| Internet Dating Has Its Risks |
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Online Lover Leaves An IP Trail Of Broken Hearts
You may have read about this online lover who has left a trail of broken hearts longer than the list of rejected links on FARK. He'll win you over with a romantic weblink, a poem recorded as a .wav file, or an interactive Flash-based e-card, and after he's captured your love like a Windows screenshot, he'll dump you like so much bad code. "He used me," said Cheryl Petrichoff, jilted Internet e-lover. "The same way he used all of my bandwidth. He leeched love from me like I was a zero-day warez server." Cheryl is just one of many victims of the Internet Casanova, the debonair downloader of love. "I met him in an IRC chat room, and his poetic keystrokes had me melting like butter on a heat sync. It wasn't long before we were sharing a private channel, and shortly thereafter, we exchanged emails. His correspondences were as eloquent as prefilled Print-Shop postcards." "But then things started to change," continued Cheryl. "The pre-scanned Kathy comics he would send me everyday stopped showing up in my Inbox. He avoided my ICQ chat requests, and he wouldn't show up to our scheduled online dates. His Outlook out-of-office reply said he was away on business, but I'm sure he was lying. He had the perfect auto-response for everything." Most of these women never realized they were sharing him like a Shakira MP3 on a peer-2-peer network. "He decrypted the 128-bit key to my heart and I was left as vulnerable as a Microsoft server on the outside of a firewall," said Debbie Dugan, another Internet lover left hanging like a frozen FTP connection. "He earned my trust, and then he earned access to my private file server. It wasn't long before he was sharing space on my domain, and he had his own keys--the cd-keys for my online multiplayer games." Debbie hasn't "hooked-up" with her Internet lover in two months. They're very charming, these high-speed heartbreakers," sighed Debbie. "But they're all after one thing...maybe two things, and I thought that one of them was love. First they'll steal your heart, and then they'll steal everything from your hard drives." For those like Cheryl and Debbie who were desperate for love, the Internet Casanova was impossible for them to resist. He was as smooth as a Linux install, he had excellent grammar and spellchecking skills, and he knew the right emoticon to use at the right time. "Finally, I was able to release him like a bad IP," said Debbie. "I deleted him from my Instant Messenger contact list, I removed him from my e-mail address book, and I added him to my ignore list in ICQ. It took time, but I was able to get him out of my system...literally, using Norton Utilities." The Internet is a vast ocean of lonely woman looking for romance. But beware the Internet Casanova, for his online personality is as infectious as the latest Blaster virus.
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