Petronius
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Joined: 1/1/2004
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Shymistress wrote something that actually addressed issues in an adult responsive way. What a joy!
While I have some disagreements with her overall analysis, let me try to respond appropriately.
Since her post "RE: Maybe leaving CM.. A warning - 7/15/2007 12:53:29 PM. p. 14" was quite long I won't republish it. If she thinks I missed something important I'll try to go back and respond to it.
My reference to warning dominant women and others was made in "RE: Maybe leaving CM.. A warning - 7/15/2007 7:04:51 AM. p. 12."
It was in response to suggestions published by Aileen68 that I, personally, was the stalker that had harassed Lockit.
I argued, in essence, that Aileen68 was simply taking cheap shots or was a tad paranoid or both.
My suggestion in the entire post, and not a one-sentence selection, was that anybody who thought I was the nefarious criminal should not be content to post her accusations in this isolated thread but do their damn'dness to inform everybody on the c.m. board.
So in answer to Shymistress's question, no, I don't think that simply publishing an accusation on this thread is really warning dom women or anybody else in a very responsible manner.
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Of course law enforcement has priorities and, sadly, cyberstalking isn't one of them as Shymistress correctly pointed out. But I thought Lockit wrote not simply of cyberstalking but cyberstalking of a particular form. It resulted, she claimed, for a massive security hole in messenger software.
I responded with the facts that people who work for major corporations like banks use messenger software at work. If the hole existed that simply let somebody into a computer it would constitute a MASSIVE security breach for such things as the big banks. It wasn't the ostensible disinterest by the FBI and the Colorado police to the cyberstalking that concerned me but the security hole. Can you imagine somebody at the Pentagon running Yahoo i.m. that would let others (bin Laden's friends?) "get into" the Pentagon computers and have the FBI express disinterest? I can't.
Yes, Shymistress is quite correct about massive holes in software. I don't think a week goes by without Microsoft putting out yet another security advisory about a patch. But the dispute wasn't about buggy software in general but a particular type of bug in a particular type of software.
In logical terms, the existence of a general phenomenon isn't proof of a specific phenomenon; the existence of one specific phenomenon isn't proof of a second specific phenomenon.
In English, so to speak, that means that the fact that presidents get assassinated (the general phenomenon) isn't proof that Truman was assassinated (the specific phenomenon.) The fact that Kennedy was assassinated (a specific phenomenon) also isn't proof that Truman was assassinated (a second specific phenomenon.)
To express the same thing more technically, the fact that there's a hole in Internet Explorer doesn't mean there's a hole in Firefox. A bug that lets somebody run a zombie spamming program on your computer isn't necessarily a bug that lets them reprogram space satellites. And none of the problems with Microsoft that people have documented have the least to do, as far as I could tell, from Yahoo i.m. bugs. Or as somebody pointed out, a particular newly discovered buy in Yahoo that was never exploited (and might be unexploitable) isn't necessarily the problem that Lockit claimed.
Shymistress also wrote:
quote:
As I pointed out in My previous post, getting help in that situation often doesn't happen until after violence has been committed. The fact that a person's mind can be as fragile (if not more fragile) then the body does not seem to occur to most who tout the "well he hasn't done anything yet...maybe you should hide out!!" As a recovering agoraphobic, I can verifiably state that is one of the unhealthiest ways of dealing with it.
This isn't relevant to anything I wrote earlier ... but I agree with her. Simply hiding out is usually a really bad way to deal with stalkers. I'm glad she made that point.
Shymistress and I disagree about her third point concerning tracability. She wrote:
quote:
This, unfortunately, I can and will not agree with at all. You can be traced in your new car (gps), buddy on his cell phone can be traced (both gps and through the service provider), and the girl down the street can change her internet provider, names, even get a dynamically changing ip and she can still be traced. It is a simple piece of hardware within most computers that defines them as traceable, and the thumbprint it leaves is called a "macaddy" (machine address for those that have not heard of it) and I can say through both experience and from years of being close to computers and computer gurus that unless you know exactly what piece of hardware it is to change...you won't ever lose that "thumbprint".
