So let's take a lot of "if's" here. *This is meant playfully.*

Say that someone had a personal statement in their profile for this site. Say this statement was later changed by someone other than the profile holder. Let's assume the profile holder's account hasn't been hacked (let's face it, there would be much more interesting changes if it had). This would mean someone with mod status changed it. I'm unsure whether or not mods have the ability to erase their footprints so there is one probable suspect from the get-go, but that may be a false lead.

So my questions in return are, "who wants to know?" and "are you genuinely asking me a question?"

I checked your profile D,
I didnt see any odd questions?
Which one are you referring to?

If a mod is monkeying with people's profiles, I need to know about it.

SJ

Yeah, I changed it again.

It used to say "Life is too short to not go after, and get, the things you want." The altered statement was "Life is forever, what do you want?"

Not a big deal. But I figure it might look a tad foolish if I started having a meandering conversation with myself about the nature of life and what I want. Especially if it's a tease.

Got any idea when it changed?

Sometime in the last week.

I can find nothing of the sort in the logs????? Poltergeists????????????????

SJ?

Well if the Mods are all going to check in, then I'll add "It wasn't me" to the lineup.

Course I have been known to mess with flying barnyard animals.

Nor I.

If I were to make a change to someone's profile, I would always identify that it was me, and the reason, say for example if it's obscene.

And no, I haven't done it.

This is getting weird, but I'm still trying to operate from the mindset that it was totally harmless.

I changed the statement yesterday to what it is now if that helps. There's pretty much only ever 2 IP addresses I show up from (same 2 computers I've used all week) if that may also help. {shakes head} Odd.

I have had a number of my Pms altered in the past.

Your PM's altered? I don't even think that is possible.

it wasn't me either. that's wierd

PM,s cant be altered by mods in any way. Nor can they be read.
A user can alter a reply to a PM before sending it ( change the original quoted text) but they cannot change the message itself.

PM=Personal Message
Post=Any of the above messages, IE a post is a public message.

Truthfully, I found this a slightly ironic comment coming from the Admin that swapped me from being a "Newbie" to "Shadowy Siren of Studfinders".

Goodness, I just thought this would be a more efficient way to find out who asked me instead of pm-ing all the Mods. Oh well.

Yes , but I did it with your full knowledge and tacit acceptance...If I thought it was a problem in any way, I wouldnt have done it.

Besides you know I would not do anything malicious.

Mischievious...maybe.

I feel inadequate. I have only 3 administrative actions logged.

One was to change my own account due to mischief by another administrator.

Another was a little mischief of my own directed at zero_snake - something about giraffes if I remember correctly.

The third was actually a valid bit of work to help out HitesFiero with account troubles.
Anyway, we're here for anyone with troubles. Or anyone who wants some trouble.

It was still a surprise.

Three is inadequate use of power, Durachko. So, Baron von Barnyard, I take it that an administrative action is not required to change someone's signature to "Bubbles".

You are correct o thee of elephantine memory. That required only a moderator touch. I have been greatly enabled by my new status but have chosen not to abuse my powers thus far.

I's just a poe Glow-bull mod-der-a-ter. I's got no power...

But here's a lolcat to diffuse the situation:

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Fight Fur with Fur!

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

lolcats are the best thing to hit the interweb since lumenlab itself

I just saw this thread, else I would have commented. It was me! I changed it when I made you my friend...I figured you'd correlate the times. You seem like a neat gal, I figured you'd 'get it'. To answer your question; it is both prank and question.

On the "shortness" of life; check out the premise behind Kurzweil's Singularity, expected around 2050. If you can make it that far, you'll be able to "upload" your conciousness into a machine avatar, achieving practically infinite lifespans.

hmmm..since brainchild probably has no admin over him this thread has come to an abrupt halt .

<cough> skynet <cough>

Hi jonjandran, not only must it be possible but it has happened to me on multiple occasions where words were changed. I sent one PM and got a response which was strange. I thought I had mistyped the wording in the original message and so I retyped it and resent it. I then got a message back from the recipient that it was the same as the original. That was when I suspected a rat in the system.

I still have them on my PM system.

So I believe that one moderator has the ability to read, modify and intercept PMs. I don't think this is right as I thought they were private.

When I send a PM it arrives within seconds to the recipient. Like I said I don't think it's possible. But feel free to suspect anything and everyone, it's the American way.

Not tryin to be paranoid or even talk down, but you should never assume anything on the internet is private. Just a fact of life. Look into packet analysis a bit. The internet is public. Period. Sure not everything you do in public some people will ever know about, but it's still in public so the chance is there. Some because it's malicious, some because they're nosy, some for the heck of it because they can. Public.

Hey whats the point of havinbg power if you cant use it? i wish i could some fun like that, of course id probably just piss a whole bunch of people off.

As the sole administrator/moderator/God of a message board/forum I can tell you that anything is possible with regards to posts, user profiles, and even PMs. Nothing is truely private, or beyond modification, or even redistribution. You just have to ask yourself, is it really likely? Chances are it's not a big deal.

If anyone ever has a problem at my board I tell them to ask me about it, rather than ask in a post where it's open to second guessing. Not that they listen to me.

I thought it was you and that's why I said there was "one probable suspect from the get-go". It just felt a little weird PMing the great and powerful Oz, so I thought I'd make sure. Silly me.

Living thousands of years as an intelligence... think I've been there before. (Which is a really big stretch of a joke for anyone other than theologians who've studied American-born faiths and put 2 and 2 together that I'm from Utah.)

