It’s your typical boy-meets-girl-over-the-Internet-posing-as-a-woman-in-Second Life story, but with some zaniness thrown in for good measure. After meeting in first life (that is, real life), the 52-year-old male victim from Claymont, Delaware ended the relationship (virtual and otherwise). This apparently upset the real woman of the pair, but instead of resorting to the typical jaded Internet-lover tactics of weepy/angry blog posts and troll forum comments calling his manhood into question, she decided to get physical, and not in the Linda Ronstadt way.

image via laughing squid.

In August the jilted woman allegedly drove to the victim’s workplace in Pennsylvania and attempted to kidnap him at gunpoint. When that initial attempt at reconciliation failed (we can’t understand why not), she returned undaunted two weeks later to track down the victim’s Delaware home address. Unfortunately for her, he had recently moved, so she did what any sane person would do: she posed as a postal worker and searched for four days until she found the new address.

A truly compassionate soul, the woman brought her dog Gogi along with her to Delaware and then cut and removed a screened window in order to enter her virtual ex’s apartment.

According to police, when our would-be beau arrived home on Thursday, August 21, he saw someone pointing an object at his chest that was projecting a laser beam. Recognizing that his apartment was not the location for an impromptu rave, he fled immediately and contacted the police.

Authorities soon arrived on the scene, only to discover that the dog Gogi had been bound with duct tape and put in the bathroom while the woman was nowhere to be found. In addition to the dog, she apparently left behind a pair of handcuffs, a roll of duct tape, a Taser and a BB gun.

Maryland authorities identified her vehicle approximately an hour after the incident at a rest stop on I-95. After a brief struggle she was taken into custody and now faces charges of attempted kidnapping, burglary and aggravated menacing.

The conclusion is one that we’ve brought up before, but it bears repeating: be careful with what you do on the Internet. It is a very short leap for a determined individual to go from cyber stalking to real world stalking. Both are very hurtful, scary and illegal, but at least you can’t get tased over email.

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ReputationDefender encourages parents to educate their children about online safety and their online reputation. Any readers have online teen safety tips? Let us know in the comments!

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Sen. John McCain’s campaign is urging supporters to spam blogs and forums with official talking points, according to the Washington Post. If you do a good job, you can even win prizes.

“That, in essence, is the McCain campaign’s pitch to supporters to join its new online effort, one that combines the features of ‘AstroTurf’ campaigning with the sort of customer-loyalty programs offered by airlines, hotel chains, restaurants and the occasional daily newspaper.”

“People who sign up for McCain’s program receive reward points each time they place a favorable comment on one of the listed Web sites (subject to verification by McCain’s webmasters). The points can be traded for prizes, such as books autographed by McCain, preferred seating at campaign events, even a ride with the candidate on his bus, known as the Straight Talk Express.”

While it is good to see the candidates reaching out and embracing the Internet as another tool to connect with voters, it is frustrating to see spam promoted so vigorously as a viable form of communication.

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# 1. Rockin’ Freebird!
# 2. Rubbing cream on that thing I noticed last weekend. Doesn’t seem to be working.
# 3. Buying DC Universe Classics Wave 5 the Atom at Wal-Mart! Build-a-figure Metallo is complete!
# 4. Feeling trapped in this male body.
# 5. Jesus, I’m lonely.
# 6. D’oh! Accidentally trimmed my pickin’ nail.
# 7. Watching The Notebook again.
# 8. Quick! Does anyone know the age of consent in Kentucky?
# 9. Just came up with a new emoticon for sanguine [:<≠>
# 10. Thinking about maybe talking to someone.

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Social networking websites have changed the way we view our reputations, the way we organize protests, and now the way we … couch surf?

The article goes on to show how AirBed&Breakfast, a web 2.0 social network is allowing people to meet one another and stay in guest houses, rather than hotels.

We’ve covered a lot of interesting internet stories here at the ReputationDefender Blog. Any readers have a favorite web 2.0 URL that changed the way you live, connect, share and think? Let us know in the comments below.

