'Chat Logs' Led to Bradley Manning's Arrest; 35 Year Prison Sentence

drudgereport.com archives

Here is a purely coincidental yet timely main stream media mention of 'chat logs.'

Manning boasted to hacker Adrian Lamo that he had been working with WikiLeaks. After engaging Manning for several days, Lamo informed Army investigators and the FBI about the breach of information and provided them with his chat logs with Manning. Manning was arrested in Iraq on May 27, 2010. ~ source Wapo

PHREIK Chat's SYSOP_FAYRAH Gives Chat Managers a Bad Name

UPDATE 15 September 2013 BREAKING...Former PHREIK SYSOP_FAYRAH Opens New Chatline

FAYRAH PHREIK Chat Public Profile - source

Good Grief, I don't even know where to start...I guess with a little background first. Over on PHREIK Chat, Sysop_FAYRAH, is the "Caretaker" of what is supposed to be their flagship room, Espressobar.

SYSOP is short for System Operator, so she is part of upper management. Her regular chatnickname is FAYRAH or FAY for short.

If you're with me so far, FAY's online lover, his chatnickname is: @ (Rock)Tom(b) we'll just call him TOM so that we're not bothered typing out the goofy @(Rock)(b) thing every time.

To matters even more um, interesting, TOM has an alter ego or something called TONI. Toni with an i is supposed to be a guy and TOM"s roommate or something.

So like I said FAYRAH and TOM are online lovers as well as TOM being a Host in Espressobar which to recap, is the chat room FAYRAH um takes care of -- which that right there in any normal, ethical company would be prohibited as a conflict of interest.

A while back someone on staff at PHREIK got the half bright idea to start a thread called "Rumor board" on the official PHREIK forum.

What FAYRAH, TOM and TONI - as platnum-d,  do is copy and paste to the "Rumor Board' bits of the vulgar and profane chats that they are having right out in the open in Espressobar sometimes even while TOM is Hosting.

Judging from the comments FAYRAH makes on her and other posts she must think that this is appropriate behavior for a professional to indulge in. Perhaps even cute. I mean c'mon if you were in a shop and the management and staff were talking like this would you stick around?

Here are a few examples:

Fayrah : i just texted a friend of mine i hope they having anal amazing time

There's page after page of this crap over there at this link.

Would any reasonable minded person think that it's appropriate for management and staff to be having these types of conversations to begin with and then post them out in public for all the world to see? What is wrong with these people?

It was just last week not long before I left PHREIK for BUZZEN that I saw FAYRAH chatting in Espressobar about how her titty fell out whilst she was camming with TOM.

Why in the world would any serious chatter even consider chatting at PHREIK when it appears to be a mad house staffed and hosted by a collection of misfits and weirdos?

UPDATE 15 September 2013 BREAKING...Former PHREIK SYSOP_FAYRAH Opens New Chatline

Why is PHREIK Chat Ownership so Secretive?

Back in late June this year I had given some serious thought to purchasing a VIP Subscription from PHREIK.

This was shortly after I was approached in Espressobar by PHREIK Host, Mist and asked  by her and Admin_Cyra to help her Host a new Official PHREIK Chat Room called ChitChat.

A PHREIK VIP Subscription costs $4.50 a month or $54.00 per year. With it comes the ability to view the chatnickname of anyone that's signed in, who in turn views your profile. You get some other stuff like an @PHREIK.COM email addresse(s) and more storage and fast tracked Member Support -- which if it is anything like the lousy regular Member support, only faster, isn't worth in my opinion maybe two cents.

When I started looking around for information on how to contact PHREIK's main office I couldn't find anything.

For example, if you look at PHREIK's Donations page you will notice that they want you to use a paypal account to pay something called STEALTH HOLDINGS.

That's it just STEALTH HOLDINGS - no Inc,. L.L.C., LTD., etc.

It appears to be set up as a Sole Proprietorship or Doing/Business/As (DBA) account belonging to who knows who.

What's more,  when I whois'd phreik.net to try and find out who the domain is registered to, I learned that information is blocked behind a domain service. (You might have to click the picture to enlarge).

Same with phreik.com.

To be fair, it does say towards the bottom of the PHREIK Chat Donations page that, "Other arrangements can be made if you would like to subscribe to a few months or a whole year in one go rather then making recurring donations or if you dont use paypal, just visit the HelpDesk anytime."

