2001-03-19 - 11:59 p.m.

Internet Idiots

Allow me to re-introduce you to Mean Mr. Hamster. That is to say that I am a bit pissed off. I'm going to vent a little here.

One of the things that I have always liked about Diaryland is that it seems to be one big happy family. It's all about the self-expression, baby.

However, there are a couple of people that, for no logical reason that I can detect, are getting on Lily's and my case. I don't like talking shit about people, so I'm going to be a little vague about the details. I don't want to add to these people's paltry hit count, I just want to spotlight their stupidity.

First off, I have to admit that my computer skills are pretty weak. This is another thing that Diaryland is all about: even people who don't know how to write code can have their own online diaries. However, just because I'm not that knowledgeable about computers doesn't mean I don't know somebody who is - Lily, my girlfriend, is something of a whiz at these things.

Something very important she taught me early on was that while the Internet seems like an anonymous communication medium, it really isn�t. Every time you sign a guestbook, send an email or post a page, you are leaving electronic footprints behind. You're a lot easier to trace than you think you are.

I actually got an object lesson in that before I ever met Lily or had a diary. I put a post in someone's forum about a diary that I thought was goofy and weird. While I didn't really say anything very mean, it was plain that my intention was mockery.

To my surprise, the next post in the forum was from the guy who had the journal I was talking about! Apparently he has done a search on his journal name and found my post. He was cheerful and polite, and seemed to be utterly ignoring the mocking subtext of my earlier post. Of course, this made me feel like crap. After that, I made myself a promise: don�t write anything about someone on the Internet that you wouldn't say to their face. Fair enough.

And a corollary to this is: don't take anything seriously from anonymous cowards. If it's not important enough for them to say using a real identity, it's not important enough to get upset about.

That being said, we move on to Idiot #1.

This person decided to get into Lily's and my business, broadcasting information I would rather have kept secret, creating a fake Diaryland diary to do so. Using information this person left lying around it was pretty easy to find their real Diaryland diary. Whoa! It had about the UGLIEST design I had ever seen. It looked like it had been put together by a color-blind six year old. Ack. The content was rather boring in a girly-girl sort of way. In fact, from the few entries I forced myself to read I never would have guessed that this dull girl was really a vicious, cowardly gossip.

Maybe it's all the Planetarion I've been playing, but I've turned into a very revenge-minded person. From her real diary it would have been a snap to figure out where this person lived, her real phone number, etc. However, cooler heads (Lily's) prevailed. She sent her an email, at her real diary, telling her to cut it out. The fake diary disappeared and we haven't heard from this little bim since. Good!

What inspired this girl to get all up in our business? I don't know but I can guess. Well, we haven't heard from this person since then, so obviously this girl is back to her original plan of trying to bore her readers to death.

Now we move on to Idiot #2.

Lily was involved in an online project with some other folks. Suddenly several of the people involved, including Lily, started getting rabid, hate-filled messages from some person going under an obvious pseudonym. These messages were abusive, but not terribly imaginative. Nearly all of these letters were designed, albeit clumsily, to hurt the recipient. However, in a couple of them the writer got so carried away that the hostile communications sounded like death threats.

Again, Lily was able to trace these messages. They all came from a part of the United States not exactly known for its Internet savvy. And, surprise of surprises, one of the people in this online project happened to be from that part of the country too. Coincidence? I don�t think so.

Still, the addresses Lily got for the abuser didn't quite match the address of the person under suspicion. They were close, but not quite close enough. So, we just didn't say anything and hoped she'd go away.

After a quiet period, the abuser returned, with Lily being her exclusive target. Perhaps the inactivity had made her careless, but the address she was sending from was an exact match for the person we thought it was. Mystery solved.

The sad thing is I actually liked the person we suspected, she seemed like a sympathetic character. Of course this was before I knew she was an obsessive, backbiting coward with deep anger control issues. Maybe she sent off the mean messages when she was on an alcoholic bender.

Lily sent a message to this person, at their real email address, telling them to stop it. Instead of realizing that she had been TOTALLY busted, this person continued to deny that she was responsible for the messages, even posting something online about it. This caused me to revise my estimation of her intelligence downward again.

Lily got yet another message under the pseudonym, again with an address that didn't match the suspect, but that matched her earlier address. Obviously this person had access to a computer terminal at a nearby college. Nice try, dearie. We still know it's you.

There was also a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to this person. Only someone involved in the online project would care enough to dive bomb the other participants, and she was a logical suspect. There was also the fact that the long silence on the part of the abuser coincided with a gap in her updates on her webpage. However, the fact that Lily got a pair of addresses that matched makes her clearly the culprit. The only way it could not be her is if there was someone else using her computer. That would be kind of tough since she has an update timestamped around the time the nasty messages popped up.

I can understand why she'd deny it, even though forgetting about it would have been the smart thing to do. Her mask of easygoing self-deprecation has been ripped off, revealing the angry, tortured, twisted psyche underneath. It's probably damaged her self-image because she's been caught doing something she's ashamed of.

So there you have it, the Tale of Two Dumb People. I guess the only lessons I can bring away from this is that stupidity is everywhere, and the Internet is one big glass house.