If he did that, he'd be sure to get a nice suspension from this site for a bit!
If I did it to someone randomly or that I was having an argument with or something then yeah that would probably get me a slapping, however as the would be user explicitly asked and presumably read a few pages of the thread to know what goes when they do then that is a different matter.
FAST, did you just look through some of my threads for a brief moment?
(I'm testing my staff-stalking skills.
)
I did, though I am not sure it is stalking when I do not use any of the activity cloaking options on the site.
I checked mainly as nobody thus far has had a proper personal site that I have found and as such I have not been able to do all the fun things I can do when I know a real website address (you might have domain privacy but that £100 a year for infinite space, bandwidth and any number of sites/domain hosting plan you shared with a few friends and local businesses might not have all sprung for domain privacy -- I find the other domains on the IP and I probably now know whereabouts you live), Most other people I just scan their profile, see any the links in their signature, posts on the forum and go out from there using pipl,
http://regex.info/exif.cgi ,
http://www.integrascan.com/ , whatever find your distant relatives thing is around, census data (the US takes a while to publish its stuff, the UK is far quicker) and such before feeding whatever I have back into search engines (also checking search engine caches and
http://archive.org/ ). I do not do any proper hacking*, I am already GBAtemp so I have that but I do not sign up for any forums/sites (anybody doing it for real will do that in heartbeat and said sign up will probably break down most doors for most forums), thus far I have not used any moderator abilities I have on GBAtemp to help me there either (mods can see IP addresses you post from after all), as I have skype open I stuck things in the skype directory and the email thing I did on burningdesire was probably as far as I have gone yet (also trivial to do which is why it is considered bad security/privacy practice for a website to do that). I do also want to emphasise the softer aspect of it all -- names, emails and such are fun but lists of interests, turns of phrase and commonalities there are what big boy detectives, analysts and investigators are on the lookout for. Similarly when I found burningdesire's school if I had not already known an address I would have possibly been able to guess something if I pulled up a school district map for that area, I mentioned the grade and time of posting of the news article for that honor roll thing which would have given an age bracket. Going a step further then if you are looking for a location you look at times of postings on forums and such -- most people are not always posting at 4am, the choice of language (despite the curse of sesame street I do still speak UK English so
http://www.onestopenglish.com/gramm...ritish-english-grammar-article/152820.article becomes worth looking for), any potentially local references they might make....
Anyway on the matter of the basic stuff it is quite boring to keep doing that, hence the draw of the cheesy medical shows. Not to mention you could always do it to yourself. It is harder, but not impossible, as you can fill in blanks that I would not be able to, not to mention when people are reading things they might gloss over any errors I have and see all their personal info dumped into a post among the noise (there is a related concept in psychology called gambler's memory where they only remember the good times and blank the bad).
*sticking feed?activity_view=1 at the end of someone's youtube channel or profile is not exactly hacking, and if you think it is cool then you probably also want to read
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
I do have some fancy stuff that the average person might not (it is good to have friends that owe you a favour), however I am not going to use it here.
Edit. I was made aware of it before but that youtube channel is nothing to do with me, not sure who set that one up. Equally in this instance I do not care but it is best to be careful doing this sort of thing, and especially if you are then posting it in public when the person you are doing it to has not asked you to.