Hirvikatu 10 - foorumi

Katsos!

http://www.captaineuro.com/index.htm

ja

http://www.ilosaarirock.fi/2005/felamaa ... i_kivi.jpg

Näyttä henkilökorttisi!

Waste is also referred to as rubbish, trash, garbage, or junk depending upon the type of material and the regional terminology. In living organisms, waste relates to unwanted substances or toxins that are expelled from them. Waste management is the control of the collection, treatment and disposal of different wastes. This is in order to reduce the negative impacts waste has on environment and society. There are many waste types, notably including municipal solid waste, commercial waste, and hazardous waste.

Waste is directly linked to the human development, both technologically and socially. The composition of different wastes have varied over time and location, with industrial development and innovation being directly linked to waste materials. Examples of this include plastics and nuclear technology. Some components of waste have economical value and can be recycled once correctly recovered.

Biodegradable waste, such as food waste or sewage, is broken down naturally by microorganisms either aerobically or anaerobically. If the disposal of biodegradable waste is not controlled it can cause a number of wider problems including contributing to the release of greenhouse gases and can impact upon human health via encouragement of pathogens.

Waste is sometimes a subjective concept, because items that some people discard may have value to others. It is widely recognised that waste materials are a valuable resource, whilst there is debate as to how this value is best realised. Governments need to define what waste is in order that it can be safely and legally managed. Different definitions need to be combined in order to ensure the safe and legal disposal of the waste.[1]. The European Union has started a discussion that will end in an End-of-Waste directive which will clarify the distinction between waste — that shall be treated for disposal — and raw materials that can be reused for the same or other purposes [2].

As a nation, Americans generate more waste than any other nation in the world with 4.5 pounds of municipal solid waste (MSW) per person per day, 55 percent of which is contributed as residential garbage. The remaining 45 percent of waste in the U.S.'s ‘waste stream' comes from manufacturing, retailing, and commercial trade in the U.S. economy [3]. However, on a per capita basis Canadians produce the most solid waste in the world - 5.05 pounds per day. [4].

E-mail spam, also known as junk e-mail, is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk.[1][2][3][4][5] "UCE" refers specifically to unsolicited commercial e-mail.

E-mail spam has steadily, even exponentially grown since the early 1990s to several billion messages a day. Spam has frustrated, confused, and annoyed e-mail users. The total volume of spam (over 100 billion emails per day as of April 2008[update]) has leveled off slightly in recent years, and is no longer growing exponentially. The amount received by most e-mail users has decreased, mostly because of better filtering. About 80% of all spam is sent by fewer than 200 spammers. Botnets, networks of virus-infected computers, are used to send about 80% of spam. Since the cost of the spam is borne mostly by the recipient,[6] it is effectively postage due advertising.

The legal status of spam varies from one jurisdiction to another. In the United States, spam was declared to be legal by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 provided the message adheres to certain specifications. ISPs have attempted to recover the cost of spam through lawsuits against spammers, although they have been mostly unsuccessful in collecting damages despite winning in court.[7][8]

Spammers collect e-mail addresses from chatrooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. Spam averages 94% of all e-mail sent.[9]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Overview
* 2 Types
o 2.1 Spamvertised sites
o 2.2 Most common products advertised
o 2.3 419 scams
o 2.4 Phishing
* 3 Spam techniques
o 3.1 Appending
o 3.2 Image spam
o 3.3 Blank spam
o 3.4 Backscatter spam
* 4 Legality
o 4.1 Canada
o 4.2 European Union and Australia
o 4.3 United States
o 4.4 Effectiveness
o 4.5 Other laws
* 5 Deception and fraud
* 6 Theft of service
* 7 Statistics and estimates
o 7.1 The growth of e-mail spam
+ 7.1.1 In absolute numbers
+ 7.1.2 As a percentage of the total volume of e-mail
+ 7.1.3 Highest amount of spam received
o 7.2 Cost of spam
o 7.3 Origin of spam
o 7.4 Spam in culture
* 8 Anti-spam techniques
* 9 How spammers operate
o 9.1 Gathering of addresses
o 9.2 Delivering spam messages
o 9.3 Obfuscating message content
o 9.4 Spam-support services
* 10 Related vocabulary
* 11 History
* 12 See also
* 13 References
* 14 External links

[edit] Overview

From the beginning of the Internet (the ARPANET), sending of junk e-mail has been prohibited,[10] enforced by the Terms of Service/Acceptable Use Policy (ToS/AUP) of internet service providers (ISPs) and peer pressure. Even with a thousand users junk e-mail for advertising is not tenable, and with a million users it is not only impractical,[11] but also expensive.[12] It is estimated that spam cost businesses on the order of $100 billion in 2007.[13] As the scale of the spam problem has grown, ISPs and the public have turned to government for relief from spam, which has failed to materialize.[14]

[edit] Types

Spam has several definitions, varying by the source.

* Unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE)—unsolicited e-mail, sent in large quantities.
* Unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE)—this more restrictive definition is used by regulators whose mandate is to regulate commerce, such as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

[edit] Spamvertised sites

Many spam e-mails contain URLs to a website or websites. According to a Commtouch report in June 2004, "only five countries are hosting 99.68% of the global spammer websites", of which the foremost is China, hosting 73.58% of all web sites referred to within spam.[15]

[edit] Most common products advertised

According to information compiled by Spam-Filter-Review.com, E-mail spam for 2006 can be broken down as follows.[16]
E-Mail Spam by Category Products 25%
Financial 20%
Adult 19%
Scams 9%
Health 7%
Internet 7%
Leisure 6%
Spiritual 4%
Other 3%

"Pills, porn and poker" sums up the most common products advertised in spam. Others include replica watches.[17][18]

[edit] 419 scams
Main article: Advance fee fraud

Advance fee fraud spam such as the Nigerian "419" scam may be sent by a single individual from a cyber cafe in a developing country. Organized "spam gangs" operating from Russia or eastern Europe share many features in common with other forms of organized crime, including turf battles and revenge killings.[19]

[edit] Phishing
Main article: Phishing

Spam is also a medium for fraudsters to scam users to enter personal information on fake Web sites using e-mail forged to look like it is from a bank or other organization such as PayPal. This is known as phishing. Spear-phishing is targeted phishing, using known information about the recipient, such as making it look like it comes from their employer.[20]

[edit] Spam techniques

[edit] Appending
Main article: E-mail appending

If a marketer has one database containing names, addresses, and telephone numbers of prospective customers, they can pay to have their database matched against an external database containing email addresses. The company then has the means to send email to persons who have not requested email, which may include persons who have deliberately withheld their email address. [21]

[edit] Image spam
Main article: Image spam

Image spam is an obfuscating method in which the text of the message is stored as a GIF or JPEG image and displayed in the email. This prevents text based spam filters from detecting and blocking spam messages. Image spam is currently used largely to advertise "pump and dump" stocks.[22]

Often, image spam contains nonsensical, computer-generated text which simply annoys the reader. However, new technology in some programs try to read the images by attempting to find text in these images. They are not very accurate, and sometimes filter out innocent images of products like a box that has words on it.

A newer technique, however, is to use an animated GIF image that does not contain clear text in its initial frame, or to contort the shapes of letters in the image (as in CAPTCHA) to avoid detection by OCR tools.

[edit] Blank spam

Blank spam is spam lacking a payload advertisement. Often the message body is missing altogether, as well as the subject line. Still, it fits the definition of spam because of its nature as bulk and unsolicited email.

Blank spam may be originated in different ways, either intentional or unintentionally:

1. Blank spam can have been sent in a directory harvest attack, a form of dictionary attack for gathering valid addresses from an email service provider. Since the goal in such an attack is to use the bounces to separate invalid addresses from the valid ones, the spammer may dispense with most elements of the header and the entire message body, and still accomplish his or her goals.
2. Blank spam may also occur when a spammer forgets or otherwise fails to add the payload when he or she sets up the spam run.
3. Often blank spam headers appear truncated, suggesting that computer glitches may have contributed to this problem—from poorly-written spam software to shoddy relay servers, or any problems that may truncate header lines from the message body.
4. Some spam may appear to be blank when in fact it is not. An example of this is the VBS.Davinia.B email worm which propagates through messages that have no subject line and appears blank, when in fact it uses HTML code to download other files.

[edit] Backscatter spam
Main article: Backscatter (e-mail)

Backscatter is a side-effect of e-mail spam, viruses and worms, where email servers receiving spam and other mail send bounce messages to an innocent party. This occurs because the original message's envelope sender is forged to contain the e-mail address of the victim. A very large proportion of such e-mail is sent with a forged From: header, matching the envelope sender.

Since these messages were not solicited by the recipients, are substantially similar to each other, and are delivered in bulk quantities, they qualify as unsolicited bulk email or spam. As such, systems that generate e-mail backscatter can end up being listed on various DNSBLs and be in violation of internet service providers' Terms of Service.

[edit] Legality
See also: E-mail spam legislation by country

Sending spam violates the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) of almost all Internet Service Providers. Providers vary in their willingness or ability to enforce their AUP. Some actively enforce their terms and terminate spammers' accounts without warning. Some ISPs lack adequate personnel or technical skills for enforcement, while others may be reluctant to enforce restrictive terms against profitable customers.

As the recipient directly bears the cost of delivery, storage, and processing, one could regard spam as the electronic equivalent of "postage-due" junk mail.[6][23] Due to the low cost of sending unsolicited e-mail and the potential profit entailed, some believe that only strict legal enforcement can stop junk e-mail. The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) argues "Today, much of the spam volume is sent by career criminals and malicious hackers who won't stop until they're all rounded up and put in jail."[24]

[edit] Canada

The Government of Canada has introduced anti-spam legislation called the Electronic Commerce Protection Act at the House of Commons to fight spam.[25]

[edit] European Union and Australia

Several countries have passed laws that specifically target spam, notably Australia and all the countries of the European Union.

Article 13 of the European Union Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (2002/58/EC) provides that the EU member states shall take appropriate measures to ensure that unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing are not allowed either without the consent of the subscribers concerned or in respect of subscribers who do not wish to receive these communications, the choice between these options to be determined by national legislation.

In Australia, the relevant legislation is the Spam Act 2003 which covers some types of e-mail and phone spam, which took effect on 11 April 2004. The Spam Act provides that "Unsolicited commercial electronic messages must not be sent," which is an opt-in requirement. This contrasts with the U.S. CAN-SPAM act, which is opt-out (i.e., companies are free to send spam until the recipient directs the sender not to). Penalties are up to 10,000 penalty units, or 2,000 penalty units for a person other than a body corporate.

[edit] United States

In the United States, most states enacted anti-spam laws during the late 1990s and early 2000s. These have since been pre-empted by the less restrictive CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

Spam is legally permissible according to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 provided it follows certain criteria: a truthful subject line, no false information in the technical headers or sender address, and other minor requirements. If the spam fails to comply with any of these requirements it is illegal. Aggravated or accelerated penalties apply if the spammer harvested the email addresses using methods described earlier.

A review of the effectiveness of CAN-SPAM in 2005 by the Federal Trade Commission (the agency charged with CAN-SPAM enforcement) stated that the amount of sexually explicit spam had significantly decreased since 2003 and the total volume had begun to level off.[26] Senator Conrad Burns, a principal sponsor, noted that "Enforcement is key regarding the CAN-SPAM legislation." In 2004 less than 1% of spam complied with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.[27]

[edit] Effectiveness

Legislative efforts to curb spam have been ineffective or counter-productive. For example, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 requires that each message include a means to "opt out" (i.e., decline future e-mail from the same source). It is widely believed that responding to opt-out requests is unwise, as this merely confirms to the spammer that they have reached an active e-mail account. To the extent this is true, the CAN-SPAM Act's opt-out provisions are counter-productive in two ways: first, recipients who are aware of the potential risks of opting out will decline to do so; second, attempts to opt-out will provide spammers with useful information on their targets. A 2002 study by the Center for Democracy and Technology found that about 16% of web sites tested with opt-out requests continued to spam.[28]

[edit] Other laws

Accessing privately owned computer resources without the owner's permission counts as illegal under computer crime statutes in most nations. Deliberate spreading of computer viruses is also illegal in the United States and elsewhere. Thus, some common behaviors of spammers are criminal regardless of the legality of spamming per se. Even before the advent of laws specifically banning or regulating spamming, spammers were successfully prosecuted under computer fraud and abuse laws for wrongfully using others' computers.

The use of botnets can be perceived as theft. The spammer consumes a zombie owner's bandwidth and resources without any cost. In addition, spam is perceived as theft of services. The receiving SMTP servers consume significant amounts of system resources dealing with this unwanted traffic. As a result, service providers have to spend large amounts of money to make their systems capable of handling these amounts of email. Such costs are inevitably passed on to the service providers' customers.[29]

Other laws, not only those related to spam, have been used to prosecute alleged spammers. For example, Alan Ralsky was indicted on stock fraud charges in January 2008, and Robert Soloway plead guilty to charges of mail fraud, fraud in connection with electronic mail, and failing to file a tax return in March 2008.[30]

[edit] Deception and fraud

Spammers may engage in deliberate fraud to send out their messages. Spammers often use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up "disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers. They also often use falsified or stolen credit card numbers to pay for these accounts. This allows them to move quickly from one account to the next as the host ISPs discover and shut down each one.

Senders may go to great lengths to conceal the origin of their messages. Large companies may hire another firm to send their messages so that complaints or blocking of email falls on a third party. Others engage in spoofing of e-mail addresses (much easier than IP address spoofing). The e-mail protocol (SMTP) has no authentication by default, so the spammer can pretend to originate a message apparently from any e-mail address. To prevent this, some ISPs and domains require the use of SMTP-AUTH, allowing positive identification of the specific account from which an e-mail originates.

Senders cannot completely spoof e-mail delivery chains (the 'Received' header), since the receiving mailserver records the actual connection from the last mailserver's IP address. To counter this, some spammers forge additional delivery headers to make it appear as if the e-mail had previously traversed many legitimate servers.

Spoofing can have serious consequences for legitimate e-mail users. Not only can their e-mail inboxes get clogged up with "undeliverable" e-mails in addition to volumes of spam, they can mistakenly be identified as a spammer. Not only may they receive irate e-mail from spam victims, but (if spam victims report the e-mail address owner to the ISP, for example) a naive ISP may terminate their service for spamming.

