If anyone is still interested by the end, I'll post the rest.

In August of 2012 my girlfriend brought home a six-pack of Cherry and Mango Nature-Jooce, and started a fight. The state legislation on fruit juice importers stated that a product could not be labeled "Juice" unless thirty percent of its ingredients by weight was unmodified liquid juice from fruit. Most people thought that it was called Jooce just because it was quirky and cute, but the real reason is that it's forbidden by law for them to call their product "Juice" . It was their way of saying 'No fruit was harmed in the making of this colored sugar-water!' while still getting people to buy it.

I know these things, and so I don't buy Jooce. I buy the real juice, that was made from fruit grown locally, without added sugar or color, that hasn't been watered down or modified in any way, even though it costs three times as much. I would never ask my girlfriend to buy me Jooce. However, she says I did. While she was in class, I sent her a voice message, asking her to buy me some real juice on her way home. She knows what I mean when I say real juice, she always bought me the right brand before. That day, she claims I specifically asked for Cherry Mango Nature-Jooce. We bickered back and forth for a few minutes, and then she said to me "I thought it was really strange, I know you hate that stuff. But you asked for it so specifically."

"You knew I hated the stuff?" I asked.

"Yes. I almost didn't buy it, but I thought you might want it for guests." She explained.

She was certain of it. However, since her voice messages are downloaded, then deleted once they have been listened to, she had no proof.

It bothered me more than it should have. How could she have heard me say something, in my voice, that I would never say?

In October of that year, I found a book about search-engine construction, and read into it a little. What interested me the most was something called a spider trap. Search engines use machines called Spiders, which autonomously crawl the web, looking for new content. Basically, they are powerful computers with a high speed internet connection that navigate across webpages, using hyperlinks and text URLs to jump to other pages to index their content and provide accurate search results. However, not everybody wants to have their websites thoroughly indexed, and so they build spider traps. The most basic of spider traps is a set of web pages with millions of hyperlinks on them, each pointing to a page that is only created when it is requested. Each page is generated to contain another million links, and so on, infinitely deep. The spider will get to the master page, and attempt to access each one. Although these spiders are very powerful and can run thousands of copies of themselves at a time, it would take one years to get even a dozen pages deep, and so the spiders get stuck. Spider trap.

I also learned the meaning of the Dark Web. As ominous as it sounds, it is simply that part of the internet which has not yet been indexed by search engines. The only way to find a website that's "In The Dark" is to already know it exists, and how to get there. The best analogy is that the dark web is like a new housing development, with all new roads built where before there was just dirt, and none of those roads are listed in your street directory or GPS. You wouldn't even know it was there, unless somebody told you about it. Even if they did, "Nick, come over for our housewarming, we're number 7 Chester street!" and you went to the start of this new development, you wouldn't know which one was Chester street. Worse yet, they haven't even put up the street signs yet. So you drive around slowly in the dark in big hopeless circles, until you phone your friend and he comes out in front of the house waving his arms at you. You have to know where you're going. Dark Web.


I started doing a little research about these things, and I came across a website with an article about a spider supertrap built by a hacker group known as the Cult of the Dead Cow, or, CDC. They called the spider trap "4rachnix", which is a blend of the french word for a spider "Arachnide", and the corruption "Nix", from the German "Nichts".

Nix - Verb
1 - To make something become nothing; to reject or cancel.
2 - To destroy or eradicate.

The 4 replaces the similar in appearance capital letter A, a practice stemming from an informal code language used on the internet for decades to obfuscate text, making it hard, but not impossible, to read, while retaining basic pronunciation. The 4 in 4rachnix is still pronounced as an A. It lived up to its name.

4rachnix was also known as "4rak", or "4x", or just plain "4". This was in following with, among other principles, a rule among CDC members that stated "Be as vague as you cow." which I didn't immediately understand. 4 was a supertrap because it was an offensive weapon, instead of a defensive shield like all other spider traps. Instead of a dumb html webpage sitting idle at the front page of a website that wished to remain off the digital grid, and hopefully trapping any passing spiders, 4 was an intelligent, self preserving virus that actively hunted spiders and took them down, long before they got to the place they were defending. 4 worked like an antispider, and at the same time, used the search engines own data against it.

For example, lets say you had the domain name http://www.nickisgreat.com, and you wanted to defend it from search engine spiders. You could put a robots.txt file on your site, which is, under a gentlemans agreement by the big search companies, a notice to their spiders to leave that site alone, which they almost definitely ignore and secretly index anyway, just in case it contains something good. You could also put up a spider trap at the front of your site, which will catch most of the spiders that try to come in through the front door. But what if you have a subpage, like http://www.nickisgreat.com/andsexytoo, and somebody put that link on their social media page, and a spider finds it? The spider will be able to easily circumvent the front page, and index your site from within. It would take a lot of work to put spider traps on every page and subpage, and there's no guarantee they would catch all the spiders.

4 works differently. 4 goes out and searches for the site it is supposed to protect on all the earch engines it can find. Lets say that on some forum somewhere, some people have been talking about nickisgreat.com, and that has been indexed by a search engine. Thanks to the search engine, 4 finds the link too, and does a few things of its own. First, if a specific subpage is being linked to, it sends back a message to its home base, which immediately deletes the subpage and migrates its contents to another subpage with a different name. So the posted link is now broken. Second, it scours the rest of the messages on the target page, searching for keyphrases that also appear on it's home site. It looks for any discussion about the contents of its home site. If any is found, it modifies those same keyphrase on the original site slightly. An example of this would be the keyphrase "Orange Agents". If 4 finds discussion of that exact phrase, it sends a message home, and turns all instances of "Orange Agents" into "Orange 4gents", or Orange &gents", or even "0r@ng3 4gen7$" until the reference no longer exists.

The third thing that 4 does is attack the web server that hosts the link and keyphrases, testing any known exploitable gaps in the software's security system. If it gains access, it copies itself to the web server, removes all references to its home site, and uses that servers resources to launch more attacks on other servers. It does not cripple the server, it only borrows from it. Most importantly, it places dumb spider traps on the server, and monitors them for activity. Because the dynamically generated pages of a spider trap would normally not be accessed by anything but a spider, there would only be a few of them at any given time. When a spider comes along and falls in the trap, lots of pages start being created. When 4 detects this, it attacks the brain of the spider. Since the purpose of a spider is to collate data, it has an analytical part to it, which reads and interprets text, and then assigns a value to each word, if it finds that word in its memory. If not, then it tries to interpret the word. 4 simply dumps a one hundred trillion character word in front of the spider, which tries to cram a hundred trillion bytes into eight trillion bytes of memory, crashing the spider for a good long while.

By doing this to every website that mentions its home site, 4 is setting up traps around its own perimeter, on those servers with the fewest degrees of separation. It does this because for a long time now, big search companies have known that where you find spider traps, you find the most valuable intel too. If you're thinking that none of this has anything to do with Jooce, then you're wrong. Jooce is the reason that the CDC has gone to such extreme lengths to defend their dark little corner of the internet. In November of 2012, the CDC told me googles biggest secret, why my girlfriend bought me Jooce.

In December, Google told the rest of the world.