Re: "freak" and recent threads

[jacques]

I see no problem with the "content" of his questions whatsoever. Your observation about fraud may be correct and it may not. But it does not matter to me, since using proxies is not illegal.

Lets give him a break. His XP is bad enough. He is a new user and probably a very young geek. At least, he knows to use Perl and not Java for his exploits. :)

[TimToady]

On top of which, there are many places in the world where what we think of as basic freedoms can be practiced only in the absence of official scrutiny. I'm not saying that's the case here, but one should not be too quick to judge the underlying motivations from external signs. I'm all in favor of morality and ethics, but such attitudes have to come from the inside. Imposing them from the outside just drives people toward Victorian-style hypocrisy.

[mirod]

Those questions belong on comp.infosystems... sorry, wrong forum ;--(

Seriously, those questions really seem to boil down to "how can I artificially inflate the hit count on a web site without being caught?". The poster never gave a satisfying explanation to why they wanted to do this. Or any explanation at all. I /msg'ed feak privately and got no answer. I imagine other monks have done the same, and suspect that if they had received an answer they would have said so.

So the signs are really, _really_, pointing to an annoying individual engaged in at least non-ethical, and possibly illegal, activities. I would love for freak to explain why they need this though.

[eXile]

I'm also curious for the reasons of his questions, so I asked him this question in his last thread. Anyone who is 'on trial' should at least get the opportunity to defend himself, don't they?

If his reasons are valid, I owe him an apology, but up until now freak has used his right to remain silent. To me that is not a good sign.

If any new dubious questions are asked by him I urge everybody to first ask him why he wants to know, so other Perlmonks that don't know of these suspicions are made aware of them. We might all be involved in some kind of criminal/unethical activity if we don't.

[fizbin]

My sincere hope is that freak is new to programming in general, and also new to ethical thinking about computer/internet usage in general. I further hope that the distinct disapproval of people who present themselves as a potential online peer group (i.e. perlmonks) will cause some growth in this area.

I admit that this hope may be a long shot, but people do grow and change. Anyone who was ethically the same person at 25 as they were at 15 was either a 15-yr-old saint or a 25-yr-old jerk.

With this in mind, it might be time to stop downvoting his posts. No one needs -145 XP; further slapping may just cause him to defensively disregard any opinion from anyone on perlmonks as the result of a bunch of elitist snobs.

[DrHyde]

/msging is broken on this site, probably by design. I'd been using it for over a year before I even knew it existed, and I still don't know (nor, I confess, care) how to use it. That someone doesn't reply doesn't mean a thing.

[Fletch]

In Soviet Russia, counter hits you!

I fail to see what that has to do with someone asking questions (well, the same underlying question eight times more or less) about inflating web hit counts. And posting questions in a public forum isn't exactly being circumspect.