This may belong in one of any number of forums, but MPSIMS is my Dopehome, so I’ll start it here.
For reasons beyond my ken I have been contacted again by a cyber…***hole that I have repeatedly asked to leave me alone.
If he’s bright and reasonable he’ll just fade away again and my life will go on.
He’s not had a habit of being either bright or reasonable. In light of that, I’m thinking I should start gearing up for bad stuff. Do the Dopers at large have a handle on what the applicable laws are for cyberstalkers and how I could contact anyone who could educate/help me?
If you have experiance in dealing with these sort of people and know specific helpful information, I’d appreciate an e-mail as the idiot in question probably will read this. Or I could just be getting paranoid. (probably both.)
I’m sorry to inflict this on the boards, but you people are the smart, educated, compassionate people I trust…and I need your help.
If it’s with email you should try to get the full header (this is the part you usually can’t see at the top of each email) of the email to find out more information about who is sending it. Or get a new email address. Or get email filtering software so you can filter out any messages from the person.
a link from e-mail has directed me to this site and I’m reading all sorts of facinating things.
I hope it doesn’t get this bad.
[sub]upon preview I have to pat myself on the back for remembering the vB code correctly the first time[/sub]
handy, he hasn’t sent me an e-mail since the last time I took serious action against him (reporting him to his ISP and getting his service pulled), and I have (of course) blocked every e-mail he ever used to contact me.
He just left a long, personal comment in my livejournal. He’s one of two people that I have ever met that I object to contacting me. I’d rather keep my livejournal public because, for the most part, I like people, even people I don’t know yet. Hopefully he won’t escalate beyond a this. I’m just preparing myself in case he does.
Well I guess that it’s good no one has ever ‘stalked’ me. They would regret the day they ever started it. What would I do? Well I’d just stalk them back. I’d find out every detail I could, I’d lock their email up with all the junk I could send. And heaven help anyone who tried it IRL. I’d be sleeping on their doorstep. Intimidation was never a problem for me.
Good luck and go get 'em.
Unfortunately, I have a life. And a high horse morality mind set. I don’t want to hurt anyone, I just want my life to not have him in it. I was doing great on that goal for a while, and now I’ve failed again.
Is he “cyber” stalking you, or has he made comments to the effect that he has other ways of contacting/observing you?
If the creep is actually physically stalking you, contact the police IMMEDIATELY. They will probably not consider it an emergency, and depending on local stalking laws, may even tell you there’s nothing they can do, but a complaint will be on record and further action will be easier. A restraining order may be necessary if he is stalking you IRL also.
As for a cyber stalker, sounds like you’re taking appropriate measures. Just make sure he stays out of your day-to-day “real” life - if he starts stalking you in the real world you should consider it a life-threatening situation.
Oh trust me, if he was even in the same state as I am, I would not be this laid back about it.
Currently, I’m just gathering information, mostly because that is how I combat fear. when I have enough information, I’ll be less afraid, and my life will go happily on as it should.
If he was an IRL stalker things would be very, very different.
Thank good god its just cyberspace. And not even private cyber space. If I really wanted to I could batten down many, many hatches that I leave open on purpose. (Not for the purposes of being stalked, but the purposes of being availible. I like people. It hasn’t gotten bad to the point of giving up the luxury of open honesty online.)
OK, just found you on LiveJournal and read a 3-part ramble that has to be the long reply you’re referring to.
Creepy.
Take any and all action you need to to protect yourself from this creep. I’m afraid I can’t give you any good suggestions for the current situation of cyber-stalking, but for what its worth I’m thinking good thoughs for you and you’ve got one shaggy highlander in your corner.
First of all, on the cyber front, I would do this:
Go here and download the free version, which is plenty.
Then go here and click on “Test my shields”. Keep restricting stuff on your machine, until everything comes back stealth mode. That means that your machine is totally invisible on the net. If someone tries to make a connection to your unshielded machine, his request is actively rejected by the operating system, which tells him that your machine is definitely “there”. What a firewall does is drop the requests altogether, so NO response is sent out to would be hackers.
Kilt I’m of the opinion that good thoughts do great deeds and I love the idea of shaggy highlanders in my room…er…corner. (and I’ll raise you some of those good thoughts…)
Oicu I post/do e-mail/livejournal from all over hell and tarnation, my home computer is behind several firewalls, both of it’s own and the network created by my housemate. I’m not all that worried about security. I’m more worried about emotional/mental health.
You have asked him/her/it to stop. My strong advice is to never respond again, just ignore it and it will eventually get bored and go away.
Continue to get hard copy print outs and if it does not go away in about 6 months, talk to a lawyer who specializes in restraining orders and bring in your box of evidence.
M’s Child, I know you already have a good supply of friends on this board, but if you need to talk please feel free to e-mail me - the address on my profile is an account I check every day or so. I don’t know what I can do besides sympathize and encourage, but if you need reassurance…well, I’ll do what I can to help someone who’s dealing with this kind of scum.
As for highlanders in your room…it’s just a pity I’m no good at flirting in text…
You might try this link. Someone here (I forget who, Kricket maybe ?) posted that their friend had a cyber-stalker, and someone suggested these folks to her.
Kilt its a pleasure to meet you and I hope I can add you to that list of wonderful people I call my friends here. (And if vice versa, I’d be honored) I’ll probably drop you a line in here sometime, but I hope to get over this little…issue…soon.
As for flirting in text, give it a shot sometime, its kinda fun. (And I can’t really do more, IRL I’m taken. now if I could get my SO into a kilt…mmm…goodness…)
Ayesha Thanks for the link! And yea, I’m pretty sure I’m physically safe and my computer is safe. (not that anything on there is of much importance. My writing. My old Engineering Projects. Ooh.)
To everyone, thanks for taking the time to e-mail or post, I’m feeling much much better about the whole thing. People are wornderful creatures, all in all. Its worth it to risk finding bad apples to be involved with all the good ones.
There is also a danger that a hacker may use your computer as a launching point for an attack against some other computer. When you hear about Denial-Of-Service attacks against big online companies, what happens is that the attacker commandeers as many computers as possible to send a bunch of electronic junk to the target and overload it. I would suggest a hardware firewall (router). This way, even if an attack is launched, it stops at the router and never reaches your computer. You can also use it to hook up a network to a single Internet connection. The one I use is Netgear RT311, it was about $50 last year.
Thanks! We have a router already in place (I told you I trusted my housemate… EE can come in handy on ocassion…) I don’t know what kind it is, but he swears that our little network is happy and safe.
I know you said you aren’t worried about security, but if there is even a small chance that this scum might be savvy enough to have hacked one or more of the computers you work from, go to http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm and scroll about 5/6 of the way down the page (it’s interesting reading, so the scrolling is optional…) to the section titled A Quick & Easy Check for IRC Zombie/Bots and follow the instructions there. These methods will let you know if your computer’s being used for denial of service attacks.
Hey, whaddaya know! Maybe I can be good for something besides good thoughts and encouragement…