Hacked - Three Meaningless Words

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Jordan Bloemen & Scott Francis Winder discuss the "internet's oldest and weirdest mystery" and whether it's any of those things. If you like the show and want to make sure we can keep making it, please subscribe and if you can visit https://www.patreon.com/hackedpodcast and show us some love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Boy, do I have a story for you. Let's go. It's not the one I thought it was when I first started looking into it. Can I put my feet up? Are you going to woo me with the storytelling time with Uncle Jordan? I'm going to weave a yarn. I'm going to tell you a story. And that story is set in a place before the web called Usenet.

Sounds familiar. Today, it is not the easiest thing to access, but through the 80s and 90s, Usenet was like a thriving online community. It wasn't a website. It was before websites. It's where Tim Berners-Lee went in 1991 to announce the creation of the World Wide Web.

And in 1996, parts of this thriving pre-web online community are being spammed with these posts titled Markovian Parallax Denegrate. And the bodies of the posts were always these sort of cryptic word noise soup puzzles, stuff like Brotherhood Web Imprompt to File Count. There were a lot of these posts.

Starting on August 5th, 1996, hundreds of them started appearing all over Usenet, all titled Markovian Parallax Denegrate. And so, this early internet mystery is born, a mystery that would later be labeled the weirdest, oldest mystery on the internet. An event that, although it predates the internet itself, is often considered to be the first true internet mystery.

Slowly, over time, the Markovian Parallax Denegrate became one of just countless campaigns that began flooding onto this decentralized, basically unregulated Usenet. Eventually, it just got lost in the noise. Usenet carried on, and for reasons we won't get into yet, declined in use as the World Wide Web rose into prominence. Until 2006. The dawn of the age of listicles, when stories of this eerily named Markovian Parallax Denegrade started making their way into internet folklore,

and this sort of age-old conspiracy theory came up again. But in the decades since, some things had changed. Since Usenet was no longer accessible to most people, all these sort of 2006 web sleuths had to go on was Google's incomplete news group archives. And because Spam had become so bad on Usenet, Google's archives make the choice not to index all of it, which Markovian parallax denigrate is flagged as.

meaning there's only one post left carrying that title. And it was sent by a visible email address. An email belonging to someone named Susan Lindauer. At the time of the original postings, that name didn't belong to anybody of note. But by 2006, Susan Lindauer was in the news. Because Susan Lindauer was a former congressional staffer turned anti-war protester

who had been arrested and indicted by a grand jury for allegedly spying for Saddam Hussein. And there was this email on all of these posts. So people started asking again, what was Markovian Parallax Denegrate? So that's the story. And it's super compelling, right? That's it?

That's all we get? Yeah, no, that's the whole thing. I watched a whole bunch of videos about it, and I was really excited to do this episode about it, right? Because it has that kind of classic internet mystery energy. It's a great headline. And it's a really fun story for articles, and YouTube videos, so many YouTube videos,

and now podcasts to tell. Nice. And it's still today widely cited as one of the oldest and weirdest mysteries on the web. The Markovian Parallax Denegrate. The topic is called the Markovian Parallax Denegrate. The Markovian Parallax denigrate. But that story has a second half.

I was going to say, I feel like it's incomplete. I feel unsatisfied in its conclusion. It has the second half, and it's way down in the source text, so people never cite it. So that first half of the story, the really provocative half, keeps getting told over and over again of the oldest mystery on the internet, the Markovian parallax denigrate. But the second half that no one includes changes the story. You can't, in good, conscious, get past this intro thinking this is about spies because it isn't,

or internet conspiracies because there aren't. or even really a mystery. What this is about is the Markovian Parallax Denegrate. Markovian Parallax Denegrate. Markovian Parallax Denegray. And whether it's actually the internet's oldest weirdest mystery

or just three meaningless words. Here on Hacked. So you were on Usenet. Correct. What did you do on it? I am that old. Truthfully, we stole a lot of software using Usenet.