[edit] Theft of service

Spammers frequently seek out and make use of vulnerable third-party systems such as open mail relays and open proxy servers. SMTP forwards mail from one server to another—mail servers that ISPs run commonly require some form of authentication to ensure that the user is a customer of that ISP. Open relays, however, do not properly check who is using the mail server and pass all mail to the destination address, making it harder to track down spammers.

Increasingly, spammers use networks of malware-infected PCs (zombies) to send their spam. Zombie networks are also known as Botnets (such zombifying malware is known as a bot, short for robot). In June 2006, an estimated 80% of e-mail spam was sent by zombie PCs, an increase of 30% from the prior year. An estimated 55 billion e-mail spam were sent each day in June 2006, an increase of 25 billion per day from June 2005.[31]

[edit] Statistics and estimates

[edit] The growth of e-mail spam

Spam is growing, with no signs of abating. The amount of spam users see in their mailboxes is just the tip of the iceberg, since spammers' lists often contain a large percentage of invalid addresses and many spam filters simply delete or reject "obvious spam".

[edit] In absolute numbers

* 1978 - An e-mail spam advertising a DEC product presentation is sent by Gary Thuerk to 600 addresses, which was all the users of that time's ARPANET, though software limitations meant only slightly more than half of the intended recipients actually received it.[32]
* 2002 - 2.4 billion per day[33]
* 2004 - 11 billion per day[34]
* 2005 - (June) 30 billion per day[31]
* 2006 - (June) 55 billion per day[31]
* 2007 - (February) 90 billion per day
* 2007 - (June) 100 billion per day[35]

[edit] As a percentage of the total volume of e-mail

More than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report.[36]

MAAWG estimates that 85% of incoming mail is "abusive email", as of the second half of 2007. The sample size for the MAAWG's study was over 100 million mailboxes.[37][38][39]

Spamhaus estimates that 90% of incoming email traffic is spam in North America, Europe or Australasia.[40] By June 2008 96.5% of e-mail received by businesses was spam.[20]

[edit] Highest amount of spam received

According to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft founder Bill Gates receives four million e-mails per year, most of them spam.[41] (This was originally incorrectly reported as "per day".[42])

At the same time Jef Poskanzer, owner of the domain name acme.com, was receiving over one million spam emails per day.[43]

[edit] Cost of spam

A 2004 survey estimated that lost productivity costs Internet users in the United States $21.58 billion annually, while another reported the cost at $17 billion, up from $11 billion in 2003. In 2004, the worldwide productivity cost of spam has been estimated to be $50 billion in 2005.[44] An estimate of the percentage cost borne by the sender of marketing junk mail (snail mail) is 88%, whereas in 2001 one spam was estimated to cost $0.10 for the receiver and $0.00001 (0.01% of the cost) for the sender. [6]

[edit] Origin of spam

Origin or source of spam refers to the geographical location of the computer from which the spam is sent; it is not the country where the spammer resides, nor the country that hosts the spamvertised site. Due to the international nature of spam, the spammer, the hijacked spam-sending computer, the spamvertised server, and the user target of the spam are all often located in different countries. As much as 80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced to fewer than 200 spammers.[45]

In terms of volume of spam: According to Sophos, the major sources of spam in the fourth quarter of 2008 (October to December) were:[20][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54]

* The United States (the origin of 19.8% of spam messages, up from 18.9% in Q3)
* China (9.9%, up from 5.4%)
* Russia (6.4%, down from 8.3%)
* Brazil (6.3%, up from 4.5%)
* Turkey (4.4%, down from 8.2%)

When grouped by continents, spam comes mostly from:

* Asia (37.8%, down from 39.8%)
* North America (23.6%, up from 21.8%)
* Europe (23.4%, down from 23.9%)
* South America (12.9%, down from 13.2%)

In terms of number of IP addresses: The Spamhaus Project (which measures spam sources in terms of number of IP addresses used for spamming, rather than volume of spam sent) ranks the top three as the United States, China, and Russia,[55] followed by Japan, Canada, and South Korea.

In terms of networks: As of 5 June 2007 (2007 -06-05)[update], the three networks hosting the most spammers are Verizon, AT&T, and VSNL International.[55] Verizon inherited many of these spam sources from its acquisition of MCI, specifically through the UUNet subsidiary of MCI, which Verizon subsequently renamed Verizon Business.

[edit] Spam in culture

The often rambling and incomprehensible nature of spam has led to an underground culture, with video tribute on the video sharing service YouTube, cartoons based on spam titles (Spamusement!) as well as spam blogs such as My Pet Spam, Delightful Spam and The Spam Hunter Diaries.

[edit] Anti-spam techniques
Main article: Anti-spam techniques (e-mail)

The U.S. Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC) has provided specific countermeasures against electronic mail spamming.[56]

Some popular methods for filtering and refusing spam include e-mail filtering based on the content of the e-mail, DNS-based blackhole lists (DNSBL), greylisting, spamtraps, Enforcing technical requirements of e-mail (SMTP), checksumming systems to detect bulk email, and by putting some sort of cost on the sender via a Proof-of-work system or a micropayment. Each method has strengths and weaknesses and each is controversial due to its weaknesses. For example, one company offers for "removing some spamtrap and honeypot addresses" from email lists, defeating the ability of those methods for identifying spammers.

Anti-spam techniques should not be employed on abuse email addresses, as is commonly the case. The result of this is that when people attempt to report spam to a host, the spam message is caught in the spam filter and the host remains unaware that their network is being exploited by spammers.

[edit] How spammers operate

[edit] Gathering of addresses
Main article: E-mail address harvesting

In order to send spam, spammers need to obtain the e-mail addresses of the intended recipients. To this end, both spammers themselves and list merchants gather huge lists of potential e-mail addresses. Since spam is, by definition, unsolicited, this address harvesting is done without the consent (and sometimes against the expressed will) of the address owners. As a consequence, spammers' address lists are inaccurate. A single spam run may target tens of millions of possible addresses — many of which are invalid, malformed, or undeliverable.

Sometimes, if the sent spam is "bounced" or sent back to the sender by various programs that eliminate spam, or if the recipient clicks on an unsubscribe link, that may cause that email address to be marked as "valid", which is interpreted by the spammer as "send me more".

[edit] Delivering spam messages
Main article: Spam email delivery

[edit] Obfuscating message content
This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (November 2007)

Many spam-filtering techniques work by searching for patterns in the headers or bodies of messages. For instance, a user may decide that all e-mail they receive with the word "Viagra" in the subject line is spam, and instruct their mail program to automatically delete all such messages. To defeat such filters, the spammer may intentionally misspell commonly-filtered words or insert other characters, often in a style similar to leetspeak, as in the following examples: V1agra, Via'gra, Vi@graa, vi*gra, \/iagra. This also allows for many different ways to express a given work, making identifying them all more difficult for filter software. For example, using most common variations, it is possible to spell "Viagra" in over 1.3 * 1021 different ways.[57]

The principle of this method is to leave the word readable to humans (who can easily recognize the intended word for such misspellings), but not likely to be recognized by a literal computer program. This is only somewhat effective, because modern filter patterns have been designed to recognize blacklisted terms in the various iterations of misspelling. Other filters target the actual obfuscation methods, such as the non-standard use of punctuation or numerals into unusual places. Similarly, HTML-based e-mail gives the spammer more tools to obfuscate text. Inserting HTML comments between letters can foil some filters, as can including text made invisible by setting the font color to white on a white background, or shrinking the font size to the smallest fine print. Another common ploy involves presenting the text as an image, which is either sent along or loaded from a remote server. This can be foiled by not permitting an e-mail-program to load images.

As Bayesian filtering has become popular as a spam-filtering technique, spammers have started using methods to weaken it. To a rough approximation, Bayesian filters rely on word probabilities. If a message contains many words which are only used in spam, and few which are never used in spam, it is likely to be spam. To weaken Bayesian filters, some spammers, alongside the sales pitch, now include lines of irrelevant, random words, in a technique known as Bayesian poisoning. A variant on this tactic may be borrowed from the Usenet abuser known as "Hipcrime" -- to include passages from books taken from Project Gutenberg, or nonsense sentences generated with "dissociated press" algorithms. Randomly generated phrases can create spoetry (spam poetry) or spam art.

Another method used to masquerade spam as legitimate messages is the use of autogenerated sender names in the From: field, ranging from realistic ones such as "Jackie F. Bird" to (either by mistake or intentionally) bizarre attention-grabbing names such as "Sloppiest U. Epiglottis" or "Attentively E. Behavioral". Return addresses are also routinely auto-generated, often using unsuspecting domain owners' legitimate domain names, leading some users to blame the innocent domain owners. Blocking lists use IP addresses rather than sender domain names, as these are more accurate. A mail purporting to be from example.com can be seen to be faked by looking for the originating IP address in the email's headers; also Sender Policy Framework, for example, helps by stating that a certain domain will only send email from certain IP addresses.

Spam can also be hidden inside a fake "Undelivered mail notification" which looks like the failure notices sent by a mail transfer agent (a "MAILER-DAEMON") when it encounters an error.

[edit] Spam-support services

A number of other online activities and business practices are considered by anti-spam activists to be connected to spamming. These are sometimes termed spam-support services: business services, other than the actual sending of spam itself, which permit the spammer to continue operating. Spam-support services can include processing orders for goods advertised in spam, hosting Web sites or DNS records referenced in spam messages, or a number of specific services as follows:

Some Internet hosting firms advertise bulk-friendly or bulletproof hosting. This means that, unlike most ISPs, they will not terminate a customer for spamming. These hosting firms operate as clients of larger ISPs, and many have eventually been taken offline by these larger ISPs as a result of complaints regarding spam activity. Thus, while a firm may advertise bulletproof hosting, it is ultimately unable to deliver without the connivance of its upstream ISP. However, some spammers have managed to get what is called a pink contract (see below) — a contract with the ISP that allows them to spam without being disconnected.

A few companies produce spamware, or software designed for spammers. Spamware varies widely, but may include the ability to import thousands of addresses, to generate random addresses, to insert fraudulent headers into messages, to use dozens or hundreds of mail servers simultaneously, and to make use of open relays. The sale of spamware is illegal in eight U.S. states.[58][59][60]

So-called millions CDs are commonly advertised in spam. These are CD-ROMs purportedly containing lists of e-mail addresses, for use in sending spam to these addresses. Such lists are also sold directly online, frequently with the false claim that the owners of the listed addresses have requested (or "opted in") to be included. Such lists often contain invalid addresses. In recent years, these have fallen almost entirely out of use due to the low quality e-mail addresses available on them, and because some e-mail lists exceed 20GB in size. The amount you can fit on a CD is no longer substantial.

A number of DNS blacklists (DNSBLs), including the MAPS RBL, Spamhaus SBL, SORBS and SPEWS, target the providers of spam-support services as well as spammers. DNSBLs blacklist IPs or ranges of IPs to persuade ISPs to terminate services with known customers who are spammers or resell to spammers.

[edit] Related vocabulary

Unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE)
A synonym for e-mail spam.
Unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE)
Spam promoting a commercial service or product. This is the most common type of spam, but it excludes spam which are hoaxes (e.g. virus warnings), political advocacy, religious messages and chain letters sent by a person to many other people. The term UCE may be most common in the USA. [61]
Pink contract
A pink contract is a service contract offered by an ISP which offers bulk e-mail service to spamming clients, in violation of that ISP's publicly posted acceptable use policy.
Spamvertising
Spamvertising is advertising through the medium of spam.
Opt-in, confirmed opt-in, double opt-in, opt-out
Opt-in, confirmed opt-in, double opt-in, opt-out refers to whether the people on a mailing list are given the option to be put in, or taken out, of the list. Confirmation (and "double", in marketing speak) refers to an email address transmitted eg. through a web form being confirmed to actually request joining a mailing list, instead of being added to the list without verification.
Final, Ultimate Solution for the Spam Problem (FUSSP)
An ironic reference to naïve developers who believe they have invented the perfect spam filter, which will stop all spam from reaching users' inboxes while accidentally deleting no legitimate email.[62][63]
Bacn
Bacn is a rarely used term to refer to e-mail sent to a user who at one time subscribed to a mailing list - not unsolicited, but also not personal.

