New Rule: When Role-Playing Gamers finally take our advice and get out more, they have to leave their fantasy world at home. We’re all very glad for you that you have at last found your place as otherkin in the land of hobbits, but when you’ve played Dungeons and Dragons so much that it starts to change your religion, that’s about as far as you need to share it with the rest of us. You may think you’re wearing a +6 Wardrobe of Coolness, but the rest of us are reaching for our -2 Barfbag of Nausea.

New Rule: John C. Dvorak could use a testosterone injection and a Viagra cocktail, pronto. I can remember when Dvorak was the rottenest, meanest technology scrooge around. Dvorak alone could get so many people hating him at once, he could start a riot at Comdex just by walking in the door.

But after 25 years of being the loudest troll to thunder across Silicon Valley, he has now decided that he’s a 14-year old girl on MySpace. His blog - did you click that link? - is just a series of old pictures he posts while tittering “OMG! WTF? LOL!” comments. We changed our mind, Dvorak! Please come back and be your old FOSS-trashing, Apple-bashing, stock-market-doom-forecasting badass self. Seeing you go to mushy pot like this is like seeing a Hells Angel retire to start his second life as… somebody’s mom. The only thing worse than reading 1990s Dvorak before is reading 2000s Dvorak after.

New Rule: Spam is no longer news. Thanks for the little heads-up alerts and all, but really, after reading about how nine million spams were sent in the last 48 hours (gee, you sat there and counted them instead of stopping them? thanks, hero!), I wondered: “What good could this information possibly do?” If my spam filter stops it, I didn’t need to know. If my spam filter doesn’t stop it, it’s too late to know because I already got the damned thing. It’s the 21st century, and spam, like head lice and smog in big cities and wars between 2nd-world countries, is just an ugly, inevitable fact of life. You might as well publish a headline telling everybody the tide went in and out again today.

New Rule: Blocking Firefox from your site automatically qualifies you as a retard. All raving lunacy aside, the whole reason that the Internet works is because the browser has control. The only way you can tell if I have Firefox is by checking the user-agent string. So, there’s this Top Secret magic spell I can cast to fool your website. It goes like this:

• Type “about:config” into the address bar.
• Type “useragent” into the filter bar.
• Double-click on “general.useragent” - dot anything.
• Enter a new string in there. I can say I’m any browser on this list. In fact, I can make up any dumb imaginary browser I want. In fact, if you get too aggressive about it, I can change the useragent string to a Javascript/PHP buffer-overflow attack that would throw your bot and get it to tell me the password to your site. Theoretically.

Join me now in applause as we see whose name is in the envelope in the category of Most Outstanding Performance By a Retard: people who try to block Firefox! Duh! D-oh! Dumb! And I might add: P0WN3D!

Related Posts:

• Dirty Spam Tricks - What to Look For
• What Your Web-Browser Says About You - part 1
• New Rules Just For Programmers
• New Rules for the Internet: August 2007
• What Your Web-Browser Says About You - part 2