Really? Yeah, news groups were, and bulletin boards were kind of places where all of the original nerds used to congregate. So it was, you know, our OG internet was a lot of text-based news groups. You know, there was newsreader apps and stuff like that eventually. It came out on Linux and Windows 3.1 and stuff. but the news groups, BBSs, IRC chats, you know, lots of the OG internet kind of mediums

for discussion and connection. I was on all of those. Spent a lot of time on lots of them. I don't think I ever post any of value on Usenet and the bulletin boards, but I spent a lot of time in IRC chats, that's for sure. What do you think happened to it? Like, why did the web win? Oh, it was, well, truthfully,

If I'm not mistaken, and I don't know everything about newsgroups and Usenets, is that I believe it was a completely distributed system. I remember connecting to the news groups through my ISP's local Usenet server, if I'm not mistaken. We're going deep in time here, so we're really stretching my memory. But it was essentially distributed, so you'd make a post onto the news group, and that post would then be, you know, replicated across the internet onto all of these different newsgroup servers. So, you know, what was in that post or file attachments

and embeds and things like that? You know, we'd get replicated across the internet, which was great because, you know, I know that there was lots of things in Usenets like software, you know, pornography, things that you're pretty much fine generically all over the internet these days used to be tucked into newsgroup. and the hidden little dark corners of the bulletin board worlds.

I think the demise of Usenet is what this story is actually about, but we're going to get to it later. Okay. In all of the breathless kind of writing about this, people have called this, you know, the internet's oldest and weirdest mystery, one of the first great puzzles of the internet, and it's not.

It's a triumph of like creepy past a misinformation and the power of a good headline. And it's a shame because, What it's actually about is also really interesting, but just in a much less scandalous way. I got onto this because I fell for it while researching for this episode. I got this close to participating in this internet myth-making. And here's what you'll find when you look this up. Atlas Obscura writes.

What is Markovian parallax denigrate? It's an enduring question for the ages or simply a case of nothing much at all. Depending on whom you asked, it's been called the internet's oldest and weirdest mystery. And it all started with a series of enigmatic early internet posts from the mid-1990s, the full meaning of which remains unsolved over 20 years later. It is provocative and spooky and really, really frustrating. The Markovian Parallax Denegrate. There are so many videos about this, and they're all the story of,

hey, look at this spooky, cool, old mystery that has stumped people for years. And every single one of them cites the same reference. a very important reference for the purposes of this story. A 2012 article by a guy named Kevin Morris for the Daily Dot, titled The Markovian Parallax Denegrate, unraveling the internet's oldest and weirdest mystery. And it's a pretty fun read. And it is really provocative because of the presence of that, you know,

character in the heart of it, Susan Lindauer, because her name is on the last available Markovian Parallax denigrate post in those Google archives. Do you know who Susan Lindauer is? No, I do not. Susan Lindauer, to drastically, drastically oversimplify, is this anti-war activist reporter-turned political actor. Coming in hot out of Anchorage, Alaska,

Masters from London School of Economics, Seattle Post reporter turned Washington political spokesperson. She's pretty accomplished. And it's difficult to parse what happens next in Susan's life, but in the early 2000, she becomes embroiled in Middle Eastern politics. She starts taking trips to New York, meeting with leaders of Libya and Iraq,

and kind of acting as this unofficial lobbyist. But all of this voluntary lobbying came to ahead on March 11, 2004, when the FBI arrested Lindauer in her Tacoma Park, Maryland home, charging that she'd acted as a, quote, unregistered agent of a foreign government in taking all of those meetings

that no one asked her to take. The government cited a trip that Lindauer took to Baghdad in 2000, where she was allegedly given $10,000 breaking trade embargoes. Lindauer, who at this point was publicly claiming to be a CIA asset, asserted that her arrest was intended to silence her from revealing the truth about 9-11. So this is all kind of turning into like a word stew of stuff that really conspiratorial people like. Oh, for sure.