[edit] History
Main article: History of email spam

[edit] See also
Search Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons has media related to: SPAM e-mail

* Address munging
* Anti-spam techniques (e-mail)
* Bacn
* Botnet
* Boulder Pledge
* The Canadian Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
* CAUCE
* Chain e-mail
* Direct Marketing Associations
* Disposable e-mail address
* E-mail address harvesting
* Category:E-mail spammers
* Junk fax
* List poisoning
* Make money fast, the infamous Dave Rhodes chain letter that jumped to e-mail.
* Mule (e-mail)
* Netiquette
* news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup
* Nigerian spam
* PDF spam
* Pump and dump stock fraud
* Spam (electronic)
* Spambot
* SpamCop
* Spamtrap
* Spamware
* Spider trap
* Stopping e-mail abuse
* Spamhaus

[edit] References

1. ^ James John Farmer (2003-12-27). "3.4 Specific Types of Spam" (FAQ). An FAQ for news.admin.net-abuse.email; Part 3: Understanding NANAE. spamfaq.net. http://web.archive.org/web/200402121755 ... ific_spams. Retrieved 2008-08-19.
2. ^ "You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If...". Rhyolite Software, LLC. 2006-11-25. http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-m ... -fighter-4. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
3. ^ "On what type of email should I (not) use SpamCop?" (FAQ). SpamCop FAQ. IronPort Systems, Inc.. http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/14.html. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
4. ^ Scott Hazen Mueller. "What is spam?". Information about spam. spam.abuse.net. http://spam.abuse.net/overview/whatisspam.shtml. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
5. ^ "Spam Defined". Infinite Monkeys & Co. LLC. 2002-12-22. http://www.monkeys.com/spam-defined/. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
6. ^ a b c Make Spammers Pay Before You Do
7. ^ Clinton Internet provider wins $11B suit against spammer
8. ^ AOL gives up treasure hunt
9. ^ "Spam Back to 94% of All E-Mail - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com". http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/3 ... e-mail/?em.
10. ^ Gary Thuerk, who sent the first e-mail spam message in 1978 to 600 people, was reprimanded and told not to do it again.Opening Pandora's In-Box
11. ^ alt.spam FAQ
12. ^ Why is spam bad?
13. ^ Ferris Research: Cost of Spam
14. ^ Spam's Cost To Business Escalates
15. ^ Commtouch Software Ltd. (2004-06-30). "Commtouch Reports Spam Trends For First Half of 2004". Press release. http://www.commtouch.com/Site/News_Even ... 5&cat_id=1. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
16. ^ Evett, Don. "Spam Statistics 2006". http://spam-filter-review.toptenreviews ... stics.html. Retrieved 2008-09-05.
17. ^ avalanche of Viagra ads and Rolex pitches
18. ^ recent upsurge in Rolex spam
19. ^ Brett Forrest (August 2006). "The Sleazy Life and Nasty Death of Russia’s Spam King". Issue 14.08 (Wired Magazine). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.0 ... ng_pr.html. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
20. ^ a b c Sophos Plc (2008-07-15). "Only one in 28 emails legitimate, Sophos report reveals rising tide of spam in April - June 2008". Press release. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/ ... jul08.html. Retrieved 2008-10-12.
21. ^ Getting it Wrong
22. ^ Eric B. Parizo (2006-07-26). "Image spam paints a troubling picture". SearchSecurity.com. http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/or ... 26,00.html. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
23. ^ McAfee/ICF - The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report - Over 95% of the energy consumed by spam is on the receiver.
24. ^ CAUCE accessed July 13, 2007
25. ^ CBC News: Conservatives introduce anti-spam bill
26. ^ Effectiveness and Enforcement of the CAN-SPAM Act
27. ^ Is the CAN-SPAM Law Working?
28. ^ "Why Am I Getting All This Spam? Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report". Center for Democracy and Technology. March 2003. http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml. Retrieved 2007-06-05. (Only 31 sites were sampled, and the testing was done before CAN-SPAM was enacted.)
29. ^ You've Got Spam
30. ^ Seattle Times: "Spam king" pleads guilty to felony fraud
31. ^ a b c IronPort Systems, Inc. (2006-06-28). "Spammers Continue Innovation: IronPort Study Shows Image-based Spam, Hit & Run, and Increased Volumes Latest Threat to Your Inbox". Press release. http://www.ironport.com/company/ironpor ... 06-28.html. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
32. ^ Brad Templeton (08 March 2005). "Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978". Brad Templeton. http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html. Retrieved 2007-01-21.
33. ^ The Big Business of Fighting Spam retrieved 8 December 2008
34. ^ Growth of Spam retrieved 8 December 2008
35. ^ Spam Statistics
36. ^ Spam overwhelms e-mail messages
37. ^ (PDF) Email Metrics Program: The Network Operators' Perspective. Report #7 – Third and Fourth Quarters 2007. Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. April 2008. http://www.maawg.org/about/MAAWG_2007-Q ... Report.pdf. Retrieved 2008-05-08.
38. ^ (PDF) Email Metrics Program: The Network Operators' Perspective. Report #1 — 4th Quarter 2005 Report. Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. March 2006. http://www.maawg.org/about/FINAL_4Q2005 ... Report.pdf. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
39. ^ (PDF) Email Metrics Program: The Network Operators' Perspective. Report #2 — 1st Quarter 2006. Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. June 2006. http://www.maawg.org/about/FINAL_1Q2006 ... Report.pdf. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
40. ^ Effective Spam Filtering (Spamhaus)
41. ^ Staff (2004-11-18). "Bill Gates 'most spammed person'". BBC News (bbc.co.uk). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4023667.stm. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
42. ^ Mike Wendland (2004-12-02). "Ballmer checks out my spam problem". ACME Laboratories republication of article appearing in Detroit Free Press. http://www.acme.com/mail_filtering/article_2.html. Retrieved 2007-01-06. the date provided is for the original article; the date of revision for the republication is 8 June 2005; verification that content of the republication is the same as the original article is pending
43. ^ Jef Poskanzer (2006-05-15). "Mail Filtering". ACME Laboratories. http://www.acme.com/mail_filtering/. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
44. ^ Spam Costs Billions
45. ^ Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO)
46. ^ Sophos Plc (2004-08-24). "Sophos reveals 'Dirty Dozen' spam producing countries, August 2004". Press release. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/ ... aug04.html. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
47. ^ Sophos Plc (2006-07-24). "Sophos reveals 'dirty dozen' spam relaying countries". Press release. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/ ... jul06.html. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
48. ^ Sophos Plc (2007-04-11). "Sophos research reveals dirty dozen spam-relaying nations". Press release. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/ ... apr07.html. Retrieved 2007-06-15.
49. ^ Sophos Plc (2007-07-18). "Sophos reveals 'Dirty Dozen' spam producing countries, July 2007". Press release. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/ ... jul07.html. Retrieved 2007-07-24.
50. ^ Sophos Plc (2007-10-24). "Sophos reveals 'Dirty Dozen' spam producing countries for Q3 2007". Press release. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/ ... oct07.html. Retrieved 2007-11-09.
51. ^ Sophos Plc (2008-02-11). "Sophos details dirty dozen spam-relaying countries for Q4 2007". Press release. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/ ... feb08.html. Retrieved 2008-02-12.
52. ^ Sophos Plc (2008-04-14). "Sophos details dirty dozen spam-relaying countries for Q1 2008". Press release. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/ ... apr08.html. Retrieved 2008-06-07.
53. ^ Sophos Plc (2008-10-27). "Eight times more malicious email attachments spammed out in Q3 2008". Press release. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/ ... eport.html. Retrieved 2008-11-02.
54. ^ Sophos Plc (2009-01-22). "Spammers defy Bill Gates's death-of-spam prophecy". Press release. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/ ... dozen.html. Retrieved 2009-01-22.
55. ^ a b "Spamhaus Statistics : The Top 10". Spamhaus Blocklist (SBL) database. The Spamhaus Project Ltd.. dynamic report. http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
56. ^ Shawn Hernan; James R. Cutler; David Harris (1997-11-25). "I-005c: E-Mail Spamming countermeasures: Detection and prevention of E-Mail spamming". Computer Incident Advisory Capability Information Bulletins. United States Department of Energy. http://www.ciac.org/ciac/bulletins/i-005c.shtml. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
57. ^ "There are 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra". cockeyed.com. 2004-04-07. http://cockeyed.com/lessons/viagra/viagra.html. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
58. ^ Sapient Fridge (2005-07-08). "Spamware vendor list". spamsights.org. http://www.spamsights.org/. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
59. ^ "SBL Policy & Listing Criteria". The Spamhaus Project Ltd.. 2006-12-22. http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/policy.html. Retrieved 2007-01-06. original location was http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl-rationale.html; the referenced page is an auto-redirect target from the original location
60. ^ Spamware - Email Address Harvesting Tools and Anonymous Bulk Emailing Software. MX Logic (abstract hosted by bitpipe.com). 2004-10-01. http://www.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1097086148_134.html. Retrieved 2007-01-06. the link here is to an abstract of a white paper; registration with the authoring organization is required to obtain the full white paper
61. ^ "Definitions of Words We Use". Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email, Australia. http://www.caube.org.au/whatis.htm. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
62. ^ Vernon Schryver: You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If...
63. ^ Tips for your new anti-spam idea

[edit] External links

* Spam info
o Spam.Abuse.Net
o SpamHelp.org
o Spam Links
o Can The Spam: How Spam is Bad for the Environment June 15, 2009
* Spam reports
o Worldwide Email Threat Activity
* Government reports and industry white papers
o Email Address Harvesting and the Effectiveness of Anti-SPAM Filters by US FTC, Retrieved on 13-Oct-2007.
o The Electronic Frontier Foundation's spam page which contains legislation, analysis and litigation histories
o Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report by Center for Democracy & Technology
* from the author of Pegasus Mail & Mercury Mail Transport System - David Harris
o Spam White Paper - Drowning in Sewage

[hide]
v • d • e
Spamming
Protocols
E-mail

Address munging · Bulk email software · Directory Harvest Attack · Joe job · DNSBL · DNSWL · Spambot · Pink contract
Other

Autodialer/Robocall · Flyposting · Junk fax · Messaging · Mobile phone · Newsgroup · Telemarketing · VoIP
Anti-spam
Disposable e-mail address · E-mail authentication · SORBS · SpamCop · Spamhaus · List poisoning · Bayesian spam filtering · Network Abuse Clearinghouse
Spamdexing
Keyword stuffing · Google bomb · Scraper site · Link farm · Cloaking · Doorway page · URL redirection · Spam blogs · Sping · Forum spam · Blog spam · Social networking spam · Referrer spam
Internet fraud
Advance fee fraud · Lottery scam · Make Money Fast · Microcap stock fraud · Phishing · Vishing
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam"
Categories: Spamming | E-mail
Hidden categories: Articles containing potentially dated statements from April 2008 | All articles containing potentially dated statements | Articles containing potentially dated statements from June 2007 | Articles with unsourced statements from November 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements
Views

* Article
* Discussion
* Edit this page
* History

Personal tools

* Try Beta
* Log in / create account

Navigation

* Main page
* Contents
* Featured content
* Current events
* Random article

Search

Interaction

* About Wikipedia
* Community portal
* Recent changes
* Contact Wikipedia
* Donate to Wikipedia
* Help

Toolbox

* What links here
* Related changes
* Upload file
* Special pages
* Printable version
* Permanent link
* Cite this page

Languages

* العربية
* Català
* Deutsch
* فارسی
* עברית
* Latviešu
* 日本語
* Русский
* Slovenščina
* Suomi
* தமிழ்
* Türkçe
* Walon
* 中文

Powered by MediaWiki
Wikimedia Foundation

* This page was last modified on 8 September 2009 at 01:09.
* Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
* Privacy policy
* About Wikipedia
* Disclaimers

rom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
It has been suggested that Postcount be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)
An Internet forum software package
Another Internet forum software package

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site.[1] It originated as the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board, and a technological evolution of the dialup bulletin board system.[2][3] From a technological standpoint, forums or boards are web applications managing user-generated content.[3][4]

People participating in an Internet forum may cultivate social bonds and interest groups for a topic may form from the discussions.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 History
* 2 Registration or anonymity
* 3 Rules and policies on forums
o 3.1 Troll
o 3.2 Sock puppet
o 3.3 Spamming
o 3.4 Double posting
o 3.5 Word censor
* 4 Forum structure
o 4.1 User groups
+ 4.1.1 Moderator
+ 4.1.2 Administrator
o 4.2 Post
o 4.3 Thread
* 5 Discussion
o 5.1 Flame wars
* 6 Common features
o 6.1 Tripcodes and capcodes
o 6.2 Private message
o 6.3 Attachment
o 6.4 BBCode and HTML
o 6.5 Emoticon
o 6.6 Poll
o 6.7 RSS and ATOM
o 6.8 Other forum features
* 7 Comparison with other Web applications
* 8 Copyright
* 9 See also
* 10 Notes
* 11 Examples
* 12 References

[edit] History

Early Internet forums could be described as a web version of a newsgroup or electronic mailing list (many of which were commonly called Usenet); allowing people to post messages and comment on other messages. Later developments emulated the different newsgroups or individual lists, providing more than one forum, dedicated to a particular topic.[2]

Internet forums are prevalent in several developed countries. In terms of countable posts, Japan is far in the lead with over two million posts per day on their largest forum, 2channel. China also has many millions of posts on forums such as Tianya Club. The United States does not have any one large forum, but instead several hundred thousand smaller forums, the largest of which are Gaia Online, IGN and GameFAQs. China, the Netherlands, and France are also home to hundreds of independent forums.[citation needed]

Forums perform a function similar to that of dial-up bulletin board systems and Usenet networks that were common from the late 1970s to the 1990s.[2] Early web-based forums date back as far as 1996. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology, computer games and/or video games, sports, music, fashion, religion, and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of topics. Internet slang and image macros popular across the Internet are abundant and widely used in Internet forums.

Forum software packages are widely available on the Internet and are written in a variety of programming languages, such as PHP, Perl, Java and ASP. The configuration and records of posts can be stored in text files or in a database. Each package offers different features, from the most basic, providing text-only postings, to more advanced packages, offering multimedia support and formatting code (usually known as BBCode). Many packages can be integrated easily into an existing website to allow visitors to post comments on articles.

Several other web applications, such as weblog software, also incorporate forum features. Wordpress comments at the bottom of a blog post allow for a single-threaded discussion of any given blog post. Slashcode, on the other hand, is far more complicated, allowing fully threaded discussions and incorporating a robust moderation and meta-moderation system as well as many of the profile features available to forum users.

[edit] Registration or anonymity

In the United States and some parts of Europe, most Internet forums require registration to post. Registered users of the site are referred to as members and are allowed to submit or send electronic messages through the web application. The process of registration involves verification of one's age (typically over 12 is required so as to meet COPPA requirements of American forum software) followed by a declaration of the terms of service (other documents may also be present) and a request for agreement to said terms.[5][6][7] Subsequently, if all goes well, the candidate is presented with a web form to fill requesting at the very least: a username (an alias), password, email and validation of a CAPTCHA code.

While simply completing the registration web form is generally enough to generate an account[note 1] the status label Inactive is commonly given by default until the registered user confirms the email address given while registrating indeed belongs to him. Until that time, the registered can log in to his new account but may not use the forum for communication (posts, threads, private messages).
Internet Forums are used frequently in conjunction with multiplayer online game sites.

Sometimes a referrer system is implemented. A referrer is someone who introduced or otherwise "helped someone" with the decision to join the site (similarly how a HTTP referrer is the site who linked one to another site). Usually, referrers are other forum members. The referrer system is also sometimes implemented so that if a visitor visits the forum though a link such as referrerid=300, the user with the id number (in this example, 300) would receive referral credit if the visitor registers.[8] The purpose is commonly just to give credit (sometimes rewards are implied) to those who help the community grow.

In areas such as China and Japan, registration is frequently optional and anonymity is sometimes even encouraged.[9] On these forums, a tripcode system may be used to allow verification of an identity without the need for formal registration.

