Cybersex consists of lurking in a two-person chat room while someone on the other end of the Net types amateur erotica that they're making up as they go along. Usually, there's a back and forth to this process, with each party typing in smut to arouse the other. "iwould put my hands on yur body," a typical session might begin -- and on and on, with pointless descriptions of hypothetical night moves. Losers hope this exchange of sexual fantasies will progress to an exchange of phone numbers so they can listen to someone recite amateur erotica that they're making up as they go along.

It's easy to find losers hunting for cybersex. They're the ones prowling around chat rooms typing whiny, agonized pleas for someone they can send dirty messages. Most Internet services include a feature that lets the user send private steamy messages to another user instead of having the text appear in the chat room, where everyone can read it. This is where you, the asshole, come in. Convince a first-timer that the way to send someone a private, one-to-one, cybersex message is to precede it with a "special command," in reality just nonsense text such as ".msg"

In fact, this will just display whatever the person has typed to the entire chat room -- preceded by the nonsensical ".msg" text. But they'll think they're sending a private message.

Sure, they'll eventually wise up. But you'll get the thrill of reading their first humiliating sentence.

.msg I've always found urine incredibly sexy.
.msg I'm looking for a woman who *appreciates* my small penis.
.msg Do me up the ass like the doggy I am.

If everyone in the room is in on your prank, there's no limit to how long you can string along your gullible chat-room Lothario!

But don't forget the simple recipe for added fun.

1. Keep a transcript
2. Post it online.

With all the pornography on the Internet, why would people even settle for plain text? Well, it started in the pre-Web days -- when dirty pictures took longer to download and pornography on the Internet wasn't as well organized. Just as adult videotapes drove people to adopt VCRs, cybersex was the major engine of Internet commerce. Back when commercial online services charged $3.50 an hour, cybersex addicts funded the onslaught of promotional floppy disks that allowed these services to grow. To this day, some critics refer to AOL as "the house that chat built."

Next time you get a promotional floppy disk in the mail, remember: It was paid for by somebody wanking off.

Some cybersex tricks are so obvious, they're barely worth mentioning. There are probably several hundred thousand people who have masqueraded as members of the opposite sex in online chat rooms (I know I have), which illustrates the low quality of most online chat to begin with. A man named Jesse Kornbluth once complained that ordinary chat rooms "bored me silly" with "dialogue that made ham radio compelling in comparison."

Kornbluth turned to a life of deception -- messing with the heads of AOL chat-room kings such as "BigStick" -- by adopting the female persona "MsTerious." Just when things started getting steamy, MsTerious would bring in an online acquaintance at the last minute to play the part of a jealous lesbian. ("We were lovers. But Jane has been drinking and drugging all summer, so I moved out..."). In a cloying online essay about how clever he'd been, Kornbluth gloated that it was a lesson about enjoying the moment. But some eyewitnesses to his prank disagree. "Boy, did I see this coming a mile off," BigStick is quoted as saying.

A humorous footnote: Today, Jesse Kornbluth is editorial director of AOL channel programming.