Lindauer is released in 2006 after a federal judge declared her unfit to stand trial, citing she suffered from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. So she's like a really complicated figure and a really ripe protagonist for a conspiracy theory, right? Totally. She's got all the right boxes checked, that's for sure. And in 2006, Susan Lindauer is checking those boxes, right when tales of this Markovian parallax denigrate start to bubble back up online. And someone researching it on Usenet archives finds this one post with the email tied to it, Susan Lindauer at wharf.UWSp.edu.

So the conspiracy machine starts to turn a little bit. This person who had tried to speak truth about 9-11, who allegedly knew these government secrets, seems to have posted these cryptic mystery posts, right before she's arrested by the very organization she was publicly criticizing. And right when that connection to Lindauer gets made, the Wikipedia for Markovian Parallax Dendigrate goes down. it is an extraordinary amount of smoke

for the conspiratorially minded to not think there's a fire somewhere there's got to be something to the Markovian parallax denigrate course it's the thing that connects all of the everything together you know it's the yarn between the thumb tags man it is

the glue at the middle of this I can feel it I can feel it coming it has nothing to do with content creation and online editors needing to make things to capture has nothing to do with that. No, nothing at all. Nothing at all.

And all of that press coverage, and there's so much of it, really picks up when Kevin Morris synthesizes everything I've just said into his article in the Daily Dot in 2012. People read that headline about this, you know, weird old mystery that people... So wait, wait. So this guy's article is literally the yarn between the thumbtacks then. Is that what you're saying? Oh, yeah. And people read that little piece of yarn he posed.

and they start writing their own articles, and they start making their own videos, and they start recording their own podcasts, and about this puzzle with this fascinating Susan Lindauer character lurking around the edges. So if you're paying attention, the whole thing really turns on that email.

Susan underscore Lindauer at wharf.UWSp.edu. Because that's where this kind of weird thing turns into a conspiracy, right? And do you notice anything about that email? Well, it's an American educational institution. Yeah. UWSP is what's Wisconsin? Surely if Kevin Morris's article

contained some important information in the second half that changed the story or provided context or really just deflated the sinister quality of all this, surely that would be included in all of the articles, all of the videos, all of the podcasts that cite that article as a source, right? Like surely all the people citing this article

read it. Yeah, of course. Lest they make content that tricks me, podcast maker, all excited about a cool internet mystery into thinking this is something it isn't. An event that, although it predates the internet itself, is often considered to be the first true internet mystery. That person must have read the whole thing, right? Yeah, of course.

This is often called one of the very first internet mysteries. What about them? Like they must have read it, right? All of them must have read it to the end because this is how the end of the story goes. In 2012, when Kevin Morris was writing his Daily Dot article, he managed to find the person who that email belonged to. And to skip right to the point,

it's an entirely different Susan Lindauer. Nice. Not the Washington political actor, but a university student in Wisconsin. And Morris gets a hold of both Susan Lindowers. And while the freelance diplomat Susan Lindauer had at least heard of this, it was not her email. She had nothing to do with it.

And neither did the other one. And it's important to understand that Usenet made it really, really easy to spoof an email. You just typed your email in. You can put any email in any post you want to. So all it's a pretty decent that whoever made the original Markovian Parallax denigrate posts just scraped a bunch of emails off a university website. And Susan Lindauer, the main character of the Markovian parallax denigrate, just happens to share a name with a person whose email just happened to get stolen. No connection whatsoever.

So this is the part where I start going. I keep reading over and over again that this is the Internet's oldest, weirdest, spookiest mystery, this puzzle unstuck from time. And I really wanted to know what is the actual mystery here. By 2012 when Kevin Morris wrote his very entertaining article, the Markovian parallax denigrate Wikipedia was no longer up, which Morris cites in his article as having fueled further speculation, writing, quote, shortly after Lindauer's connection to all this was dug up,

the Wikipedia page disappeared. You needn't have been a conspiracy nut to connect the dots to think something fishy is going on. But if we hop in the wayback machine, we go look at a cashed June 2005 version, shortly before the page went down, we're going to find an edit saying, quote, beyond the name connection, there is no compelling information introduced to suggest that these messages had any sort of meaning.