[edit] Rules and policies on forums

Forums are governed by a set of individuals, collectively referred to as staff, made up of administrators and moderators, which are responsible for the forums' conception, technical maintenance, and policies (creation and enforcing). Most forums have a list of rules detailing the wishes, aim and guidelines of the forums creators. There is usually also a FAQ section contain basic information for new members and people not yet familiar with the use and principles of a forum (generally tailored for specific forum software).

Rules on forums usually apply to the entire user body and often have preset exceptions, most commonly designating a section as an exception. For example, in an IT forum any discussion regarding anything but computer programming languages may be against the rules, with the exception of a general chat section.

Forum rules are maintained and enforced by the moderation team, but users are allowed to help out via what is known as a report system. Most American forum software contains such a system.[10][11] It consists of a small function applicable to each post (including one's own). Using it will notify all currently available moderators of its location, and subsequent action or judgment can be carried out immediately, which is desirable in large or very developed boards. Generally, moderators encourage members to also use the private message system if they wish to report behavior. Moderators will generally frown upon attempts of moderation by non-moderators, especially when the would-be moderators do not even issue a report. Messages from non-moderators acting as moderators generally declare a post as against the rules, or predict punishment. While not harmful, statements which attempt to enforce the rules are discouraged.[12]

When rules are broken several steps are commonly taken. First a warning is usually given; this is commonly in the form of a private message but recent development has made it possible for it to be integrated into the software. Subsequently, if the act is ignored and warnings do not work, the member is – usually – first exiled from the forum for a number of days. Denying someone access to the site is called a ban (as in "you have been banished"). Bans can mean the person can no longer log in or even view the site anymore. If the offender, after the warning sentence, repeats the offense, another ban is given, usually this time a longer one. Continuous harassment of the site eventually leads to a permanent ban. However, in most cases this simply means the account is locked. In extreme cases where the offender – after being permanently banned – creates another account and continues to harass the site, administrators will apply an IP ban (this can also be applied at the server level): if the IP is static, the machine of the offender is prevented from accessing the site. In some extreme circumstances, IP range bans or country bans can be applied; however, this is usually for political, licensing or other reasons. See also: Block (internet), IP blocking, Internet censorship.

Offending content is usually deleted. Sometimes if the topic is considered the source of the problem, it is locked; often a poster may request a topic expected to draw problems to be locked as well, although the moderators decide whether to grant it. In a locked thread, members cannot post anymore. In cases where the topic is considered a breach of rules it – with all of its posts – may be deleted.

[edit] Troll
Main article: Troll (Internet)

A troll is a user that repeatedly and intentionally breaches netiquette, often posting derogatory or otherwise inflammatory messages about sensitive topics in an established online community to bait users into responding, often starting flame wars (see below). They may also link to shock sites or plant images on networks that others may find disturbing in order to cause confrontation. Trolls known as gravediggers (or necromancers) purposefully post in old and irrelevant threads simply to bring that thread to light again. Responding to a troll's actions is known as 'feeding the troll' and is generally discouraged.

[edit] Sock puppet
Main article: Sockpuppet (Internet)

The term sock puppet refers to someone who is simultaneously registered under different pseudonyms on a particular message board or forum. The analogy of a sock puppet is of a puppeteer holding up both hands and supplying dialogue to both puppets simultaneously. A sock puppet will create multiple accounts over a period of time, using each user to debate or agree with each other on a forum. Sock puppets are usually found when an IP check is done on the accounts in a forum.

[edit] Spamming
Main article: Forum spam

Forum spamming is a breach of netiquette where users repeat the same word or phrase over and over, but differs from multiple posting in that spamming is usually a willful act which sometimes has malicious intent. This is a common trolling technique. It can also be traditional spam, unpaid advertisements that are in breach of the forum's rules. Spammers utilize a number of illicit techniques to post their spam, including the use of botnets.

Some forums consider posts consisting solely of: Thank you., I love it. – or similar phrases – spam.

[edit] Double posting

One common faux pas on Internet forums is to post the same message twice. Users sometimes post versions of a message that are only slightly different, especially in forums where they are not allowed to edit their earlier posts. Multiple posting instead of editing prior posts can artificially inflate a user's post count. Multiple posting can be unintentional; a user's browser might display an error message even though the post has been transmitted or a user of a slow forum might become impatient and repeatedly hit the submit button. Multiple posting can also be used as a method of trolling or spreading forum spam. A user may also send the same post to several forums, which is termed crossposting. The term derives from Usenet, where crossposting was an accepted practice; however, it causes problems in web forums, which lack the ability to link such posts, so replies in one forum are not visible to people reading the post in other forums.

[edit] Word censor

See also Internet censorship#"By-catch".

A word censoring system is commonly included in the forum software package. The system will pick up words in the body of the post or some other user editable forum element (like user titles) and if they partially match a certain keyword (commonly no case sensitivity) they will be censored. The most common censoring is letter replacement with an asterisk character; for example: in the user title it is deemed inappropriate for users to use words such as "admin", "moderator", "leader" and so on, if the censoring system is implemented a title such as "forum leader" may be filtered to "forum ******". Rude or vulgar words are common targets for the censoring system.[13][14] But such auto-censors can make mistakes, for example censoring "wristwatch" to "wris****ch", "Scunthorpe" to "S****horpe", or "shitaki" to "****aki."

[edit] Forum structure

A forum consists of a tree like directory structure containing at the lowest end topics (commonly called threads) and inside them posts. Logically forums are organised into a finite set of generic topics (usually with one main topic) driven and updated by a group known as members, and governed by a group known as moderators.[citation needed]

[edit] User groups

Internally, Western-style forums organise visitors and logged in members into user groups. Privileges and rights are given based on these groups. A user of the forum can automatically be promoted to a more privileged user group based on criteria set by the administrator.[15] A person viewing a closed thread as a member will see a box saying he does not have the right to submit messages there, but a moderator will likely see the same box granting him access to more than just posting messages.[16]

An unregistered user of the site is commonly known as a guest or visitor. Guests are granted access to all functions that do not require database alterations or breach privacy. A guest can view the contents of the forum or use such features as read marking.[note 2] A person who is a very frequent visitor of the forum, a section or even a thread is referred to as a lurker and the habit is referred to as lurking. Registered members often will refer to themselves as lurking in a particular location, which is to say they have no intention of participating in that section but enjoy reading the contributions to it.

[edit] Moderator

The moderators (short singular form: "mod") are users (or employees) of the forum which are granted access to the posts and threads of all members for the purpose of moderating discussion (similar to arbitration) and also keeping the forum clean (neutralising spam and spambots etc). Because they have access to all posts and threads in their area of responsibility, it is common for a friend of the site owner to be promoted to moderator for such a task. Moderators also answer users' concerns about the forum, general questions, as well as respond to specific complaints.[17] Moderators themselves may have ranks: some may be given mod privilege over only a particular topic or section, while others (called 'global' or 'super') may be allowed access anywhere. Common privileges of moderators include: deleting, merging, moving, and splitting of posts and threads; locking, renaming, stickying of threads; banning, unbanning, warning the members; or adding, editing, removing the polls of threads.[18]

[edit] Administrator

The administrators (short form: "admin") manage the technical details required for running the site. As such, they may promote (and demote) members to moderators, manage the rules, create sections and sub-sections, as well as perform any database operations (database backup etc). Administrators often also act as moderators. Administrators may also make forum-wide announcements, or change the appearance (known as the skin) of a forum.[18]

The term prune used extensively in administration panels is synonymous with delete or remove. The term comes from pruning, the practice of removing diseased, non-productive, or otherwise unwanted portions from a plant.

[edit] Post

A post is a user submitted message enclosed into a block containing the user's details and the date and time it was submitted. Members are usually allowed to edit or delete their own posts. Posts are contained in threads, where they appear as boxes one after another. The first post starts the thread; this may be called the original post, or OP. Posts that follow in the thread are meant to continue discussion about that post, or respond to other replies; it is not unknown for discussions to be derailed.

On Western forums, the classic way to show a member's own details (such as name and avatar) has been on the left side of the post, in a narrow column of fixed width, with the post controls located on the right, at the bottom of the main body, above the signature block. In more recent forum software implementations the Asian style of displaying the members' details above the post has been copied.

Posts have an internal limit usually measured in characters. Often one is required to have a message of minimum length of 10 characters. There is always an upper limit but it is rarely reached – most boards have it at either 10,000, 30,000 or 50,000 characters.

[edit] Thread

A thread is a collection of posts, usually displayed – by default – from oldest to latest, although the option for a threaded view (a tree-like view applying logical reply structure before chronological order) can be available. A thread is defined by a title, an additional description that may summarise the intended discussion, and an opening or original post (common abbreviation 'OP', which can also mean original poster) which opens whatever dialogue or makes whatever announcement the poster wished. A thread can contain any number of posts, including multiple posts from the same members, even if they are one after the other.

A thread is contained in a forum, and is displayed in chronological order from newest to oldest, where the date is taken as the date of the last post (options to order threads by other criteria are generally available). When a member posts in a thread it will jump to the top since it is the latest updated thread. Similarly, other threads will jump in front of it when they receive posts. When a member posts in a thread for no reason but to have it go to the top, it is referred to as a bump or bumping. Threads which are important but rarely receive posts are stickyed (or, in some software, 'pinned'). A sticky thread will always appear in front of normal threads, often in its own section.

A thread's popularity is measured on forums in reply (total posts minus one – the opening post) counts. Some forums also track page views. Threads meeting a set number of posts or a set number of views may receive a designation such as "hot thread" and be displayed with a different icon compared to others threads.
Thread (viewing as moderator)

Forum (viewing as moderator)


[edit] Discussion
This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2009)

Forums prefer a premise of open and free discussion and often adopt de facto standards. Most common topics on forums include questions, comparisons, polls of opinion as well as debates. Because of their volatile and random behavior it is not uncommon for nonsense or unsocial behavior to sprout as people lose temper, especially if the topic is controversial. Poor understanding of differences in values of the participants is a common problem on forums. Because replies to a topic are often wording aimed at someone's point of view, discussion will usually go slightly off into several directions as people question each others validity, sources and so on. Circular discussion and ambiguity in replies can carry out arguments for several tens of posts of a thread eventually ending when everyone gives up or another similar debate takes it over. It is not uncommon for a style over substance or ad hominem debates to be the ones to take it over.

[edit] Flame wars
Main article: Flaming (Internet)
This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2009)

When a thread—or in some cases an entire forum—becomes unstable the result is usually uncontrolled spam in the form of one-line complaints, image macros or abuse of the report system. When the discussion becomes heated and sides do nothing more than complain and not accept each other's differences in point of view, the discussion degenerates into what is called a flame war. To flame someone means to go off-topic and attack the person rather than their opinion. Likely candidates for flame wars are usually religion and socio-political topics, or topics that discuss pre-existing rivalries outside of the forum (eg: rivalry between games console systems, car manufacturers, nationalities, etc.)

When a topic that has degenerated into a flame war is considered akin to that of the forum (be it a section or the entire board), spam and flames have a chance of spreading outside the topic and causing trouble, usually in the form of vandalism. Some forums (commonly game forums) have suffered from forum-wide flame wars almost immediately after their conception, because of a pre-existing flame war element in the online community. Many forums have created devoted areas strictly for discussion of potential flame war topics that are moderated like normal.

[edit] Common features

By default to be an Internet forum, the web application needs an ability to submit threads and replies. Forum software may sometimes allow categories or subforums. The chronological older-to-newer view is generally associated with forums (the newer to older being associated more akin to blogs).

[edit] Tripcodes and capcodes
Main article: Tripcode

In a tripcode system, a secret password is added to the user's name following a separator character (often a number sign). This password, or tripcode, is hashed into a special key, or trip, distinguishable from the name by HTML styles. Tripcodes cannot be faked but on some types of forum software they are insecure and can be guessed.

Moderators and administrators will frequently assign themselves capcodes, or tripcodes where the guessable trip is replaced with a special notice (such as "# Administrator"), or cap.

[edit] Private message
Main article: Personal message

A private message, or PM for short, is a message sent in private from a member to one or more other members. The ability to send so-called carbon copies is sometimes available. When sending a carbon copy (cc), the users to whom the message is sent directly will not be aware of the recipients of the carbon copy or even if one was sent in the first place.[example 1]

Private messages are generally used for personal conversations. They can also be used with tripcodes—a message is addressed to a public trip and can be picked up by typing in the tripcode.

[edit] Attachment

An attachment can be almost any file. When someone attaches a file to a post they are uploading the file to the forums' server. Forums usually have very strict limit on what can be attached and what cannot (among which the size of the files in question).

[edit] BBCode and HTML
Main article: BBCode

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is sometimes allowed but usually its use is discouraged or when allowed it is extensively filtered. When HTML is disabled Bulletin Board Code (BBCode) is the most common preferred alternative. BBCode usually consists of a tag, similar to HTML only instead of < and > the tagname is enclosed within square brackets (meaning: [ and ]). Commonly is used for italic type, is used for bold, for underline, for color and

• for lists, as well as [img] for images and [url] for links.
  
  The following example BBCode: This is clever text when the post is viewed the code is rendered to HTML and will appear as: This is clever text.
  
  Many Forum hosts offer Custom BBCodes, where the Administrator of the Board can create complex BBCodes to allow the use of javascript or iframe functions in posts, for example embedding a YouTube or Google Video complete with viewer directly into a post.
  
  [edit] Emoticon
  Main article: Emoticon
  
  Emoticon or smiley is a symbol or combination of symbols used to convey emotional content in written or message form. Forums implement a system through which some of the text representations of an emoticons (e.g. XD, ) are rendered as a small image. Depending on part the world the forum's topic originates (since most forums are international) smilies can be replaced by other forms of similar graphics, an example would be kaoani (e.g. *(^O^)*, (^-^)b).
  
  [edit] Poll
  
  Most forums implement an opinion poll system for threads. Most implementations allow for single-choice or multi-choice (sometimes limited to a certain number) when selecting options as well as private or public display of voters. Polls can be set to expire after a certain date or in some cases after a number of days from its creation. Members vote in a poll and a statistic is displayed graphically.
  
  [edit] RSS and ATOM
  Main article: Web feed
  
  RSS and ATOM feeds allow a minimalistic means of subscribing to the forum. Common implementations only allow RSS feeds listing the last few threads updated for the forum index and the last posts in a thread.
  
