bogons

Bogons are convincing bogus versions of documents and media circulating on the Reticulum. They are deliberately generated and maintained so that filtering systems are continuously challenged. As described by an Ita specialist, for every legitimate item there may be hundreds or thousands of carefully prepared decoys.

Origins and purpose

• Developed within the family of techniques called Artificial Inanity, first used for military deception and later spreading into wider botnet ecologies.
• To restore and preserve Reticulum integrity after a period of deliberate clutter, Ita‑run defenses co‑opted these methods. The aim is to subject filters to constant, high‑quality challenge so that the network remains usable.

Characteristics

• Quality over noise: bogons are “good crap”—well‑formed, plausible items with mostly correct content but subtle falsehoods—rather than random gibberish.
• Scale and variety: they may exist in large numbers for any one legitimate item, ranging from short texts to longer media.
• Filtering context: discussion of bogons is tied to reputon‑based weighting of sources and content on the Reticulum; most of the time ordinary users do not notice them directly.

Recent relevance

• During coordinated operations supported by the Antiswarm, an Ita observed a low‑level bug affecting reputon dynamics under load. As a practical consequence, support cells on the ground—and occasionally the team—could have difficulty distinguishing legitimate messages from bogons until links stabilized.

Terminology

• Singular: “bogon”; plural: “bogons.”