Usenet Celebrity - Eccentric Personalities

Eccentric Personalities

These individuals (or user-IDs, or pseudonyms) are noted for their eccentric, paranoid, or threatening behavior, or newsgroup trolling activities.

• Scott Abraham – skiing enthusiast banned by court order in 1999 from posting on the Usenet discussion group "rec.skiing.alpine", after engaging in a flame war with other online posters. The heated exchanges lasted for months, eventually escalating into death threats, until a police detective from Seattle posted a request for all involved to calm down. All involved did except Abraham, which ultimately led to a court order being filed against him. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups commented that this violated free speech, but did not deny that Abraham's aggressive behavior exceeded the boundaries of normal newsgroup civility.
• Serdar Argic – alias used in one of the first automated newsgroup spam incidents on Usenet, with the objective of denying the Armenian Genocide, it was an automated bot that made thousands of posts to several newsgroups (especially "soc.history", "soc.culture.turkish", and "misc.headlines") in 1994. The deluge of posts suddenly disappeared in April, 1994, after Stefan Chakerian created a specific newsgroup ("alt.cancel.bots") to carry only cancel messages specifically for any post from any machine downstream from the UUNET feed which carried Serdar Argic's messages.
• David D'Amato – former assistant high school principal, he actively spammed and trolled a variety of newsgroups (particularly "alt.gothic" and "rec.music.phish") from roughly 1996 to 1999, initiated e-mail bombings against those he considered "opponents," and solicited for video recordings of young adult males being bound and tickled, all while using the pseudonym/alter ego Terri DiSisto, who was supposedly a female college student. D'Amato was found guilty of e-mail bombings which caused service outages at a number of colleges and universities, was fined $5,000 (USD), and spent a year in prison after being convicted in 2001.
• Valery Fabrikant – former associate professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia University, he shot and killed four colleagues in the school massacre referred to as the Concordia University massacre. He is currently serving a prison sentence in Canada. Fabrikant has posted in several newsgroups, particularly "can.general" and "can.politics", claiming that he is the innocent victim of a conspiracy against him. These posts can be found at an archive of his home page.
• Hipcrime – called "a leading Usenet terrorist," this user wrote and distributed software applications that allow users to modify or cancel newsgroups posts, and to generate large volumes of e-mail spam. These have been classified as denial of service (DoS) and spamming programs. The pseudonym is derived from a neologism appearing in the science fiction novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. Hipcrime has never been positively identified and thus it is unknown if it is the work of a single person or a group.
• MI5Victim (Mike Corley, a.k.a. Boleslaw Tadeusz Szocik) – paranoid user who goes through periods of binge posting, claiming that British intelligence has bugged his home and is sending people to follow him around and harass him. These allegations are often crossposted to newsgroups where his messages would be considered off-topic. This has led to claims that he suffers from paranoia. Since 1995 he has posted transcripts and snippets of conversations that he has recorded, citing it as evidence, sometimes years after the actual event. He has also claimed in his posts that television personalities are often talking about him in code and are part of the MI5 conspiracy. After applying the cui bono test, many people have found it difficult to understand why Corley should have been targeted by MI5 (given that he has no connections/affiliations which would make him of interest), and cannot see what possible benefit the security services could derive from such harassment, given that they have always had more pressing concerns, e.g. monitoring PIRA in the 1990s and later the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Corley will often cross-post "examples" of MI-5 victimizing him 20 or 30 posts at a time. He has been banned from posting through Google for his abuse of Usenet, and has been similarly bounced from most ISPs in England, an assertion which Corley rebutted in August 2012. In the past, his posts were relatively easy to filter out, due to his similar subject lines and email address. However, at the start of 2008, he began a series of posts that avoided filters through sporgery and by slightly varying his subject line of "MI-5 Persecution", showing an ability to adapt. In 2007, the opera The Corley Conspiracy by Tim Benjamin and Sean Starke premiered at the Southbank Centre in London. Corley has his own web site on which he provides so-called evidence of the conspiracies against him. Corley has written a book about his "experiences" with MI5.