  [edit] Other forum features
  
  An ignore list allows members to hide posts of other members that they do not want to see or have a problem with. In most implementations they are referred to as foe list or ignore list. Usually the posts are not hidden, but minimized with only a small bar indication a post from the user on the ignore list is there.[11][19] Internet forums include a member list, present in almost all forums it allows display of all forum members, with integrated search feature. Some forums will not list members with 0 posts, even if they have activated their accounts.
  
  Common on forums, a subscription is a form of automated notification integrated into the software of most forums. It usually notifies either by email or on the site when the member returns. The option to subscribe is available for every thread while logged in. Subscriptions works with read marking, namely the property of unread which is given to the content never served to the user by the software.
  
  Recent development in some popular implementations of forum software has brought social network features and functionality. Such features include personal galleries, pages as well as a social network like chat systems.
  
  [edit] Comparison with other Web applications
  
  One significant difference between forums and electronic mailing lists is that mailing lists automatically deliver new messages to the subscriber, while forums require the member to visit the website and check for new posts. Because members may miss replies in threads they are interested in, many modern forums offer an "e-mail notification" feature, whereby members can choose to be notified of new posts in a thread, and web feeds that allow members to see a summary of the new posts using aggregator software. The main difference between newsgroups and forums is that additional software, a newsreader, is required to participate in newsgroups. Visiting and participating in forums normally requires no additional software beyond the web browser.
  
  Wikis, unlike conventional forums, typically allow all users to edit all content, including each other's messages. This level of content manipulation is reserved for moderators or administrators on most forums. Wikis also allow the creation of other content outside of the talk pages. On the other hand, weblogs and generic content management systems tend to be locked down to the point where only a few select users can post blog entries, although many allow other users to comment upon them.
  
  Forums differ from chat rooms and instant messaging in that forum participants do not have to be online simultaneously to receive or send messages. Messages posted to a forum or Usenet are publicly available for some time, which is uncommon in chat rooms that maintain frequent activity.
  
  One rarity among forums is the ability to create your own picture album. Forum participants can upload personal pictures onto the site, add descriptions to the pictures, and choose album covers. Pictures are in the same format as posting threads, and contain the same options such as "Report Post" and "Reply to Post".
  
  [edit] Copyright
  This section has no content. You can help Wikipedia by introducing information to it. (July 2009)
  
  [edit] See also
  Internet portal
  
  * List of internet forums
  
  Technologies:
  
  * Bulletin board system
  * Imageboard
  * Shoutbox
  * Usenet
  
  Concepts:
  
  * Chat room
  * Hit-and-run posting
  * Internet social network
  * Multiforums
  * Online research communities
  * Postcount
  * Social software
  * Social web
  * Virtual community
  
  Implementations:
  
  * Comparison of Internet forum software
  * Comparison of Internet forum software (ASP)
  * Comparison of internet forum software (other)
  * Comparison of Internet forum software (PHP)
  
  
  Culture:
  
  * Internet meme
  * Internet slang
  * List of Internet phenomena
  * List of internet slang
  * Usenet quoting
  
  
  * Warnock's Dilemma
  
  [edit] Notes
  
  1. ^ an account is a space on the site identified by the chosen username through which a member carries out activities and contributes.
  2. ^ read marking is the process through which a thread, post or forum which has been viewed is distinguished from those which have not. The function is usually automatic with the addition of controls, like Mark All etc.
  
  [edit] Examples
  
  1. ^ Presuming someone is sending a private message and has the ability to send carbon copies: If someone fills the recipient field with "John" and "Tom", and the carbon copy field with "Gordon". John will know Tom got the message. Tom knows John got the message. But, both Tom and John have no clue that Gordon got the message as well.
  
  [edit] References
  
  1. ^ "vBulletin Community Forum - FAQ: What is a bulletin board?". vBulletin.com. http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/faq.php? ... eads_posts. Retrieved 2008-09-13. "A bulletin board is an online discussion site. It is sometimes also called a 'board' or 'forums'. It may contain several categories, consisting of forums, threads and individual posts."
  2. ^ a b c "What is an "Internet forum"? (video entry by Ethan Feerst and Dylan Stewart group)". http://www.videojug.com/expertanswer/in ... rnet-forum. Retrieved 2008-11-04.
  3. ^ a b "Glossary Of Technical Terms". Green Web Design. http://www.greenwebdesign.com/Glossary- ... -Terms.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-28.
  4. ^ "Brevard User's Group - Technical Glossary". Brevard User's Group. http://bugclub.org/glossary.html. Retrieved 2008-04-28.
  5. ^ "vBulletin Community forum - FAQ: Registration". vBulletin.com. http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/faq.php? ... 3_register. Retrieved 2008-09-14.
  6. ^ "phpBB FAQ: Why do I need to register at all?". phpBB.com. http://www.phpbb.com/community/faq.php#f01. Retrieved 2008-09-14.
  7. ^ "phpBB FAQ: What is COPPA?". phpBB.com. http://www.phpbb.com/community/faq.php#f07. Retrieved 2008-09-14.
  8. ^ "vBulletin Options - User registration". vBulletin.com. http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/. Retrieved 2008-09-15.
  9. ^ http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/ ... 4/2channel
  10. ^ "phpBB FAQ: How can I report posts to a moderator?". phpBB.com. http://www.phpbb.com/community/faq.php#f29. Retrieved 2008-09-14.
  11. ^ a b "vBulletin FAQ: Dealing with Troublesome Users". vBulletin.com. http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/faq.php? ... some_users. Retrieved 2008-09-14.
  12. ^ "Community Rules 1c". phpBB.com. "Members are asked to not act as 'back seat moderators'. If members note an issue which contravenes something in this policy document they are welcome to bring it to the attention of a member of the Moderator Team. Please use the 'post report' feature to report posts. Do not respond to such topics yourself. Members who constantly 'act' as moderators may be warned."
  13. ^ "Censorship Options". vBulletin.com. http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/vbop ... oup_censor. Retrieved 2008-10-30.
  14. ^ "3.4.5. Word censoring". PhpBB.com. http://www.phpbb.com/support/documentat ... ng_censors. Retrieved 2008-10-30.
  15. ^ "Message Board Features - Website Toolbox". Website Toolbox. http://www.websitetoolbox.com/message_b ... tures.html. Retrieved 2009-07-12.
  16. ^ "vBulletin Manual: User Groups and Permissions". vBulletin. http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/vb2_ ... usergroups. Retrieved 2008-11-04.
  17. ^ "PlayStation.com Forums New User Guide.". playstation.com. http://boardsus.playstation.com/playsta ... 16#modteam. Retrieved 2008-12-22.
  18. ^ a b "vBulletin FAQ: Moderators and Administrators". vBulletin.com. http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/faq.php? ... ods_admins. Retrieved 2008-09-14.
  19. ^ "PhpBB FAQ: How can I add / remove users to my Friends or Foes list?". PhpBB.com. http://www.phpbb.com/community/faq.php?#f61. Retrieved 2008-09-14.
  
  [hide]
  v • d • e
  Computer-mediated communication
  Online chat · Online discussion · Communication software · Collaborative software · Social network service
  Asynchronous conferencing
  Blog • E-mail • Electronic mailing list • Usenet • Internet forum • Shoutbox • Wiki
  Synchronous conferencing
  Data conferencing • Google Wave • Instant messaging • LAN messenger • Talker • Videoconferencing • Voice chat • VoIP • Web chat • Web conferencing
  Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum"
  Categories: Groupware | Internet forums | On-line chat | Social information processing
  Hidden categories: Articles to be merged from September 2009 | All articles to be merged | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from February 2009 | Articles with unsourced statements from June 2009 | Articles needing additional references from June 2009 | Articles to be expanded from July 2009 | All articles to be expanded
  Views
  
  * Article
  * Discussion
  * Edit this page
  * History
  
  Personal tools
  
  * Try Beta
  * Log in / create account
  
  Navigation
  
  * Main page
  * Contents
  * Featured content
  * Current events
  * Random article
  
  Search
  
  Interaction
  
  * About Wikipedia
  * Community portal
  * Recent changes
  * Contact Wikipedia
  * Donate to Wikipedia
  * Help
  
  Toolbox
  
  * What links here
  * Related changes
  * Upload file
  * Special pages
  * Printable version
  * Permanent link
  * Cite this page
  
  Languages
  
  * العربية
  * Català
  * Česky
  * Deutsch
  * Español
  * Esperanto
  * فارسی
  * Français
  * 한국어
  * Հայերեն
  * Hrvatski
  * Bahasa Indonesia
  * Italiano
  * עברית
  * Latina
  * Lëtzebuergesch
  * Lietuvių
  * Magyar
  * Македонски
  * Nederlands
  * 日本語
  * ‪Norsk (bokmål)‬
  * Polski
  * Português
  * Русский
  * Simple English
  * Српски / Srpski
  * Srpskohrvatski / Српскохрватски
  * Suomi
  * Svenska
  * ไทย
  * Türkçe
  * Українська
  * اردو
  * Tiếng Việt
  * Walon
  * ייִדיש
  * 粵語
  * 中文
  
  Powered by MediaWiki
  Wikimedia Foundation
  
  * This page was last modified on 5 September 2009 at 08:13.
  * Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
  Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
  * Privacy policy
  * About Wikipedia
  * Disclaimers

Shit
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about the word "shit". For the waste product, see feces. For the egestion of bodily wastes, see defecation.
This article is semi-protected due to vandalism.
This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2009)

Shit in its literal meaning is usually considered a vulgarity and profanity in Modern English. As a noun it refers to fecal matter (excrement) and as a verb it means to defecate or defecate in; in the plural ("the shits") it means diarrhea. Shite is also a common variant in parts of the British Isles.

As a slang term, it has many meanings, including: nonsense, foolishness, something of little value or quality, trivial and usually boastful or inaccurate talk, or a contemptible person. To shit, in slang, is to talk nonsense, or to attempt to deceive[citation needed].
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Etymology
o 1.1 False etymology
* 2 Usage
o 2.1 Vague noun
o 2.2 Surprise
o 2.3 Trouble
o 2.4 Displeasure
o 2.5 Dominance
o 2.6 Positive attitude
o 2.7 Shortening of bullshit
o 2.8 Emphasis
o 2.9 Drug usage
o 2.10 The verb “to shit”
o 2.11 Backronyms
* 3 Usage in English media
o 3.1 Television
+ 3.1.1 United Kingdom
+ 3.1.2 United States
* 4 See also
* 5 References
* 6 External links

Etymology

The word is likely derived from Old English, having the nouns scite (dung, attested only in place names) and scitte (diarrhoea), and the verb scītan (to defecate, attested only in bescītan, to cover with excrement); eventually it morphed into Middle English schītte (excrement), schyt (diarrhoea) and shiten (to defecate), and it is virtually certain that it was used in some form by preliterate Germanic tribes at the time of the Roman Empire. The word may be further traced to Proto-Germanic *skit-, and ultimately to Proto-Indo-European *skheid-. The word has several cognates in modern Germanic languages, such as German Scheisse, Dutch schijt, Swedish skit, Icelandic skítur, Norwegian skitt etc. Ancient Greek had 'skor' (gen. 'skatos' hence 'scato-'), from Proto-Indo-European *sker-, which is likely unrelated.[1]

False etymology

A popular belief is that the word shit originated as an acronym for "Ship High In Transit", referring to the apparent need to stow manure well above the water line when transporting it by ship. This has been shown to be a myth.[2][3]

Usage

The word shit (or sometimes shite in Scotland, Ireland, Northern England and Wales) is used by English speakers, but it is usually avoided in formal speech. Substitutes for the word shit in English include sugar and shoot.

In the word's literal sense, it has a rather small range of common usages. An unspecified or collective occurrence of feces is generally shit or some shit; a single deposit of feces is sometimes a shit or a piece of shit, and to defecate is to shit, or to take a shit. While it is common to speak of shit as existing in a pile, a load, a hunk and other quantities and configurations, such expressions flourish most strongly in the figurative. For practical purposes, when actual defecation and excreta are spoken of in English, it is either through creative euphemism or with a vague and fairly rigid literalism.

"Shit" can also be combined with other words to denote the type of feces one has. For instance, "Snake shit" describes feces that are long and slender in shape, thus reminiscent of a snake's appearance. "Shapeepee" or "Shit pee pee" is another word for diarrhea, or can be used to describe feces that are almost entirely of liquid composition.

Shit carries an encompassing variety of figurative meanings, explained in the following sections.

Vague noun

Shit can be used as a generic mass noun similar to stuff; for instance, This show is funny shit or This test is hard shit, or That was stupid shit. These three usages (with funny, hard, and stupid or another synonym of stupid) are heard most commonly in the United States. Note that shit is both a positive and negative thing in these examples, shit being apparently very funny (a positive thing) and in the second and third examples very hard (as in, difficult - a negative thing to be) or very stupid. Note also that in a phrase like this, the speaker doesn't include the term as; saying that something is as funny as shit would be taken as a negative statement (shit not being a very funny thing to be). A similar usage is the shit, which indicates great praise or approval; for example, the phrase This show was the shit indicates major approval from the speaker of a show.

In Get your shit together! the word shit may refer to some set of personal belongings or tools, or to one's wits, composure, or attention to the task at hand. He doesn't have his shit together suggests he is failing rather broadly, with the onus laid to multiple personal shortcomings, rather than bad luck or outside forces.

To shoot the shit is to have a friendly but pointless conversation, as in "Come by my place some time and we'll shoot the shit."

Surprise

To shit oneself, or to shit bricks can be used to refer to surprise or fear. The latter form can be commonly seen in a form of internet meme which goes by the phrase when you see it, you will shit bricks, used in connection with an image of a busy scene with an often unnoticed laughing face or disturbing object which is hard to see until you study the picture.[citation needed]

The word can also be used to represent anger, as in Jim is totally going to flip his shit when he sees that we wrecked his marriage.[citation needed]

You could use it in the following way, "i thought someone was following me, i was shitting myself"

Trouble

Shit can be used to denote trouble, by saying one is in a lot of shit or deep shit. It's common for someone to refer to an unpleasant thing as hard shit (You got a speeding ticket? Man, that's some hard shit), but the phrase tough shit is used as an unsympathetic way of saying too bad to whomever is having problems (You got arrested? Tough shit, man!) or as a way of expressing to someone that they need to stop complaining about something and just deal with it (Billy: I got arrested because of you! Tommy: Tough shit, dude, you knew you might get arrested when you chose to come with me.) Note that in this case, as in many cases with the term, tough shit is often said as a way of pointing out someone's fault in his/her own current problem.