Still though, why should I have to go to the HelpDesk just to get a postal address, providing they would give me one? For all I know the HelpDesk Guide could be giving me his own address -- Notice that it doesn't even mention what country STEALTH HOLDINGS is located in. What if I wanted to report something that I thought a HelpDesk Guide was up to?

It makes me wonder what is with all this secrecy if PHREIK Chat is even a real company? I noticed that their About Us page is totally blank. The Contact Us page is just a generic email form. It seems that an honest company would want a customer to be able to verify it from independent sources.

Anyway, last week after I moved to BUZZEN, I wondered if their ownership info was so hard to come by.

The first thing I did was click their Make a donation! button. Below is a full screen capture of what I saw:

BUZZEN also uses paypal to take donations but if you look at the bottom of the page there is a name and postal address to contact the owner.

BUZZEN's whois domain registration information isn't hidden either:

Of course there is no way that I can prove that I would have sent PHREIK Chat any money, because I never did. It's purely speculation. I know that I could have and I would like to think that had my experience with them turned out to have been a positive one I would have.

BUZZEN has a postal address though, so time will tell. stay tuned....

Review: Phreik Chat Network, A place to forget!

I am cross-posting this review written in 2009. Please correct me if i'am wrong but If there have been any software or services upgrades at PHREIK since then, (other than moving to the PHREIK.NET domain) as well as any attempt to recruit honest, respectable staff I haven't noticed any.

However, in 2013 like in 2009, PHREIK still has a "poor staff that couldn’t manage a sky viewing competition." Some things never change. 

Also where this reviewer noted that PHREIK (back then) had a couple of its own rooms with about 25 - 30 people in them, this is no longer true and hasn't been for years. PHREIK has only one poorly managed and poorly hosted server room, Espressobar, which has less than about 20 chatters in it at a time and many of those are bots and room count inflalator bots.

Phreik Chat Network, A place to forget!

  29.04.2009 (30.04.2009)

Advantages:
I suppose if you want to get banned its easy .

Disadvantages:
Too many to put in this little box .

109 Ciao members have rated this review on average:  very helpful

Phreik Chat network is an Australian based clone of the former MSN Chat Network, that offers a similar service to the one that was previously run by MSN. In my review I will discuss generally what I think of the network, it staff and its features. I haven’t had a good experience with this site but I will try not to be too biased when I am writing about it.

Phreik Chat was first opened in June 2004 to the public, around the time MSN Chat shut it doors due accusations that paedophiles were using the network which is probably true to some extent, but it was really due to financial reasons, but I wont go into that. The site itself runs on an outdated community portal by PHPBB which gives it some major vulnerability in its back bone, the site hasn’t really received any major updates apart from a few graphical changes since it opened, and generally looks very old.

The chatrooms run on a custom be internet chat relay server that works with the MSN Chat Control which is used illegally by the site without Microsoft’s permission to have it as part of there site. You can also use PJIRC to access chat if you’re a MAC user but there is nothing on the site to tell you how to access it, which I see as a major floor in providing that service at all. As it is an IRC network you can also uses various applications to use the server including mIRC with some modding and ICEChat, there is probably more but I have never tried them.

As a former MSN Chat room owner I visited the site originally to the quality of chat, but unfortunately this didn’t meet my expectations, the rules there mean you can be banned at anytime meaning the site staff have a little demi god thing going on, removing your freedom to have a normal conversation. The amount of people who used to use the network used to be a lot greater, but problems with the key people who run site have led to most of these users being banned. Popular rooms on the network after a while become scrutinised by the network admin, causing rifts between users and staff eventfully leading to the chatters moving on to other sites that meet there interests. However the site does manage to keep a couple of its own rooms going averaging about 25-30 people in them at a time.

The support on the site isn’t really as they say dedicated, helpful or supporting in anyway its common to be told in helpdesk which is there support chat if you disagree with anything on the site you will be permanently banned. I do have one of the former Admins on this site on Xbox live but he doesn’t seem to use the site anymore, and some other former staff have started there own rival network twice, which just says to me that the staff who disagree with the bigwigs also just move on.

One thing I cant understand about the site is why they offer additional poorly run features such as an Arcade, Forum, A video section, Radio and a Phreik Toolbar, which are all very odd looking amateur productions that no one on the site uses. If the site wants more users this is not the way to go the best thing to do would be to have a high quality chat support team and a better easier to use site.
The site has 15 categories of chatrooms to choose from depending on what you’re interested in but most of these categories are bare and have no users or chat rooms what so ever which is slightly hard to imagine why they would these areas if no one uses them, Although if there is nothing you’re interested in you can start your own room and once you have 15 simultaneous users in the room it automatically become permanent that’s if the admin decide its okay to have a normal room where you and your friends can chat about a subject you’re interested in.

