The Secret's

[imaginary friend]

Hey Geoffrey,

I thought you had stopped the private eye thingie...

[Harry S]

I don't know what he's talking about but it is very tragic if "Geoffrey" investigates posters on a Leonard Cohen forum, someone should write a poem about it! Poor man.

[Geoffrey]

imaginary friend wrote:
>Hey Geoffrey, I thought you had stopped the private eye thingie


i have now. believe me, that was absolutely the very, very last time. never again will i let someone force me into doing something that is completely against my nature. I hate doing it, pure and simple. there's no pleasure in it for me; quite the contrary, in fact. many folk might get some sort of perverse kick out of snooping around in places where they’re not supposed to go, eavsdropping on the personal thoughts exchanged by people who are ignorant of third party surveillance, but that kind of behaviour is totally alien to me - i do not have the conscience for such underhand subterfuge. For a person with scruples, like myself, it's like donning the skin of a skunk - and i cannot allow myself ever again to be pushed into that world of clandestinity. from now on i am here on the same level as everybody else. i am not a wrong-doer, basically - i am certainly not interested in what goes on in secret behind my back. let them have private areas to gossip and hatch evil plots because i couldn't care less. from hereon i watch them not, possess not the slightest curiosity about what they get up to. but verily i say unto you; it is folly to believe that furtive schemes which tolerate not the light of day will forever remain hidden. the truth has an uncanny knack of always divulging sinners who whisper and contrive. yea, these cockroaches will have a torch shone into the dark corners where they crawl in their own muck. personally i don't use that shadowy territory. my option is switched off, and always has been, because i like everything to be open. for it is written: "there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known" [luke 12.2] if i were you i would be like me and turn off the 'private message' option, it's not necessary.

[John K.]

Harry S wrote:
>my name is Harry S . . .

not according to the ISP uncovered by brute force software. download it yourself from rapid share and see.

I thought "Brute Force" was a password hacking program. I also thought that ISP tracking required either being the owner of a website, or installing a program on the computer one wants to track through either being there on-site or hacking into it.

Then again, I'm a banker not a computer geek.

Then again, I never thought I should consider using encryption software to participate in the Leonard Cohen Forum.

Sincerely,

The Viper's Son

[lazariuk]

I hate doing it, pure and simple. there's no pleasure in it for me; quite the contrary, in fact.

Well then thanks for doing it anyway now maybe none of us will need to, that is if you can share the essence of what you learned. I think that will be the point when you will experience forgiveness.

Without naming names maybe you can tell us what you learned by doing those terrible deeds. Maybe you noticed something that we would do well to be aware of.

I will give you an example to let you know what I am curious about. A person who I enjoyed reading very much on the newsgroup a long time ago stopped doing so and when I asked her why she replied that there was another person posting who she had no interest in getting close to who started writing to her as another person using another name pretending to be someone who he was not. It came about that to this pretend person she spoke of personal things that made her very vulnerable. She then learned who it was that she was speaking to and this upset her greatly and she never posted to the group again.
Is this the kind of things that you saw happening Geoffrey that occasioned you to want to find out who was who? If that is so that such things go on it might be of benefit to all of us to know so that we can wisely take steps to place our trust in the right places. Are there other things that you can now caution us about, that you learned through your encounter with sin?

Jack

[~greg]

I tried to log on the other night and was not allowed to
because someone had tried to log on to my account
too many times with the wrong passwords.
I was made to pass a "captcha" test to get on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

Captcha tests are supposed to stop bots, but they are often
just as difficult for people. (That one, if I remember right, was
the kind that looks just like a color-blindness test.)

My password was low strength; just a list of words unlikely
to occur in nature. Now I've uped it to max strength.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength

[imaginary friend]

I can't suppress a smile
at Georges unwitting title for this thread

[imaginary friend]

...But I'm not smiling
when I ask Violet
whether she sent me a PM today.
Did you V? Please respond here, rather than via PM

XO

[lazariuk]

I've come to think that there is always someone seeing my secrets for a twofold reason. One is that I am pretty sure that I don't know everything about myself and that it comes with being aware that we will always have a blind spot and the other reason I think that is that sometimes it seems that I am seeing things in others that they are not aware can be seen.
If someone is seeing something about me that I am not aware of it does make me somewhat vulnerable to them but because I have no way of knowing what can be seen there is no way to tell that person directly what I would like them to do with that information, how I would like to be treated. It does occur to me though that I can and probably do show them how I would like to be treated by how I treat those whose secrets I can see. It seems to give a practical application to the suggestion to treat others how you would like to be treated. It does lead one to considering how much we are all in this together.

Jack

[imaginary friend]

What you say is true Jack, although somewhat altruistic.