When the shit hits the fan is usually used to refer to a specific time of confrontation or trouble, which requires decisive action. This is often used in reference to combat situations and the action scenes in movies, but can also be used for everyday instances that one might be apprehensive about. I don't want to be here when the shit hits the fan! indicates that the speaker is dreading this moment (which can be anything from an enemy attack to confronting an angry parent or friend). He's the one to turn to when the shit hits the fan is an indication that the person being talked about is dependable and will not run from trouble or abandon their allies in tough situations. The concept of this phrase is simple enough, as the actual substance striking the rotating blades of a fan would cause a messy and unpleasant situation (much like being in the presence of a manure spreader). Whether or not this has actually happened, or if the concept is simply feasible enough for most people to imagine the result without needing it to be demonstrated, is unknown. Another example might be the saying shit rolls down hill which is particularly illustrating, the consequences of putting your superiors in a bad position at work. There are a number of anecdotes and jokes about such situations, as the imagery of these situations is considered to be funny. This is generally tied-in with the concept that disgusting and messy substances spilled onto someone else are humorous.

Displeasure

Shit can comfortably stand in for the terms bad and anything in many instances (Dinner was good, but the movie was shit. You're all mad at me, but I didn't do shit!). A comparison can also be used, as in Those pants look like shit, or This stuff tastes like shit. Many usages are idiomatic. The phrase, I don't give a shit denotes indifference. I'm shit out of luck usually refers to someone who is at the end of their wits or who has no remaining viable options. That little shit shot me in the ass, suggests a mischievous or contemptuous person. Euphemisms such as crap are not used in this context.

The term piece of shit is generally used to classify a product or service as being sufficiently below the writer's understanding of generally accepted quality standards to be of negligible and perhaps even negative value.The term piece of shit has greater precision than shit or shitty in that piece of shit identifies the low quality of a specific component or output of a process without applying a derogatory slant to the entire process. For example, if one said "The inner city youth orchestra has been a remarkably successful initiative in that it has kept young people off the streets after school and exposed them to culture and discipline, thereby improving their self esteem and future prospects. The fact that the orchestra's recent rendition of Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony in B minor was pretty much a piece of shit should not in any way detract from this." The substitution of shit or shitty for pretty much a piece of shit would imply irony and would therefore undermine the strength of the statement.

Dominance

Shit can also be used to establish superiority over another being. The most common phrase is eat shit! symbolizing the hatred toward the recipient. Some other personal word may be added such as eat my shit implying truly personal connotations. As an aside, the above is actually a contraction of the phrase eat shit and die!. It is often said without commas as a curse; they with the other party to perform exactly those actions in that order. However, the term was originally Eat, Shit, and Die naming the three most basic things humans have to do, and it is common among soldiers.[citation needed]

Positive attitude

Interestingly, in slang, prefixing the article the to shit gives it a completely opposite definition, meaning the best, as in Altered Beast is the shit, or The Medic Droid is the shit. Again, other slang words of the same meaning, crap for example, are not used in such locutions.

Shortening of bullshit

The expression no shit? (a contraction of no bullshit?) is used in response to a statement that is extraordinary or hard to believe. Alternatively the maker of the hard-to-believe statement may add no shit to reinforce the sincerity or truthfulness of their statement, particularly in response to someone expressing disbelief at their statement. No shit is also used sarcastically in response to a statement of the obvious, as in no shit, Sherlock.

In this form the word can also be used in phrases such as don't give me that shit or you're full of shit. The term full of shit is often used as an exclamation to charge someone who is believed to be prone to dishonesty, exaggeration or is thought to be "phoney" with an accusation. For example:

1. "Oh, I'm sorry I forgot to invite you to the party, it was a complete accident... But you really didn't miss anything anyway.
2. "You're full of shit! You had dozens of opportunities to invite me. If you have a problem with me, why not say it!"

The word bullshit also denotes false or insincere discourse. (Horseshit is roughly equivalent, while chickenshit means cowardly, batshit indicates a person is crazy, and going apeshit indicates a person is entering a state of high excitement or unbridled rage.). Are you shitting me!? is a question sometimes given in response to an incredible assertion. An answer that reasserts the veracity of the claim is, I shit you not.

Emphasis

Perhaps the only constant connotation that shit reliably carries is that its referent holds some degree of emotional intensity for the speaker. Whether offense is taken at hearing the word varies greatly according to listener and situation, and is related to age and social class: elderly speakers and those of (or aspiring to) higher socioeconomic strata tend to use it more privately and selectively than younger and more blue-collar speakers.

Like the word fuck, shit is often used to add emphasis more than to add meaning, for example, shit! I was so shit-scared of that shithead that I shit-talked him into dropping out of the karate match! The term to shit-talk connotes bragging or exaggeration (whereas to talk shit primarily means to gossip [about someone in a damaging way] or to talk in a boastful way about things which are erroneous in nature), but in such constructions as the above, the word shit often functions as an interjection.

Unlike the word fuck, shit is not used emphatically with -ing or as an infix. For example; I lost the shitting karate match would be replaced with ...the fucking karate match. Similarly, while in-fucking-credible is generally acceptable, in-shitting-credible is not.

Drug usage

Shit itself can be a dysphemism or quasi-euphemism, with many intoxicating or narcotic drugs (notably hashish and heroin) being referred to as shit. A particularly excellent drug may be described as This is some good shit. To be shitfaced is to be extremely drunk. A shitshow denotes a party or gathering during which multiple people become intoxicated to the point of incapacitation.

The verb “to shit”

The preterite and past participle of shit are attested as shat, shit, or shitted, depending on dialect and, sometimes, the rhythm of the sentence. In the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, shitten is used as the past participle; however this form is very rare in modern English. In American English shit as a past participle is often correct, while shat is generally acceptable and shitted is uncommon and missing from the Random House and American Heritage dictionaries.[4]

Backronyms

The backronym form "S.H.I.T." often figures into jokes, like Special High Intensity Training (a well-known joke used in job applications), Special Hot Interdiction Team (a mockery on SWAT), Super Hackers Invitational Tournament, and any college name that begins with an S-H (like Sam Houston Institute of Technology or South Harmon Institute of Technology in the 2006 film Accepted or Store High In Transit in the 2006 film Kenny). South Hudson Institute of Technology has sometimes been used to describe the United States Military Academy at West Point.[1] It is an urban myth[citation needed] that Grampian Television was almost called Scottish Highlands and Islands Television until they realised what their acronym would be. The Simpsons' Apu was a graduate student at Springfield Heights Institute of Technology.

In polite company, sometimes the backronym Sugar Honey in Tea or Sugar Honey Iced Tea is used.

Usage in English media

Television

Recently the word has become increasingly acceptable on American cable television and satellite radio, which are not subject to FCC regulation. In other English-speaking countries, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia, the word is allowed to be used in broadcast television by the regulative councils of each area, as long as it is used in late hours when young people are not expected to be watching.

United Kingdom

It is believed that the first person on British TV to say "shit" was John Cleese of the Monty Python comedy troupe in the late 1960s, as he, himself, mentions in a eulogy to Graham Chapman.

United States

"Shit" was one of the original "Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV", a comedy routine by American Comedian George Carlin. In the United States, although the use of the word is censored on broadcast network television (while its synonym crap is not usually subject to censorship), the FCC permitted some exceptions. The October 14, 1999 episode of Chicago Hope is believed to be the first show (excluding documentaries) on U.S. network television to contain the word shit in uncensored form. The word also is used in a later ER episode "On the Beach" by Dr. Mark Greene, experiencing the final stages of a deadly brain tumor. Although the episode was originally aired uncensored, the "shit" utterance has since been edited out in syndicated reruns.

An episode of South Park, "It Hits the Fan," originally aired on June 20, 2001, was a parody of the hype over the Chicago Hope episode. "Shit" is used 162 times, and a counter in the corner of the screen tallies the repetitions. The moral of this episode is that swearing is okay occasionally, but if it is done over and over and over, it takes away from a word's impact and the word gets very, very boring. South Park airs on American cable networks, outside the regulatory jurisdiction of the FCC, where censorship of vulgar dialogue is at the discretion of the cable operators. [5].

American terrestrial radio stations must abide by FCC guidelines on obscenity to avoid punitive fines, unlike satellite radio. These guidelines do not define exactly what constitutes obscenity, but it has been interpreted by some commissioners as including any form of words like shit and fuck, for whatever use.

Despite this, the word has been featured in popular songs that have appeared on broadcast radio in cases where the usage of the word is not audibly clear to the casual listener, or on live television. In the song "Man in the Box" by Alice in Chains, the line "Buried in my shit" was played unedited over most rock radio stations. The 1980 hit album Hi Infidelity by REO Speedwagon contained the song "Tough Guys" which had the line "she thinks they're full of shit," which was played on broadcast radio. On December 3, 1994, Green Day performed "Geek Stink Breath," on Saturday Night Live, shit was not edited from tape delay live broadcast. The band did not appear on the show again until April 9, 2005.

Some notable instances of censorship of the word from broadcast television and radio include Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner." Although radio stations have sometimes played an unedited version containing the line "funky shit going down in the city." The songs was also released with a "radio edit" version, replacing the "funky shit" with "funky kicks". Another version of "Jet Airliner" exists in which the word "shit" is faded out. Likewise, the Bob Dylan song "Hurricane" has a line about having no idea "what kind of shit was about to go down," and has a radio edit version without the word. Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" video had the original album's use of the word censored in its video. The music video title "...On the Radio (Remember the Days)" by Nelly Furtado replaced by the original title "Shit on the Radio (Remember the Days)." This also happened to "That's That Shit" by Snoop Dogg featuring R. Kelly, which became "That's That." In Avril Lavigne's song "My Happy Ending," the Radio Disney edit of the song replaces "all the shit that you do" with "all the stuff that you do." Likewise, in the recent song "London Bridge" by the Black Eyed Peas member Fergie, the phrase "Oh Shit" is repeatedly used as a background line. A radio edit of this song replaced "Oh Shit" with "Oh Snap."

See also

* Bullshit
* Feces
* Profanity
* Seven dirty words
* Shit happens

References

1. ^ Harper, Douglas. "shit". Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=shit. Retrieved 2008-09-06.
2. ^ ""shit" is not an acronym". Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/baloney.php. Retrieved 31 May 2009.
3. ^ Mikkelson, Barbara (8 July 2007). "Etymology of Shit". Snopes. http://www.snopes.com/language/acronyms/shit.asp. Retrieved 31 May 2009.
4. ^ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shit
5. ^ "South Park Libertarians", Reason Magazine

External links
Search Wiktionary Look up shit in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

* Indo-European Roots: skei-

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit"
Categories: Profanity | Feces | Interjections
Hidden categories: Wikipedia pages semi-protected against vandalism | Wikipedia protected pages without expiry | Articles needing additional references from February 2009 | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from May 2009 | Articles with unsourced statements from February 2009 | Articles with unsourced statements from July 2007
Views

* Article
* Discussion
* View source
* History

Personal tools

* Try Beta
* Log in / create account

Navigation

* Main page
* Contents
* Featured content
* Current events
* Random article

Search

Interaction

* About Wikipedia
* Community portal
* Recent changes
* Contact Wikipedia
* Donate to Wikipedia
* Help

Toolbox

* What links here
* Related changes
* Upload file
* Special pages
* Printable version
* Permanent link
* Cite this page

Languages

* العربية
* Deutsch
* Ελληνικά
* Español
* Français
* Italiano
* Lumbaart
* Bahasa Melayu
* Nederlands
* 日本語
* ‪Norsk (nynorsk)‬
* Polski
* Português
* Ripoarisch
* Sicilianu
* Simple English
* 粵語

Powered by MediaWiki
Wikimedia Foundation

* This page was last modified on 26 August 2009 at 20:56.
* Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
* Privacy policy
* About Wikipedia
* Disclaimers


Nonsense
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Nonsense (disambiguation).
For the usage of "nonsense" in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Patent nonsense.

This article or section has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page.

* It needs additional references or sources for verification. Tagged since September 2008.
* It reads like a personal reflection or essay. Tagged since April 2008.
* Its lead section requires expansion. Tagged since November 2007.

Nonsense (pronounced \ˈnän-ˌsen(t)s, ˈnän(t)-sən(t)s\) is a verbal communication or written text which resembles a human language or other symbolic system, but which lacks any coherent meaning.

In philosophy, nonsense refers to a group of statements which cannot carry sense in the context of sense and reference. Logical truths such as "it's either raining or not raining" and mathematical propositions such as "1+1=2" are regarded as "nonsense".
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Technical Meaning in Analytic Philosophy
* 2 Distinguishing sense from nonsense
* 3 Teaching machines to talk nonsense
* 4 Literary nonsense
o 4.1 Nonsense verse
* 5 Examples
* 6 See also
* 7 References

[edit] Technical Meaning in Analytic Philosophy

In analytic philosophy word "Nonsense" carries special technical meaning which differs significantly from the normal use of the word.

In the context analytic philosophy "nonsense" does not refer to meaningless gibberish, "nonsense" simply refers to the lack of sense in the context of sense and reference.

In this context, logical tautologies, and purely mathematical propositions may be regarded as "nonsense". For example, "1+1=2" is a nonsensical proposition. [1]

It is important to note that here "nonsense" does not necessarily carry negative connotations. Indeed, Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus that the propositions contained in his own book should be regarded as nonsense.



Possible copyright infringement
If you have just labeled this page as a possible copyright infringement, please add the following to the bottom of Wikipedia:Copyright_problems/2009_September_8
* {{subst:article-cv|:Nonsense}} from . ~~~~
Place this notice on the talk page of the contributor of the copyrighted material:
{{subst:Nothanks-web|pg=Nonsense|url=}} ~~~~


By default, this template blanks all other content on the page. To limit blanking of the text, as for a copyright violation in a single section, place </div> at the end of the suspected copyvio area.