The site is also common to downtime, which is annoying for it users this either due to the systems there running failing or bills not being paid but either way if you’re looking for a chat to use where the service is stable then this wouldn’t be place for you.

The site has also due to the closure of MSN Groups started to offer its own community groups, which I have to say are very poor and uninspired, using part of a social networking software known as phpFOX this site is limited poorly run and unpopulated and I wouldn’t recommend it to users interested in online communities.

The sites usability is a let down as it is just a lot of publicly released copies of other peoples software clumped together to make an all together poorly run web site, which I find unimpressive, poor and quite bemused on why it had been made this way.Its outdated vulnerable site isn’t worth a shred of respect, and the owners obviously need to look up a few things about web design and the consequences that it might have from using outdated mass used publicly released web scripts.

My personal experience of the site is that the service is poor, when I have used it, I have been banned for no reason, I was even banned by mistake once, When I have asked for support it wasn’t given, the staff were unhelpful and friendly and they even one time had the cheek to ask me to donate money to there site when they couldn’t afford the bill. I defiantly wouldn’t recommend this site to anyone.

What’s next for Phreik?, well they’re working on a new site at http://www.phreik.net/ which is again using outdated software, I did look one time and they had a very nicely made site that did look amazing but now it seems to look like a mess again, maybe the horrible green colour they use on the sites is an Australian thing, who knows.

Overall Phreik chat isn’t for me and is poor in most areas of its presence, offering poor support, services no one uses, using out dated software and having poor staff that couldn’t manage a sky viewing competition.

Thanks for reading,

Ben

Oh and did I mention it has a stupid name??

click here to view original

“Online chat rooms help terrorists hide”

source

At first online chat rooms were going to change the world. Might would have too if the internet wasn’t new and if it was known and understood how to manage large numbers of people talking to each other in real time.

Just in case should anyone figure out how, along comes NBC and their “To Catch a Predator,” series which made a lot of people quit chat rooms lest their family and friends think they were trying to pick up a child.

MSN closed their chat service in October, 2006. If memory serves, they said that the declining numbers of chatters willing to pay a subscription was costing them too much money.

The way I remember it though was that MSN chat after the subscription part began in October, 2003 was like it always was — just smaller.

The management was horrible and did things that convinced me that they were intentionally sabotaging chat in order to lose enough subscribers to have an excuse to close it.

The funny thing is that right now at PHREIK chat the current management and ownership is doing the exact thing as MSN.

At PHREIK the management and hosting staff is so incompetent and sleazy right now, that,  I see no hope for this crew to ever grow the chat line out of its current massive slump – oh yeah, that they originally caused. Time will of course tell if I am right. Meanwhile, it does make for a good mystery just exactly what is going on there.

The ability of chat rooms to change the world still exists and every once in awhile you can catch a glimpse of it.

Every once in awhile the media will claim that a chat room was behind this or that or that someone killed themselves live in a chat room while the chatters cheered and now they are going all out to associate chat rooms with being mixed up in terrorism.

If the read the “news” report you will see that it’s not even really about chat rooms at all but people see the headline and suggestion implanted.

The point of this post, if there is one, is that chat rooms already have a lot going against them like the government and the media so why do they tolerate incompetent management too? For that matter, why do chatters?

Originally Posted on August 16, 2013 at:

http://chatlog.blog.com/2013/08/16/online-chat-rooms-help-terrorists-hide/

Another Look at Buzzen Shows Much Improved Chatting

I will be the first to admit that I was dreading switching chatting sites to BUZZEN after I finally accepted that PHREIK Chat is managed and hosted by people who don’t have a clue and worse, don’t want a clue. Let’s just say that the name PHREIK pronounced freak suits them well.  They made a good choice.

I’ll be including  in forthcoming posts  … well… chat logs, whisper logs, emails, publicly available screen grabs and so forth. In other words, the freaky evidence to help you to understand how I came to be of this opinion.

Anyway, BUZZEN has been around since at least 2005 or ’04. Back then it was called NSM (MSN backwards).

It was an alternative to MSN Chat which had went paid subscription in October 2003.

I started chatting there probably not long after I resigned Hosting for MSN Chat in March 2005. .

When MSN Chat closed in October 2006, I did move to BUZZEN along with many friends until I discovered that a former MSN CHA called StormWatcher had become their chat manager.