It is warming to meet a young child for the first time, and be greeted with an open face and smile, as if they believe I can be trusted. It makes me think that love and support are all they have experienced in their little lives so far, and it makes me want to give them more of the same. As we grow, we inevitably experience betrayal, and thus become wary of where we place our trust, and who we allow to see our vulnerability. Sometimes we have no choice – like it or not, we must trust the pilot of a plane to fly us to our destination, for example – and other times we rely on our instincts.

There are many people I trust, some unreservedly, some perhaps undeservedly. And I'm no saint, but I do respect people's privacy, and that is directly related to how I would want to be treated by others.

[John K.]

And I'm no saint, but I do respect people's privacy, and that is directly related to how I would want to be treated by others.

I could have written these words myself.

And this is why I disagree with the notion that the "secrets" that were allegedly learned be shared with the group. Let's share private thoughts and make them less private?

Of course this assumes that anything shared has any accuracy.

I also find greg's story about being locked out of his account interesting. WTF is up with that?

[imaginary friend]

Who just removed Cate's post? It came after John K.'s

[Cate]

me - Cate

I thought I better wait.

[Harry S]

Harry S wrote:
>my name is Harry S . . .

not according to the ISP uncovered by brute force software. download it yourself from rapid share and see.

I thought "Brute Force" was a password hacking program. I also thought that ISP tracking required either being the owner of a website, or installing a program on the computer one wants to track through either being there on-site or hacking into it.

Then again, I'm a banker not a computer geek.

Then again, I never thought I should consider using encryption software to participate in the Leonard Cohen Forum.

Sincerely,

The Viper's Son

hey, maybe Geoffrey was just lying. it's weird being accused of being someone else but from what you say he was lying about the password programme he uses to hack into other peoples' stuff.

[lazariuk]

It is warming to meet a young child for the first time, and be greeted with an open face and smile, as if they believe I can be trusted. It makes me think that love and support are all they have experienced in their little lives so far, and it makes me want to give them more of the same.

There is another way to look at that. I will use Geoffrey as an example. ( he is the only one who has ever given me permission to speak about them in public when I suggested that I might even discuss his faults)
When I first got to know Geoffrey a bit, he too seemed to be greeting me with an open face and a smile but there was something very different from the child that you spoke about. By the stories he told and a little by how scary he seemed to me it seemed that Geoffrey at a very young age often had the rug pulled out from under his feet. I say scary but in the most important respects a fun and kind sort of way.

By rug-pulled-out-from- under-his-feet I mean that he had long ago lost the kind of trust that came with always being surrounded with surface love and support but also that by doing so he had regained a trust that could withstand living in an environment much more universal than that which we could give to a child.

You said that you would want to give the child more of the same but the world that child might be destined for isn't filled with just more of the same and so someone just as loving as you might think of trying to provide a safe environment but where what they trust is sometimes removed so that they can learn that trusts lost can be regained that are not so fragile. I write this in case there is anyone who is ever interested in giving their inner child a bit of a scary ride that they will be better off for having taken I would highly recommend Geoffrey. I say that because I trust him.

What he knows though I don't think came easily and I think there was a lot of pain involved and it is natural for him to not want others to have to go through the pain that he has felt and I think that is what led him to use his skills to go where people think others do not go. I think it was done like a loving father who checks out the background of someone dating his daughter. He knows it is wrong but probably feels too much love for her to stop himself. I have never seen nor have been given reason to think it might have happened that Geoffrey has ever tried to uncover a secret to cause anyone any hurt - on the contrary I have seen him go well out of his way to try to prevent hurt.

A case can be made that secrets are best not revealed but I don't think that is necessarily so. I will give an example that in some form reflects what once really happened to me. Lets imagine that someone contacted me privately and told me that they were going to tell me a secret that they didn't want me to tell anyone and then they went on and told me that they love killing cats. I never asked to be told the secret and haven't agreed to keep it a secret but think I don't really have any reason to be telling this to anyone and just wonder why they told me. Later it comes about that we are in a group of people and there is a chance that someone might be lending their cat to this person and this person turns to me and says " Isn't it true jack that I take good care of cats?" Do I keep the secret? I think not.

It is not that people might know secrets that concerns me it is that they use being in secret to do unkind things. maybe we can take this occasion to speak of what we don't like experiencing in secret. I don't like being told that someone loves killing cats if they intend to use me to keep their cat killing love secret so that they can kill more cats but then again maybe they told me because deep inside they didn't want to kill more cats and that they trusted that I would tell the secret so maybe i am glad that they told me rather than someone who would have kept it secret. T.S. Elliot once said "The act of thinking changes thought"

Jack