The previous content of this page appears to infringe on the copyright of the text from the source(s) below and is now listed on Wikipedia:Copyright problems:

Do not edit this page until an administrator has resolved this issue.

* To write a new article without infringing material, follow this link to create a temporary subpage.

State that you have done so on this article's discussion page.
Note that simply modifying copyrighted text is not sufficient to avoid copyright infringement—if the original copyright violation cannot be clearly identified and the article reverted to a prior version, it is best to write the article from scratch. For license compliance, the new article cannot incorporate phrases and sentences that were placed in the original article by other contributors unless credit is given as set out at the copyright policy. You may, however, duplicate non-infringing text that you had contributed yourself. An administrator will move the new article into place once the issue is resolved.

* If you hold the copyright to this text and permit its use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts):

Explain this on this article's discussion page, then either display a notice to this effect at the site of original publication or send an e-mail from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-en at wikimedia dot org or a postal letter to the Wikimedia Foundation. These messages must explicitly permit use under CC-BY-SA and the GFDL.
Note: Articles on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view and must be verifiable in published third-party sources; copyright issues aside, your text may not be appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia.

* If this text is in the public domain, or is already under a license suitable for Wikipedia:

Explain this on this article's discussion page, with reference to evidence.

Unless the copyright status of the text on this page is clarified, it may be deleted one week after the time of its listing.

* Posting copyrighted material without the express permission of the copyright holder is a violation of applicable law and of Wikipedia policy.
* If you have questions about copyright, see Copyright FAQ.
* Those who repeatedly post copyrighted material will be blocked from further editing.
* Temporarily, the original posting is still accessible for viewing in the page history.
* You are welcome to submit original contributions.



"Nonsense, as opposed to senselessness, is encountered when a proposition is even more radically devoid of meaning, when it transcends the bounds of sense. Under the label of unsinnig can be found various propositions: "Socrates is identical", but also "1 is a number". While some nonsensical propositions are blatantly so, others seem to be meaningful — and only analysis carried out in accordance with the picture theory can expose their nonsensicality. Since only what is "in" the world can be described, anything that is "higher" is excluded, including the notion of limit and the limit points themselves. Traditional metaphysics, and the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, which try to capture the world as a whole, are also excluded, as is the truth in solipsism, the very notion of a subject, for it is also not "in" the world but at its limit."[2]

[edit] Distinguishing sense from nonsense

While Emily Dickinson wrote that:

Much madness is divinest Sense

To the discerning Eye…

...the problem lies in the discernment. Distinguishing meaningful utterances from nonsense is not a trivial task. Confronted with a lengthy text in an unknown script, how does one determine whether those characters in fact contained a meaningful text, or were simply set using the equivalent of printer's pi or a lorem ipsum-style text?

The problem is important in cryptography and other intelligence fields, where it is important to distinguish signal from noise. Cryptanalysts have devised algorithms for this purpose, to determine whether a given text is in fact nonsense or not. These algorithms typically analyze the presence of repetitions and redundancy in a text; in meaningful texts, certain frequently used words — for example, the, is and and in a text in the English language — will frequently recur. A random scattering of letters, punctuation marks and spaces will not exhibit these regularities. Zipf's law attempts to state this analysis in the language of mathematics. By contrast, cryptographers typically seek to make their cipher texts resemble random distributions, to avoid telltale repetitions and patterns which may give an opening for cryptanalysis.

[edit] Teaching machines to talk nonsense

It is harder for cryptographers to deal with the presence or absence of meaning in a text in which the level of redundancy and repetition is higher than found in natural languages (for example, in the mysterious text of the Voynich manuscript). Some have attempted to create text which carries no meaning, but still complies with the regularities predicted by Zipf's law[citation needed]. The Markov chain technique is one such method, and it has occasionally been used in surrealistic jokes[citation needed].

The Markov chain technique is one method which has been used to generate texts by algorithm and randomizing techniques that seem meaningful. Another could be called the Mad Libs method: it involves the creation of templates for various sentence structures, and filling in the blanks with noun phrases or verb phrases; these phrase-generation procedures can be looped to add recursion, giving the output the appearance of greater complexity and sophistication. Racter was a computer program which generated nonsense texts by this method; however, Racter’s book, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed, proved to have been the product of heavy human editing of the program's output.

[edit] Literary nonsense
Main article: Literary nonsense

The phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was coined by Noam Chomsky as an example of nonsense. The individual words make sense and are arranged according to proper grammatical rules, yet the result is nonsense. The inspiration for this attempt at creating verbal nonsense came from the idea of contradiction (for a start, how can a green idea be colorless?) and seemingly irrelevant and/or incompatible characteristics, which conspire to make the phrase meaningless. The phrase "the square root of Tuesday" operates on the latter principle. This principle is behind the inscrutability of the kōan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?", where one hand would presumably be insufficient for clapping without the intervention of another.

Still, the human will to find meaning is strong; green ideas might be ideas associated with a green political party, and colorless green ideas could describe them as lacking in color, or defeated and uninspiring. For some, the human impulse to find meaning in what is actually random or nonsensical is what makes people find luck in coincidence, believe in omens and divination or engage in conversation with a computer (see ELIZA effect).

The dreamlike language of James Joyce’s final novel Finnegans Wake sheds light on nonsense in a similar way: full of portmanteau words, it appears to be pregnant with multiple layers of meaning, but in many passages it is difficult to say whether any one person’s interpretation of a text could be the intended or correct one.

Jabberwocky, a poem (of nonsense verse) found in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (1871), is generally considered to be one of the greatest nonsense poems written in the English language. The word jabberwocky is also occasionally used as a synonym of nonsense.

[edit] Nonsense verse

Nonsense verse is the verse form of literary nonsense, a genre that can manifest in many other ways. Nonsense verse represents a long tradition; its best-known exponent is Edward Lear, author of The Owl and the Pussycat and hundreds of limericks.

Nonsense verse comes from a tradition older than Lear: the nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle is also a sort of nonsense verse. There are also some things which appear to be nonsense verse, but actually are not, such as the popular 1940s song Mairzy Doats.

Lines of nonsense frequently figure in the refrains of folksongs, where nonsense riddles and knock-knock jokes are often encountered. Lewis Carroll, seeking a nonsense riddle, once posed the question How is a raven like a writing desk?. Someone answered him, Because Poe wrote on both. However, there are other possible answers (e.g. both have inky quills).

[edit] Examples

The first verse of Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll;

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

The first four lines of On the Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milligan;[3]

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There's a Nong Nang Ning

The first verse of Spirk Troll-Derisive by James Whitcomb Riley;[4]

The Crankadox leaned o'er the edge of the moon,
And wistfully gazed on the sea
Where the Gryxabodill madly whistled a tune
To the air of "Ti-fol-de-ding-dee."

The first four lines of The Mayor of Scuttleton by Mary Mapes Dodge;[4]

The Mayor of Scuttleton burned his nose
Trying to warm his copper toes;
He lost his money and spoiled his will
By signing his name with an icicle quill;

[edit] See also

* Asemic writing
* Bollocks
* Bullshit
* Dada, nonsense as art
* Discordianism
* Fiction
* Gibberish
* Gobbledygook
* Humor



* Language game
* Logorrhoea, an excessively wordy style of abstract prose lacking concrete meaning, i.e. nonsense
* Mojibake, random nonsense characters generated by foreign text
* Nonce word
* Schizophasia
* Sokal affair
* Tall tale
* Vacuous truth
* Wit

[edit] References

* Kahn, David, The Codebreakers (Scribner, 1996) ISBN 0-684-83130-9

1. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=md-KV6 ... t&resnum=3
2. ^ Biletzki, Anat and Anat Matar, "Ludwig Wittgenstein", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition) "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"
3. ^ Top poetry is complete nonsense
4. ^ a b A Nonsense Anthology collected by Carolyn Wells from Project Gutenberg

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonsense"
Categories: Riddles | Gibberish language | Word play | Philosophy of language
Hidden categories: Articles lacking reliable references from September 2008 | Wikipedia articles needing style editing from April 2008 | All articles needing style editing | Cleanup from November 2007 | Wikipedia introduction cleanup | Articles tagged for copyright problems | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from June 2008
Views

* Article
* Discussion
* Edit this page
* History

Personal tools

* Try Beta
* Log in / create account

Navigation

* Main page
* Contents
* Featured content
* Current events
* Random article

Search

Interaction

* About Wikipedia
* Community portal
* Recent changes
* Contact Wikipedia
* Donate to Wikipedia
* Help

Toolbox

* What links here
* Related changes
* Upload file
* Special pages
* Printable version
* Permanent link
* Cite this page

Languages

* Беларуская (тарашкевіца)
* Български
* Dansk
* Deutsch
* Français
* Italiano
* עברית
* Nederlands
* ‪Norsk (bokmål)‬
* Polski
* Português
* Русский
* Slovenčina
* Türkçe
* 中文

Powered by MediaWiki
Wikimedia Foundation

* This page was last modified on 5 September 2009 at 19:59.
* Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
* Privacy policy
* About Wikipedia
* Disclaimers

da
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Dada (disambiguation).
Cover of the first edition of the publication Dada by Tristan Tzara; Zürich, 1917.

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.[1] The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.

Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau réalisme, pop art, Fluxus and punk rock.

Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.
—Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation

Contents
[hide]

* 1 Overview
* 2 History
o 2.1 Origin of the word Dada
o 2.2 Zürich
o 2.3 Berlin
o 2.4 Cologne
o 2.5 New York
o 2.6 Paris
o 2.7 Netherlands
o 2.8 Georgia
o 2.9 Tokyo
o 2.10 Yugoslavia
* 3 Poetry; music and sound
* 4 Legacy
* 5 Art techniques developed
o 5.1 Collage
o 5.2 Photomontage
o 5.3 Assemblage
o 5.4 Readymades
* 6 Early practitioners
* 7 See also
* 8 References
* 9 External links
* 10 Footnotes

[edit] Overview
It's too idiotic to be schizophrenic.
— Carl Jung on the Dada productions.[2]

Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity — in art and more broadly in society — that corresponded to the war. [3]
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90x144 cm, Staatliche Museum, Berlin.

Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction".[4]

According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art." For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics the Dadaists hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.

As dadaist Hugo Ball expressed it, "For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in."[5]

A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, "in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."[6]

Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."[6]

[edit] History

[edit] Origin of the word Dada

One explanation maintains that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara [7] and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words da, da, which, translated into English is equivalent to yeah, yeah, as in a sarcastic or facetious yeah, right. (Da in Romanian strictly translates as yes.)

Some believe that it is simply a nonsensical word.

Another theory is a group of artists assembled in Zürich in 1916, wanting a name for their new movement, chose it at random by stabbing a French-German dictionary with a paper knife, and picking the name that the point landed upon. Dada in French is a child's word for hobby-horse. In French the colloquialism, c'est mon dada, means it's my hobby.[8]

According to the Dada ideal, the movement would not be called "Dadaism", much less designated an art-movement.[9]

[edit] Zürich

In 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Täuber, along with others, discussed art and put on performances in the Cabaret Voltaire expressing their disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it. By some accounts Dada coalesced on October 6 at the cabaret. By other accounts Dada did not spring full-grown from a Zürich literary salon but grew out of an already vibrant artistic tradition in Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, that transposed to Switzerland when a group of Romanian modernist artists Tzara, Marcel & Iuliu Iancu, Arthur Segal, and others, settled in Zürich. Because Bucharest and other cities had already been the scene of Dada-like poetry, prose and spectacle in the years before WW1., this suggests Dada came from the East. [10]

The artists were in "neutral" Zürich, Switzerland, having left Germany and Romania during the happenings of WWI. It was here that they decided to use abstraction to fight against the social, political, and cultural ideas of that time that they believed had caused the war. Abstraction was viewed as the result of a lack of planning and logical thought processes. [11]

"[A]bstract art signified absolute honesty for us." - Richard Huelsenbeck

At the first public soiree at the cabaret on July 14, 1916, Ball recited the first manifesto (see text). Tzara, in 1918, wrote a Dada manifesto considered one of the most important of the Dada writings. Other manifestos followed.

Marcel Janco recalled,

We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the "tabula rasa". At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.

A single issue of Cabaret Voltaire was the first publication to come out of the movement.

After the cabaret closed down, activities moved to a new gallery, and Ball left Europe. Tzara began a relentless campaign to spread Dada ideas. He bombarded French and Italian artists and writers with letters, and soon emerged as the Dada leader and master strategist. The Cabaret Voltaire has by now re-opened, and is still in the same place at the Spiegelgasse 1 in the Niederdorf.

Zürich Dada, with Tzara at the helm, published the art and literature review Dada beginning in July 1917, with five editions from Zürich and the final two from Paris.

When World War I ended in 1918, most of the Zürich Dadaists returned to their home countries, and some began Dada activities in other cities.

[edit] Berlin
Cover of Anna Blume, Dichtungen, 1919

The groups in Germany were not as strongly anti-art as other groups. Their activity and art was more political and social, with corrosive manifestos and propaganda, satire, public demonstrations and overt political activities. It has been suggested that this is at least partially due to Berlin's proximity to the front, and that for an opposite effect, New York's geographic distance from the war spawned its more theoretically-driven, less political nature.

In February 1918, Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin, and produced a Dada manifesto later in the year. Hannah Höch and George Grosz used Dada to express post-World War I communist sympathies. Grosz, together with John Heartfield, developed the technique of photomontage during this period. The artists published a series of short-lived political journals, and held the First International Dada Fair, 'the greatest project yet conceived by the Berlin Dadaists', in the summer of 1920.[12] As well as the main members of Berlin Dada, Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Höch, Johannes Baader, Huelsenbeck and Heartfield, the exhibition also included work by Otto Dix, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Rudolf Schlichter, Johannes Baargeld and others.[12] In all, over 200 works were exhibited, surrounded by incendiary slogans, some of which also ended up written on the walls of the Nazi's Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937. Despite high ticket prices, the exhibition made a loss, with only one recorded sale.[13]

The Berlin group published periodicals such as Club Dada, Der Dada, Everyman His Own Football , and Dada Almanach.

