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"My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles"

If you are a member of Perverted Justice, you are a vigilante , and have no standing as a law enforcement officer. Your records of posing may mean you are under investigation for a copy cat crime , after using the Dateline special as your guide.

If you get your kicks online by posing as an underage girl in the guise of "catching pedophiles", go right ahead, but don't claim your legal rights are somehow being violated.

"My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles"

If you are a member of Perverted Justice, you are a vigilante , and have no standing as a law enforcement officer. Your records of posing may mean you are under investigation for a copy cat crime , after using the Dateline special as your guide.

If you get your kicks online by posing as an underage girl in the guise of "catching pedophiles", go right ahead, but don't claim your legal rights are somehow being violated.

I checked my profile on MySpace. Would someone more familiar with databases explain why the "Last Logged In" is 1/1/0001 ?

Chatmag's MySpace profile.

I found myself and Chatmag.com in the middle of an argument over one of the more controversial Wikipedia entries, that of the online vigilante group Perverted-justice.com

Even though the controversy has not fully ended, it has slowed to the point that we reported it as concluded

I am convinced that the discussion feature works in that all parties involved have had more than their share of chances to defend their positions. The self correcting format of Wikipedia, in both the editing and discussions, sets Wikipedia in a class of its own.

Bob Parsons, owner of GoDaddy, contributed $10,000.00 US to Perverted-Justice.com, an online vigilante group. Perverted-Justice is the group involved with Dateline NBC. Media groups and journalism scholars have taken Dateline NBC to task for journalism ethics violations regarding their involvement with Perverted-Justice.

Most Linux groups are either in IRC or discussion forums.

Linux discussion groups

Good luck with your project.

You could check our Japan discussion and chat listings for some online help.

A related proposal, involving "uniformed" police to monitor chat rooms, was announced June 9th 2004 Cyber Cops to Patrol Internet Chat Rooms We polled over 100 IRCops and Server Administrators and posted the results at: Chat Network Operators and Users Wary of Uniformed Police Presence

There really isn't anything to prevent them from using the logs in a similar fashion to the out of control cyber-vigilante web site Perverted Justice other than a privacy policy that seems to leave a lot of questions in my mind as to the security of the system.

According to their privacy policy:
"Access to your personal information other than your chat logs and buddy lists (which are protected according to Section 2.3) is limited to employees who reasonably require access to it in the course of doing their jobs, such as providing customer support to you. We require those employees to sign confidentiality agreements promising to safeguard your information."

There's been a few highly publicized cases of insiders stealing information. I've got to pass on IMSmarter.

The FBI and British Police decided to patrol chat rooms with uniformed police, and IRC administrators are against their proposal. When will they find the time to track down identity theft and scam operators?

I've known Parry since '97, when she was involved in Cyberangels. Her site, Wired Safety has a lot of good information and resources for kids on the 'net. Also, our Safety Section and Kids Chat Rooms have more detailed information regarding safety issues for both children and adults, and chat areas that we've previewed as kid friendly.

I've known Parry since '97, when she was involved in Cyberangels. Her site, Wired Safety has a lot of good information and resources for kids on the 'net. Also, our Safety Section and Kids Chat Rooms have more detailed information regarding safety issues for both children and adults, and chat areas that we've previewed as kid friendly.

Here's one that will crack you up.

2004-07-22 04:01:37 Identity theft case could be largest so far (Index,Security) (pending)

Pending???? it's been pending since the 22nd of last month. I submitted that almost 12 hours before the story was posted, by someone else.

Here are a few other stories that were missed.

Chat Network Operators and Users Wary of "Uniformed" Police Presence.

We had conducted a poll of IRC Server Administrators and chat users to get their reaction. This proposal cuts to the heart of who owns the networks, and how much cooperation should they give, also, do police have the right to enter chat networks uninvited. "The recent proposal outlined by The U.K.'s National Crime Squad (NCS) to monitor Internet chat rooms is not a workable solution, according to Internet chat network owners and administrators. In their statement of 9 June, 2004 the NCS stated that "Uniformed Officers" will enter certain chat rooms, primarily those chat rooms frequented by adults seeking underage children, and have an icon attached to their nickname to identify themselves as law enforcement officers. The F.B.I. is also named as one of the agencies participating in this proposal." The full report is at: Chatmag News Special Reports.

