PeterDavid.net

I hope they catch that fucker.

I'm not condoning anything this goofball has been posting (and this place would be better without "him"), but does AOL actually have the power to regulate this sort of thing over the regular Internet (I thought they only could enforce their rules within the AOL Community -- which this board is not part of). Or do they expect their subscribers to abide by their terms of service/rules even outside of the AOL realm? Just curious...

PAD doesnt your blog record IP addresses?? Maybe you can ban this fucker that way?? AOL is a joke and I doubt they'll take any action...

Bendis is also the last name of my HIgh School Geometry and Physics teacher too...

Okay, the 50 pages of * (or did you guys already edit part of his post?) the two words repeated for several pages in the middle, then another load of ** was annoying. Not because of the words (words are just words, like Glorb! Blong! Cribble!), just the annoying length of the post...

Sheeze... you people sure like to use the "F" word, huh?

Wow...The people who jog around the internet just to post that sort of gibberish really need to discover this little thing called life. Frankly, I think it's rather sad that some people get their kicks and giggles that way.

Dennis:

AOL ABSOLUTELY has the power to regulate this kind of behavior. "Bs" is posting through THEIR servers, and as a customer of theirs has agreed to abide by their Terms Of Service. If he is violating those Terms, they not only CAN cut him off, they are practically OBLIGATED to do so.

It's not a matter of the First Amendment on two grounds: 1) they're not saying he can't say what he wants, just that he can't use their property to say it; and B) the First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law." AOL is a private entity, and can make whatever rules for the use of their property as they wish. If they choose, they could demand that every single message that passes through their servers contain the word "purple," and utterly ban "yellow," and everyone would either have to live with that or go elsewhere.

At this point, I feel the need to state that "Bs" is a farging icehole and a pathetic bastich who needs to get a life. However, my comments might be deemed inappropriate by PAD or Glenn and modified or deleted as they see fit. So be it. They pay for this space, they maintain it, and it's their responsibility to pick up their property. Sometimes part of that picking up process involves disinviting people who leave messes, and sometimes you even have to take vandals to court to get them to stop trashing the place.

J.

Correction to the above: When I typed it, I had put four asterisks between the "B" and the "s" to refer to the miscreant. Somehow that got abbreviated to "Bs." My apologies to anyone offended or confused.

J.

(George Carlin moment: why is "abbreviate" such a long word, anyway?)

About f'in time Bs got the boot. No matter how much leeway some people get, they insist on pushing it past the point of all reason. Of course, posting hundreds (thousands?) of nothing but *s and curse words is beyond what most people would even consider posting online. Sad.

Oh, and Bs, if you're reading this, here are some parting asterisks for you:

GOOD RIDDANCE, F***ER!!!

Dee,

Unless I'm mistaken, banning an IP address would be fairly useless -- if the offending individual is on dial-up (a curse with which some of us are still saddled), all he or she has to do is disconnect, reconnect, and get a new IP.

You can, theoretically, ban IP ranges, but banning a range of AOL IP addresses is likely to inconvenience at least one or two other readers.

Ban the prick. Give him the boot.

Is that Bendis person 11 or 12 years old? He must be if he was thinking that was in any way humorous. Puh-lease

Good riddance.

The point to getting rid of this guy is not the fact that he's cursing. Rather it's because he's purposely making an effort to bring this site down by overloading the software.

And AOL IP addresses can't be banned, because they use a proxy. The IP that's returned is not the same IP that an AOL user is given when logging in to the service.

Hey Bendis, did you ever wonder why even though your name isn't Richard everybody calls you "Dick"?

Hey Peter,

Dont' have AOL ban the email address this "Bendis" poster used, because they used Brian Bendis' real email address.

Well, not only was it disruptive, but it was kind of a non-sequitur at that. I mean, we were talking about the legality and acceptability of things said on television for the most part. The series of asterisks followed by the series of "N-word C-word" (Yeah, I may be ok to say them here, but I really don't like either of them -- I find them vulgar to a point I prefer not to go) and then more asterisks just doesn't make any sense as part of that conversation.

It makes me think of Lewis Black's explanation of an anneurism (oddly appropriate, since the discussion was about Comedy Central and the Daily Show, and he's one of their boys):

"... from behind me, a young woman of 25 uttered the following. It was the dumbest thing I had ever heard until Dan Quayle was elected Vice President of the United States. She said, 'If it weren't for my horse, I would never have spent that year in college.'

