posters were flat-out trolls.
A troll was somebody who logged into a newsgroup and posted something provocative purely for the sake of generating attention or starting an argument. The term supposedly came from fishing, wherein lines were set to troll for fish. Some said it came from those mythical beasts who lived under bridges and menaced passers-by. Either way, a troll on UseNet was a waste of time and space. They were almost always anonymous, posting insults under screen names so as to be insulated from reprisals, and sometimes they went past merely being annoying to offering libel online.
Some trolls were more clever than simply shouting obscenities into the faces of anybody around; they would pose a question or comment in such a manner as to seem serious. But clever or merely loud, trolls were an annoying fact of net life.
Sometimes very annoying.
Thorn had attracted a couple of these pests in his years on the net, both as a programmer and as a fencer, and when he opened the thread on pistol-grip handles versus straight-grips that now ran to forty-three messages, he found that one of the more irritating trolls of recent months was there, dogging him again.
Thorn had posted the question:
There had been several helpful replies, a few more that were interested, and, invariably, the idiot who tried to hijack the thread to serve his own ends. The troll — he had several pseudonyms he hid behind, but his current netnom was “Rapier”—had entered the building:
Thorn gritted his teeth. What was wrong with somebody that the only way he could get attention was to jump up and down spitting and cursing at people, acting like a two-year-old?
Responding only made it worse. These fools didn’t care what you said, only that you said something—
Which, unfortunately, was not true of the really obnoxious ones. They simply changed their netnoms and came back in a new disguise, looking to get your goat.
Generally, as soon as Thorn recognized a troll, he put the name into his “kill” filter. From then on, that name would be marked and he simply didn’t open the postings. Of course, every time a troll changed names, he would slip by for a message or two.
The anonymity of the net had given rise to tens of thousands of such losers. If they said those things to a man’s face, they would be looking for their teeth, but safe in their homes at a keyboard they felt free to insult the world at large. Sad that this was all the life they had.
Thorn had a huge kill file of names, and one of the worst had used a dozen aliases in the last six months. It was the same guy. The writing style — such that it was — was easy to spot. The guy didn’t shout by using all caps, and his grammar wasn’t atrocious, but the snideness was definitive, and the speech patterns didn’t vary. And here he was yet again.
Thorn sighed, then added “Rapier” to his kill file.
Somebody ought to do something about these idiots.
Even as he thought it, he had the realization: He was now in a position where he could do something. He was running Net Force.
He smiled and shook his head. Trolls weren’t illegal. Irritating, obnoxious, sometimes even pitiful or outright psychotic, but there weren’t any laws against that. If they actually threatened or libeled you, you could do something, but the smarter ones would avoid going that far. They’d step right up to the edge, but not past it. Innuendo, yes, and thinly veiled threats, but never enough to take them into court to squash.
There were ways to backtrack e-mail and postings, perfectly legal ones to run through an Internet service provider to bring to their attention that they had people misbehaving. Some of the larger ISPs would kick an offender off if they got enough complaints. But some of the smaller ones, especially those in third-world countries, didn’t really care what their patrons did, as long as they paid their bills. Nigeria was notorious, all kinds of con-men ran schemes from there, the most famous being one about smuggling a large fortune out of the country and cutting in people who would help. A lot of folks had lost a lot of money on those schemes, even after they had been made public time and time again.
Clever trolls could hide their identities, and some of them used anonymous machines, at libraries or Internet cafes, so even if you tracked the computer down, you wouldn’t catch them. If they were dangerous, you could install key-watch software and eventually nail them, but Net Force didn’t chase trolls; if they did, they wouldn’t have time for anything else.
Well, it was what it was, and you just had to shrug it off. It was tempting to drop the posting into Jay Gridley’s lap and tell him to find the guy, though. Outing “Rapier” on the net would feel very satisfying. There were folks who, if they knew where the man lived, would drop by and have a few words with him.
Of course, the “man” could be a thirteen-year-old precocious brat using his mother’s computer, and Thorn didn’t want to be responsible for some irritated stranger kicking the crap out of him. Though it would be very satisfying to have the kid’s mother do it…
He smiled. Enough for today. Time to get to bed.
7
Natadze picked up his guitar and moved to his playing chair, a specially made stool with a footrest built in at precisely the right height for him. He was in a T-shirt and sweatpants, and he had a sleeve, made from a silk sock with the toe end cut off, over his right arm, to keep his skin from touching the instrument. The sweatpants were elastic — no buttons or zippers, nothing that might scratch the wood.
He did not wear a watch or rings, and the only things that might possibly damage the fine finish were the fingernails on his right hand, which were kept long and filed carefully for plucking the strings. The nails on his left hand were trimmed very short, so as not to cause buzzing on the frets.
Classical guitar was a strict discipline, and that had appealed to Natadze even when he had been introduced to it as a boy. It needed a certain position, the left leg up, the instrument’s waist on that leg, the lower bout just so, the left thumb always placed behind the neck, right hand relaxed here…
This guitar had been made in 1967 by the luthier Daniel Friedrich, one of the most renowned guitar makers of the late twentieth century. At his peak, there had been a tenor twelve-year waiting list for one of his new instruments, which was not that uncommon among the best makers. The top was German spruce, the back and sides Brazilian rosewood, the neck a standard 650-millimeter scale and 52 millimeters at the nut. The finish was French polish, the tuners by Rodgers, and it had been in almost mint condition when Natadze had bought it — paying forty thousand U.S. dollars for it.
A decent concert guitar could be had for a quarter of that. This was much better than decent, though. It was superb.
He was, he knew, not a good enough player to deserve such an instrument. Yes, he could play with sufficient skill so that he probably could have earned a meager living at it. He had a fair repertoire, several memorized pieces that ran more than twenty minutes, one that was almost half an hour without repeating sections, and he could manage a better-than-average tremolo when playing Fernando Sor, even though he was largely self-taught. But his music theory was only fair, his sight-reading still slow, and he resorted to tablature when he was in a hurry to learn a new piece.
