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@Home Gets the Usenet Death Penalty
A reader wrote to us with the news that an UDP has been declared on @Home in news.admin.announce.
You can read it on Deja.com for the full post. Interesting - let's see how long it takes @Home to respond to the UDP. Usually, this gets people attention pretty quickly, and I'll welcome any sort of respite from the spam flood of the last couple months. The penalty is due to begin 17:00 PST, Jan. 18, 2000.
This is an interesting phenomenon - USENET has no central authority and no control centre, so if the UDP has the desired effect, then it's an example of anarchism actually working (for once; note - I'm not in any way an anarchist). It's also support for what your mother told you about bullies and annoying brothers and sisters - "ignore them and they'll get fed up and stop it". Thanks, mum!
ben_ the technologist and platform agnostic
FYI... "Because of this lack of response to serious, ongoing problems, even when they have been pointed out repeatedly, a full active Usenet Death Penalty will go into effect at the close of business, 17:00 PST, on Tuesday, 18 January 2000 (19 Jan 2000 01:00:00 GMT)."
And he saw what he and done and said "it is good". Now, if only the same action could be applied to post from *.aol, the people in the streets would rejoice!
The Midnight Watch - All the news that's fit to ridicule:
UDP Faq .sig: File not found.
That's the faq for the UDP.
ls:
ls:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
It basically means that all usenet news to and from @home will be blocked.
so their news servers would become useless to their users.
---
How about reading the article?
According to the article, the UDP doesn't start for another week:
Usenet Death Penalty will go into effect at the close of business, 17:00 PST, on Tuesday, 18 January 2000 (19 Jan 2000 01:00:00 GMT).
Presumably to give @home a chance to become YclueK compliant?
Rafe
V^^^^V
Rafe
Opinions expressed by the author may not actually exist in the wild.
I've been on the Internet for 11 years now (c'mere kid and pull my finger). But seriously, I remember when I could read about 50 newsgroups in 1/2 hour and most of the messages were not spam in any sense of the word.
/..
The last time I read USENET was gosh..almost 2 years ago. Full of spam, threads that went all over the place, crossposting galore. I have since given up and am using
What would problably work in this day and age would be a WDP (Web Death Penalty). Block port 80 from and to known ISPs that spam. Boy will that get people's attention.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Actually, it only affects the outgoing traffic from the *.home.com domain. Home.com users should still be able to read USENET, they just won't be allowed to post anything.
To???? I don't think it's sensible or possible to control their newsfeed, but their posts are rejected.
This may sound heavy handed, but from my experience (5 years as an anti-spammer now) the anti-spammers involved make every effort to contact the offending ISP and help them secure their news servers, report abusive users to them, etc. In essence, a UDP is something of last resort.
It should also be noted that this isn't some small cabal (TINC) of people trying to censor others, as participation in a UDP is voluntary. All you need to do to not participate is alias NNTP traffic with the "udpcancel" site in the path. Often however, the benefits of a UDP outweigh the disadvantages, and the UDPed site cleans up their act rather quickly.
Hope this helps.
this sucks for me, being a new @home user. i have wanted to stop by the usenet, but i havent had a chance to anytime. now im being punished for something im not even doing... anyway a hapless victim could get around this?
---- Sig? What sig? Who needs one, anyway?
This is the sort of thing I like to see. As someone else stated, it's comparable to anarchy working.
:) It's just not the same in my book).
I like the idea of people/organizations fending for themselves on the internet. The last thing we need is any government intervening and trying to enforce it. Anarchy may not be suitable for real life, but I think the general concept is perfect for the Internet where the real laws lie in the software. For example, when someone tries to break into your box, you shouldn't call the cops - you should make sure your box is secure and defend yourself. If you're incapable, then buy software to assist you. (note: Please, nobody make analogies comparing this to some crime in real life
Although the story is wrong (in that it says the penalty starts today), the penalty is announced today, and goes into effect 5 business days after announcement.
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
The original message linked to on deja states:
The UDP, if effectively implemented, cuts off all users of that domain from being heard by the rest of usenet.
As an @home customer who sometimes uses usenet (and has complained about spam before) I am going to go write a letter to customer service now...
Oops.. what I meant to say was, of course, that it goes into effect 5 business days later if nothing changes.
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
"Death Penalty"? @Home? Is it possible we could get Kevorkian in there for an assisted suicide?
Here is a better link to the article in question: Keeps from /. 'ing one server.
