At The Register, John Leyden talks about the researchers who finally got sick of being asked to write articles (unpaid) for the “biggest IT security magazine in the world”:
Security researchers have taken revenge on a publishing outlet that spams them with requests to write unpaid articles — by using a bogus submission to satirise the outlet’s low editorial standards.
Hakin9 bills rather grandly bills itself as the “biggest IT security magazine in the world”, published for 10 years, and claims to have a database of 100,000 IT security specialists. Many of these security specialists are regularly spammed with requests to submit articles, without receiving any payment in return.
Rather than binning another of its periodic requests, a group of researchers responded with a nonsensical article entitled DARPA Inference Checking Kludge Scanning, which Warsaw-based Hakin9 published in full, apparently without checking. The gobbledygook treatment appeared as the first chapter in a recent eBook edition of the magazine about Nmap, the popular security scanner.
In reality there’s no such thing as DARPA Inference Checking Kludge Scanning (or DICKS, for short) and the submission was a wind-up. Nonetheless an article entitled Nmap: The Internet Considered Harmful — DARPA Inference Checking Kludge Scanning appeared as the lead chapter in recent eBook guide on Nmap by Hakin9.
