Official Warning: Zero3K
reactos.org
reactos.org
Ultimately he ended up unemployable and bitter while his family tripled down on him being the victim because of an Asperger’s diagnosis. Moved to central Canada last time I heard.
I think what I learned from the experience is at some point you’ve got to compartmentalize harmful people from your groups and inevitably a growing number of segments of society, even if that feels wrong in some way. It’s more wrong to let them perpetually abuse people.
Edit: I’m not going to litigate this. If you don’t trust me or don’t want to accept that this person was truly abusive and harmful, or if you believe that victims should be made to tolerate abuse, I can’t help you.
This a real thing, mild forms are socially inhibiting, extreme forms can mean social skills are completely crippled.
I feel sorry for these people (although I’m probably in the mild category), but I’m not sure what we could do to help without getting hurt ourselves?
I just hope my kid is normal socially with a good sense of empathy.
But the abusive parts got worse and worse and became intolerable. I’m not sure what could have been done differently. Though as a teenager that was probably not my role to play.
this strikes me as similar to the concept of being for life imprisonment over the spending of resources towards rehabilitation.
To throw people to the wayside because YOU have determined them to be 'UN-fixable' IS wrong. It's useful for YOU to compartmentalize them out of your life because they represent a personal burden -- but this doesn't help them improve themselves or their conditions; it may not be your responsibility to help them improve -- but many of these people are hopeless without outsider intervention, they need help, not partitioning. If you can't help them then the next best thing is to make an effort to find them help, not to shut the door in their face.
>It’s more wrong to let them perpetually abuse people
what do you think happens when you make yourself lost contact with these people? Well, having been 'compartmentalized' earlier in life and never receiving any help or social training, they continue to perpetually abuse other people.
Ironically the strategy of isolating them from oneself likely increases or prolongs their time 'out of step' with society -- all it does is protects YOU from the damage the person might do.
All I can say is that i'm glad the entire world doesn't take your advice of 'compartmentalizing harmful people', otherwise this place would be a pretty brutal world to live in.
It's really not his or her job to fix abusers.
most societies believe that each individual must contribute to some degree. It's being lost, but for most societies historically the mentally ill were the burden of the immediate family.
Now we see the effects of the mental illness affecting society-at-large, it stands to reason that the entirety of the affected population is now somewhat responsible for making their own lives better by trying to assess and remediate the problems within their society.
If I walked past litter on the ground in my home-town, I wouldn't say "Hey, not my job." and walk past it, I would pick it up for the betterment of my town.
This isn't a foreign concept for most people.
This is this and that is that. Litter won't stab you, whereas I've had a friend get stabbed by a mentally ill person who asked for their restaurant leftovers, and were given them, only to then do just that. (Which is a bit different than what the OP is talking about, but you mentioned mental illness in society in general, so it seems fair to bring it up.)
If for 3 years I am constantly picking up litter as fast as other residents throw it on the ground, at what point to I just move to as different town where people litter less?
That sounds like tax money to be used for mental health services.
Even societies "without" life imprisonment have legal ways of putting people away for life if they're deemed too incompatible with society. Take Norway; longest sentence is 21 years, but for especially vile crimes, that sentence can be extended at the end of the 21 years if the convict is found to not have been rehabilitated.
I’d sleep on the idea of ostracising people with social issues because it can hasten a downward spiral.
In a lot of cases, people who don’t fit in are looking for love they don’t receive. Speaking from experience, if you can offer them that love in spite of challenging behaviour, you could be the key to them developing positive relationships that serve as models of how they can effectively fit in.
If you can muster the energy, instead of pushing these people away, as hard as it may seem, try drawing them closer - it’s not an exaggeration to say that you might be saving someone’s life.
You need to ban abusive people at the first possible time (after you have established that they are abusive and not, e.g just ESL who learned from an old TV show/book). The more moderation a community has, the better the community will be.
If somebody has Asbergers and can't adjust, ban them too. The why doesn't matter (unless it is easily correctable), the how does.
Forgiveness is one thing, but deliberately putting yourself in position to be victimized again is another.
It’s a bit sad, we’re all on the same OSS team in the end. I’ve never found it that difficult to keep it cut and dry on software repos, I don’t know why people don’t just save the venom for forums and social media like the good ol days.
Here’s lattner telling some guy off. There’s none that I can think of that are super memeworthy or anything. It’s usually just insecure devs with a little Dunning Kruger cocktail in the mix.
Certainly not anybody bothering dozens of people manually, for months, like in the link. That’s pretty wild.
They can keep the noise and disruption of the craziest spammers to a minimum.
It went down in 2014 and the guy vanished never to be heard of again.
Anywhere they’re mentioned: https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-17499?jql=comment%20~%2...
Issues created by them: https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-17492?jql=reporter%20in...
I guess the original account was banned somewhere in March 2021? But at a quick glance I can’t quite see what the problem is.
We are well past the era where we maintained the fantasy that the internet was separate from real life. People who are acting out online sometimes also act dangerous IRL and it is therefore prudent to figure out who they are IRL if they've proven to be bad actors online.
to anyone reading this, DO NOT listen to the person I am replying to. Even if this extreme case seems "justified", its all too easy to fall down a slippery slope, where you start doxxing anyone that slights you. I have been the victim of this, its NOT OK.
Here's the thing: they did do that. But the banned person would not move on, and continued to evade the ban and be a pile of misery for everyone involved. "Ban them and move on" is the sort of advice that works great until it doesn't.
If the troll was threatening life or some other crime, then fine do what you need to do. but the person is just essentially being annoying, that is not grounds to doxx someone. if they do not have the skills to keep out harmful users, thats their own fault, they should implement a captcha or some other tactic.