I'm a disgruntled @home user, or in other words, I've been on the service for more than three months. No one at @home takes proper measures to inforce the acceptable use policy. Instead, they cap bandwidth at 5k a second to make their ISP a less viable 'server', inconveniencing every user.
@home costs $65 a month Canadian, and they cut corners everywhere they can. My personal WAN area has between 32 and 40 people on it, and the packet drops are phenomenal. I have been phoning their tech support for thirteen months in a row, and they have told me it's everything BUT a crowded WAN area. They most recently have told me that 'Internet Access' does not include UDP. They do not support UDP, therefore they have no responsibility to control the quality of Internet gaming, despite advertising gaming on their network on television with fullscreen Quake pictures. I have been keeping track and am wondering about the viability of a lawsuit.
As I hinted above, servers are against the rules with @home. Have you ever played on a Quake server with an IP starting with 24.113 or 24.112? That's @home cable. Expect 5 to 50k/s upstreams.
Ever gone to a mp3 search engine? A ton of the sites are 24.113 or 24.112.
@home has been banned from Dalnet, due to excessive numbers of people spamming the network. The Dalnet ops have tried to contact @home about the problem, but they were ignored. The only way to connect to Dalnet for @home members is through gate.dal.net, which has too much lag. My two year old channel dwindled to zero people within a week.
The bottom line is, do NOT sign up with @home if there are any other alternatives. They will hook you in with a high installation fee, and it goes downhill from there. You're on your own. Everyone who has any sense of right and has power at @home must be ignored internally.
I'm no USENET expert, by any stretch, but you *may* (most likely, you can) still be able to read/post messages using DejaNews. Of course, this is just in theory (my theory too, which isn't saying much.) So, like a lot theories, it stands an equal chance of being proven wrong or right.
I will be sending email, making phone calls, sending more emails, having my friends/relatives/coworkers send emails and make phone calls, and basically abusing the hell out of @home.
As far as I'm concerned, this is not excusable in any way by @home, and besides, my news server @ work (news.eni.net) doesn't carry some of the ng's that @home's news server does (specifically alt.os.linux.slackware and a few gimp ng's.)
Rest assured that the not-asshole-ish users of @home will be very, very active in making this stop.
Mike
Sure, I have a thankless job. That's okay. I have a lot of (non
On a relational note, I seem to remember that the alt.scientology folks went about self moderating usenet to remove offending posts about their beloved L. Ron a few years ago, and it was never resolved exactly how to approach/moderate the Usenet hierarchy in general. Self-moderating is a misleading term, since only a few Admins are capable of actually issuing something like a UDP (outside of alt. of course). Eventually, the issue of spam and individual user rights on Usenet has to be adressed, but I for one believe that you kinda gotta take the good with the bad (*Raise Flame shields*), and let the spammers post their crap in the name of protecting the ability to post any and every idea, trivial or not.
-just My 2cents
I agree that to "call the cops" is overall a pretty useless thing to do if someone tries to break into your system.
... see what happens. Keep abreast of the newest script-kiddie fads and they won't surprise you.
However, the right answer to security isn't to "buy software" either. As Bruce Schneier is fond of pointing out, security is not a checklist feature: it's not something that can be slapped onto the side of a fundamentally poorly-designed system.
"Poorly-designed" here refers not only to the software and other instrumentality, but also to your administrative methodology. Administrative methodology has to do with the things you do as routine system upkeep. Do you monitor security-related mailing lists (CERT-CC, BugTraq)? When setting up a new system, do you close unneeded services? Do you make a habit of knowing everything that should be running on your system, and noticing when things that shouldn't be there appear? Do you run security audits against your system? Do you regularly check for security updates to your software and install them?
My new favorite security procedure: Go to a script-kiddie Web site, download some k00l t00lz (cracking tools, DoS utilities, etc.) and wield them against your own system (over your own network)
Security is a way of thinking -- some would say a way of life. It's not something you can just buy a program to install.
I've been an @home user for almost 3 years now.
/dev/null.
I find it amusing that they have managed to let this come down to a UDP. @Home has some of the most draconian user rules in existance. If they were enforced at ANY level this wouldn't of happened.
I suspect abuse@home.com =
Have you compiled your kernel today??
The author of the slashdot story misread the original DEJA reference. The 12th is the date of the posting of the usenet message, not the UDP. The UDP is set for 17:00 (local) on the 18th (GMT 0100 on the 19th)
Surely Deja has the volume to absorb a slashdotting. Their servers seem to have ground to a halt.
