Gregory Morrow wrote:

> This happened on soc.history.what-if last year, rendering the group vitually
> unusable for a while. In that case, someone eventually ferreted out that
> the ISP was in Austria. Every single nonsense post in that case had a
> different address, so it was hard to filter the posts out...the culprit was
> the infamous shw-i troll "Matt Giwer".
>


I'm using Mozilla on a Linux platform. I killfile by sorting my
messages by sender and marking them all read in one fell swoop. I
re-sort by thread and do the same to the threads I'm not interested in.
When I get back to the newsgroup, all the messages I don't care to
read are gone, and I can sit back and enjoy. I have to do it each time
I sit down to the computer, but it takes only seconds so I don't mind
too much. It also means I have to memorize the names of the people I
choose to killfile (yes, there are some regulars in this category), but
I don't find that too difficult.


I'm not normally this curious about usenet annoyances preferring to find
a killfile solution and move on, but the name "Matt Giwer" caught my
attention. It seems he's been around for at least 10 years and has, at
one time or another, bothered every group including a private mailing
list I'm on. He (it?) uses an amazing array of bothering techniques
including porn, anti-Semetic remarks, flooding, automatic doubling.
Does anyone know who or what it is? Is he a troubled individual, a
group, a program? It would seem that if he's an individual there ought
to be some law somewhere that could jail or silence him. (That's not a
well-thought out comment on law and law enforcement, more of a sigh and
lament.)


--Lia