Changing the communications policy of the organization to only allow people a communications forum after they've been vetted might. That's a significant change that puts an OSS project at a severe disadvantage towards gathering support / interest. Also, it wouldn't even work in this situation; the actor in question proved willing to use every communications channel they could find to attack project volunteers.
its not my job to teach people how to police their own forums. nor is it the judicial systems job.
What crime? Be specific. You could perhaps suggest slander, incitement to violence, or invasion of privacy.
High bar to satisfy a case for any of those three. Consider everything a private investigator could do IRL if one retained their services to track down an unknown individual; in general, none of those actions are considered criminal (though the spied-upon person would certainly wish the PI wasn't tailing them).
... but in the presence of persistent harassment that will not cease online, tying the behavior to the person behind the behavior and bringing proper consequences to bear is the only regulatory system that actually works. There's a reason that you can be fined or imprisoned for trying to pull crap like that IRL.
But I am sorry that you were falsely accused. That is a possibility (both in doxxing attempts and in more "traditional" harassment).
False accusation is entirely possible, but it doesn't imply we just let harassers get on unchecked.
nope. trolling online is not a crime, so no regulations are needed. its the same as if someone walks up to you in real life and calls you a jerk. you dont get to do anything about that. you just move on.
If someone just walks up and calls me a jerk (and, well, we ignore the particulars of the words they used and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words), I agree.
If they do it every day, every hour, or call my house 24 times a day, I can legally compel them to stop.
nobody has a natural right to anonymity, and if your actions are causing real harm then you should expect some of the real-world consequences that come from having your identity exposed.
is this a joke?
In fact, the opposite right (the right to face one's accuser) is enshrined Constitutionally in the United States when we bring the force of law to bear on a citizen.
Anonymity has value in specific contexts. It is not a universal right in all contexts.
If your position is "Well they should involve the courts first," we are probably reaching agreement, but we're all aware of how weak the legal system is regarding online harassment, right? Most cyber-crime falls way outside the jurisdictions that are traditionally designed to handle harassment (as harassment was traditionally a very geographically-localized crime).
I'm personally willing to let the bar for "Disclosing enough information about someone's handle that they can be found IRL" lower than "a warrant is out for their arrest."
(This does raise an interesting question: perhaps we do need some kind of new cross-jurisdictional legal organ to decide when harassment raises to the bar of "doxxing acceptable" whether or not it raises to the bar of "prosecutable." That'd be nice to have; then we could have a generally-accepted standard for when it is and is not okay).
no because no crime has been committed, unless you count the doxxing.
It may be a component of another crime, such as slander or incitement to violence.
If the individual in question believes this organization has done either of those things, they are welcome to involve the law (as the other party is doing).
Doxxing is an escalation intended to cause real harm in the real world.
Correct. And is the necessary escalation when online-only tools have failed and the attacker will not relent (such as this circumstance, where the actor in question is taking active steps to bypass methods to down-sample their signal).
I'm assuming most people holding a position in this conversation aren't absolutists (for example, they recognize why the FBI honeypots / tricks people / subpoenas information to de-anonymize those suspected of crime). Is the issue which hands hold the power / take the step of de-anonymizing someone? If that is the issue, what is the recommend course of action in this scenario (which exceeds people's tolerance to continue to operate freely in the OSS community without harassment but does not meet the threshold of an FBI criminal investigation)?
other tools are available (captcha, TLS fingerprinting, browser fingerprinting). if the moderator is not using these, its not a free permission for them to doxx someone.
It seems to me issuing a public warning about this persons "paper trail" is probably the only real option to shut down this behavior that these OSS projects can see.
The way out has always been there: said person just disengages. People like this refuse to use it.
On the other had, as much as I've had fun with ChatGPT, it does really seem quite a long ways off being able to understand context and write a meaningful response that people would believe is a real person.
How are stories ranked?
The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
(To be clear, I'm not implying nor do I think that HN uses raw comment-count as a signal of overheating, just expressing my surprise at the previous poster's surprise at seeing high-ranked stories with few comments, since the correlation should run the other way if at all.)
:-)
I just think it's sad, and one of the many things we need to think about to fix FOSS, because FOSS will save us :-)
For all we know, this might be a private dispute between two people, and, if presented all the information, Bryan's side might be the side that sounds more reasonable...
While the post fails to directly present evidence, and could be improved by doing so, given the nature of the complaint perhaps simply searching in the bug tracker and related forums would easily surface said evidence.
(( no, it's still doxxing. ))
At least, if you want to identify them at all. But a warning without the identity is a bit pointless I guess.
That said, I can’t find anything crazy in a quick look at either their Jira or Forum.
https://jira.reactos.org/browse/ROSBE-173?jql=reporter%20in%...
Zero3K seems to have been involved with ReactOS since at least 2019, and has quite a lot of issues reported.
I may have done this 15 years ago to someone that I felt deserved it at the time, on a forum I enjoyed trolling and to a coworkers identity that eventually came through.
I'm not this insane anymore.
> recommend to contact the local authorities
Does this kind of behavior meet the bar for legal harassment? In California it seems not per https://www.courts.ca.gov/1258.htm?rdeLocaleAttr=en which requires a threat of violence to rise to the level of harassment.
Does the post's recommendation rise to the level of legal advice? This all feels very childish to me.
I suspect that in most jurisdictions this behaviour could be of legal concern.
The other word they used, which I note you don't question, is stalking. This sort of behaviour is even more likely to infringed on laws (which may not exist, or are well enforced, in all jurisdictions but certainly do and are in some) intended to manage that more specific form of harassment.