The tech support boiler-room for Rogers.com (one of the @home resellers) was unaware of the UDP call. There is no response yet at Rogers.
The Deja page is an archive of a usenet news posting. If Deja falls over, you should be able to pick up the usenet posting from your NEWS: server.( Posted to: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet ; news.admin.net-abuse.policy ; news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins ; news.admin.announce )
The faq for UDP is
http://www.stopspam.org/usenet/faqs/udp.html
Well the way Usenet/Newsgroup/NNTP's work is you post a message on your local ISP's NNTP and it gets sent to the master server (?) then passed along to all other servers. Some servers block binary messages (porn, warez, ect) some block certain newsgroup's themselves (AOL probably doesnt carry alt.aol.suck). If you get cut from the usenet feed, your NNTP server is pretty much useless and your customers will have to subscribe to a commerical server (which doesnt block anything) or they just might drop the service altogether. Of course on @Home you have no choice but to go with a commerical service. The Usenet was originally used to exange information via text based posts, but now its littered with spam porn pics. Automatic scripts keep the spam postings there, and there is no shortage of it either. I would assume that a good deal of @Home users post huge binary files like VCD's, Warez ISO's which may cause problems with other servers who may or may not be able to handle the load.
sorry I guess I was misinformed, but where do they get their newsfeed ?
they have to get it from another server , don't they? can't that be cut off ?
---
You can tell your usenet client to pick up its news items from any server. Performance is better from your ISP, but it is not the biggest concern. I'm not sure who the usenet (sometimes called "Internet News" or "newsgroups" providers are. I've picked up the impression that buying this service from someone other than your ISP costs real money. (my impression is about US$10 a month)
A quick net search pointed to: National Usenet Newsgroup Providers
Please note that no one has successfuly sued the Realtime Blackhole List, either.
UUNet attempted to do the same thing two years ago when they got UDP'd. Their lawyers, and the government also, told them that they had no case.
We aren't attempting to destroy @Home, we're simply not carrying their packets on USENET - which we aren't obligated to do anyways. They could only sue us if we had a contract requiring us to carry any and all spam from them.
UUNet thought they were all that with lawyers too, and when they tried, the number of people supporting the UDP nearly doubled in anger.
Nope, no one is required to carry it. Freedom of speech doesn't supercede (sp?) my freedom to hear. If I choose not to re-print or listen to someone's words, unless I have a contractual obligation to them, they have no recourse against me. @Home would be laughed out of court.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
According to the FAQ that one gentleman posted, UUnet got this in 1997, and threatened legal action. That was stupid, infeasible, and generally clueless, and was laughed out in short order. However, the internet was not really Big Business then, with Big Pockets and Stupid Corporate Lawyers (tm). How stupid is @Home? Might they try a lawsuit? Yes, it would kill them and not work anyway, but stupidity knows few bounds...
Communication is only possible between equals
apologies to OT.
Ironic UDP is same acronym for thin layer communication protocol User Datagram Protocol (UDP) which is thinner than TCP/IP.
One UDP connects.
Another UDP disconnects.
I like the irony.
Corrinne Yu
3D Game Engine Programmer
Can @Home users still post on Deja then?
I have been reading a discussion on the incidents mailing list (www.securityfocus.com) were a great deal of site admins are reporting scans and other attacks orginating from @home IP addresses. It appears that abuse@home.com goes to /dev/null.
I have road-runner and they check their customers for open wingates, relayable sendmail ports and trojans like BO, netbus etc.. ( I know this because I probed one of the admins boxen after I saw my kernel dropping packets from his IP. He directed me to the security website for road runner which explained everything. http://bofh.rr.com)
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
I have personally felt the wrath of spam from @home. Everyday around lunch I would recieve more unwelcomed spam originating through the horrid depths of @home. I replied, complained and nearly cried as I could do nothing. I made doubley sure and verified that I was not the only user recieving these questionable spams...sure enough roughly 15 other subscribers to my isp were being spammaged. Unfortunately blocking the site entirely would have caused more problems with @home than it would have solved. In the end I tweaked our spam shield and since then "I" have not recieved an ounce of spam to this day.