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Something curious has happened to Google Maps recently: Georgia got scrubbed.

The interiors of the countries of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan have all been made curiously empty on the “map” function, erasing the whereabouts of towns, roads, cities, etc. This was not the case last week, and one can only assume that this move was done in response to the recent escalating conflicts in the region.

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ReputationDefender Blog recently ran across this gem that places Hamlet on Facebook.

This is very funny, and very clever work.

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As if getting your city shelled with mortars and being under sniper fire were not bad enough, in the 21st century Information Age there is also a digital front to the fighting. Wired reports on the digital assault taking place:

The websites of Georgia’s government have been under denial-of-service attacks for weeks, with Russian hackers fingered as the culprits. Those online assaults have only intensified in recent days, as a shooting war between the two countries has broken out.

Galrahn at Information Dissimenation says that “Russia appears to have targeted the .ge domain for specific government websites, and are pounding the Georgian military networks, but other websites in Georgia in org, net, and other domains are still up, sporadically.” The Washington Post adds that “the Caucasus Network Tbilisi — key Georgian commercial Internet servers — remain under sustained attack from thousands of compromised PCs aimed at flooding the sites with so much junk Web traffic that they can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors.”

IntelFusion calls it a “full scale cyberwar being conducted by Russia against Georgia.” As always, however, its extremely difficult to sort out which hacks are being done with government involvement, which are being done with government wink-and-a-nod, and which have nothing to do with the government whatsoever.

Looks like warfare just went digital.

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Pennsylvania residents Aaron and Christine Boring filed an invasion of privacy lawsuit against Google earlier this year because images of their home were published on the popular engine’s “Street View” mapping feature. Google has moved to dismiss, arguing that the couple:

live in a residential community in the twenty-first-century United States, where every step upon private property is not deemed by law to be an actionable trespass.

Google’s legal eagles go on to assert that

Today’s satellite-image technology means that even in today’s desert, complete privacy does not exist. In any event, Plaintiffs live far from the desert and are far from hermits.

The photos, such as they are, do not reveal much of the Boring home (no pun intended), and appear to be from the couple’s driveway, which is allegedly a private road in its own right. Google’s motion notes that the company intends to prove that there was no sign designating the road as private. True to their first motto, Google has removed its “Street View” photos of the Boring residence after the couple filed its lawsuit.

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The Smoking Gun got in on the action and promptly posted the official report the officer submitted about the incident, much of which is in direct contradiction to the events caught on camera.

Judging from the sources, the outrage from many people stems from the fact that the attack on the bicyclist seems unprovoked and overly violent. People expect the NYPD to be more courteous, or at least not tackle cyclists in the street, it seems.The officer has been stripped of his badge and gun pending review, and is reportedly on desk duty for the foreseeable future. This all sounds fairly standard for a police force with proper internal controls. Now we wait for the hearing and justice to prevail, yes?Not on the Internet, they don’t. If there is one thing to take away from this incident, it is that the mob justice of the Internet is swift and brutal. There are websites now that are providing more information than the bicycle tackling cop would probably ever have wanted to find about himself online.

We won’t link to those sites, but a cursory overview of some of them reveals:

The Officer’s Badge Number
The Officer’s Age
The Officer’s Full Name
The Officer’s Family Information (father and mother’s names, careers)
Where the Officer Attended High School (and class year)
The Officer’s Home Address (with both street and map views)
The Officer’s Phone Number
The Officer’s Facebook Profile
The Officer’s Past Legal Issues

If you have any private information on the Internet you must understand that this can become (and already is, to some extent) public information. Anyone with relatively basic computer skills can dig up and repost information. They can even make stuff up, if they like, and they have a platform from which to disseminate their views. In this instance a police officer upset some people and his actions were caught on tape (we won’t wade into the arguments for/against justification, that’s not our job). Now he has very quickly learned how online information can be wielded to attain what the internet perceives as justice.

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