The page was nominated for deletion in 2009 because there was no story. No connection to Lindauer or beyond her name and an email. No one else writing about it yet, so no sources to cite. Until 2012, when the Daily Dot published a 3,000-word article that spends 90% of its time entertaining the many fabulous implications of this story before finally debunking everything that came before in the final paragraphs. An article that begins being cited as a source across the internet, most of which do not include the debunking details at the very end of the article. And I'm talking about legitimate sources here. Wired has talked about this. And so this story,

this myth is born the day Kevin Morris posts his article about it, about a misdemeanor. that never really existed until he wrote a story about it. So I kept pulling on the thread. And I wanted to see if anyone else was on this, the oldest mystery on the internet isn't actually a mystery tip. And I'm really happy to say that I am no longer alone. There are dozens of us. Dozens of us.

There are hundreds of conspirators of theorists and dozens of you. Google's use in that archive is really compromised. But it actually has more stuff about this story than more. Morris cites in his article, a YouTuber named Barely Socialable, hunted it down in an essay last year. If you go to the alt.religion.christian.boston newsgroup, we can look at other posts made around the same time as the famous one. And it's here that we make a really important discovery about all this, which is that the phrase, Markovian parallax denigrate, is just one random title from this much larger spam event. It's just three meaningless words in an ocean

of these meaningless word posts. All the other ones just had different random words as their subject lines. It was a spam bot. If we jump a couple days later, we can actually see the aftermath of Markovian Parallags Denegrate where user Catherine Hampton outlines all of the different groups that were struck by the spam bot. UK.religion. Christian.

rec.music. Christian. Alt.orgion. So specifically, the internet's oldest and weirdest mystery is a spam bot targeting religious groups. So what you've found is the origin of spam and probably the origin of fake news. And they are explicitly linked. I bumped into this story, not through the Daily Dart article,

but through all the other coverage. I think it started with Wired. And I read about it. And I thought, what a cool story for our cyber tech. story podcast. And I'm embarrassed to say that I then watched another video about it. And then a third one before finally going, oh my God, I need to read the source article on this, which I did. And it took me a second to realize what had occurred here, that the oldest, weirdest mystery on the internet was neither a mystery nor weird nor old. It was born with Kevin Morris's article. It was

kind of an invention that over cycles of coverage and coverage about that coverage turned a random snippet of text in a spam event into a grand conspiracy and a part of internet folklore. And it's not. It's what you just said. One of the earliest events of its kind, an event that would destroy the very place where it occurred. Usenet.

And I want to chat about that with you right after this break. Think about the last time you heard a breach story on this show. It always starts the same way. Someone somewhere saw something too late. An alert buried, a signal missed, an SOC that just couldn't keep up. Arctic Wolf set out to solve that problem by rebuilding security operations from the ground up for a world where attackers are already using AI. They created the Aurora Super Intelligence Platform, a fully agentic system powered by the swarm of experts. Instead of single-purpose bots or lucky-guess LLMs, this swarm is fully.

of deterministic agents that handle whole entire workflows. Humans stay in the loop and on the loop to validate the critical decisions and keep everything trustworthy. And all of this is just off running on their secure operations graph. A constantly updating intelligence engine fueled by more than 9 trillion telemetry events every week and over a decade of real world incident response. The system reasons on real signals and real context not synthetic training data. And the result is the new Aurora agent SOC. It's the first SCC that is agent-Legiate. It's the first SCC that is agent-Legiate by design, you get agents that coordinate, agents that investigate, agents that respond at machine speed, and hundreds more that automate the repetitive work that normally buries human analysts.