The point of this is...I did attempt to contact @home on a at least 3 seperate occassions...I do not recall recieving one letter from any of thier support or administration personnel.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
You won't win any friends by "fighting back" like some sort of Che Guevara wannabe of the Internet. But, if it makes you feel any better, you can forge cancels for all of _my_ posts, too.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
No offense meant, but I'd be more impressed if you indicated who you are. If you are not in control of a major newsfeed, who will notice? If you don't pass the NG articles on, then most likely a number of others will. A UDP, to be effective, must be enforced by the majority of the sites which relay the articles. Again, not saying that you can't do this. It is your right. Just as it is the right of other people who relay newfeeds to say that they won't relay articles from one area. Kind of like having an area in a business for "free" newspapers. The business owns the area, therefore they can say to a distributor, "I don't want your newspaper." Is this wrong? I don't think so.
From the UDP FAQ (http://www.stopspam.org/usenet/faqs/udp.html):
10.What about legal issues? Don't you worry about being sued?
As UUnet (and others) have found, there is no legal requirement for other sites to carry or post their messages. Cancel messages are advisory in nature, and the sites which accept them have to have the ability to process them enabled in their software for them to be effective (the vast majority of sites have them enabled). UUnet threatened legal action when they were UDP'ed in August of 1997, but both the US Justice Department and the FBI (and presumably their own legal department after they consulted them) stated that there had been no laws broken and that they refused to investigate or act. Because none of their own equipment or networks were attacked, compromised, or even affected, there was no legitimate Denial Of Service (DOS) complaint that could be filed. What was happening, in effect, was an organized boycott of their messages. Nothing more, nothing less - and there is nothing illegal in all that. There would also be a horrendous negative public relations wave from actually instituting any legal action. When UUnet threatened, even more people came out in support of that UDP, contributions to legal funds were offered by a large number of people, lawyers volunteered to defend those participating in the UDP, and many ISPs promised to alias UUnet permanently (and work to get others to do the same) the moment they actually instituted legal action.
As another example, there was a rogue canceler, nicknamed "the Kikecanceller" [because his racially inspired cancel message paths all had "!kikecancel" (along with "!spiccancel," "!wopcancel," and others) in them], who was active for a short while. This rogue canceler nuked over 25,000 articles for no legitimate reason before his account got canceled. James M. Hawkins, the supervising agent at the FBI's Tulsa office, stated: "We don't have a case. I don't think we're going to be getting involved in the matter." The local United States Attorney's office was contacted about the cancellations and they replied that no law had been broken. (see the NY Times article about the "Kikecanceller". Note: this site requires you to enter a user name and password to access it, although it is free. There have been no reported instances of spam being sent to any test address that was used to enter the site, so it appears as if this data is only used by that site and not released to anyone who might utilize it for a spamlist).
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
Actually your statement is wrong!!
:)
24.x.x.x represents for the most part CABLE ISP's!!
I live in Montreal, Canada, where we use Videotron CAble (which has no association whatsoever to @Home) and my IP starts by 24.x.x.x!!
Just a small correction
" Microsoft Integration = Inbread software! " SpIcEz
hmm, i'm paying $40 a month i think, and i get 50kB/sec up and 300kB/sec down, only problem i have are the occasional short (10-20 minute) downtimes and online gaming (weird network pauses and packet loss)
Deliberate attempts to destroy a business are illegal.
Uh, this _isn't_ an attempt to destroy a business. There has been a huge rise in spam coming from @home, and even messages sent to @home about it have been ignored. This spam is causing problems for other sites, so the UDP is meant to help the other sites lower their spam intake, and to get @home's attention.
I don't know what you're reading, but nowhere in the message I read did I see anything that said "let's get @home." I do see things like Because of this lack of response to serious, ongoing problems, even when they have been pointed out repeatedly,... Looks to me like @home is at fault for not taking any action.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
Anyone who wants to post must obtain a client.
How is this different from e-mail, HTTP, FTP, Gopher, etc?
Even then it is not 100% likely that you will be able to get that group that you want.
What newsgroups are carried are set by the system administrator for your ISP, and most wellbehaved ones will add ones if you ask for it. (Although you may want to rethink about asking for sex, warez binaries groups, etc.)
There are also some public servs that carry as many groups as possible, or cater to specific areas (binaries, portman, grits, etc.)
What people need to do is to simply delete the spam and just look at what's there. How hard is it to just delete it?
USENET postings cannot be deleted. With USENET, one person posts a message, and that message is then duplicated bit by bit to every server in existence that carries the newsgroup. So:
1) No centralized source to delete it from.
