Snicker :-)

Please excuse me while I’m just a lit­tle bit petty.

Some of you know that an idiot has been stalk­ing our fam­i­ly since 1996, most­ly harass­ing us online now that he can­not find us offline. Yes, real­ly that long. Yes, he should get a life. Has any­body got one for him?

Any­way, in late January/early Feb­ru­ary he post­ed my par­ents’ names, home num­ber and address, and where my mom works on one of his web­sites. And sud­den­ly, oh my what a coin­ci­dence, pros­ti­tu­tion ads were post­ed in sev­er­al places in my and my moth­er’s names giv­ing that home phone num­ber as a con­tact num­ber. He’s post­ed ads in my name uncount­able times in the past, but this time he went after my moth­er too. Not Okay.

We had about six dif­fer­ent court dates and due to absolute inep­ti­tude by the Gwin­nett Coun­ty police and the fact that stalk­ing cas­es sim­ply are not tak­en seri­ous­ly in this state until some­body dies or is at least hos­pi­tal­ized after a vio­lent assault, we nev­er real­ly got any­thing done. But it did put a scare into the jerk, and he took down the site where he’d post­ed the infor­ma­tion as well as anoth­er site where he host­ed ads for pros­ti­tutes and reviews of the same by their customers.

Some of the ads were post­ed via anony­mous mail to news gate­ways. Noth­ing to do with those but try to can­cel them and get them out of Google Groups’ archives. But some were post­ed on a web­site called bigdoggie.net. They refused to even respond to any of our attempts to con­tact them about the ads. The address giv­en in the domain reg­is­tra­tion is in Flori­da (not always reli­able, but oth­er infor­ma­tion point­ed there, as well).

This morn­ing I saw an arti­cle on CNN about two men in Flori­da who ran a pros­ti­tu­tion-relat­ed web­site being arrest­ed (along with oth­er peo­ple) and being charged with rack­e­teer­ing among oth­er things. I looked around and yes, it’s the guys who run bigdoggie.net.

Polit­i­cal­ly, I don’t actu­al­ly give a damn about what con­sent­ing adults do with each oth­er whether any mon­ey changes hands or not. I think pros­ti­tu­tion laws are sim­ply stu­pid. I don’t actu­al­ly have a prob­lem with the fact that these guys ran a web­site with ads and reviews. But they pissed me off, and they were run­ning things very irre­spon­si­bly. They set up a sys­tem that allowed any­body to post anony­mous­ly (using web prox­ies and such), and they refused to remove the mes­sages after they were informed that they were post­ed to harass some­one. So I’m real­ly quite hap­py that they were arrest­ed on a pure­ly per­son­al and admit­ted­ly pet­ty level.