As DBs mentioned last week when he introduced me on his column, I`ve been privileged enough to have been online slightly longer than the average Quaker. Over the past four and a half years, I`ve had connections ranging from lan to Bristol Uni`s wide boy pipe to the cheap 9.6kbps smartcard modem and mobile phone I was reduced to using whilst working in Ibiza. And unlike most who`ve had connection as long as me, I pride myself in not having disappeared up my own arse, avoiding the common aloofness and distance that most adopt simply because they know the answer to every newbie question they see online, and feel superior to. Instead, I remain as willing as any to enter the nearest flame war and frequently step out of line as every newbie during their first faltering steps online inevitably do. (Thanks go to Skeeve for keeping me in check on the BarrysWorld Web board the other day. "Can I have my head back please mister?" J)

So after four years of having been a user it`s been kinda nice over the past six months to have finally got to met those up there… Who am I talking about? Well none other than the "people with the power," those who "press the buttons," the silent ones whose names you should fear to mention because if you do, and you offend them, seconds later they`ll reduce the extent of your online life to the login screen…

And what prey tell have I learnt from meeting these people? Well that`s the important part, and to be honest, it`s bloody scary.

Now I`m not scare mongering here, and I`m not talking about the average irc oper or web admin either, I`m talking about rare individuals whose inability to cope with what equates to supreme executive power has led them on massive ego trips and caused unprecedented behavior. But what I am asking is that people be made more aware of what goes on up there, so perhaps it might be kept in check a little more often. The phrase, "you`ve been a very, very naughty boy" doesn`t even begin to describe it, and, if like me, you thought the people who ran the show were all mature, adult types who were bound by rigid codes of conduct, you`ve got a lot to learn.

Take, for the example, the ISP admin who the recently crashed the IRC server I use by flooding it with his ISP`s core line just because I beat him at Ra2. I mean, how childish? This guy crashed hundreds of people from the server, taking away what could be their only chance during the day to chat online with friends they won`t see elsewhere to settle a personal vendetta. And this is just the start.

During my early days as one of the wannabie freaks on alt.gothic, (shout out to oddlystrange who still haunts those twisted and at times hilarious halls of passage) a fellow poster once found herself mail bombed thirty times a day by an ISP mail admin simply because in her opinion, Marylin Manson isn`t very good. Things got so bad that eventually, instead of helping her solve the problem, her ISP cancelled her account claiming that she was "a liability user who went looking for trouble" and quoted some extremely vague and dodgy looking mail she`d posted months before.

Next consider the African American who on finally raising enough money to set up the basics of a ISP for his town`s community, found his only available router to the outside world, a geographically nearby ISP, wouldn`t hook him up because their node admin "didn`t like niggers." An attitude that in a real life situation, would have sent the admin to prison…

And do you know the worst part? 99.9% of the time, there`s nothing you can do about it. You see, when it comes down to using what online rules and regulations there are, one major factor comes into play, and that`s proof. Hard, undeniable evidence, and as things are, most of the time this just isn`t available.

In the case of the Denial of Service attack that crashed the irc server I use, I`d be reliant on the routers between myself and the source for proof. But in most cases, the people that provide this routing service only bother to log the data sent or received by their own clients, leaving those that transfer through them safe as long as they mask the source ip, which this guy of course did.

The mail bombing admin used re-mailers to cover his tracks, knowing he`d be safe as the re-mailer`s connection had a much larger transfer capacity than the poor girl`s modem had. He also knew that the majority of re-mailer admins close their eyes to such activities both out of laziness and also in fear for their own set up.

Life as one of those up there it appears, depends very much on their position in the pecking order. And this is defined as much they their rig`s beefcake value as it is by their own personal skills.

So here comes my request. If you've had similar experiences, get in touch sometime. I'm not out to turn this into a personal crusade, it's not particularly wise considering how vulnerable my hosts have to make themselves as a free ISP, but I am curious to see if it's a common occurrence. Perhaps even pick out a few regularly mentioned individuals and shop them in… BarrysWorld have done my a lot of favour in putting this column up, so I promise not to attract hassle for themselves by putting stuff up here, so just let me know.

But enough whining. Just next time you go to load your favorite webby and find it's taking ages to load, instead of grumbling about your lame 33.6kps modem, consider that perhaps it's another causality in one of those up there's little wars.

Couple of quick shouts now. Ta muchly to Gestalt at PlanetQuake and the wonderful people at GameGirlz for linking me. 100 hits an hour is not sommit to be laughed at. J

Next, a couple of benchmarks for 3Dfx`s new OpenGL game dlls. Unfortunately being the 450 V2 SLi animal that I am, I can't actually give the top end benchmarks as my current monitor only does 85Hz and I don't wanna mess with the v-sync tab just to get a couple of numbers. Instead I'll mention the 30.6fps to 31.3 fps rise I got with the new miniGL on the brain numbingly slow crusher.dm2 @ 800&600 with gl_round_down 0 and gl_shadows 1. Only a 2% rise in fps, so I'm left wondering why they bothered. Has anyone noticed better image quality? Or is it a bug fix? (Having not had a crash in Q2 since 3.12 I find that hard to believe…) Or is it simply cos boys love playing with their toys? J

Final couple of things for tonight… Frenzy. There's that word again, hope you`re paying attention. J And thanks to Eric Sage amongst the many who mailed about the Anime character. Your offers are appreciated. And of course, thanks to all for reading. J

Thought for the day:

<DBs> let me check
<DBs> yesterday we achieved 213595 hits to the barrysworld.com domain
<Carla> irk
<DBs> 977 hits were too our columns
*Carla grins
<DBs> 970 were to your column :)
<DBs> 7 to the rest
*DBs eats more hormone tablets
<Carla> <no comment>
<Carla> :-)
<Carla> Can I paste this to the column? ;-)

"If you buy this record your life, could be better, could be better....." J