"I'm gonna repeat that. Because it bears repeating. 'If it weren't for my horse,' -- as in, 'Giddyup, giddyup let's go,' -- 'I would never have spent that year in college,' -- which is a degree-granting institution.

"Don't think about that sentence for more than three minutes or blood will shoot out your nose. The American Medical Profession does not know why we get an anneurism. An anneurism is when a blood vessel bursts in your head for no apparent reason. There's a reason. You go to the mall one day with your friends and somebody over there says the dumbest thing you've ever heard, and it goes... in your ear. So you turn back to see who said it, because if you could talk to them, you could just ask them, 'What did you mean by that?' But they're gone! And now those words... are in your head. And they stay there. They don't go away. I know you think you're driving to work, but you're not driving to work; all you're thinking is If it weren't for my horse... If it weren't for my horse... You sit down and have dinner with your family, and you think you're having dinner but you're not; It's just, 'Wh- How did she get to college with a horse?' It's like a mobius strip in your head. It just goes over and over and over; for seven days it's all you think about. You don't know you're thinking about it, but you're brain's going overtime, and at the end of the week they find you dead in your bathroom."

Jason wrote: And AOL IP addresses can't be banned, because they use a proxy. The IP that's returned is not the same IP that an AOL user is given when logging in to the service.

True, for AOL dial-ups only. However, AOL should know who had what IP address at what particular point in time (when the message was posted on PAD's site, for example). And if PAD's Web site server provider does, in fact, log IP addresses accessing PAD's site, then it's just a matter of connecting the dots.

Russ Maheras

Two things:

1. Luigi, that "extras from Deliverance" line was priceless.

2. Anyone else catch themselves checking their watch scrolling past all that stuff?

Thank you nekouken for that wonderful reminder of why Lewis Black is one of my heroes. *grin*

---KRAD

Lewis Black & Dave Attel were here a few months back on their national comedy tour.

They were definately worth seeing. :)

As for the troll, I can't see the point of contacting AOL.

I mean, this is AOL we're talking about... kings of giving out free cd's to keep their subscription numbers up, home to a great majority of the spam email on the internet, etc.

You're better off putting in an IP blocker for the blog.

AOL can boot the guy, but he'll just be back next week.

I'm reminded of a line from HEAVY METAL, the sequence where Handover Fist is being questioned, and Handover says "HANGIN's too good for him! BURNIN's too good for him!! It kind of makes me wish this was Singapore and we had public floggings.

Hey. I'm just joking. I would never want to wish to be in Singapore.

Actually, I'll be surprised if AOL DOESN'T cancel the account. Due to the fact that their service was used in an attempt to disrupt PAD's server, they could become liable to legal action if they do not take every reasonable attempt to prevent it from happening again. This becomes much harder to control when anonomous e-mail servers and re-routers are used, but this wasn't the case here. In fact, AOL is believed to keep one of the largest log files of any server, making this a fairly straight forward matter to deal with. I'm fairly certain that I could trace this ass-hat's account even though I'm not a professional working for an ISP.

Ping Glenn: If you don't mind, let us know what happens to the little you-know-what.

PS. Anybody else get the felling that Mom and Dad are gonna hit the roof when they find out why their account got canceled?

There's been a lot of this going on, of late. The Ellison newsgroup has ALSO been overrun with trolls.

A website I write for has also had it's forums hit in the last week by trolls.

Sadly, these are merely teenage idiots - proof is in the fact that they used their school's computers as part of their trolling.

How do we know it wasn't a faked AOL account? There's nothing written saying that the account typed into the E-mail line has to be a real one.

(Meaning, written in stone.)

See, suncat is absolutely right, you'll definitely need the IP address, since anyone can type in ANY email address...

I'm finding myself dropping by here less, and less these days. While PAD's comments are generally entertaining, and/or informative, it used to be just as much fun to read the comments. This just isn't true anymore. The focus for the last month or so seems to be a particularly rude post, followed by a scolding by PAD, then countless comments approving the scolding, and disapproving the rude comments.

Dull.

I imagine that constantly having to threaten banning, and monitor the site fo malicious posts will begin to grow tiresome for Peter and Glenn. Not to mention, all the regulars constantly having to reassure each other that rude posts are bad, and they (the regulars) are good, is just sad. I don't mean to say the regulars are unimaginative or uninteresting, but you could almost copy and paste the responses from every thread that takes this road.