2) It can always be found on some odd server.
3) Same ethical/philosophical reasons that Slashdot doesn't allow moderators to delete postings.
Is it's presence that bad that it actually causes people to react like it was a cockroach or maybe a demon?
The headers must be downloaded when you spam off line; it takes time to download a million spam messages. Much less people like me who have to let my machine grab full text for me to read later.
It's a lot like e-mail spam, except messier and in such huge quantities as to compare CyberPromo (anyone remember Stanford?) to a landfill the size of Texas.
http://www.remarq.com/
I'm not going to say it's great, but the interface is IMHO a lot better than Deja's.
Namely WebTV, Deja, Hotmail, and AOL. I don't see them getting UDP'ed
I am also paying $40/month for @Home. An extra ip address is another $10. ... ...
Sometimes the service is good, occasionally it is terrible.
When I own my own home, I'll probably get wired for DSL
In the meantime, I am looking for an email address to complain to @Home about this UDP. I could just use my Deja account, but figure I should make a point
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
So it means that unless @Home cleans up their act, starting Tuesday of next week at 17:00pm, all participating Usenet servers (i.e. most ones out there) will dump all messages from @Home users into the bitbucket, not posting them.
@Home and all clients going through @Home Usenet servers become gagged until the upper echelon management finds out and orders an immediate change of policy on spam.
A UDP requires the participation of other USENET servers, but many, in fact most, servers are set up to automatically honor all UDPs by default.
A newsreader with a killfile in today's USENET is a must. You also would like one with good filters that can rank messages based on subject or author.
Can anybody recommend a good newsreader for X? I used to use YA-Newswatcher on my Mac, and I loved it. It would be nice if it could handle inline images, too (gotta get my daily prawn allowance)
I do not agree. Just because there are users who abuse the internet and usenet groups the entire domain is black listed. This is the dirtiest part of human nature! Why is it when there are bad apples the entire stereotyped population suffers!
I agree that there is a problem. All the good users should be made aware of the issues at hand. They should be then able to isolate the insolent users and cancel their subscription to @home.
Being an @home user, I will be glad to kick off the assholes that are causing crap. Hell, I would even BOTCOT @home if they do not allow users to self-moderate the system. HELLO? It is a shared network. We are all paying for it. It is about time we all share in the democracy of the system and flush out the bad apples. Make the all go to AOL for all I care! They are cost all other users of @home MONEY, TIME, and STRESS! This is more that enough justification to spend the time and effort to isolate the 10 - 20% who are abusing this service.
All those with me, call @home and complain. We should put up a website saying that there should be a faster turnaround on kick out delinquent users.
On another note: I would like to see where the AOL IPs stand in the UDP priority. I always get spam from them... is it just because it is easier to see people from @home (Ips are generally 24.112... or 24.113... etc....)????
Thanks for you time.
This
reminds me of the Southpark episode where Stan and Kyle were ripped off by a carnival game and called "Shananagans" on the guy.
*snip*
How hard is it to just delete it? Is it's presence that bad that it actually causes people to react like it was a cockroach or maybe a demon?
*snip*
The problem is not from the users complaining, it's from the thousands of messages a day that the spammer posts which can create serious storage and bandwidth issues when several spammers are involved. UDP (IMO) isn't malicious in any way, it's simply the last ditch attempt to get a ISP to do what they should already be doing (policing their own servers).
*snip*
They mentioned in the article that @home people are operating "open proxies" I assume that this means that they are allowing public access from the outside world. Well my friend what is wrong with that? You know I have had accounts at the infameous hotmail and even then I got spam in small quantities.
*snip*
Unfortunately, there are so few open proxies out there, the ones that exist are constantly bombarded with spammers (since usually their own ISP polices the ISP's newsgroup, they can't use it for spamming). While the idea of an open proxy is a good one, it just doesn't work out in the real world. All major ISPs have their own news servers, so you shouldn't really need to go looking for a open proxy. And, if they don't have the newsgroup you are looking for, you can usually e-mail the administrator and request it to be added. They usually will, as long as your requested newsgroup isn't alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.beastiality.cows or some such high volume newsgroup. (There are a lot of sickos out there you know!)
Or does this guy sound like he works for @Home? He's the only @Home customer who's had something good to say about the service, and it sounds like the complete opposite of what everyone else's experience is...
