[Gllug] ADSL upload speeds

[Bruce Richardson]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 12:39:32PM +0100, Caparo wrote:
> > This isn't universally true. We used to do that, to protect the individuals
> > in question. But IIRC, each fictitious name corresponded to a real person,
> > and if you phoned or wrote to the fictitious person, you'd get through to
> > the person you intended to contact. You just wouldn't be able to trace them
> > in real life.
> >
> > Seems pretty reasonable to me.
> >
> > Tet
> Hi,
>  You mean to say that the service is SO BAD that tech support live in fear of 
> their lives, 

The conduct of a minority of Net users is so bad that it can be worth
taking simple measures to protect your staff from unnecessary
harrassment and abuse.

> is there a new crime surfing rage now?

It's not new.  Online communication is much more susceptible to problems
of miscommunication and too many of the people using it don't realise
that.  Even people who are reasonable in other contexts can behave very
badly online because there is no direct contact to correct
misunderstandings about tone and intent.  As for the unreasonable
people, the immunity from immediate consequences that online
communication offers is frequently more than they can resist.

You're illustrating some of the dangers yourself; your response to his
message went further than was reasonable, in the sense that you choose
to infer from his statement something that he clearly did not mean to
imply.  If he were to take your comment as anything less than jokey in
tone (which I'm assuming was your intent) and if he then replied to an
imagined insult, you might well be startled by a response that you would
see as unjustified and then it can all snowball from there.  The real
problem is that a significant minority of Net users don't even need that
innocent sequence of events to start them off.

-- 
Bruce

The ice-caps are melting, tra-la-la-la.  All the world is drowning,
tra-la-la-la-la.  -- Tiny Tim.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 261 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/gllug/attachments/20050627/8c65609b/attachment.pgp>
-------------- next part --------------
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug