merging or blending, perhaps

A long time ago, a person I was emailing with about privacy on the web concerns was like dealing with a double edged sword. She was obviously lurking me really hard, but terrified herself of someone watching her on the webs. So I gave her a test. I gave her a list of links and told her click each one in order, waiting a few seconds between each one. We were both loaded on at the same time, both had that emailed page open at the same time. I was watching her in my stats live.

She was concerned because her son dug through a bunch of porn and she was afraid it would compromise her system, you see.

She didn't really understand the test, but I knew from experience how to catch whether someone could shadow what you pull up on screen. Nowadays we have all this security, right. They still give us the setting options to turn off remote users, which we have to turn back on when a pro tech on a phone or chat is helping us. What a lot of people don't know is that general populace control settings that we can see are much different from nongeneral populace, who can see whatever they want when they want because there are no settings for that. We're not really supposed to know this, but yeah, we all know it even though most of us never really think about what that really means.

I've caught nerdie techs aka a friend here and there doing this, like they think they're so smart (and they are), but I've also caught surveillance a number of times on my own system.

So this friend I was on live email with, identical page pulled up, was clicking down a list, and I was watching a site tracker catch her clicking to an old blog, right. Except someone slipped up and clicked just a few seconds ahead of her. I watched it clicking right after her, but one time it clicked before her, actually caught the timestamp. If it had been a bot, it wouldn't have been able to do that. Someone was live clicking along with her. I was able to show her this. It terrified her completely, and she stopped all contact with me.

I've mocked my own shadows in the past, fondly calling it 'live blogging', but basically, here's the deal. I let everything go dead. Super dead. All trackers removed (except blogger's internal tracking), feeds actually turned off, some of the blogs were even unlisted. I let them sit this way for months so I could see whether I would still get any traffic. I found out a few surprising things, which are irrelevant, but long story short, patience wins out and one of you in particular needs to rethink your strategy, because you stick out like a sore thumb.

People who really want to find me will find me. Well, they don't find everything, but they do find what is findable.

It's one thing to find me. It's a game.

It's another thing to remote watch my monitor and show up on a tracker. That's called being sloppy. Just because my mouse stops at a link I made while I'm clicking through things on my own blog doesn't mean it's my next click. Caught ya.

I'm very used to being surveilled. It started hard in 2009. That kind of surveillance doesn't happen much any more. But I'm still surveilled once in awhile (that is viewable), and sometimes someone thinks I'm out of the room because a page sits and my mouse doesn't move and I literally watch a page start scrolling, or a box pop open. This is very rare. I have the usual stuff turned off, of course. No one should be able to remote hijack me at all. But the 'blips' are there. They are real. They aren't my mouse randomly clicking out of the blue with a sticky stuck button. That kind of stuff would more or less just look like a string of unfortunate events (like the way I've lost entire pages of stuff before saving because the page suddenly shuts, although a couple of those were extremely extremely well timed for the things I was about to say), not like someone intelligent was looking around.

I have always been pro lurker. I don't watch stats trying to find anyone, I just like numbers. I like stats in general. I had 3 stats classes in 3 different fields in college. I love stats.

The first year I was Lexx blogging, I completely forgot I had installed a tracker because I was going through one of the most horrific years of my life. We had a very horrible death in the family, and my mom was going through severe disability and hospitalization, I cashed out my 401K and changed jobs in the middle of it all, and THEN I was struck with the worst illness (poisoning?) I have ever gone through in my life, literally taking years to recover. I lost being able to math, developed dyslexia overnight, lost a lot of hair, the worst pain throughout my nervous system bar none, that kind of stuff.

And then the next year I stumbled across that tracker and was very humbly blown away by how many people all over the world had found my Lexx blog. I wasn't aware I had installed one of the top trackers on the planet at the time (sadly abandoned now), so that was a delightful thing in my life after so much awful and still struggling through what would turn out to be years of healing. That gave me a goal to focus on, which pretty much changed my path through some pretty rough depression.

Am I getting to a point to all this? Not really. But, at the risk of terrifying any super lurkers, you yourselves are shadowed, and you either know this and blow it off while you super lurk others for sport (or other interest), or you don't know this and are feeling upset now that I'm saying it.

It's either a real person or QAI. But nothing you do is unnoticed. Nothing.

Just thought I'd share.