I do have a possible solution, but it isn't pretty, shut the site down, completely, for about 3 months.

Since we're asked not to add comments to the blog entry with the offending comments, let me take this space to note that:

1) I have the Daily Show in question on my ReplayTV.

2) I just reviewed the segment in question and it seems fairly clear that he said the dirty word in question. He did not say "fathers".

3) The Closed Captioning skips that line entirely. (Not that their CC is 100% accurate anyway; the preceding line from President Bush's speech has "squarely" put up as "scarely".)

4) I was not turned into a hideous monster by hearing the word.

GOOD. Serves the guy right. Those kind of posts don't add anything to the conversations and just offend the people here. He WON'T be missed.

Michael Pullmann: Two things: 1. Luigi, that "extras from Deliverance" line was priceless.

Luigi Novi: Thank you very much, folks, I’ll be here all week. Try the buffalo wings. :-)

Michael Pullmann: 2. Anyone else catch themselves checking their watch scrolling past all that stuff?

Luigi Novi: No, but I did look at the status bar on my browser when first logging onto that page. It indicated that the page was FOUR MEGABYTES. I wondered, “What in the world is on this page that took up so much space? Has the blog finally been discovered by someone who makes longer posts than my own?” When I got to the bottom, I said to myself, “Oh.”

The email account posted is Brian Michael Bendis' actual email account, so obviously the poster didn't use his own email. If they cancel this account, it will be Bendis', so don't cancel it!

The email account posted is Brian Michael Bendis' actual email account, so obviously the poster didn't use his own email.

I believe GreyMatter logs actual IP addresses. As long as that is given to AOL rather than the email address, the AOL TOS team can track the actual perpetrator.

It occurs to me that it's kind of interesting that someone would do something that so deserved to be censored by a moderator after Peter's recent dilemma of Freedom of Speech ethics.

It occurs to me that it's kind of interesting that someone would do something that so deserved to be censored by a moderator after Peter's recent dilemma of Freedom of Speech ethics.

This isn't censorship, deserved or not. Censorship involves the smothering or restricting of an exchange of ideas. Usurping someone's name and using it to post a string of profanity designed to try and impede or destroy a venue...that's not exchange of ideas. That's just abuse.

Calling an attempt to stop the behavior "censorship" is like calling someone who installs a burglar alarm a "poor host."

PAD

>> I do have a possible solution, but it isn't pretty, shut the site down, completely, for about 3 months.

Kind of a drastic move which I have to believe no-one wants to see. Unfortunately, the mix of people this blog attracts really is no different from life - although the majority of us are pretty decent individuals, occassionally you encounter an inDUHvidual (as Scott Adams would put it) that tries to ruin it for everyone else.

That's life - and I don't plan on shutting mine down for 3 months any time soon!

BTW - Kudos to PAD for making a stand against him - something that most people in the real world don't seem to do :-(

Actually, as I think about it, it occurs to me that we should try to invite the guy back to the blog and help him through his current issues. There may be some serious underlying social issues and what he did was merely a cry for help.

Or maybe his asterisk key was just stuck and he was annoyed.

The "F" word is the only way to describe someone who is nothing more but a troll and a spammer. Bandis is both.

Hmm, hadn't thought about the roaming IP addresses a dialup would use but, like I said, I'll be surprised if AOL does disable or ban someone's account afterall, they are "paying" for it. Or, their parents. In this case Bandis sounds like a 12 year old looking for attention on a blog.

A copy & paste spammer gets their jollies out of posting a ten mile long post. Thats all it is. Just waste of bandwidth and nothing new. I've seen it done on plenty of forums & blogs. Just kiddies with nothing better to do with their online time. and if it is an adult, I'd hate to know their IQ level.

Well, I sure do hope AOL goes after the juvenile twit. It'll be a nice triumph. My own experience, however, is that ISPs and the like generally have little or no manpower or energy to devote tracking down and eliminating the "cut one down, two take its place" trolls.

Not entirely related to this is my recent emails back and forth to Yahoo and Geocities alerting them to a Yahoo Geocities personal web page that posts the entire text of all five of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books online. This website features the immortal disclaimer "The text on the site are my personal copy of the guides, from the Ultimate hitchhiker's Guide, which I own. If you read or download the guides, you do it at your own free will, understanding the consequences of your action, and taking all the blame for it."