I'm not much of a scientist and I realize the draw of having the whole of one's thoughts going on without the degradation of age or illness is powerful for some. Would be a sort of ultimate goal. To exist in one's prime in one's most gifted field... many things could be accomplished. But I guess I don't really want that. I believe loosely in life and progress beyond the one we're currently apart of, but the two don't have to be mutually exclusive. My brain could live on here, humming away and my soul (spirit, life force, whatever) could continue on with its regularly scheduled program. Whatever that is.

My first year of college, I had the grades, scholarship and various other hooey that gave me automatic entrance into the Honor's Program. By that point in my life I was just about over accolades but was excited about being around other people my same age that were likely very nerdy as well. As part of the program, we went to plays, operas, museums -- all those things that "smart" people are supposed to like. During the course of that first year, we saw two different plays by Tom Stoppard. The first being Arcadia, the second being Rough Crossing. I was enthralled with Arcadia while just about every other member of the Honors group hated it, thought it boring. Heh, even the professor that came with us. It's main tenet (and I need to go back and read it again, been almost a decade now) is that the highest levels of all thought come to certain truths and these truths intersect at the highest level no matter what the field of study. Not a new idea, but one I was thinking a lot about at the time. Rough Crossing, on the other hand, is predictable and formulaic. Standard comedy faire for the last 1000 years. The others loved this one and I didn't. I remember everyone back on the bus thinking Stoppard had been a hack, but not now they could appreicate him. Something about that day...

Anyway, part of the plot in Arcadia is that there is a brilliant young woman who excels in physics, falls in love with her tutor and I'm not remembering all the details right but commits suicide by fire rather than live the rest of her life without him. This is why I need to read it again, but it explains why she picked fire, having an explanation as to why when the universe started to reverse back to the beginning, she wouldn't be recreated. A very final act. Her message being, what is the point of living or living forever if you don't have love? Now I'm not a teenage girl and I've never been suicidal about unrequited love, but to an extent, I would agree.

It was mentioned in the article you linked that the machines wouldn't have need for progeny or love. That is a great part of what makes us human. Sure all those cravings have had the heck explained out of them by science, but there is a great deal to us that is irrational. And in that irrationality is where I find the beauty. If we condense the Bohemian ideals into four: Beatuy, Freedom, Truth and Love; I've got all I want of the first three.

To leave us existing for eons as thoughts, we'd have stripped so much of what makes us humans and have become an entity of only thought. For all intents and purposes, a machine. So if or when this Singularity occurs, I'll likely pass on keeping my thoughts kickin' around for millenia. It would be an odd sentimentality to keep the thoughts of an inferior machine churning away when newer and more efficient ones would be constantly created. But then again, keep those human brains working. For exactly those reasons: Irrationality and Sentimentality. There would still be a kernel of humanity to the idea of it. An enduringly hopeless optimism.

In the words of Brian May (guitarist from Queen who wrote the song from the movie soundtrack for Highlander*):

"Who wants to live forever, anyway?"



* The original Highlander movie. After all - There can be only one!

brainchild you sent me on another 2 hour linkhop in wikipedia..productivity was down today my friend...waaaaay down.

If machines took over I believe we would irritate them with our illogical and unpredictable behaviour...luckily our body heat will power them so we will still survive .

but then again who knows what usefulness may be found in human life to that of a higher "mind"..if we will admit that there is more to be known than what we know, and that something could be smarter than we..then we must admit that we cannot know and speculation is merely for our entertainment.

It is true that the PM would have to be altered before it was read to be effective, and since they're delivered right away it would have to be altered after delivery, which would be easier to catch.

What change was made? Can it be explained with a find and replace routine? I don't know about this forum, but some forums have certain sites that you're not allowed to post links to. For instance an Xbox forum might not let you post links to Team Xecuter.

Another thought that comes to mind: were you on an, how should I say, "unprotected" wireless network? If you were, there's things people can do to mess with the traffic going through their router.

I use to play a game called Unreal on server called DAWGA. Every time someone would curse their message would be changed to "I like Cheese". My wife thought we were all cheese fanatics. Sometimes it's hard to believe she has a genius IQ.

Anyway if the I like cheese servers are coming up with funny messages then maybe someone put a I like cheese selective filter on them.

Now that I can do; it's only a bad-word filter making substitutes based on input word selection-alternates (and I don't use a bad-word filter anyway).

I can not read PM messages any more than I can read minds. If I could do this, it is something I'd feel ashamed to do; like watching someone masturbate (who wasn't paid or aware for me watching). Therefore it is impossible that yours-truly has any hand in your personal affairs (you paranoid weirdos!).

Not for one minute suggesting that anything untoward has happened, I just thought I'd respond to this, for accuracy's sake. It is relatively straightforward to change PM's, bearing in mind that delivery doesn't really happen until the receipient reads the message. If this board operates in a similar fashion to mine then the PM's are simply stored as text in a database, with a corresponding table to show whether they've been read or not. So the crux of your statement saying it would be easier to catch only applies after the message has been read, not after it's been sent. Anytime in between and it would be nigh on impossible to catch, apart from comparing original to received, and having said original or a sender convinced that their original had been tampered with.

For the record I have a private forum on my board that even I don't have access to. Of course as an admin I could give myself access, but I don't, for similar reasons as brainchild mentioned. It would be breaking a trust that I would be ashamed to do.

Now I do have occasional fun in changing thread titles.

Sweet, I was wondering how to do this...

Well, now you know.