The Day Leo Traynor Confronted His Troll 594
McGruber writes "Dublin-based writer Leo Traynor has written a piece about confronting the troll who drove him off Twitter, hacked his Facebook, and abused and terrified his family. Quoting: 'I blocked the account and reported it as spam. The following week it happened again in an identical manner. A new follower, I followed back, received a string of abusive DMs, blocked and reported for spam. Two or three times a week. Sometimes two or three times a day. An almost daily cycle of blocking and reporting and intense verbal abuse. ... Then one day something happened that truly frightened me. I don't scare easily but this was vile. I received a parcel at my home address. Nothing unusual there – I get lots of post. I ripped it open and there was a Tupperware lunchbox inside full of ashes. There was a note included, saying, "Say hello to your relatives from Auschwitz." I was physically sick. ... In July I was approached by a friend who's basically an IT genius, and he offered some help. He said that he could trace the hackers and trolls for me using perfectly legal technology, which would lead to their IP addresses. I said yes. Then I baited them – I was deliberately more provocative toward them than ever I'd been before.'"
Traced his IP? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First post (Score:5, Funny)
God hates fags
Yes. Smoking can kill you.
Puhleese (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a lifetime movie to me.
Safety first (Score:5, Funny)
This is why content delivery systems need to be licensed by governments. This wouldn't have happened if Twitter were prohibited because it's unlicensed.
It's a safety issue. Just like the license you need before you can drive your own car. Just like the license you need to be a barber. Or the permit that those kids should have gotten before the cops shut down their lemonade stand [forbes.com]. Or the license that that guy in North Carolina needs to publish dietary advice on his blog [nytimes.com]. Or the law license that Elizabeth Warren doesn't need because she's one of the special people [volokh.com].
Leo Traynor should be ashamed for having an unlicensed conversation with his Troll. Is he a certified criminal counselor? He should have gotten the authorities involved, because they should always be involved. In everything.
Re:Safety first (Score:2, Funny)
He should have gotten the authorities involved, because they should always be involved. In everything.
Precisely. Sadly, some people are perfectly willing to trade away safety for this 'freedom' nonsense. I honestly wish it was possible to have a TSA agent constantly breathing down everyone's necks; if that happened, we'd be perfectly safe from all the evil trolls, rapists, and terrorists! Oh, and copyright infringers (the most dangerous criminals of them all).
Safety first.
Re:First post (Score:2, Funny)
What god? Cthulu hates everyone.
Re:Traced his IP? (Score:5, Funny)
I bet they used a GUI interface using Visual Basic!
No! Everyone knows when you trace an IP it does a 3D mapping google fly over with a little dot following a line from each location and then zooms in close to the final location showing a live video feed! I watch movies I know how computers work!
Re:Trolling? (Score:3, Funny)
I do my part
Clean-shaven tradition:
A most healthy start.
Burma Shave
Re:Trolling? (Score:5, Funny)
This is a real troll. And a good one (even if it's not true):
http://www.bash.org/?244321 [bash.org]
Re:Trolling? (Score:2, Funny)
that's up there with telling someone the green light on their CRT is really a camera...
Or "Oh, you wanna hack me? OK, my IP, to make life easy for you, is 127.0.0.1, and you can try and plant this command: "format c: /f". I'll send you a thousand Dollars if you can kill my computer."
Next system message: "SUCKER HAS LEFT CHAT (BROKEN PIPE)"
Re:Trolling? (Score:0, Funny)
"Nah, roman_mir is just a libertarian type"
No, he's not. He's just a dickhead.
Re:Trolling? (Score:2, Funny)
No this is terrible. When you are making a movie or TV show, you have to illuminate things so the folks at home can see them. Since you don't have much light in the vacuum of interstellar space, you have to provide your own. You can't light every surface because you don't have a portable sun, so you do the best you can. So you get the occasional shadow.
The shadow is maintained in more modern movies, when it can be fixed digitally, because it provides atmosphere (the literary kind, not the physical kind). If you broke with tradition people would go nuts on you, call you Michael Bay, and make a song about how much your movie sucked. Like taking out the whip-smack sound effect from martial arts movies - if it doesn't sound like it hurt, it wasn't kung fu.
And, just because you don't see the light source doesn't mean there isn't one. They could be right next to a dwarf star, or close enough to a solar system. It just isn't in frame.
And finally, anyone familiar with "in space they can't hear you scream" is unlikely to have a brain fart long enough to replace sound with light in their model of how fake science works. So go lrn2intrnet moar.
Re:Trolling? (Score:4, Funny)