TRUST AND IRC's

Our Sun 690MP recently crashed due to one of our users executing a piece of code they received from some unidentified person they were communicating with on an irc. According to our users account,

"I got into a heated argument with a channel operator. Some other stranger in the channel observed this, offered to send me a script to freeze the other guy's computer screen. He thought the channel operator was abusing his power. In the heat of the moment, I stupidly accepted and ran the script immediately, trusting him implicitly."

1. It does absolutely no good to argue with a channel operator.

2. Why is it that people trust strangers in an irc more than they trust a stranger on the street? In this case, I suspect the unidentified user was, at the very least, a friend of the channel operator, and if I were a betting man, I would lay even odds that it was the channel operator himself.

3. Freezing the other guy's screen, (assuming that is possible) does not sound like a big deal, but in fact freezing the other guy's screen means freezing the other guy's machine. Now let's assume that the other guy's machine is like ours and has 20 students on it that are minding their own business trying to get their homework done that is due Monday morning. Put this way, it just does not sound quite so innocent.

The result of the above was to make nye unavailable for use from Saturday morning until the following Monday.

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