Usenet personality - treatise

This treatise written by Juan Hall

A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a
certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a
vast array of topics for discussion. Since its inception, Usenet newsgroups have attracted a wide
variety of people posting all manner of fact, fiction, theories, opinions, and beliefs. Some Usenet
posters achieved a certain amount of fame and celebrity within Usenet circles because of their
unusual, non-mainstream ideas, or because their writings and responses are considered
especially humorous or bizarre.
Eccentric believers
These individuals are noted for their eccentric beliefs and theories.
Alexander Abian – American mathematician who taught for many years at Iowa State University
and became an Internet legend for his incessant and frequently bizarre posts to various Usenet
newsgroups. In particular, he gained international notoriety for his claims that blowing up the
Moon would eliminate virtually all natural disasters, and that mass and time are equivalent.
Another of Dr. Abian's hypotheses was the challenge to the Big Bang Theory with the Big Suck
Theory. Despite his eccentric views, Abian often contributed productively and settled debates on
sci.math.
Robert E. McElwaine – self-described Bachelor of Science in physics who wrote a series of
ranting fringe science essays characteristically peppered with capitalized words for emphasis.
Each essay covered topics such as alien influence on violence, free energy, coming UFO landings,
and cancer cures, often carrying a message that there existed a conspiracy to suppress the
information. The essays often concluded with the signature "UN-altered REPRODUCTION and
DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER
BULLETIN BOARDS." McElwaine's writings stopped appearing on Usenet after 1998, although he
continued writing essays up to 2003. He died at age 59 in his home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on
12 February 2008.
Archimedes Plutonium – noted for his many posts about his own theories of physics,
mathematics, and stock market investing, and in particular his "Plutonium Atom Totality"
theory, which posits that the universe is a giant plutonium atom and that galaxies are "dots" in
the electron dot cloud of this atom.
MI5Victim – paranoid user who goes through periods of binge posting, claiming that British
intelligence has bugged his home and is sending people to follow him around and harass him.
These allegations are often crossposted to newsgroups where his messages would be
considered off-topic. Since 1995 he has posted transcripts and snippets of conversations that he
has recorded. He has claimed in his posts that television personalities are often talking about
him in code and are part of the MI5 conspiracy. Corley often cross-posted "examples" of MI-5
victimizing him 20 or 30 posts at a time. He has been banned from posting through Google for
his abuse of Usenet, and has been similarly removed from most ISPs in England, an assertion
which Corley rebutted in August 2012. In 2007, the opera The Corley Conspiracy by Tim
Benjamin and Sean Starke premiered at the Southbank Centre in London. Corley has his own
web site on which he provides so-called evidence of the conspiracies against him. Corley has
written a book about his "experiences" with MI5.
Jack Sarfatti – American author of a number of non-scientific works on quantum physics and
consciousness, known for his iconoclastic ideas concerning the schism between science and the
humanities, as well as space migration, intelligence increase, life extension, UFOs,
extraterrestrials, time travel, and psychokinesis.
Nancy Lieder was a woman from Wisconsin who claims that as a girl she was visited by
extraterrestrials from Zeta Reticuli who implanted a communications device in her brain. In 1995
she founded the website ZetaTalk to distribute her ideas. She came to public attention on
Internet newsgroups during the buildup to Comet Hale–Bopp's perihelion in 1997. She claimed
Hale-Bopp was not a comet but a fraud to keep people distracted until "Planet X" would pass
near the Earth and destroy civilization on 27 May 2003. That date passed without incident, and
then Lieder claimed she had said a "white lie to fool the establishment". Lieder has refused to
give any other date when she thinks "Planet X" will pass near the Earth.
Criminal and eccentric personalities
These individuals are noted for their criminal, eccentric,
paranoid, or threatening behavior, or newsgroup trolling activities.
Scott Abraham – skiing enthusiast banned by court order in 1999 from posting on the Usenet
discussion group "rec.skiing.alpine", after engaging in a flame war with other online posters. The
heated exchanges lasted for months, eventually escalating into death threats, until a police
detective from Seattle posted a request for all involved to calm down. All involved did except
Abraham, which ultimately led to a court order being filed against him. The Electronic Frontier
Foundation and other civil liberties groups commented that this violated free speech protection,
but did not deny that Abraham's aggressive behavior exceeded the boundaries of normal
newsgroup civility.
Serdar Argic – alias used in one of the first automated newsgroup spam incidents on Usenet,
with the objective of denying the Armenian genocide. It was an automated bot that made
thousands of posts to several newsgroups in 1994. The deluge of posts suddenly disappeared in
April 1994, after Stefan Chakerian created a specific newsgroup to carry only cancel messages
specifically for any post from any machine downstream from the UUNET feed which carried
Serdar Argic's messages.
David D'Amato – former assistant principal and director of guidance at West Hempstead High
School, he actively spammed and trolled a variety of newsgroups from roughly 1996 to 1999,
initiated e-mail bombings against those he considered "opponents", and solicited for video
recordings of young adult males being bound and tickled, all while using the pseudonym/alter
ego Terri DiSisto, who was supposedly a female college student. D'Amato was found guilty of e-
mail bombings which caused service outages at a number of colleges and universities, was fined
$5,000, and spent six months in federal prison after being convicted in 2001. He is a subject of
the 2016 documentary Tickled. He died in March 2017.
