t for an observant kid who notice his friend take a dump and screamed that Johnny had shit in the pool.

It seemed that the kid’s mother strictly enforced regular mealtimes and that the kid must remain out of the pool for exactly one hour after eating. Since other parents were more lax, Johnny’s friends were all in the pool ignoring him. His solution was sort of elegant and definitely simple. Shit in the pool and force everybody out of the pool for one hour so all his friends could play with him.

Now what brings this to mind is Americanthumbs.com had remarkably primitive code. The code starts by setting a cookie with the following Javascript code.

document.cookie = ‘ucjc=xucjcxnorefxucjcxnorefxucjcx1xucjcx0xucjcx0xucjcxxucjcx; path=/;’

Even to the casual observer, that’s an awful lot of ucj’s and it would appear that xucjx is being used to pass 6 different pieces of information. The next interesting aspect (to a geek) is that the small thumbnail pictures have various values associated with them including values for rating, votes, use and age. The values appear to be passed along with your unique cookie to the server by way of a php script if you click on the picture for a larger version.

Links to other sites are called from a cgi-file named ucj which is also an executable script.

Now when I Googled “ucj”, two results of relevance came up. The first was UCJ is a Traffic Trading Script for the porn industry, sort of like a link exchange. The unique aspect is that Keeve from americanthumbs has two other sites listed and there are 22 sites with Lolita as part of the name so your chance of getting a link to a dangerous sounding URL to be presented at trial are pretty good. As a matter of fact porn site operators can get a discounted service if the limit their customer’s choice to only anglehardcore.com or angleteen.com . Seems like if you click a link you are purchasing your one way ticket to jail.

The final interesting code was a referral to porngraph.com which was an analytic tool for pornsite owners. You find out incoming traffic from typed URL’s, domain referral, search engine and more. You see the IP addresses of old and new visitors and you find out the browsers they use and which plug-in services they have. from their 2004 site, ”Porngraph.com statistics are much too comprehensive to list everything here.”

Adult webmasters loved this service even though it was pretty obvious they were tracking there customers. Unfortunately, it was highly visible and dangerous for law enforcement trackers to use because it could be easily identified and the type of information collected explored at trial. So someone shit in the swimming pool and destroyed the product. Pornmasters bemoaned the loss and all that is left is a blank page when you go to porngraph.com

Oh yeah the other reference to ucj is from a blog.

“Greetings… I suppose the most noteworthy thing to point out is that I have a week and a half to master UCJ before Diane goes on vacation. I’m getting there… I just hope I’m “there” then. UCJ, of course, is the Uniform Criminal Judgment, the program that allows us to print orders the judge signs that effectively outlines the sentence people who are convicted get. I’ve got most of it, but I know I don’t have all the little bells and whistles I need to know.”

Your choice UCJ is the name for a link exchange program or a law enforcement protocol.