rrufff,
"one can imagine that he was pouring over accounts for hours a day over the past few weeks and then finally found one that he felt that he could "get away" with. If he hadn't made his first post a personal attack on you, he might have succeeded."
Obviously, there is no way I can put myself in the head of SirVinny and try to divine his motivations. It gives me a headache just to think about it.
But I will speculate. I don't think SirVinny is as stupid as you think. I believe his recent post was very intentional and it's purpose was to let Bob know that he does indeed have lots of accounts at his disposal.
I will concede the possibility that SirVinny is a complete moron, but in truth complete morons are rare. And remember, he was caught very quickly in his previous incarnation. Almost certainly, he had to assume that it would happen that way again. I believe the 'Rick T.' identity was a 'throw-away' just to make a point.
I'd also be willing to bet money that 'SirVinny' is merrily posting away under another alias elsewhere on SI, most probably on one or more of the politically oriented threads.
I've noticed previously that most of the racist-hate mongerers who have been tossed off SI have had memberships that date back to 1996-1997. There appears to be a reason for this.
Apparently, I'm told; there were a lot of free memberships available back in those years. Lots of people created multiple aliases....and then forgot about or abandoned them after limited use. If SirVinny, or someone else of his ilk, wanted to hijack an account they would concentrate their efforts on these accounts.
People who create multiple identities would tend to keep their passwords very simple. I've been told that some very popular passwords are 'password' and 'myname' or a password the same as their user name.
It's easy enough to locate these accounts. For instance, go to "people search" - type in the name 'Rick' and you will get 50 names that begin with 'Rick' and the dates their memberships commenced. At that point, the hijacker needs to check the account to make sure it's not in current use and plug-in obvious passwords. This would be the tedious part of the job.
However, because of the sheer number of apparent hijackings I think it unlikely that it is the work of a single individual. A group of like-minded people seems a more plausible explanation to me. Maybe a College campus somewhere with lots of computers and students with time on their hands. Probably not in the USA. JMO.
Another possibility would be that a clever hacker compromised SI at some point and literally hijacked the accounts, but this is pure speculation on my part. Only Bob could tell us if this could happen. |