@Home should sue any site that refuses to carry its traffic (at least those subject to US courts).
The UDP is a community action. @Home was not a good neighbor, and now they can't borrow the weed whacker. There is no obligation to carry a particular companies usnet articles. There is no obligation to even allow IP packets from @home into their networks (except for their upstream provider who IS under contract).
Besides that, there are very few 'smaller' sites out there. Most ISP's that don't own their own national network outsource their usenet service.
I like porn, and binaries groups are the best way to get it fast. Better than wading through websites.
This isn't to punish the users, this is to force @home get its act together. If deja started allowing too much spam, they might get it too...
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
You've been taken in by spammer FUD and BS. Net sites are the private property of their respective owner, free to reject traffic according to their own rules (though they may be liable if they selectively enforce the rules in a prejudicial manner).
Especially go after the smaller sites. They'll BUCKLE under the legal pressure as their bosses realize that they cannot afford a long expen$$$ive lawsuit.
@Home presumably hires reputable and competent lawyers, who do not wish to besmirch their recordss with frivolous-lawsuit sanctions. Their spammer customers are welcome to file such lawsuits, if any of them can find an attorney willing to accept chick en bones as a form of currency.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Maybe I am missing something, but how would the UDP (which will go into effect on the 18th, and involves USENET, not email, AFAICT) affect you getting your business emails???
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
You must be one of the $cientologist spammers who love @Home's wide open network.
Because the spam that is being sent is costing network administrators real time and real money that could otherwise be spent on other things. Spam is a real problem, not something that should just be ignored.
hmm, my sympatico HSE installed nice and easy ./adsl-connect, yeah it eats up 10% cpu on my p133, but I can deal with that
rp-pppoe added my password to pap-secrets, and typed
proxy server? it seems pretty transparent, I get 50-80k on some sites
I can look at my web server
the only problem was I got my modem friday, but they wouldn't activate my account till monday
I kinda think you haven't actually tried anything other then your precious cable.
How is an ISP supposed to "delete" all of the gigabytes of spam (e-mail & news) which they are forced to carry every day, and for which they had to pay big bucks for the bandwidth, servers, hard disk space & administration to be able to support? They can send out cancel messages, but this uses MORE resources and the time lags involved allow spam to slip through. (Plus, _somebody_ has to be paid to identify the messages to cancel & issue the cancel message...)
You seem to have a very limited understanding of the mechanisms which support the Internet, and a debating style consisting mostly of emotional appeals w/very little logical content.
Nevermind, I posted that previous in anger when I attempted to check my email, and the mail server appears to be down. Then, I just happened to notice about @Home being the target of usenet death, but I didn't check the part about "starts on the 18th"
Oh well. Stupid me.
Tanman
the way a UDP works is that several news admins are generating cancel messages for articles originating from @Home. If you go read the UDP FAQ you would know this. Anyone not wishing to participate in an active UDP can refuse to accept articles from the pseudosite udpcancel.
All cancels delaing with an active UDP have udpcancel in their path header.
So, the majority of usenet admins are participating simply because they haven't chosen to ignore these cancels.
Even if a site that ignores these cancels passes them on to another site which honors these cancels, the second site will get the cancels and the messages will go away. (It's magic!) The only news servers where the articles originating from @Home will be found are the guys who ignore the udpcancels.
And not to try to impress you, but I do control a major newsfeed. You can also reach me at my deja.com address. I'm their primary news admin.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
...you clearly did NOT read the original declaration of an impending UDP. Things were qualified rather carefully, and in particular, a listing of the 100 news servers that were the origin of the most spam to usenet was listed.
/dev/null.
EVERY DAMN ONE OF THEM WAS AN @HOME NEWS SERVER.
The AUP Enforcement department for @Home has had their thumbs stuffed up their asses for long enough. The throw the book at anyone who dares have a web server showing the default Apache page on it, but never do a damn thing about open relays, which are a much bigger threat. The reasoning seems to be that open relays aren't a bandwidth muncher, but a web site that gets twelve hits a month is.
In all honesty, they'll probably ignore this UDP since the summary cancellations will mean they will no longer have to forward so many complaints about Usenet spamming to
I'm in a 'group' and in which I am the head of newsgroup posting. My status in the group itself is based upon how and what I post... But the problem lies in the fact that I post to @Home servers, sometimes up to 2.5gig/week and NOTHING spam.
Rest assured, I WILL be contacting them and fighting my way through their system to talk to someone intelligent about this whole situation.