I've gone back and forth with Yahoo alerting them about this big steaming copyright violation of a webpage on their server, but continue to get from them a form letter that they will take no action until a complaint has been legally filed by the copyright holder.

Sic Harlan on 'em, I say.

(end of rant)

Good luck on AOL actually doing anything. It took forever to get rid of a repeated TOS offender on the AOL board, in fact he'd probably still be there if he hadn't quit on his own. It's a long frustrating process to ban a member for breaking TOS ON AOL, I can't imagine what it must take to ban them for breaking it OFF AOL. I hope this is an instance they actually get off their asses and do something.

Re: Lewis Black's aneurysm...what if the girl in question had been inspired to try to get into veterinary medicine by a favorite horse from her childhood? One that had died of an illness or something?

OR, OR...she had a scholarship for that school's equestrian team, but had to leave after one year...

Presented as a public service to keep Lewis Black aneurysm-free (at least until November 2).

"I'll be surprised if AOL does disable or ban someone's account afterall, they are "paying" for it. Or, their parents"-Dee

I don't think it matters whether or not they are paying for it. When you sign up, you sign up agreeing to their terms of service, and I'm sure there's somewhere in all that legalese babble about violating said TOS will result in termination of service with no refund of money. It's not like the douche bag accidentally violated the rules either. It's kind of like a car and a driver's license. There are rules surrounding both, like you can't drive drunk. Now, most of us pay for our licenses and cars, but if we break the rules, both can be taken away, and not only will you not get your money back, you'll probably have to pay more money.

People who exist solely to annoy and people who try to circumvent rules at the expense of others (like the jack ass reprinting the Hitch Hiker's Guide) need a good beating. They won't listen to logic or reason and care only about themselves anyway, so perhaps a good kick in the neck will get some sense into them.

Monkeys.

While I agree that the guy's post was annoying, I find it a little amusing that everyone is in such a froth over him being so offensive over the two words he used when every other post on that thread contained the word "fucker."

I think most people who would really get their knickers in a bunch over the two words in the offending post would have wanted to ban the whole lot of you.

If you're going to ban him, do it because he posted an inappropriately long post and was only looking to waste everyone's time. Don't do it because you think his two words are more offensive than your words.

On the other hand, he may have been trying to be ham-handedly ironic by trying to see how far you might be willing to go with the obscenity thing since everyone was dropping the f-bomb with such casualness. Maybe it was an art piece...

Yeah, I don't think so either.

"Sheeze... you people sure like to use the "F" word, huh?"

Fucking A, buddy! :)

Scott E.

While the F word is fairly generic and can be used to refer to anyone, the words in the post are more specific to African-Americans and women. While I try not to curse because I would rather find more appropriate ways to express myself, I have to tell you that the words on the post ARE more offensive than the F word. All curses are not equal.

While the F word is fairly generic and can be used to refer to anyone, the words in the post are more specific to African-Americans and women.

That, and like the FCC ruled, it's all about context.

Plus, it was a discussion about the word itself. We're not sitting here calling each other f*ckers or anything and other such insults.

@ John DiBello,

Have you notified the publisher of Hitchhikers's about the website, perchance? They should be able to do something about it pretty quick.

Jon Stewart just confirmed it - and apparently no one did anything about it.

It had nothing to do with the choice of words.

Dont you guys know a copy & paste spammer when you see one???

And fucker in my opinion is not a curse word. Its used to describe someone big diff if you ask me.

ObeeKris: Yep, I sent an email to (what I hope was) the legal department at Ballantine Books. I hope they take action.

I'm reminded of the Ballantine Books copies of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings that I bought (in 1973, in a paperback boxed set for $28.5, 95¢ for each book), that featured a note on the back from Tolkien (scolding the unauthorized Ace editions and those who bought them) "Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other."

I'd guess that being dead, Douglas Adams apparently merits no such courtesy from owner of this unauthorized website. Okay, enough kvetching.

I'd guess that being dead, Douglas Adams apparently merits no such courtesy from owner of this unauthorized website.

The people that do these kinds of things could care less if the author is living or dead.

Peter,

Has your request to abstain from posting further posts on the previous blog entry been reversed? I ask, because people are still posting on it.

"Re: Lewis Black's aneurysm...what if the girl in question had been inspired to try to get into veterinary medicine by a favorite horse from her childhood? One that had died of an illness or something?

