some ol' rants from the past until i write new ones, perhaps?
Unedited for the time being. I am considering making sections, like this one, WordPress-driven. Anyway, blah blah blah, nerdspeakhere, computerjargonthere, blah blah and when I decide how to blah blah then you will know cause I'll announce it. double blah. :)
I don't know exactly when I wrote this but it was during a period when I spent a lot of time in yahoo chat.
Internet Gangstas - The Battle of the Minds
I have been on the internet since about early 1995, prior to that I dwelled on local edu BBS. During those years it was a much more intuitive and informative era. As time would tell with the advent of America Online growing in popularity after their 2.5 release, things would change dramatically. My early experiences on AOL was quite interesting as I was very young and not really that tech savvy. I was quickly infected with trojans, keyloggers, password stealers deltree's, etc. This was the beginning of my voyage into the wonderful world of the cyber culture.
As the result of being infected and all that good stuff my PC simply stopped functioning. During this time I knew absolutely nothing about computers really. I tried to follow instructions as best I could and with time I fixed the computer all by myself. From here on out I decided I would learn all I could so I would never find myself in the same position.
While my search for knowledge was quite difficult I did manage to succeed and learn. During this time was when I encountered what we call Internet Gangsta's. These are people who were the "elite" of whatever room or chat you visited. Their main priority was and still is to piss you off for your lack of technological information. I saw it for many years on AOL with people that ran Host Scrollers thus lagging rooms through massive html codes.
Today is a different era and we have alot more locations where these Internet Gangstas can be. A perfect example is Yahoo! chat rooms. You have numerous people who simply can't grow up and find it amusing to have the power to boot, crack names, lock mic's, etc. While it can be justified to protect your chat space through these methods such as I do from time to time, there is also a number of people who do it for no reason whatsoever. These people are the Internet Gangstas. Basically, they do what they do because they know and because you don't. Simply put it's people with limited to absolutely no knowledge beyond the basics of operating a computer.
There are other types of Internet Gangstas which would be amazingly categorized as Internet Tough guys. These class of people are classic shit talkers and claim they can do this and do that in order to intimidate the unknowing. My question is why waste your time? Do you live such a sad life that you must come on the internet to brag about what you know and how elite you are?
Basically all I can conclude is that they'll always be here and more are born every day. The only way to protect yourselves against these kind of people is to ignore them and educate yourself. Learn to differentiate the shit talkers from the technical savvy. Then and only then will you be able to defeat their purpose and destroy their ego by simply not caring and being more knowledgable than them in all fields.