- 8Complex
A UDP is not invoked lightly. It is invoked as a last resort against a set of servers that have resisted or ignored all reasonable requests to participate within the USENET community.
If @Home is incapable or unwilling to act as a responsible member of the USENET community, news admins are fully within their rights as owners of their news servers to reject traffic from @Home's users.
Similarly - by aliasing out the "udpcancel" site in the path, news admins who wish not to participate in the UDP are fully within their rights to ignore it.
This isn't about "censorship" or a "Cabal" (TINC). This is about the rights of news administrators to choose for themselves whether or not to accept traffic from a site that has demonstrated a clear inability or unwillingness to clean up its act.
To @Home users: The problem is with the management of the company who (poorly) administers your news servers. The proper course of action is to contact your @Home technical support or customer service reps and tell them that you want @Home's managment to authorize @Home's news administrators to take the actions required to bring @Home out of the UDP. While the rep you speak with on the phone can't help you, the message will eventually be heard by @Home management. While it's regrettable that the situation went as far as it did, the precedent for the UDP is good; UDPd firms generally do clean up their acts, and USENET is the better for it.
Corrinne-
:-)
Just because I forgot to mention this in a previous thread: You Rock.
Rafe
V^^^^V
Rafe
Opinions expressed by the author may not actually exist in the wild.
In general I think usenet is just elitist in general. Anyone who wants to post must obtain a client.
Ummm, excuse me, but AFAIK every TCP/IP based service requires a client. For example, HTTP (ie. WWW) requires a browser (netscape, et al); FTP requires a client as well (or you can use netscape for this as well). In fact, you can use netscape for your news as well!!!
BTW, why don't you try reading the UDP FAQ (URL is above) before you start condemning (sp?) the process. just my $0.02...
Does this mean that the @Home users will be the only people who get to read the spam which the @Home network is responsible for propagating?
Pfft advocating an authoritarian stance based on the actions of a few irresponsible individuals? Sounds like you're trying to stop crimes from occuring by sticking everyone in jail from the get go.
----
Dave
Purity Of Essence
- Dave
As a former Usenet administrator and current user, I thoroughly (sp?) applaud the decision. The entire point of a UDP (as you would glean had you actually read the sentencing) is that admins around the world have tried to work with @home's administration for an extended period of time and had all their efforts ignored. A UDP is never taken lightly or until all other options have been exhausted. It's the usenet equivilent of air bursting a 25 megaton nuke over someone's capital. While it does stir the blood, it's not to be undertaken lightly. Historically, whenever the offending site shows the least tendency to reopen communications, apologize and even talk about cleaning up their act, the UDP is lifted. Sometimes it turns out that they're blowing wind and it has to go back (correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this happened to uunet, who used to be notorious), but the benefit of the doubt always goes to the targeted site. Admins realize they have innocent victims, but just as innocents must occasionally die in war-time bombing to stop a greater evil (i.e. see WWII German cities), the greater world must be looked out for. Good job usenet! --Jason
I like lots of people. That doesn't mean I go carting them around the galaxy with me. --Dr. Who
> Lack of authority is Bad. This same anarchistic
> quality you praise so much also keeps an ample
> supply or w4r3z and kiddie pr0n available to
> anyone on the 'net. Is this what you are
> supporting.
Some, like myself, would argue that neither of
these is imnherently bad. (while I am against
forcing children into sexual situations for
any reason- especially something as base as
capital gain, I see nothing wrong with the
act of transmission of pictures themselves)
Noone is being hurt by these simple transmissions
of data. Noones rights are being abused. I see
no real problem.
Its simply the free exchange of information. Is
that what you are against?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
For the most part. Them and anyone using servers that are not participating in the UDP...
It'd be nice to see this extended to other services, I'm not sure how feasable it would be. I suppose a centralized procmail filter database would be feasible.
Take a look at the Realtime Black Hole List. This is a DNS-based hack that publishes the domain names of sites that allow spammers to send through their mailservers - in a form that lets mail transfer agents do a quick DNS inquiry and dump mail if it is coming from such a site.
Interestingly, it's an example of anarchism in action. Anybody can publish such a list. Anybody can hack their sendmail to use such a list - and pick any such list they chose. (As far as I know there's only one such list at the moment - probably a sign that it's doing a good job.)