An online vigilante group is harming law enforcement efforts to stop online predators, we have an extensive report regarding this group.

Unrelated question. Is Slashdot having problems, I'm seeing a lot of 503's today.

Here's one that will crack you up.

2004-07-22 04:01:37 Identity theft case could be largest so far (Index,Security) (pending)

Pending???? it's been pending since the 22nd of last month. I submitted that almost 12 hours before the story was posted, by someone else.

Here are a few other stories that were missed.

Chat Network Operators and Users Wary of "Uniformed" Police Presence.

We had conducted a poll of IRC Server Administrators and chat users to get their reaction. This proposal cuts to the heart of who owns the networks, and how much cooperation should they give, also, do police have the right to enter chat networks uninvited. "The recent proposal outlined by The U.K.'s National Crime Squad (NCS) to monitor Internet chat rooms is not a workable solution, according to Internet chat network owners and administrators. In their statement of 9 June, 2004 the NCS stated that "Uniformed Officers" will enter certain chat rooms, primarily those chat rooms frequented by adults seeking underage children, and have an icon attached to their nickname to identify themselves as law enforcement officers. The F.B.I. is also named as one of the agencies participating in this proposal." The full report is at: Chatmag News Special Reports.

An online vigilante group is harming law enforcement efforts to stop online predators, we have an extensive report regarding this group.

Unrelated question. Is Slashdot having problems, I'm seeing a lot of 503's today.

I didn't forget the Nigerians, but is it considered spam or a scam. The scam doesn't send out millions of emails, they instead target certain individuals, so I created a DIY Nigerian Scam Template just to see how long it takes for one to get back to me. Nothing since I posted it last year, but it's gotten a few laughs.

Ronald Reagan Discussion Too bad /. doesn't have a discussion board for these times of off topic news.

I'm glad to see that the Feds are pursuing predators online by using methods that will stand up in court, rather than the questionable tactics used by the vigilantes of Perverted Justice

With all the bad press lately regarding Perverted Justice, I can see that this ruling may put an end to their tactics. There is a full write up on Perverted Justice and how they hinder law enforcement efforts to nab predators on Chatmag

We see both a lot of hits to our Live Help Software page, and frequent requests to add software to our list of live help software providers. Most live help software is configured by the user to be passive, waiting for a person to request a chat session, rather than actively pushing a session. We preview all software prior to adding it to our list, and personally, I prefer to be the one to initiate a session, rather than having the site push a session.

SPEWS is not anonymous.

Some moron email bombed my server last night with over 16000 emails for camcontacts.net

I contacted Ameritech, and they contacted their customer, and found out that it was a "malicious" program that they had downloaded that was spitting out the spam. The interesting thing was that the program had one email address in it, mine.

Apparently I must of ruffled some feathers with the perverted justice people when I did an expose` of their site, Vigilante Web Site Perverted-Justice.com harming legitimate law enforcement efforts to stop online predators.

I can deal with normal spam, but that was above and beyond what I normally get every day. I'm all in favor of tracking down the spammers and going through the court system, after all, all they understand is money.

When Yugo first started to import to the US, I was running an open car carrier, and over the course of a year picked up several hundred Yugos from the port of Houston. Most of them could not go into reverse gear, and the wheelbase was so narrow I had to deck the racks with plywood to prevent them from falling into the middle of the trailer. I couldn't find a picture of one on a carrier, but here are Yugo's on a train car Still a narrow fit, and worse on a car carrier.

Due to not being able to put the car into reverse, I loaded them nose to the front and to unload, I had to tilt the front of each rack up high enough for gravity to take over, put the the car in neutral, and back off the racks. To paraphrase Yakov Smirnov, "what a ride".

OK, what is the count? It's a stretch to say 30 - in over two years. BFD.

Where did you ever arrive at such a rediculously low number? Here's a more accurate way to determinte this:

Go to google and look at the number of posts appearing in NANAE/NANAB beginning with [SXXXX] where XXXX is a 4 digit number identifying the SPEWS record of the offender. If you only see 30 of these in two years, something is very wrong with your computer or yourself.

What else can you count - complaints from peoplle who have no connection to spam and have their perfectly decent email blocked? Numbers are good: show some numbers. You said you could count them: do it.

Count them yourself, go to google and do as I suggested above. What I'd like to ask you is where you got that "30" number?

