As already written about, this is infrequent at best and is far out shadowed by my near daily purchase of the same sorts of media from Amazon, local brick and mortar shops and otherwise. But will, occasionally and on a whim, find something I'm interested in online, from torrent sites or any number of media-centric blogs, and just to check out and decide if I want to actually spend money on it.
But that's been written about and covered at length and is not the point of this particular post...
"Hey Man! Think if I mailed you a portable drive...?"
And that's pretty much the exact language this dude used.
I'm talking about a guy who randomly private messaged me on Head-fi.org, a very popular audiophile oriented web forum devoted to the discussion of high end headphone based audio gear. A forum I am a very long standing and somewhat prominent member of; I have thousands upon thousands of posts there and have been a daily, contributing member for over seven years now. My user name is "s1rrah" (Harris backwards and with a numeral 1 for the "i")
So this guy private messages me...
He starts out with lots of lavish and flattering praise regarding certain hardware reviews I've written there, and one in particular ... a review done for MHDT Laboratories and their very excellent Stockholm Vacuum tube digital to analogue converter (DAC).
We begin talking about this bit of equipment (I'm going to post the entire text of the dialogue once I get around to completing this blog post); at some point, I mention that I have about a 20,000 file collection of MP3s/FLACs that are on constant rotation (most of which are ripped from my own CD's thank you very much) and it doesn't take him any time to say something to the effect of:
"Dude! You think if I mailed you a portable hard drive you could copy your entire collection over to it and mail it back to me!? I assure you, you will be well compensated for this!"
...
Now I must admit, at the time of the original discourse, I was rather inebriated (Saturday Dec. 28/2013) and really just considered him a fellow music loving freak like myself and I said sure, though no compensation was necessary as I'm not in the business of peddling music; but it's true that me and my local friends trade CD's, share records/files all the time...pretty standard procedure as it is among most music listening humans, and my first inclination was to simply consider this more of the same.
(the evening passes and Joel sobers up and begins to consider the night's previous dialogue)
Immediately all the flags and bells and whistles start waving, ringing and blowing. I re read our dialogue and I notice a couple interesting things:
- The guy is overtly praising and flattering, as though (in a Psych 101 sort of way) attempting to "lubricate" my responses to upcoming questions by somehow filling me with pride or narcissistic self love of some sort. Or otherwise, to somehow manipulate my affections for him via such silly praise. (er...thanks guy, but I know I'm a pretty decent writer already and I'm full of myself enough without the flattery)
- Once I bring up having a pretty decently sized music collection, the guy immediately asks if he can mail me a portable drive and if I can mail it back.
- On two separate occasions, the guy expressly mentions that he will "pay" me for this and that I will be well "compensated."
...
Suffice it to say, I politely messaged him back that same following day saying that I didn't' feel it would be a good idea based simply on conscience and that I'd hate to either one, lose my civil liberties for taking part in something so blatantly illegal as such a mailing and even worse, perhaps, lose my good standing with the Head-fi.org forum, where it is explicitly stated in the Terms of Service that:
...
"The Head-Fi Web Site, Head-Fi Forums and any other Head-Fi user participatory areas shall be used for lawful purposes only. No material shall be posted on or transmitted through the Head-Fi Web Site, Head-Fi Forums and any other Head-Fi user participatory areas, which violates or infringes in any way upon the rights of others, which is unlawful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, vulgar, obscene, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable, which encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, gives rise to civil liability or otherwise violates any law."
...
I am going to write more about this bit of correspondence but wanted to get something down on the blog as, at the very least, a statement of awareness and perhaps a placeholder for further writing as I'm certainly not in the habit of selling/peddling music to person's, friends or otherwise.
I think I made my friend Juan (an illegal immigrant who was just learning how to operate an MP3 player at the time) pay me 20 bucks to find him some AC/DC tracks once a good bit back; but that certainly wasn't me charging for the music as much as it was my time spent in trying to hunt it down for him (cause it's a pain in the fucking ass). LOL ... but that's the only single thing I can think of in my entire life that could even remotely be viewed as such.
But it remains....
But it remains that I am very much aware that the persons behind the ongoing (and still non-officially-publicized "investigation" of myself are quite desperate to "get him!" (me) for something, anything and especially anything involving computers and/or the internet.
And this whole thing just reeked of a classic bait operation. Subtle, caught me on New Years weekend when I was quite happy with my drink at home, but still and especially in retrospect, it reeks.
And so I've given the guy the word that I'm not cool with it (and he's already said that he might be through Houston soon, as he "has relatives" here and that we could get together and copy it that way) ... LOL ... that's not gonna happen either, friend.
;-)
(more on this later and as I have time to write)
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this post is intended to be supplemental to the facts made public in my main website, http://www.jbhfile.com/; it probably will not make much sense to you if you have not already made yourself aware of the legal and personal efforts discussed in that site. please see http://www.jbhfile.com/ for a necessary introduction into why this blog exists. or, if you just like reading weird stuff, then don't. and, enjoy.
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jbh.