Valery Fabrikant – former associate professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia University
in Montreal; he shot and killed four colleagues in the school massacre referred to as the
Concordia University massacre. He is currently serving a prison sentence in Canada. Fabrikant
has posted in several newsgroups, particularly "sci.research.careers", "can.general" and
"can.politics", claiming that he is the innocent victim of a conspiracy against him. These posts
can be found at an archive of his home page.
Hipcrime – called "a leading Usenet terrorist", this user wrote and distributed software
applications that allow users to modify or cancel newsgroup posts, and to generate large
volumes of e-mail spam. These have been classified as denial of service and spamming
programs. The pseudonym is derived from a neologism appearing in the science fiction novel
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. Hipcrime has never been positively identified and thus it is
unknown if it is the work of a single person or a group.
Unusual personalities
These are individuals that are unusual for reasons other than being eccentric.
B1FF – well-known pseudonym and prototypical newbie on Usenet. Posts usually consisted of
uppercase text containing many bangs, typos, "cute" misspellings, the use of fragments of chat
abbreviations, a long signature block, sometimes a doubled signature, and exaggerated naïveté.
The BIFF pseudonym was originally created by Joe Talmadge, also the author of the infamous
and much-copied Flamer's Bible. Talmadge posted twice as BIFF and after that Richard Sexton,
who posted as BIFF a few dozen times over the next year or two.
Joel K. "Jay" Furr – Usenet poster in the early 1990s immortalized in the newsgroups
"alt.fan.joel-furr", "alt.bonehead.joel-furr", and "alt.joel-furr.die.die.die". He was a pretender to
the throne of James "Kibo" Parry, and the bitter enemy of Serdar Argic. Furr was also notable on
Usenet for his self-appointed leadership over the "alt" hierarchy during the commercial
expansion of the Internet, during which he attempted to bring some order and rationale to
rampant newsgroup creation, but with minimal success. According to Brad Templeton, Furr is
one of the earliest people to refer to unsolicited electronic messages as "spam".
Gharlane of Eddore – pseudonym of David G. Potter, a science fiction writer and critic in
Sacramento, California, who was widely known for acerbic, scathingly humorous and
knowledgeable postings to Usenet science fiction newsgroups. He guarded his true identity
carefully for many years before his death in 2001. His chief surviving non-fictional work is the
Lensman FAQ and voluminous Usenet postings.
The Internet Oracle – collective effort at humor in a question-and-answer format, wherein a
user sends a question to the Oracle via e-mail or the Internet Oracle website, which is then
randomly sent to another user who has asked a previous question. This second user may then
answer the question. Meanwhile, the original questioner is also sent a question which he may
choose to answer. All exchanges are conducted through a central distribution system which also
makes all users anonymous. A completed question-and-answer pair is called an "oracularity".
Many exchanges make allusions to Zen koans, witty word play, and computer geek humor, as
well as in-jokes.
Kibo – pseudonym of James Parry, who provided the basis for the formation of an entire
newsgroup, "alt.religion.kibology". Kibo was known for his high-volume but thoughtful posts,
but achieved Usenet celebrity circa 1991 by writing a small script to grep his entire Usenet feed
for instances of his name, and then answering personally whenever and wherever he was
mentioned, giving the illusion that he was personally reading the entire feed.
Mark V Shaney – pseudonym of an automated program that used Markov chain logic to
recombine the text of posts into nearly coherent posts.
Publius – anonymous poster who, from 1994 to 1995, used the Penet remailer service to deliver
cryptic messages to "alt.music.pink-floyd". These posts revealed that an enigma had been
hidden within Pink Floyd's The Division Bell, and Publius called upon fans to find the solution.
Although the remailer service was shut down in 1995 and Publius has not been heard from
since, the puzzle and the prize for solving it were acknowledged by Pink Floyd's drummer, Nick
Mason, at a book signing in 2005. The Publius Enigma has never been officially solved.
Other personalities
These people are known for their exceptional and widely read contributions within their
respective Usenet communities.
John C. Baez – mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside, known to science
fans as the author of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, an irregular column on the web
featuring mathematical exposition and criticism, which he started in 1993 for the Usenet
community and which now has a worldwide following. Baez is also known on the World Wide
Web as the author of the crackpot index, a humorous numerical method for rating scientific
claims and the individuals that make them.
Torkel Franzén – Swedish academic who worked at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, in
the fields of mathematical logic and computer science. He was known for his work on Gödel's
incompleteness theorems and for his contributions to Usenet.
Tilman Hausherr – German poster who is well known among critics of Scientology for his
frequent Usenet posts and for maintaining a website critical of Scientology. He is also credited
with coining the term "sporgery".
James Nicoll – science-fiction reviewer and retired game-store owner. As a Usenet personality,
Nicoll is known for writing a widely quoted epigram on the English language, as well as for his
contributions of concepts like the Nicoll-Dyson Laser and the "brain eater" to Usenet groups like
"rec.arts.sf.written" and "rec.arts.sf.fandom"; and for his accounts of suffering a high number of
accidents recounted in these groups.
Brad Templeton – software architect, civil rights advocate and entrepreneur. An early luminary
of Usenet, Templeton founded ClariNet Communications Corporation and created the
newsgroup rec.humor.funny in 1987 and moderated it from 1987 to 1992.
Erik Naggum – a Norwegian computer programmer recognized for his work in the fields of
SGML, Emacs and Lisp. Since the early 1990s he was also a highly active and provocative
participant on various Usenet discussion groups.
See also
Backbone cabal
Crank
List of Internet phenomena
References
People