Month: October 1998

i remember the first time i got on irc. it must have been in 1994 or 1995. after several unsuccessful attempts, i finally found a channel, called #nin that i liked and was joining on odd occasions (re: when i should have been in class). one day, this character ladydeth and i were sitting around yacking, when she said something like ‘hi lisa rabey’.
i was scared shitless.
not knowing anything about the wondrous power of /whois, i had always assumed that my identity was kept secret. it wasn’t. little did i know that my info line in the /whois command provided the person loads of information, such as my ‘real name’, my ip number, and what my user id was. now obviously, this is just a scant explanation, but humor me for the moment.
i asked her (if it were really a her), how she did that. after much teasing and giggling, she showed me the ropes onto irc. several weeks later, armed with scripts and a better working knowledge of UNIX, i was safely hidden.
with the advent of kiddie-hax0rs (kids who find gui-based programs to ‘hack’), and the damn near easiness to do so, you can change your /whois identity on irc with barely a sniffle. you can fake both dns and ip numbers, change your user id (thanks to mirc), and fake just about everything there is now. i would say roughly about 80% of the population doesn’t care about this, but the 20% that does, this is helpful (if not harmful) information.
but the purpose of my discussing this isn’t to show someone how to do it, but that no matter what is said, your privacy on the internet is an oxymoron.
last night, i was talking to my friend jacob, whom i met on #easteden and whom i’ve known for about 3-4 years. while we were lamenting about how lame the web was and how lame even irc was, i decided to check out my counter states for simunye.org. while i would say overall i could give a rats ass about how many hits i get, i’m always curious as to WHO is accessing my page. since i put the link up on first domain to here, i have seen the hits go up. okay, no big deal. .com is in every fucking search engine, and i have all three domains on my .sig file. but still, i’m nosey as hell, and i wanted to know.
slip.net (also known as the fucking company i work for) offers full access to web logs, which is pretty damn cool. you download some lame program like webtrends, use it in demo mode and off you go. stats and java based information shows up and you get to see crap like what hours the pages are more accessed, and things that are not that great (like what browser/OS). i’m sure if i really gave a fuck, this would be important, but it’s not. I just want to know about the PEOPLE.
so one day, i’m hanging out at will’s page, and he has this free counter that allows you configure a lot of shit for it. you can do things like have a cookie inserted so it won’t count ‘you’ when you do the page (handy for me since I always refresh it when i’m writing it), and you could also put in a list of top 10 domains to see whose coming from what domains that would be relavent to you. so, i’m configuring the fucker, and i put in a domain of someone, who i haven’t spoken to in about 8 months.
now you would thinking ‘why would she do that?’. well simple: i’m nosey and i wanted to know if the person who basically said: “i don’t give a shit about you anymore.” was lying or not. 🙂 i always just ‘wondered’ if when people say that if they meant it. i know that i don’t (all the time, depending on the person), but that’s me and not them.
so i’m nosing around, checking out my stats. and i look. i blink several times, and say ‘holy shit!’. jacob asked me what’s going on. i give him the basic rundown, he sighs as if ‘damnit lisa, stop being so weird.’
what it was, is that one person i never though would venture to my page, ventured. i thought about why that person would, and a zillion things went through my mind. i fired up ws_ftp, down loaded the log files from simunye.com, and started manually going through them with a fine tooth comb. since the access to the log files are in ascii format, it shows up as ip numbers, and where they were referred from. so for instance if you do a search at a search engine about: +hot +big +cocks, and for some unknown reason, my page comes up in the listing and you go to my page, not only do i have the ip number you are coming in from (with handy tools such as traceroute that will allow me to figure out the isp/company that it originates from. which i could report to the isp/company with, by checking their radius logs could figure out who was on that machine/ip that particular day.), i know what browser your using, what OS and that you were at at the search engine looking for +hot +big +cocks humor me on the technicalities). i check through a few things, and yep. that person has been to the site where the lisa chronicles were originally set up, several times in the month of september.