Arctic Wolf didn't try and bolt AI onto an old model. They rebuilt the model entirely. What makes it even more effective is how it works with Arctic Wolf's concierge experience. The team brings customer-specific context directly into the platform so every AI-driven decision reflects your environment instead of generic assumptions. The automation frees your concierge Air's security team to focus on higher value strategy and proactive risk reductions while the agents handle the grind. If you want to see what trustworthy, production-ready AI and security operations actually looks like, go to arcticwolf.com slash hacked. Never feel like cyber threats are evolving faster than anyone can keep up? Last year, 2025,

was nothing short of a record-breaking year for major breaches, from sophisticated ransomware operators to AI-enabled attacks that turned defenses on their head. Organizations around the world saw headlines they never expected and cyber security teams were tested like never before. But here's the thing. These incidents aren't just news headlines. They're learning opportunities. And that's why Arctic Wolf is hosting a live webinar on February 5th, diving the most impactful breaches of 2025. Their field CTO and security leaders are going to unpack not just what happened, but why these attacks succeeded.

And most importantly, what businesses can do to fortify their defenses for it's too late. You're going to walk away with real insights and how threat actors are wrong. evolving, how defenders are responding, and what strategies can help you stay ahead of the next big breach. It's not fearmongering. It's practical, actionable, intelligence from experts in the trenches. Register now at arcticwolf.com slash hacked. Was there a lot of spam on Usenet? I think, you know, with any kind of, if you've spent any time on any kind of message boards, web forums, you know, there's, there wasn't that much spam. I don't think in the beginning, but I feel like everything just kind of eventually ends up there.

If you don't have proper moderation, if it's completely uncontrolled, it's like email. I don't know, if you're old enough to remember email before all of the complicated Markovian, no, they're Bayesian, actually,

Bayesian filters and stuff that deal with our spam headaches. We, email used to be great, and then it was really, really, really, not great, and now it's great again. And I feel like, That's just part of the thing.

So Usenet, yeah, I think definitely had its own spam issues. So the modern era of spam is generally thought to have begun in 1994. When a law firm called Cantor and Siegel sent out a message to 5,500 Usenet newsgroups advertising a green card lottery service. And they claim that the advertisements netted them about $100,000 in business at a cost of a couple pennies. This claim came at the same time as they launched a spam for hire business. so you got to take it with a grain of salt.

But it was a pretty notable event in the history of the internet. And spam on Usenet was apparently a pretty big deal because of how Usenet was built. It was a broadcast protocol where every message posted to a Usenet group got copied to every server that carried the news group it was posted to. Hey, I remembered it correctly. So the cost of sending a Usenet message was really tiny for you

and the one server you were connected to, but the cost of storage and processing multiplied by every server at the network, plus the bandwidth of moving that message between all of the servers, basically meant that spam was really cheap for the spammer and really expensive for the system. Someone described this system as turning a spam attack almost into like a DDoS attack. In an odd twist, I actually did a rather lengthy paper in my grad degree about the cost.

the economic and social cost of spam and you know the additional power consumption the additional like time loss for corporations all of the you know things that you know think about when it comes to spam like you know if you get 60 if back in the day used to easily get 60 70 messages a day it would waste a lot of your day just pruning through spam figuring out if it's a real email that needs you to respond to deciphering a deleting it you know unsubscribing trying to get unsubscribe et cetera, et cetera, not to mention just the sheer cost of sending it, you know, big spam for profit operations that used to exist that would spam billions of messages a day, you know, the

additional power capacity that the servers and the networks needed to just deal with this overwhelming amount of network traffic that was just generated because of spam. It's actually ridiculous how much like, how much of like a social, environmental impact. and economic impact spam has had and it had it back in the day especially. You know, we've gotten pretty damn good at catching and

filtering and flagging spam. And, you know, big, big props to you know, a lot of the CS researchers and stuff that have done that because that's just made a tremendous different to the efficacy of the platform, not to mention all of the other impacts that I just mentioned. Hmm.

