Dom_sufc;241222 wrote:
Not sure on his local laws, but doesn’t the necessity of SWIM depend on where you come from?
it actually provides no protection whatsoever
lets say someone was a fed or working for them and had obtained a big text file called “junkies.txt” what contained a few days worth of forum messages with all the smilies and other stuff stripped out. Any linux machine using something called could scrape our forum automatically for this content and if the person doing it put a small bit of effort into the script I or any of the other mods would find it impossible to work out whether it was a legit user or this automated fed-bot getting the info.
the command (on Linux)
$ cat junkies.txt | grep swim
would then show all the occurences of people trying to hide themselves and make the posts more bait, as a fed would obviously assume that whoever wrote stuff like this had something to hide. it would even show up if someone wanted to be the next Duncan Goodhew but decided to use amfetamines to enhance their performance….
in a nutshell, using the term swim is saying HEY! LOOK HERE OFFICER, I’M DOING ILLEGAL DRUGS! and is perhaps best avoided..