Where's this PR war?

You're reading it, right now! Look at the people posting links to kookery like this.

In addition you ignore that most of the blocking that occurs because of SPEWS listings is blocking for actual spam-source IPS. That's what the spammers don't like, that's the source of their PR war, such as it is (where is it?)

Riiight.

Why would spammers give a damn if non-spam-email is blocked? They'd celebrate: the darling of the loudest anti-spammers is a rogue, anonymous monster.

Here's how SPEWS hurts spammers:

Spammers arrange "pink contract" with $LARGE_BACKBONE provider. Contract stipulates that spam complaints will be ignored if the spammer pays a premium for his access, and that the ISP will move the spammer's allocation occasionally to prevent blacklisting.

SPEWS completely foils this arrangement. Now an ISP who makes an agreement with a spammer not only risks being caught out and having their backroom dealings exposed to the light of day, it will eventually *also* break the service of its legitimate customers, causing them to (hopefully) find out what all the fuss is about and eventually vote with their wallets against spammer friendly ISPs. Since SPEWS records and discussions are inherently public, this also provides the entire internet community with an in-stone history of the compliance of various providers.

After a run in last year with SPEWS, and after some investigation, I believe I have found SPEWS owner/administrator, and posted last March as SPEWS no longer anonymous

The Pew Internet Life Project issued a similar report recently, suggesting that Internet chat usage had shown only a modest increase.

We recently published our years end list of the top ten chat topics for 2003, and have seen a very good growth both in Chatmag and Internet chat and discussion sites in general. Two years ago, our estimate of functioning chat rooms were at about 750,000. End of 2003 estimates are at about 1,325,000. We now include 'blogs and discussion groups such as Yahoo! Groups and MSN Groups in our listings, to reflect the changes in social interaction.

Online game playing, while not in itself "chat" offers players the opportunity to talk to each other. According to statistics from 2002, an estimated 50 million people around the world were playing online games that year, and the number is expected to grow to 114 million by the year 2006. Online game playing is the Internet equivalent of "poker night" or board gaming with friends.

According to Alexa, the two year ranking for Slashdot rose from a low of about 1750 to todays rank of 881. In that same time, Chatmag's rank was at about 230,000 two years ago, with todays ranking of 43,656. Other social networking and related sites have shown a similar increase in users, suggesting that the reports do not delve into all aspects of social interaction.

When Pew and The World Internet Project look at usage, they do not consider sites such as Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Ryze, or Ecademy as "chat" sites, although the primary function of such sites are to promote dialog.

Social interaction is evolving from the traditional IRC chat room toward more focused integrated sites, such as interactive games, 'blogs and Slashdot-type sites.

The Pew Internet Life Project issued a similar report recently, suggesting that Internet chat usage had shown only a modest increase.

We recently published our years end list of top ten chat topics for 2003, and have seen a very good growth both in Chatmag and Internet chat and discussion sites in general. Two years ago, our estimate of functioning chat rooms were at about 750,000. End of 2003 estimates are at about 1,325,000. Online game playing, while not in itself "chat" offers players the opportunity to talk to each other. According to statistics from 2002, an estimated 50 million people around the world were playing online games that year, and the number is expected to grow to 114 million by the year 2006.

According to Alexa, the two year ranking for Slashdot rose from a low of about 1750 to todays rank of 881. In that same time, Chatmag's rank was at about 230,000 two years ago, with todays ranking of 43,656. Other social networking sites have shown a similar increase in users.

When Pew and The World Internet Project look at usage, they do not consider sites such as Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Ryze, or Ecademy as "chat" sites, although the primary function of such sites are to promote dialog.

Social interaction is evolving from the traditional IRC chat room toward more focused integrated sites, such as Slashdot.

Excerpt from our Policy regarding Pop Up ads.

Chatmag.com DOES NOT USE POP UP ADS!

If a user of Chatmag is viewing a pop up ad, it IS NOT being served by Chatmag.com but by one of several third party advertising servers. These third party advertising servers place a program on a users system, and then while browsing, serve ads from their servers.

If you have installed a file sharing program or "wallet", from such companies as: Gator, (Note: Gator has changed their name to Claria) Kazaa, WhenU, BearShare, or AudioGalaxy, you may have downloaded an ad server as part of their software. These programs are authorized by you, when you read the agreement before you installed their software (you did read it, didn't you?). We realize most people do not read their agreement, and inadvertently download ad server software, which is now happily serving you pop up advertisements when you visit a Chatmag.com page.