The problem as I saw it was that when I was Hosting on MSN, StormWatcher and his clique didn’t like me at all and was always trying to get me removed.

However, one day in January 2005 he along with three other CHA’s were fired from MSN.

I wasn’t looking to Host at BUZZEN, I just assumed that with StormWatcher now in a high enough position, I felt that I could see the handwriting on the wall and would probably be eventually banned or given a hard time.

So I left BUZZEN to what turned out to be a waste of many years at PHREIK Chat.

My epiphany about PHREIK appeared on Wednesday, August 14, 2013, when I observed PHREIK Chat Managers appoint an online chatroom player (see a subsequent series of posts The BeguilingMyst Phenomena) known before hand, by them, to be a liar, grifter, spammer and otherwise unethical and deceptive host and chatter to Host their Espressobar chatroom.

I just couldn’t take it any more, especially after just the previous month watching her attempting to deceive some male PHREIK Members like Slurpy and v3euk as well as myself; her pretending to be the 22 year old chatter Liger and all the rest of the crazy lies she told and bizarre behavior.

This misconduct of Mist’s  and more had all been reported by me who had witnessed it to the PHREIK Management — because I was Hosting TheLobby with Mist while she was doing it.

A PHREIK Guide, Guide_Neka, aka Gracee, agreed with me and from her perch shared that PHREIK knew even more about what Mist was up to.

What’s interesting is that Guide_Neka, aka Gracee was also TheLobby room Caretaker and instead of removing Mist’s Hosting Privilege which would have seemed like the common sense and prudent thing to have done, instead — both her and I had to leave TheLobby and go to ChitChat to get away from Mist and her lies and bizarre behavior.

So despite all that and despite what a reasonable minded person would expect from a competent chatroom manager, who had their Members (not to mention PHREIK’s or even chat itself) best interest at heart, they made her a Host of their supposedly flagship chatroom, Espressobar. yep freaky.

So, after asking for a curse on PHREIK for their foolishness, wickedness and deception LOL, I hustled over to register at BUZZEN.

At the end of the registration process, I was automatically placed in BUZZEN’s The Lobby chatroom where much to my surprise it was being Hosted by what turned out to be a great Host Rebel.

He really made me feel comfortable in greeting and welcoming me and explaining to me how BUZZEN works introducing me to the other room regulars and helping me to fit in — you know things that you’d expect from a chatroom Host.

That evening an old friend of mine and regular chatter from MSN 30s Main, chatnickname RyanBelmore happened in and it was great seeing him again and catching up.

Don’t get me wrong, there are times when The Lobby at BUZZEN is slow, like when the regulars are out doing something in real life but it picks back up again.

BUZZEN doesn’t just consist of The Lobby they have other busy chatrooms, for instance 40s (under Peers) is usually always packed out.

But hey don’t take my word for it. I invite you to check out PHREIK and compare the experience to BUZZEN. I bet you’ll be shocked at what you find.

Originally Posted on August 16, 2013 at:

http://chatlog.blog.com/2013/08/16/another-look-at-buzzen-shows-much-improved-chatting/

ChatLog: About Zany Chatters

Social & Political Commentary, Sometimes Parody & Satire About Chatlines & the Chatters Who Use Them

The thing to remember about chatters is that in order to conceal their identity (which is recommended) they all use fake names, or chatnicknames as they are usually called. Along with the chatnickname comes a persona.

No effort is made by this blog to learn or to reveal any chatters real name or any personally identifiable information, if such information would be available in the first place — other than any information a chatter willingly placed into the public domain by placing it on a public profile, in a public chat room or on a public forum.

ChatLog only deals in chatnicknames and personas in order to give you the reader, a glimpse into the zany world of online, realtime chatting.

Sometimes we will go into the dark, seedy side of chat. For instance we know of at least one case of a so called ‘chat whore’ or ‘internet slut’ who trolls online chat rooms and forums looking for men to scam, usually as a Host in order to give her an appearance of legitimacy and respectability before unsuspecting men and the suspicious Australian or New Zealand based chatline that encourages and facilitates it.

This is all done within the context of social commentary and sometimes political commentary with satire and parody thrown in for good measure.

Comments and guest posts are welcome concerning your own experiences, good or bad, chatting.

All posts and editorial content are  strictly an opinion the writer holds.

Comments are those of the commenter.

Email anytime: skip.tracer@hotmail.com

Originally Posted on August 15, 2013 at:

http://chatlog.blog.com/2013/08/15/chatlog-about-zany-chatters/