Actually Osama bin Laden doesn't seem to be traceable despite the Bush government's proclamation several years ago that "he can run but he can't hide." I also don't think anybody can trace my fifth grade report card or the twenty dollar bill I had in my wallet on April 17, 1972. But in fairness to Lockit I think she meant to limit her concerns to traced messages on computers, not terrorists, school papers, or currency. The dispute wasn't about whether something could be traced under conditions ideal for the trace but under all conditions (i.e. remove the gps from your car; remove the keylogger from your computer perhaps via discovery with hijackthis as Lothlauren suggested.)
I can't lay any special claim to expertise about MAC addresses but I believe they are hardware based on the modem. In other words, change the modem, change the MAC address. It's been so long since I had to deal with things like TCP/IP stacks and packet codes that I've forgotten if MAC addresses are built into every packet. But even if they are that address only remains in the first leg of a post. Anything that my first anonymous remailer sends out won't carry my MAC but, perhaps, the remailer's MAC.
I've mentioned public key encryption and chains of anonymous remailers. People have denounced that as sci or fairy tales but nobody has challenged my claim by showing how you can trace through that technology assuming it was properly used.
Shymistress commented "Have you seen half of what is available these days? Everything from keyloggers to spyware to cookie seeders, and you are surprised and disbelieving because this girl is not aware of the how and what of it?"
There's so much available that I probably have not seen even the quarter of it these days. But luckily for the world state of the art security does not require my personal knowledge. Again, the point isn't that people can do stupid things with security that royally fuck them up; it's that people can, e.g. be traced no matter what they do.
Am I surprised because Lockit doesn't know a lot of this? To the contrary, I've been one of the people stating precisely that! I am not DISbelieving but very believing about Lockit's lack of knowledge about what she writes.
Why did I take the particular tack I took toward Lockit's claims, Shymistress asked.
I'm writing lots more on this and I'll publish soon. But to provide a bit of information ....
There's a lot of highly politicized and hysterical bullshit presented on the Internet.
I'm not talking about spoofs that get believed -- "Microsoft To Merge With Vatican" or my favorite "Microsoft Buys Rights To Christmas" ("Due to design flaws the release of Christmas 2007 will be rolled back to the second quarter of 2008.")
I'm talking about absolute bullshit concerning technology, released with utter hype and warnings about various dangers.
Some years ago a whopper surfaced, ostensibly written by a "concerned mother" who had to tell the world about the horrid problems with computer security and the problems they produced for her. In the story the mother got a free AOL disk in the mail. She put it on the table with the rest of the mail and went to take the trash out. When she got back less than five minutes later she discovered, to her horror, that her five-year-old had opened the AOL package, put the disk in the computer, and had been instantly taken to "pornographic chatrooms" where he was staring at the pictures.
It was pure technological bullshit, invented by somebody and massively circulated by others, complete with horrid tales of the consequences of modern technology and the lurking evils of the modern world..
In a related matter, I recently had a talk with a neighbor who kept her children off the net because she thought it was limited to "myspace" and "myspace" limited to adult predators. There's no sin in being misinformed; the sin is staying misinformed.
We had a nice talk about this and I ultimately invited her to my place to look at the real net. I recall we tracked the cheapest price of beer in Manhattan, the death of actor Raul Julia, and soccer in Panama. In short, the fun stuff you can do with the net. She ended by realizing how she had been misinformed about technology.
People can't engage in some discussion based on their knowledge and experience and then demand special treatment because they don't really know what they're talking about. People can't meaningfully claim their personal experience provides them with a special qualification to be an expert and then retreat from documenting the experience they claimed. People especially can't make some claim to knowledge and then demand that they go unquestioned because they're a "victim." Yet the hysterics and hucksters do these things.
I sensed, in Lockit's first post, more than a tad of this. As I read Lockit's next few claims I was more convinced, on a personal and subjective level, that something else was going on. I'm writing more about that.
Thank you for your focused response to some of my writings, however critical it might have been.
Let me know if you think I've missed something important.
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RE: Maybe leaving CM.. A warning - 
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