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The Day Leo Traynor Confronted His Troll
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.'"
Compared to the typical trolling found on the internet, this seems a bit more like harassment or stalking, no?
So, do we actually believe that a college-age man is sufficiently motivated to troll the same person, including offline, for weeks on end; but so obtuse that he doesn't realize such trolling's effects, or did TFA's author just get played by a sociopathic little fucker's crocodile tears?
I'm voting for #2, personally. Wholly anonymous mob pile-ons can easily enough sweep up ethically-unimpressive-but-basically-standard-issue people; and some damaged-but-mostly-harmless types actually seem willing to spend their time dumping copypasta on entire forums; but solitary, prolonged, systematic trolling of one target chosen for no reason? Kid is bad seed.
I bet they used a GUI interface using Visual Basic!
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
God hates fags
Yes. Smoking can kill you.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Keywords in the original text:
"basically an IT genius,"
"hacked my facebook account"
"trace the hackers and trolls for me using perfectly legal technology, which would lead to their IP addresses."
"the abuse had emanated from three separate IP addresses in different corners of Ireland."
"The third location was a friend's house."
so, you can know the house location of each poster on twitter ? - troll-
Sounds like a lifetime movie to me.
At what point would a sane person just call the cops?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Oddly heartwarming ending. It's awesome when people can take the high road and restrain themselves from lashing back at abusers, who do this stuff out of boredom, insecurity, and immaturity (or sometimes mental instability issues, alas). But recognizing that people do stupid regrettable crap, and that maybe their lives need not be ruined over it, and that maybe some good might come out of something bad... that's great strength and maturity. Kudos.
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
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. Or the license that that guy in North Carolina needs to publish dietary advice on his blog. Or the law license that Elizabeth Warren doesn't need because she's one of the special people.
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.
"I was deliberately more provocative toward them than ever I'd been before."
This sentence makes me think that, however vile the "troll" could have turned out to be, this wasn't an entirely black-versus-white situation. I suspect this guy was being a jerk back at anyone who was a jerk to him, and it escalated further than he thought it would.
#DeleteChrome
This is stalking
Its like calling arson vandalism
Identify the nature of the transgression correctly
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A kid basically ruined the guy's life, essentially just for lulz -- or for lack of anything constructive to do with his time. Fortunately, the kid did not understand how traceable IP addresses are and he was caught and confronted. Most interesting part of it was that the kid really didn't seem to truly comprehend what devastation he was causing to another human being, because he did it all remotely from the safety of his computer.
Reality is that this is just an extreme example of what goes on daily on semi-anonymous message boards (like this one). If we all had to show our faces, I'm sure we'd be a little more civil toward one another. Personally, I don't think I run a very high risk of ending up in the situation that this guy was in, since I value my online anonymity too much. I realize that for many, the temptation to spread their personal misery is just too great, and so they troll, which is really just a cry for attention -- something they probably didn't get enough of growing up.
Anyway, enough pontificating. Queue the trolls...
See also the radio troll Alan Jones in Australia - very upset this weekend because he was caught the second time he said he publicly addressed a group of people with a comment about the Australian Leader's recently deceased father dying of shame. Stirring up a race riot a couple of years back and getting away with it probably made him think he could get away with anything.
What god? Cthulu hates everyone.
It's a nice moralistic story but it doesn't pass the smell test
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"There are a lot of people arguing that this whole story is a fable; the IT guy the author presents to defend his account is a feckless bullshitter. Basically it's a case of two guys who don't know that they don't know the technical difficulties in what they claim to have done. The whole thing is embarrassing and annoying."
Are we getting ... wait for it ... trolled? (Can I start a meme? Rick-Trolled?)
What's really out of whack is the sequence of events. So the cops can't find this guy, they're wringing their hands in helplessness. Along comes "An IT Genius" that traces the house by IP ... and the cops couldn't call any of their guys on the entire force to do that? However if the kid torrented a Song they would have found him pronto.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Cthulu want more brownies!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The author is just too naive, or cowardly to deliver his friend's son with legal action.
In the end the author tries to spin this little story as a 'I'm the bigger man' tale instead.
The author is at this point just enabling him, like his parents.
This is a 17 year old who's in college. He's a danger to himself and others, and any additional damage caused by him will also be in the author's head.
What did he learn from this? Cry when you get caugh, and your actions have no consequences.
Post a link for a guy to click on. He clicks on it. It goes to a page you publish on your server. You look in the server logs. You know his IP address. Then you can find his city and possibly his neighborhood from that. And you know his ISP.
After that it can become more difficult. But it's hardly impossible. If a friend at the guy's ISP will do you a favor (the troll in the story is local), or if you can simply guess the right answer and check it, it's easy again. If you can read someone's cookies with a cross-site scripting vulnerability or trick them into installing malware, it's not going to be too hard to find them.
How does Traynor's "genius" I.T. friend get an IP address from ...Facebook (wtf??) ?
Quite easy. You post a status with a link that's only visible to the stalker. When he visits the link, you have his IP address.
Happened to me in high school.
I blocked at least a dozen AIM accounts a night for weeks (maybe months); I can be fortunate there was no "twitter" then, nor this "book of faces", and that smartphones were this exciting new thing Handspring was just introducing to the market that nobody could afford.
