Editing 1808: Hacking

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The main joke in this comic refers to the common practice of adding spaces between parts of an email address when publishing them on websites.  For example, "[email protected]" may be written as "john dot doe at example dot org".  The purported goal of doing this is to thwart page scraping bots from {{w|Email address harvesting|harvesting the correct email addresses}} and prevent them from becoming the target of spam or being sold as address lists for email marketers.   
 
The main joke in this comic refers to the common practice of adding spaces between parts of an email address when publishing them on websites.  For example, "[email protected]" may be written as "john dot doe at example dot org".  The purported goal of doing this is to thwart page scraping bots from {{w|Email address harvesting|harvesting the correct email addresses}} and prevent them from becoming the target of spam or being sold as address lists for email marketers.   
  
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In this comic, [[Ponytail]] tells [[Cueball]] that the CIA has a tool which can delete such spaces. Such a tool can fix the space and most likely convert the words "dot" and "at" into their respective symbols. This will overcome the problems faced by harvesting tools, and make these email addresses more prone to receive spam.  
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In this comic, [[Ponytail]] tells [[Cueball]] that CIA have a tool which can delete such spaces. Such a tool can fix the space and most likely convert the words "dot" and "at" into their respective symbols. This will overcome the problems faced by harvesting tools, and make these email addresses more prone to receive spam.  
  
 
Cueball appears shocked to hear this news, but given the caption below, stating that this was one of the ''less dramatic revelations'' from the CIA hacking dump, this is likely sarcasm by Cueball (and [[Randall]]). In fact, it is quite simple to devise a program which detects and converts/removes such spaces; it's naive to believe that one can prevent e-mail addresses from being harvested just by writing the addresses with space or omitting @ etc. Some people might not realize that he's being sarcastic, though, and that misunderstanding might be part of the joke.
 
Cueball appears shocked to hear this news, but given the caption below, stating that this was one of the ''less dramatic revelations'' from the CIA hacking dump, this is likely sarcasm by Cueball (and [[Randall]]). In fact, it is quite simple to devise a program which detects and converts/removes such spaces; it's naive to believe that one can prevent e-mail addresses from being harvested just by writing the addresses with space or omitting @ etc. Some people might not realize that he's being sarcastic, though, and that misunderstanding might be part of the joke.

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