We strongly advise getting and running Ad Aware, and dump all ad servers, unless you like pop up advertisements, and other web sites losing revenue by these programs.

Please note that Chatmag.com loses revenue by the use of any third party ad serving software, and we highly resent others being paid for our hard work and dedication to provide only relevant advertising, or none at all, depending upon the specific topic page.

As we reported in our annual report of the top ten Internet chat topics for 2003, the U.S. Navy uses secure chat rooms for communication on board ships.

Apparently they missed securing their email server. I wonder if keelhauling is still allowed.

It was emarketersamerica.org operated by Mark Edward Felstein, an attorney in Florida, supposedly in the pocket of the South Florida spam gang. They pursued a SLAPP against:

SPEWS.ORG d/b/a THE HERMES GROUP; SPAMHAUS.ORG d/b/a THE SPAMHAUS PROJECT; CSL GMBH JOKER.COM; STEVE LINFORD; JULIAN LINFORD; ALAN MURPHY; SUSAN WILSON a/k/a SUSAN GUNN a/k/a SHIKSAA; STEVEN J. SOBOL; CLIFTON T. SHARP; RICHARD C. TIETJENS a/k/a MORLEY DOTES; ADAM BROWER; and STEPHEN JOSEPH JARED a/k/a JOE JARED, Defendants.

The real purpose of the suit was to determine the ownership of SPEWS, and as a secondary consequence, financially hurt those involved in fighting spam.

I don't think much of any attorney that aligns himself with DH spammers, and cannot find the real owner of SPEWS

Had you read the article, I did not say I was going to sue SPEWS. I did say that by coming forth with the owner of SPEWS, it would compel SPEWS to either act responsibly, or disband. Also, rather than helping spammers, we do exactly the opposite, by posting the most aggregious spammers web sites on our Internet Scams section. My mobile home????? Spammers make in a year what I make in a week. I think you have me confused with the spammer that lives in South Florida, and was recently profiled in a news article regarding spammers. To say I'm linked to spammers shows a complete lack of knowledge on your part. Apparently you don't understand the meaning of "empirical evidence" when you make baseless statements. And calling someone names shows a total lack of maturity. It's long been thought that SPEWS should operate in secret, as if it was some clandestine government agency. Any organization that affects commerce must be open to scrutiny, or cease to exist. The word is "credibility".

Slashdot will now pause, while you go look up the big words.

I have to agree that online forums seem the better choice, rather than RSS. We originally indexed only live chat rooms, but now are seeing a large number of good forums, and have included forums in our listings. Judging by the click thru's, forums are as popular as live chat.

RSS is still a viable option to UCE, but I do not see it lessening the amount of spam emails. I think the main reason RSS would be adopted by legitimate newsletter operators would be in order to avoid the possibility of blacklisting by such groups as the soon to be defunct SPEWS.

Since posting our original comment earlier today, other facts have come to light. In our Opinion posted on 24 May 2003 we outlined who we believe is responsible for SPEWS. Since then, certain details have changed, in particular the registration information for Wewak.net, which has been alluded to in the NANAE group as the host of SPEWS.

As the blocklist lists more sites/providers, then it stands to reason those sites will follow the trail back to the blocklist, such as Osirusoft or SPEWS, in order to get information regarding their inclusion in that list, and how to get delisted. (Reference: The "Slashdot Effect).
I noticed that Joe Jared mentions his other site as a collateral casualty of the DDoS. Now where did I hear the term "collateral damage" before? As a provider of SPEWS blocklists, that would in effect make him as accountable as SPEWS, to use their own twisted logic of "a customer of an ISP is as guilty of spamming as the spammer themselves".
We do not condone any DDoS attack, nor do we condone the actions of SPEWS. The demise of Osirusoft demonstrates that unaccountable "vigilantism" does nothing to stem the tide of unwanted commercial emails and as stated in previous posts regarding spam, more rational discussion should be forthcoming, with real solutions, rather than the tactics used by the blocklists that would hack down the forest to fell one tree.

Nigerian Scam Template (short form) For entertainment purposes only (the lawyers made me say that).