[edit] Cologne

In Cologne, Ernst, Baargeld, and Arp launched a controversial Dada exhibition in 1920 which focused on nonsense and anti-bourgeois sentiments. Cologne's Early Spring Exhibition was set up in a pub, and required that participants walk past urinals while being read lewd poetry by a woman in a communion dress. The police closed the exhibition on grounds of obscenity, but it was re-opened when the charges were dropped.[14]

[edit] New York
Rrose Sélavy, the alter ego of famed Dadaist Marcel Duchamp.
Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp; photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.

Like Zürich, New York City was a refuge for writers and artists from World War I. Soon after arriving from France in 1915, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia met American artist Man Ray. By 1916 the three of them became the center of radical anti-art activities in the United States. American Beatrice Wood, who had been studying in France, soon joined them. Much of their activity centered in Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, 291, and the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg.

The New Yorkers, though not particularly organized, called their activities Dada, but they did not issue manifestos. They issued challenges to art and culture through publications such as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada in which they criticized the traditionalist basis for museum art. New York Dada lacked the disillusionment of European Dada and was instead driven by a sense of irony and humor. In his book Adventures in the arts: informal chapters on painters, vaudeville and poets Marsden Hartley included an essay on "The Importance of Being 'Dada'".

During this time Duchamp began exhibiting "readymades" (found objects) such as a bottle rack, and got involved with the Society of Independent Artists. In 1917 he submitted the now famous Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt, to the Society of Independent Artists show only to have the piece rejected. First an object of scorn within the arts community, the Fountain has since become almost canonized by some. The committee presiding over Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, for example, called it "the most influential work of modern art."[15] In an attempt to "pay homage to the spirit of Dada" a performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli made a crack in The Fountain with a hammer in January 2006; he also urinated on it in 1993.

Picabia's travels tied New York, Zürich and Paris groups together during the Dadaist period. For seven years he also published the Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona, New York City, Zürich, and Paris from 1917 through 1924.

By 1921, most of the original players moved to Paris where Dada experienced its last major incarnation (see Neo-Dada for later activity).

[edit] Paris

The French avant-garde kept abreast of Dada activities in Zürich with regular communications from Tristan Tzara (whose pseudonym means "sad in country," a name chosen to protest the treatment of Jews in his native Romania), who exchanged letters, poems, and magazines with Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Max Jacob, and other French writers, critics and artists.

Paris had arguably been the classical music capital of the world since the advent of musical Impressionism in the late 19th century. One of its practitioners, Erik Satie, collaborated with Picasso and Cocteau in a mad, scandalous ballet called Parade. First performed by the Ballet Russes in 1917, it succeeded in creating a scandal but in a different way than Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps had done almost 5 years earlier. This was a ballet that was clearly parodying itself, something traditional ballet patrons would obviously have serious issues with.

Dada in Paris surged in 1920 when many of the originators converged there. Inspired by Tzara, Paris Dada soon issued manifestos, organized demonstrations, staged performances and produced a number of journals (the final two editions of Dada, Le Cannibale, and Littérature featured Dada in several editions.)[16]

The first introduction of Dada artwork to the Parisian public was at the Salon des Indépendants in 1921. Jean Crotti exhibited works associated with Dada including a work entitled, Explicatif bearing the word Tabu. In the same year Tzara staged his Dadaist play The Gas Heart to howls of derision from the audience. When it was re-staged in 1923 in a more professional production, the play provoked a theatre riot (initiated by André Breton) that heralded the split within the movement that was to produce Surrealism. Tzara's last attempt at a Dadaist drama was his "ironic tragedy" Handkerchief of Clouds in 1924.

[edit] Netherlands

In the Netherlands the Dada movement centered mainly around Theo van Doesburg, most well known for establishing the De Stijl movement and magazine of the same name. Van Doesburg mainly focused on poetry, and included poems from many well-known Dada writers in De Stijl such as Hugo Ball, Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters. Van Doesburg became a friend of Schwitters, and together they organized the so-called Dutch Dada campaign in 1923, where Van Doesburg promoted a leaflet about Dada (entitled What is Dada?), Schwitters read his poems, Vilmos Huszàr demonstrated a mechanical dancing doll and Nelly Van Doesburg (Theo's wife), played avant-garde compositions on piano.

Van Doesburg wrote Dada poetry himself in De Stijl, although under a pseudonym, I.K. Bonset, which was only revealed after his death in 1931. 'Together' with I.K. Bonset, he also published a short-lived Dutch Dada magazine called Mécano.

[edit] Georgia

Although Dada itself was unknown in Georgia until at least 1920, from 1917-1921 a group of poets called themselves "41st Degree" (referring both to the latitude of Tbilisi, Georgia and to the temperature of a high fever) organized along Dadaist lines. The most important figure in this group was Iliazd, whose radical typographical designs visually echo the publications of the Dadaists. After his flight to Paris in 1921, he collaborated with Dadaists on publications and events.

[edit] Tokyo

In Japan there were some Dada movement. One group is MAVO, founded by Tomoyoshi Murayama and Yanase Masamu. Others are Jun Tsuji, Eisuke Yoshiyuki, Shinkichi Takahashi and Katsue Kitasono.

[edit] Yugoslavia

In Yugoslavia there was heavy Dada activity between 1920 and 1922 run mainly by Dragan Aleksic and including Mihailo S. Petrov, Zenitists & brothers Ljubomir Micic and Branko Ve Poljanski. Aleksic used the term "Yugo-Dada" and is known to have been in contact with Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara.[17]

[edit] Poetry; music and sound

Dada was not confined to the visual and literary arts; its influence reached into sound and music. Kurt Schwitters developed what he called sound poems and composers such as Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Heusser and Albert Savinio wrote Dada music, while members of Les Six collaborated with members of the Dada movement and had their works performed at Dada gatherings. The above mentioned Erik Satie dabbled with Dadaist ideas throughout his career although he is primarily associated with musical Impressionism.

In the very first Dada publication, Hugo Ball describes a "balalaika orchestra playing delightful folk-songs." African music and jazz was common at Dada gatherings, signaling a return to nature and naive primitivism.

[edit] Legacy
See also: Postmodernism#Notable philosophical and literary contributors
The Janco Dada Museum, named after Marcel Janco, in Ein Hod, Israel

While broad, the movement was unstable. By 1924 in Paris, Dada was melding into surrealism, and artists had gone on to other ideas and movements, including surrealism, social realism and other forms of modernism. Some theorists argue that Dada was actually the beginning of postmodern art.[18]

By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists had fled or emigrated to the United States. Some died in death camps under Hitler, who persecuted the kind of "Degenerate art" that Dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new movements in art and literature.

Dada is a named influence and reference of various anti-art and political and cultural movements including the Situationists and culture jamming groups like the Cacophony Society.

At the same time that the Zürich Dadaists made noise and spectacle at the Cabaret Voltaire, Vladimir Lenin wrote his revolutionary plans for Russia in a nearby apartment. Tom Stoppard used this coincidence as a premise for his play Travesties (1974), which includes Tzara, Lenin, and James Joyce as characters. French writer Dominique Noguez imagined Lenin as a member of the Dada group in his tongue-in-cheek Lénine Dada (1989).

The Cabaret Voltaire fell into disrepair until it was occupied from January to March, 2002, by a group proclaiming themselves neo-Dadaists, led by Mark Divo.[19] The group included Jan Thieler, Ingo Giezendanner, Aiana Calugar, Lennie Lee and Dan Jones. After their eviction the space became a museum dedicated to the history of Dada. The work of Lennie Lee and Dan Jones remained on the walls of the museum.

Several notable retrospectives have examined the influence of Dada upon art and society. In 1967, a large Dada retrospective was held in Paris, France. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a Dada exhibition in conjunction with the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

[edit] Art techniques developed

[edit] Collage

The dadaists imitated the techniques developed during the cubist movement through the pasting of cut pieces of paper items, but extended their art to encompass items such as transportation tickets, maps, plastic wrappers, etc. to portray aspects of life, rather than representing objects viewed as still life.

[edit] Photomontage

The Berlin Dadaists - the "monteurs" (mechanics) - would use scissors and glue rather than paintbrushes and paints to express their views of modern life through images presented by the media. A variation on the collage technique, photomontage utilized actual or reproductions of real photographs printed in the press.

[edit] Assemblage

The assemblages were three-dimensional variations of the collage - the assembly of everyday objects to produce meaningful or meaningless (relative to the war) pieces of work.

[edit] Readymades

Marcel Duchamp began to view the manufactured objects of his collection as objects of art, which he called "readymades". He would add signatures and titles to some, converting them into artwork that he called "readymade aided" or "rectified readymades". One such example of Duchamp's readymade works is the urinal that was turned onto its back, signed "R. Mutt", titled "Fountain", and submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition that year.[11]

[edit] Early practitioners

For a more complete list of Dadaists, see List of Dadaists.

* Guillaume Apollinaire — France
* Hans Arp — Switzerland, France and Germany
* Hugo Ball — Switzerland
* Johannes Baader — Germany
* John Heartfield — Germany
* Arthur Cravan — United States
* Jean Crotti — France
* Theo van Doesburg — The Netherlands
* Marcel Duchamp — France and United States
* Max Ernst — Germany
* Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — United States, Germany
* George Grosz — Germany
* Marsden Hartley — United States
* Raoul Hausmann — Germany



* Emmy Hennings — Switzerland
* Hannah Höch — Germany
* Richard Huelsenbeck — Switzerland and Germany
* Marcel Janco — Switzerland (born in Romania)
* Clément Pansaers — Belgium
* Francis Picabia — Switzerland, United States and France
* Man Ray — United States and France
* Meg Gröss — United States and Germany
* Hans Richter — Germany, Switzerland and United States
* Kurt Schwitters — Germany
* Sophie Taeuber-Arp — Switzerland
* Tristan Tzara — Switzerland and France (born in Romania)
* Beatrice Wood — United States and France
* Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd) — Georgia and France

[edit] See also

* Anti-art and Anti-anti-art
* Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
* The Central Council of Dada for the World Revolution
* Épater la bourgeoisie
* Expressionism in film
* Futurism
* Modernism
* Surrealism
* Sudac Collection

[edit] References

* The Dada Almanac, ed Richard Huelsenbeck [1920], re-edited and translated by Malcolm Green et al., Atlas Press, with texts by Hans Arp, Johannes Baader, Hugo Ball, Paul Citröen, Paul Dermée, Daimonides, Max Goth, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Vincente Huidobro, Mario D’Arezzo, Adon Lacroix, Walter Mehring, Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Alexander Sesqui, Philippe Soupault, Tristan Tzara. ISBN 0 947757 62 7
* Blago Bung, Blago Bung, Hugo Ball's Tenderenda, Richard Huelsenbeck's Fantastic Prayers, & Walter Serner's Last Loosening - three key texts of Zurich ur-Dada. Translated and introduced by Malcolm Green. Atlas Press, ISBN 0 947757 86 4
* National Gallery of Art, Dada
* Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris, Paris, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965 /Flammarion, 1993 / CNRS, 2005
* Marc Dachy, Journal du mouvement Dada 1915-1923, Genève, Albert Skira, 1989 (Grand Prix du Livre d'Art, 1990)
* Marc Dachy, Dada & les dadaïsmes, Paris, Gallimard, "Folio Essais", n° 257, 1994.
* Marc Dachy, Dada, la révolte de l'art, Paris, Gallimard / Centre Pompidou, "Découvertes" n° 476 , 2005.
* Marc Dachy, Archives Dada / Chronique, Paris, Hazan, 2005.
* Gérard Durozoi, Dada et les arts rebelles, Paris, Hazan, "Guide des Arts", 2005
* Dada, catalogue d'exposition, Centre Pompidou, 2005.
* Serge Lemoine, Dada, Paris, Hazan, coll. L'Essentiel.
* Aurélie Verdier, L'ABCdaire de Dada, Paris, Flammarion, 2005.
* Giovanni Lista, Dada libertin & libertaire, Paris, L'insolite, 2005.
* Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991) (paperback)
* Irene Hoffman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago.
* Richard Ball, Flight Out Of Time (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996)
* Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965)
* Uwe M. Schneede, George Grosz, His life and work (New York: Universe Books, 1979)
* Melzer, Annabelle. 1976. Dada and Surrealist Performance. PAJ Books ser. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. ISBN 0801848458.

[edit] External links

* Dada at the Open Directory Project
* Dada art (Dada Online) includes images showing the characteristics of Dada.
* The International Dada Archive includes scans of many Dada publications.
* The Essential DADA

Manifestos

* Over 30 Dada and Futurist manifestos from 1912 to present day
* Text of Hugo Ball's 1916 Dada Manifesto
* Text of Tristan Tzara's 1918 Dada Manifesto
* Excerpts of Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto (1918) and Lecture on Dada (1922)
* Dada Manifesto (1921)

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ de Micheli, Mario(2006). Las vanguardias artísticas del siglo XX. Alianza Forma. p.135-137
2. ^ Melzer (1976, 55).
3. ^ Richter, Hans (1965), Dada: Art and Anti-art, Oxford Univ Press
4. ^ Schneede, Uwe M. (1979), George Grosz, His life and work, Universe Books
5. ^ "DADA: Cities". National Gallery of Art. http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/dad ... index.shtm. Retrieved 2008-10-19.
6. ^ a b Fred S. Kleiner; Christin J. Mamiya (2006). Gardner's Art Through the Ages (12th ed.). Wadsworth Publishing. pp. 754.
7. ^ [1] Dada biographies NGA, Washington DC. Retrieved July 15, 2009
8. ^ Marc Dachy, Dada & les dadaïsmes, Paris, Gallimard, "Folio Essais", n° 257, 1994.
9. ^ Aurélie Verdier, L'ABCdaire de Dada, Paris, Flammarion, 2005.
10. ^ Tom Sandqvist, DADA EAST: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire, London MIT Press, 2006.
11. ^ a b , http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/dad ... index.shtm
12. ^ a b Dada, Dickermann, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2006 p443
13. ^ Dada, Dickermann, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2006 p99
14. ^ Schaefer, Robert A. (September 7, 2006), "Das Ist Dada–An Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC", Double Exposure, http://www.doubleexposure.com/DadaExhibit.shtml
15. ^ "Duchamp's urinal tops art survey", BBC News December 1