Journal Journal: Who can you trust? 6
(Background music: "Let me see" by Morcheeba)
Who can you trust when you need to?
Why do we rust when we heed you?
Once upon a time there was a man named William Scott Lockwood, the 3rd, who used to write under the nick of Vladinator and many others. He was branded a troll, and since he wrote a lot, it happened to annoy some other people who didn't like him, and they decided that they want him away, so they found his phone number by doing a whois on his domain, geekizoid.com.
They managed to harrass him for a while, until that phone stopped being functional, or something like that. But the bad people, who called themselves "The midnight phone boys" or "The anti-vlad triad", still searched for ways to force him to stop writing on slashdot and kuro5hin.
Do you ever think in bubbles?
Do you ever shake up troubles?
Falling apart right from the start
Crawling 'round
After some months (march 2002, to be precise), our friend Vladinator moved to another appartment, so he sent an email to his friends with his new phone number and the phone number of his mother-in-law, so they can notify him in case there are troubles with his weblog.
But what, one or more of the people he regarded as friends weren't really friends of him, and they passed his phone numbers to the harassers, who gladly looked for ways to abuse it. First they posted that number anywhere they could, but since people weren't too glad to call Vladinator, the harassers gave the numbers to Nigerian scammers (you know of them, right?) and told them to call those numbers at 2:00am.
Since that involved Vladinator's mother in law, he was forced to give in to them and he promised he'd stop writing in slashdot and kuro5hin. For some reason that deal didn't hold up and Vladinator is writing in slashdot once again, but that's above the scope of our story.
He wasn't the only one to get harassed. There was a girl who ran that controversial site called Adequacy which looked like a news site but in fact was meant to troll people and cause them to post angry responses. Like Vlad, a similar thing happened to her, probably more because she's a girl and a troll, which is a rare combination. The problem with her is that people could find her real name by searching for her nick, so people somehow found her details, like her phone number, and posted it for some reason.
Show us how to stand up, strong
Waiting, for you takes so long
Shadows leave us standing naked
We can't fake it
So what am I saying? I'm not saying that you can't trust anyone, but I'm saying that you should think twice before sparing information about yourself, especially if you are a troll, or you're intending to act in a very controversial way or annoy a lot of people. Or if you are a girl. Girls are scarce and they raise more attention than boys.
So what should you do?
- If you intend to act controversially, invent a new nick instead of using a nick you used in other websites - especially if it may help people to associate your real name to that nick.
- Don't send your details to several people at once, especially if you don't know them personally. If you want to provide a way for people to send you notices, create some email-to-SMS gateway which will enable people to send you pager/phone messages without letting them know your number.
- Don't put your real phone and address when you register a domain. Invent some funny text instead (like "Reva Altamira" or "Trollaxor De maligne"). Yes, it might cause you problems when doing a domain transfer, but you can easily do a domain transfer by changing the administrative contact.
- Also, the computer security measures mentioned in this semi-humoristic journal entry apply too.