Then I got two unsolicited copies of the TSR novel "Death of the Dragon" in the mail - this may have been an error by a small book distributor I did business with, so I can't be sure -- but "Dragon" was part of the IM name I used at the time, and I could never be sure. I still have both copies, and I haven't read either. I don't actually think I even touched either after I put them on the bookshelf those years ago.
Then the fella proved himself grossly incompetent, and threatened to beat me to death. In a public library, where I "was", he was "behind" me. I was sitting at a desk, at home, with a baseball bat within arms' reach. I mocked him for the rest of the night, and then it ended. He failed. Epically. His confrontation... wasn't.
But I'm not in high school any more. I spent the next couple years reading books like "Shooting To Live" and "Kill or Get Killed". I took years of aikido, tae kwon do, and studied a few forms of swordplay for a few more years. I carry a gun, and enough ammo to get through the statistically average civilian-defense gunfight, and then a little more. Sometimes, more than one. I'm seriously considering building some ghetto-but-effective body armor. (Steel rifle plates went out of style because they're heavy and unconcealable, but they offer an awful lot of protection). I don't carry a gun because I expect to get in a fight; I carry because I don't expect to get in a fight. If I expected one, I'd simply send a SWAT team in my stead, and sip Starbucks in the mobile command center. (No police department takes documentable, documented conspiracy to commit murder lightly in this age of lawsuits!) I don't sit with my back to the door at restaurants any more, I know what phrases like "condition yellow" mean, and I look for the bulge of a poorly-concealed weapon now when someone walks into the gas station while I'm fueling up.
Fortunately, for the most part, I don't mind living like this. In practice, 98% of the time, it just means I can make unplanned trips to the gun range without going home for weapons. And - unlike most liberals - I know a secret: The shooting sports are fun. I hesitate to say it, but it's a blast to put 20 shots into a single hole not any bigger than a nickel; mastery for its own sake is one of the most rewarding things.
But somewhere, deep down, I know and cannot forget: I found this thing I enjoy because someone threatened to kill me in a public place, in front of witnesses, and get away with it. And other geeks may not get through it as well as I did. I may enjoy the trappings, but I wouldn't want to put anyone through the scary parts on the way to where I am today.
Let us not mistake this for an isolated incident; it is not. Let us not mistake it for something new; it is not. Let us not allow this to happen again; it should not.
The article is most likely a fake.
Tracking someones home simply by having an IP adress with no help from the ISP and various legal procedures? Yeah, sure.
*Not* going to the police over physical world death-threats? Yeah, sure.
I bet money that this is a fabricated news story by a loony pseudo journalist. Or that Leo Traynor simply doesn't exist. There are accounts on the interweb that indicate this.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
360 degrees means you're looking directly at the xbox again ...
Leo Traynor is a fiction. Apparently he has lived in no less than seventeen countries over the past eight years, including some of the most politically unstable regions on the planet; more that he has managed to stay still long enough to gain a DPhil in international politics (no school anywhere has any record of him), that he has worked for all three main parties in the UK as a press liaison officer (yet no mention of him in the Press, ever). That he has worked for both parties in the US as a Press liaison officer (ditto). His story is so full of holes you could drain chips with it.
Leo Traynor, you are a bullshitter.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
That's basically what this guy was, a bully. He was picking out someone he deemed weaker, he looked for a trigger that he could push to make his victim cower in fear and he went for it. That's the same shit that has been going down schoolyards for ages now.
The only reason this gets some attention is that it can happen to someone of voting age.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A good beating will modify the behaviour of anyone dramatically.
Evidence shows that punishment like this only modifies behaviour whilst the threat continues. Remove the threat, and you'll find nothing changed. This has been very precisely studied.
Medieval crowd control methods as practised by the Catholic Church and Vlad the Impaler, still work just as efficiently today, as it did back then.
Gee... you must be an authoritarian personality. People are different. They are not all like you. Most are not like you. You cannot project your experience of life onto others. Perhaps medieval crowd control would be good for you -- but for the rest of us, it will just create a spiral of violence. Like the violence in medieval times.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
And then you find out the household that was using that IP address at that time by...?
Remember, Fantasy Man here assures us this his "basically an IT genius" friend did it "legally".
How?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Fun fact, per the DSM-IV Sociopathy, or actually Antisocial Personality Disorder, as it's now known, can't be diagnosed before age 18.
Technically correct, because the childhood version has its own separate equivalent, known as Conduct Disorder, in which the criteria are appropriately tailored for the characteristics of younger individuals. Note that the criteria list for Antisocial Personality Disorder includes an item for past history of Conduct Disorder, too.
The author of this story typifies everything that is wrong with today's no-accountability culture.
He's weak in the exact way that fosters the troll that tortured him. I honestly find myself disgusted with him. I imagine, though she may not admit it, his wife was not thrilled and consciously or subconsciously thinks less of his approach to "defending" the family.
I don't care if it's a friend's kid or my kid. He needed to fail at manipulating his way out of trouble. He needed to go before the police and the courts.
Now others will suffer because of the author's common, and absolutely awful, "the past is the past, I forgive you" approach to dealing with crime.
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