mercredi 25 décembre 2013

Weird Internet Experiences

My weirdest. I thought of this because of a thread in FMF. Now I can't get it out of my mind unless I write it out.



Ten maybe twelve years ago. I was running AOL 6.0 on a laptop with Win98SE connecting via a 56K modem. One of the first things I discovered was I liked message boards. Still do (obviously). The one I favored at AOL was the News Board. But it was funky. I had never ever seen the kind of stuff I saw on that message board. The most racist stuff imaginable. I remember commenting in one thread, "I didn't know people still thought like this. I haven't seen these kinds of comments since the 1960s!" One of the worst was a thread entitled:




Quote:








Barry Bonds: Steroid Ridden N-word



Only the N-word was spelled out. I was shocked that AOL would let stuff like that remain.



Okay so in one thread there were women obsessing about how shallow guys are. I said biologists say (I had just seen a Nova show about this) that the males of most species are hard-wired by evolution to seek as many sex partners as possible. Females of the species are usually the ones that make the choices.



One of the women (the outspoken one) responded that was a disgusting comment. I told her, "It's not. I just heard this comment on Nova." Later when I went back to see what other followups there were I discovered my message had been deleted. I complained about this in a message. I said that on a board that permits some of the most outrageous racial crap imaginable it was hard for me to believe I had been censored for making the comment I made.



There was a pretty cool poster on the board and he said AOL regularly censors serious comments while never censoring racist comments. He added, "Draw your own conclusions." I was really shocked and I replied that maybe my U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton, would be interesting in learning that.



About five minutes later I lost my AOL connection. Back in the 56K era that was not too unusual so I thought nothing of it. Only when I tried to reconnect I got the following message from Windows:





Quote:








Unable to connect with AOL. Needed components are missing or damaged.







This seemed like an amazing coincidence -- I threaten to make a racial complaint to Hillary Clinton and in five minutes I lose my AOL connection and can't log back on. But I thought, "Nah. It is a coincidence."



But what to do? Then I remembered I had a CD with a free AOL 4.0 download. I dug it out, loaded it and replaced my software. I logged back on to AOL. After using 6.0 for a while 4.0 looked pretty primitive so I ran an upgrade to 6.0. When that finished I went back to the message board. I wanted to see if there were any replies to my threat to complain to Hillary Clinton. As soon as I clicked on Message Boards my AOL screen slowly dissolved. Wow!, I thought. I don't believe this. When I tried to log back on I got the same message again: Missing or damaged components. I was stunned!



In disbelief I reloaded 4.0. I got back on AOL. I decided NOT to check on the message board. Instead I checked my email and maybe read the late sports scores. I had no problems and when I finished up I logged off and went to bed.



This was on a Saturday night and Sunday I decided not to try and access the message board again. Monday at work I called AOL to complain. The customer rep was pretty nice. He said that the message boards do have moderators but he said none can access an individual account, much less disable it. Not the way I was describing. I said well apparently one of them can. Maybe you've got an ex-hacker working for you. We discussed it some more -- and as I say, he did impress me as a pretty straightforward guy -- and he finally asked would I hold while he checked with a supervisor? He came back on and said something like, "Sir we checked with the techs here. Believe me, there is absolutely no way a moderator could do something like that."



I said to him, "I can believe that's what they're telling you. But within five minutes of posting that message my connection was corrupted. I reloaded and everything was normal until I tried to access the message board. Then I immediately lost my connection and had to reload AOL all over again. It never happened before and it hasn't happened since." I said to him, "I would feel like a complete fool if I didn't believe somebody at AOL had been retaliating against me. I don't want to believe it either. But I would feel foolish to think anything else. It's really not explainable any other way."



To my surprise the customer rep kind of hedged. I thought, 'OMG I think I'm actually convincing this guy I'm right!'



It didn't happen again either. Of course the next time I visited the message boards I used my work computer. You know, just to be on the safe side. :D





via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=270918&goto=newpost

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