"OR, OR...she had a scholarship for that school's equestrian team, but had to leave after one year..."

I do believe the man said, "Don't think about that sentence for more than three minutes or blood will shoot out your nose."

Your efforts are appreciated, and now that you have likely suffered an anneurism, a nice fruit basket will be sent to your survivors.

PAD This isn't censorship, deserved or not. Censorship involves the smothering or restricting of an exchange of ideas.

I thought we covered this on the last censorship discussion.

Censor: To examine and expurgate.

To remove or prevent something (an idea, a person, an expression) from something else (a discussion, a print media, your own behavior) is to censor. I know; you're talking about ideology, not definition, but that's like saying this isn't a case of someone expressing something. Well, yes he did express something. It's something of little to no obvious value, but it is decidedly saying something, even if that something is just "*, N-word, C-word, *" with no underlying message.

Is it speech? Yes. Is it Federally protected speech? No. Unless Bendis comes back and tries to tell us it's performance art or some crap.

Back during your crisis of ideology, you asked if one who espouses Free Speech as you do has an ethical conflict censoring what someone else has to say. I said you did not, and Bendis's post is a perfect example of why.

What you are doing, Peter, is censorship. It may not be art or literature; it may lack redeeming social value, and may actually have a hand in deconstructing the community in which it is expressed (in this case, crashing your server). That doesn't matter because it's not a semantic issue; you are censoring Bendis. You are right to do so, just as you would be right to have the police arrest a houseguest who tries to knock out the supports in your basement as a means of expression, especially if all he's expressing is "I want to knock the supports of this house out."

You can do both without fear of being labelled a bad host.

Nekouken, I fail to see how booting Bendis would be censorship. Is it censorship to arrest someone who knocks over your mail box with a baseball bat or smashes your car window? Bendis didn't just post naughty words, he filled up quite a bit of space with just asterixs (sp?). If he was trying to make a valid point, he should explain it, but it seems pretty clear by his lack of point and the amount of space he tried to take up that his intentions have been to cause problems. Arresting or kicking out the person who is trying to knock out the support beams of your house isn't censorship, it's arresting or kicking out a person who is trying to knock the support beams out of your house. I don't think free speach covers intentionally distructive behavior.

Just my opinion, I guess.

Monkeys

Basically, freedom of expression stops when it causes others harm or infringes upon their rights and freedoms. You can't express yourself at the expense of others (and I'm not talking about just offending someone, because that's too subjective).

Monkeys.

Nekouken, I fail to see how booting Bendis would be censorship. Is it censorship to arrest someone who knocks over your mail box with a baseball bat or smashes your car window? Bendis didn't just post naughty words, he filled up quite a bit of space with just asterixs (sp?). If he was trying to make a valid point, he should explain it, but it seems pretty clear by his lack of point and the amount of space he tried to take up that his intentions have been to cause problems. Arresting or kicking out the person who is trying to knock out the support beams of your house isn't censorship, it's arresting or kicking out a person who is trying to knock the support beams out of your house. I don't think free speach covers intentionally distructive behavior.

Actually, it's possible, I see from this, that I'm misunderstanding the issue a bit.

My perspective on it was, if someone causes harm as a means of expression, it is unprotected speech, thus acceptable to censor -- by this I mean expressing one'sself through a means that does quantifiable damage, such as crashing the server or destroying the supports of the house, not simply saying things that "damage the moral fibre of our whatever."

I assumed that it the message conveyed had something to do with the issue; it was non-constructive, blatantly offensive (things like that are the reason I believe obscenity laws should be reformed rather than outright revoked), and threatened to damage something quantifiable through its expression.

I see that perhaps the message itself is not relevant to this issue, and that if the posted message had been the same only with less of everything present (and I would at least pose the notion that the same would be gleaned from the post had it not been so ridiculously long as to endanger the stability of the server), this thread wouldn't exist, and the steps taken would not have been taken. If this is the case, I retract my previous post; I failed to separate in my mind the message from the medium.

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.

My s/n got TOSed and I did nothing wrong except have a fight with a friend on AOL, I didn't curse or be rude...we just fought without verbal insults
It's weird because my sibling's s/ns also got reported...but why?

I keep getting these TOS on my screen everytime I turn on my computer .. what shall I do?? Change my Master Screen Name and the other rest of my other names along with my passwords?? I need help in this .. because I really do not know who is doing this to me and I want it to be clear of this violation.