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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Sunday 19 May 2002 (Day View) – Banned from Austnet

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19.05.2002 – Sunday 19 May – Banned from AustNet

• The border between today and yesterday is somewhat blurred as I didn’t get to bed until nearly six this morning and awoke around 11. In line with my recent policy of rest and recuperation, I did a whole lot of nothing, and once again spent a lot of time at my computer and online on IRC. One interesting thing that happened to me on IRC today... and not a very pleasant experience, was getting banned from the network I chat on. Its not all that unusual to be banned, but what made this different was the total lack of coherent reasoning for the ban, and then the re-placing of another ban, once again with a total lack of reasoning; amounting to blatant abuse of the privileges vested in the network staff of the chat network. I emailed the appropriate abuse departments and such seeking a resolution to what I saw was obvious and unwarranted abuse against my self, but it just so happened that the person that reads the abuse email is the same person who set the ban is the CEO of Austnet Chat Network is the big boss man himself, so needless to say I didn’t achieve any satisfaction from emailing.
  The actual bans placed and the reasons given were:
  “(s) (G) Banned from this server: Banned from AustNet: didn’t your mother say if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all ?”
  “(s) (G) Banned from this server: Banned from AustNet: If you are that dis-interested in the Austnet network, finding it a source of constant complaint, this is a friendly reminder that you are under no obligation to continue to it”
  The more serious side to this little mess was that the “oper” who placed the ban was not on any of the channels in which I was chatting, and so ordinarily should not have been able to see anything I was saying. Opers have the ability to be present in a channel without anyone knowing, essentially spying on the channel, and when properly regulated this is beneficial and probably necessary for the smooth functioning of an IRC network, but also very open to abuse. I was one of those who were abused today. Fortunately for myself, it seems the oper in question has calmed down. It has really soured my opinion of this particular chat network though.

• But onto brighter matters, I had a restful night’s sleep – getting to bed around 2:30.