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Web Site Sues Annoying Pest Troll
kongjie writes "Cleveland's The Plain Dealer has a story in the business section about a pest-control web site that is suing someone who obviously has a particular bone to pick with exterminators: he is accused of being a "troll" who "constantly leaving obnoxious and offensive messages" on their pest-control bulletin board. The suit is for $5,000 and is for "violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.""
They've simply refused to put themselves in a constantly reactive state. They are taking some action to establish a precedent that you must abide by their TOS, or face REAL consequences, not simply 'you can't post for 2 hours' or some other slap on the wrist.
PCT seems to be an association or industry portal of some sort - they're servicing a number of pest control companies. Their forum users aren't there to get into popularity contests with 'friends/foes' and moderation totals and all that crap - they're there to exchange business information. Other 'social engineering' answers simply burden the rest of the users who are abiding by the rules.
Block by IP and you potentially block other members. Require moderator approvals and you lose the 'real time' aspect of the forum.
IT people want to look for technical solutions to this because it keeps them in a position of power. If this lawsuit is successful, you won't have to rely on your IT people as much to keep a lid on technical problems. There will hopefully be one more precedent which establishes that 'stop' means 'stop', and there will be a financial penalty for failing to comply.
creation science book
YHBT
While you are generally correct, if the bum said "fuck" while expressing political speech, most good judges would be less inclined to punish him than if he were merely using the word to harass women.
What we really need to know, is how the ammendment does apply to this. For instance, if the bum goes into the corner grocery, does the same thing... he could be prosecuted for trespassing. But what if someone had a business with the primary purpose of allowing someone to speak their opinion? In the real world, there is no such thing that I'm aware of. But on the internet, slashdot certainly comes to mind, and possibly kuro5hin is an even better example. Would it be wrong to ban only some of those that want to express their opinion, while allowing others?
And if so, to what degree does this bulletin board accomplish the same purpose? Their primary business isn't providing a forum like slash or kuro5hin, but it does somehow seem deceptive of them to only want to allow "good speech". Would there be any difference if the guy were telling nasty truths about the company, instead of outright trolling?
I'd be much more comfortable if they were suing for slander/libel, to be honest. Then it could be decided solely on what he said, and how true it was. They'd still nail him, without reinforcing the power to silence anyone they didn't like.
Mind you, they already have that power technically, but it doesn't mean they have the moral right to use it capriciously.
Since only the Troll can see his posts, there will be no followups, unless the Troll replies to his own posts. I think it's a brilliant idea. The Troll isn't going to try to get around a ban, since he's not banned. His posts are there for everybody to see -- or at least he thinks so. Then when he doesn't get any reponses to his posts, he's going to get bored and go away.
There's good trolls and there's bad trolls. As a slashdot reader I find some funny. As a messageboard administrator, I hope they make an example out of this guy, would save me a shitload of hassle. One troll I've dealt with repeatedly posted personal attacks against various members of several forums I admin at, did everything he could to piss off as many people as possible (it's a site about a game series so basically he posted spoilers absolutely everywhere), then after being banned registered a slew of accounts and flooded the general discussion forum with crap. Having cleared that up and banned the source IPs he then used about fifty different open proxies to slip around -- got to the point where I just customized the forums to send me a message over Jabber every time someone registered and let me watch their first steps then decide whether or not it's a troll; I'm sure I roasted more than one account as a false positive. That's not counting the personal attacks on me and my AIM getting flooded with crap, as well as impersonations of me and various others on AIM and IRC or whatever; social-engineered an admin password off another site I go to this way and then deleted the entire database.
I dunno what's worse; the trolls or the fact that there's an ever growing number of people at the site who find him hilarious and egg him on. Though they're a minority, most people quite publicly think he's a twat. He's stopped attacking forums but continues to infest IRC.
To cut a long story short then, there are some sad, sad individuals like this, and someone or other always has to deal with them. The more people like this get publicly and painfully burned, the better. It's all fun and games until you really make it your mission to just piss everyone off.