BUSTED!
what does this mean?
actually, unless you are a freak like me, who constantly needs to know about things she really doesn’t need to know. i thought about emailing the person and saying “so, i thought you didn’t give a rats ass about me.” but then they would probably end off some long ass flame or they would ignore me.
okay, in all actuality, it begs a few questions (ones i was thinking about before i finished my smoke), and so i’m going to answer those questions now.
Lesson Learned:
The main lesson I’m stressing here is that NO ONE is ‘private’ on the internet. Sure there are exceptions, but those are few and far between. But guaranteed that if there is someone like me manually combing log files, there are people doing a search on +hot +big +cocks on altavista. So remember that when you are looking for something.
I also thought about many possibilities such as:
It possibly cannot be that person.
This is also a possibility because they are not the only ones using that particular domain. It is an ISP after all. But the chances are that is pretty slim since it is a regional ISP and I don’t know that many people (other than them) in that area using that ISP.
They are reading this now and won’t come back.
I’ve existed 26 years without them, and so I can continue living. 😉 Okay, that is rather snotty, but truth be told, this page is for me, not for them.
they are reading this and think you are even more crazy then before. doesn’t the word obsessive mean anything to you?
Erm.
Okay, it sounds obsessive, but it isn’t really. Obsessiveness would be hounding this person, by email, phone, snail mail. Hanging pictures up, thinking we are going to work things out, and all that other fun stuff. Basically anything that seems a little overboard, probably would border on obsessiveness. But truth be told, when we broke it off, it hurt. and it hurt bad. i considered this person to be one of my bestest friends in the whole world, and it hurt that we no longer even had some sort of communication level or that we were even going to be speaking anymore. i think that if anyone went through that, they would understand what i’m feeling.
but you just wrote a whole entry on the fact that you found a their domain in your web logs.
Sue me.
i think that i’m going to go away now….
okay okay look. it’s like this. certain people really dig hard into me. they strike much emotion and depth *from me* it’s frightening. i do crazy things, but it’s because i want them to know that yeah, i really dig them too. not many people do that to me. less than a handful in my whole life. this is one of those people.
i’m not going to be stupid and think that we are going to be even friends one day, because i won’t delude myself. but i guess i just wanted to say ‘you know, i miss you. i still think about you. i hope your doing okay. and i still care in some sort of capacity.’
um, sure.
okay, here is another example. when i was 19 i dated this guy, alan. we dated from the time i ws 19 till i was 21. we broke up, and i was devastated. i spent two years in grievance because of it.
last winter, i was out to dinner with my friend michael, and i saw alan’s twin in the restaurant. i thought to myself “how the hell can he be where i’m at?”. my stomach dropped to the floor and i cried all night. and it had been over four years since the break up.
even though i hadn’t even barely thought of him or what happened. it became nothing more than a dim memory. the mere site of his ‘twin’ just burst my poor heart into flames and anguish.
okay, that’s melodrama, but, you get the point. 🙂
a mind fuck game
that could very well be true. this person and i were not that hip to being completely honest with each other. it was always a struggle, and it was always exciting because of the struggle. they couldn’t conquer me and i couldn’t conquer them. that is what made it exciting. at least to me. they were my hero.
sounds like you’re in love still
what is love? but a flower blooming on stem?.. bad poetry. i don’t know what love is. but i know what i’m feeling and i know what i felt with that person. i know how that person made me feel. it wasn’t always rational, and it wasn’t always right.
the relationship, in a lot of aspects was totally unhealthy: too much fantasizing, too much projecting. too much hope. too much left unsaid.
so get over it.
hahahahahaha.
who says i haven’t? i’m not OBSESSING about him (see here), it’s just that. i always had about a 1000 different answers for everything. i just miss them. a lot. why can’t that ever be good enough for someone?
So, i could continue on with this for hours, however, Justin is waiting for me outside and it’s time to go home and do something this weekend.
Let’s just say, even if this was nothing but an over assumption of one web log, to know the possibility that person is curious enough to even venture here. well, that’s enough for me.
 
1.not really. however, this is for arguments sake, and so that i won’t spend hours arguing with myself. i want it all. i would never settle for less. but i will wait. for what i want. for the most part. just the fact alone! convinces me that even in some aspect, no matter how much you say you don’t care, you do. 🙂