When it was first kind of birthed on Usenet, it actually sparked a pretty early discussion about free speech in these spaces. Some advocates were arguing that no one had the authority to actually remove this spam from Usenet. And admins would say they weren't censoring the content of the messages. They were preventing this DDoS-style attack. And the fight just sort of went back and forth. And at a certain point, it became really hard to tell who was actually debating this

and who was there just to kind of mess around. There were people saying that anti-Internet space. were backed by lumber cartels trying to protect the profits from the threat of junk mail becoming electronic, which would reduce the demand for paper. Oh my God. But even by the mid-1990s, it was getting pretty clear that Usenet's mass duplication and decentralized system that you've described wasn't really necessary. And it came with this devastating overhead to the service as a whole. Usenet was uniquely

unequipped to deal with spam which didn't exist when it was designed and was kind of birthed on Usenet and if you want to understand what killed Usenet which had more than a decade's head start on the web it was kind of spam events like Markovian parallax denigrate

the number of posts to Usenet has actually gone up over time even as the number of users has plummeted By 2012, the traffic was at an all-time high of about 18,000 posts a day. And at this point, from what I can parse, it's mostly just a spam graveyard. There's still people who do use it for file sharing, but it's by volume, mostly just spam bots howling at each other in this void. One Reddit user raised the question of who the spam bots are even trying to communicate to

at this point. Well, that makes total sense. Maybe they're just literally automatones that people haven't turned off that have completely forgotten that they exist. Why is that spooky to me? Just little robots running on computers and servers somewhere. You know, somebody hacked into a server and installed a spam bot and that server. And some, you know, American educational institution hasn't been taken down or has been replicated over and over. And it still has this weird little automaton on it that this screams into Usenet groups that nobody listens to.

Could you imagine? It's like 25-year-old, you know, our 20-year-old bug just screaming into these things that no one's in anymore. It's kind of like the golden record in space, but it doesn't make me hopeful. It makes me sad and afraid. Like this message just going out. You kind of cracked what this was about before the commercial break. And I got into the story because I thought it was going to be a mystery because everything kept calling it the internet's oldest and weirdest mystery. And then I stayed on it because I thought it could be a fun debunking, which I hope it kind of was.

But I think it's actually a story about how internet communities can die. It's probably constantly going to be an issue because we don't really have an arbiter of truth. So without an arbiter of truth that is, you know, all knowing and all seeing, it's hard to disallow freedom of speech. And with freedom of speech comes all these other problems like spam, which would be probably one of the least. least biggest problems for freedom of speech these days. But yeah, so there's a great philosophical challenge you have there. Because of how it was built, Usenet wasn't able to adapt to how people were using it and it collapsed.

And it's interesting that 15 years after Markovian Parallax Denegrate helped usher in the collapse of Usenet, it then reared its head again, this time as misinformation. at a time when that was the biggest threat to the internet. And it's kind of like this ghost that keeps coming back to haunt the internet in whatever new form is most vulnerable to. First it was spam, and then it was conspiratorial of misinformation,

and maybe someday it'll be something else. But it will always be Markovian parallax denigrate three meaningless words. I'm here to shout out our patrons on Patreon Desh Gunatunga, you get me. I'm here for it. Liam Richards, I love it.

Thank you so much. Willem Decker, you mean the world to me. It's the best way to support the show, patreon.com slash hacked podcast. Maybe you can be a sponsor that brings back deepfake Jordan and pays for the money subscription for the service that keeps deep fake Jordan from the last episode existing.

Also, just want to say shout out to Barely Sociable, a YouTuber who was a big source for this episode. I feel like Barely Socialible really kind of cracked to this debunking angle in this story. A.V. Club wrote a great article to follow it. And now there are enough sources that I'm excited to say that the Wikipedia for Markovian Parallax Dentegrade has been updated to reflect our current understanding of what it actually is, which is hopeful. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Fact. Catch you on the next one.