This guy is an idiot who deserves to lose in court. If someone wants to run a message board purely for exterminators to discuss their occupational issues, that's their right. If some idiot won't adhere to their use policy and repeatedly tries to interfere with their site, it's their right to boot him. Technical and legal means are both valid ways of doing this. The latter is valid, IMHO, because it's a much more powerful deterrent, and detracts less from the webmaster's daily work. Even /. can't keep the trolls away through technical means w/o crippling the site in unpleasant ways.
/. folks have cause a horde of infantile nerdlings to bombard the pest control message board with goatse photos and the like. I feel sorry for them - both the message board people and the idiot trolls (or crapflooders, rather) bombarding the site, though for different reasons.
Of course, having posted this story here, the
A photography message board I once frequented was eventually killed due the the actions of one - ONE - extremely persistent, incredibly prolific and mindblowingly obnoxious, teenage troll.
When reason inevitably failed (and since when have zit-faced virgin trolls ever been capable of reason...?), the board ops appealed to their ISP, their local police, then finally -- in desperation -- the FBI, but were told by almost everybody in a position to help to essentially f*ck off and stop wasting everybody's time with such nonsense. The fact that the troll was probably breaking numerous laws didn't seem to matter.
When they invoked the specter of legal action, their ISP's so-called security team laughed and suggested they get "Mulder and Scully" onto the case.
I think it would be better if ALL trolls could see each others posts, but no one else could. That way they can troll each other and have there fun.
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The existence of public space doesn't mean that anybody's obligated to show up at your web site and listen to you, or that anybody's SMTP server is obligated to accept your requests to connect to their Port 25*, any more than the existence of public parks and legality of soapboxes means that anybody's obligated to stick around and listen to you rant about space aliens' plots to destroy us all with volcanoes, but if you've gotten thrown out of the pub because you were rudely yelling at everybody about why they should buy canned meat from you, the commons and the high seas are still public space. The internet works through cooperation, and if nobody wants to cooperate with you because you won't cooperate with them, well, perhaps their lives are drearier for it, or perhaps not.
There are ways in which private groups are trying to take over public space. Various proposals for "internet drivers' licenses" and various governments' restrictions on their citizens' free speech and freedom to read are obvious examples. Australia's attempts to extend local defamation law around the world are especially disturbing, given the number of regimes that make "defaming the state" illegal. ICANN's main objective seems to be to assert trademark-owners' control over the namespace, and secondarily to make sure that some service providers always make money on namespace, rather than to provide technical management and high-quality implementations. You can see this especially in their insistence that registrars get your True Name and True Subpoena-Delivery Address for whois records and publish them, rather than insisting that your Technical and Administrative email addresses go somewhere that doesn't bounce and maybe even get a human to respond. Some big ISPs periodically try to attract customers to a Walled Garden that doesn't really access the full Internet, and the market gradually tells them that people want more than that - that's why AOL now lets you fetch real web pages as well as AOL-provided content, and cellphone WAP systems aren't getting the respect their purveyors expected, so they're trying to find better ways to get real Internet content and not just newswires. The cable modem companies are the big exceptions right now, by trying to prevent their users from running "servers" from home (there were initially some technical reasons for this, but it was always basically the fear that they might not be in control.) That hasn't killed them all yet, though @Home's really dead, and their quasi-monopoly status and TV-content-pusher background has made it take longer for them to realize that they need active users to generate interesting content and develop the Killer Apps that will make everybody else buy cable modem, but they'll get there. The kinds of people who want to tell Google how to rank their pages because everybody uses Google to search the web are another example, not realizing that the reason that everybody uses Google is *because* of the way they rank their pages, and if they want to have a "politically correct web search ranking" system, which is really just an outlet for their own speech and ideas, they should use the Internet's public-space capability, set out their own soapbox with a big "politically correct searches here" sign over it, and hope the public shows up.
* There's a corrolary to Godwin's Law which says that all discussions that don't trigger the primary form of it will eventually devolve into discussions about spam.... But then Godwin also used to be an EFF lawyer...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That's exactly what I do on my website's forums and it works like a charm.
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