The RBH client code is included in current Linux distributions. (I saw it as a {recommended} sendmail configuration option in Red Hat 6.1, for instance.) I've heard estimates that about 60% of the email inboxes in the world are now behind mail transfer agents that subscribe to RBH and thus bounce mail from any site on the list.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The ARIN whois at http://www.arin.net/whois lists many separate owners of 24.x.x.x addresses. Yes, many of them do belong to cable companies like Videotron, Time Warner and MediaOne (Road Runner) and @Home Networks, but some don't, like those for Blazenet and its customers.
There is nothing illegal about a UDP, as has been proven over and over again. @Home's users can still post to Usenet. What will happen is that they will be the only ones to read their own messages. The other servers aren't saying home.net can't post, they are simply choosing not to carry any messages from them. It's their right to do so, as the data resides on THEIR private property. If they actually went in and stopped @Home from posting, then it would be a Denial of Service.
@Home was repeatedly asked to do something about the spam problem, and nothing was done. The activation of a UDP is a last resort to protect the servers from overload of junk. It's not an action to destroy a company, but an effort to protect a larger community from a company's blatant disregard or disrespect.
A final thought...I normally have my threshold on 1 (I made an exception this time). This is not to deny anyone their right to post, but to filter off a majority of garbage posts that I don't have the time to read. Do you think I'm actually after anyone for it? No, I do it for my OWN well being. I'm not abridging free speech, I'm choosing what I wish to see. Same rule applies to the news server admins, who have the right to pick and choose what abides on their servers.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
Um -- I doubt that email (via SMTP) would be affected by a UDP (which is NNTP).
It will affect @Home when they get hundreds of calls from their pissed off users.
My other
> and to think we could have 1.5mbit BOTH ways
;-), but doesn't ADSL stand for "ASYMMETRIC digital subscriber line"? So you won't get 1.5mb both ways, even if other ISPs get to the lines eventually (wasn't there a court ruling some time ago saying that the telcos *had* to open the lines to everyone?).
IMBW (I might be wrong
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
do not agree. Just because there are users who abuse the internet and usenet groups the entire domain is black listed
.com domain helped, but that removed some good posts too. It worked for a while and made the groups readable.
I remember when AOL opened its floodgates upon the internet. No only did they put a big POST button in their software and not educate their users what usenet was, they had a little bug in their software. Each post would be duplicated seven times. Putting the entire aol.com domain in my killfile returned the newsgroups back to an enjoyable state. In fact, it would be over a year before I ever saw an intelligent post from the aol.com domain. I wasn't missing much by filtering them out.
Then other ISP's unloaded the masses onto usenet. Newbies are a fact of life, but usenet was then carpetbombed with scams and what was to be known as spam. It was unreadable. Filtering everything with the
I have seen the usenet death penalty used. And it works! It keeps me from having to filter, because it forces responsiblility for those who wish to become part of the usenet community.
The people who provide them could of course cut of the feed entirely, but @home would take their business elsewhere. It's impossible to stop them from getting a newsfeed from someone, as long as one person is prepared to give them a feed. However, if only one admin is prepared to carry their articles, that means that the rest of the internet never sees their messages.
No insult intended but you have no idea what you are talking about. This is USENET SPAM. Not e-mail spam. Usenet is infinately larger than any one person's e-mail. There are over 40,000 active newsgroups, and I have seen no public groups that didn't have at least 10 spam in the queue and that is a small number. You get groups such as comp.mail.sendmail which has 3800 messages alone. Even if 1 out of a hundred messages is a spam, thats 380 spam. Bring that across 40,000 newsgroups with pictures and other binaries, you have a HUGE chunk of diskspace, Bandwidth and CPU power that is taken up.
E-mail spam and usenet spam are very different beasts.
Do you Gentoo!?
USENET is not a god givin right. You don't pay for the use of the USENET servers. If the admins want to block trafic over their own servers then thats their right.
I have to return some videotapes...
If you look at the history of the UDPs, we have yet to find a UDP that has lasted longer than five days.
/dev/null.
We hurt millions of users for five days to remove billions of crossposted spam from millions of Usenet servers - and also as retaliation for @Home's little alias of abuse@home.com to
Have you ever run a Usenet server? Do you have any idea of the pure amount of GARBAGE from spam and advertisements that will suck up entire T3s 24/7? If you want a better analogy, this is little different than when Iraq invaded Kuwait and didn't respond to demands to stop; most of NATO got together and pounded on them.
Given the choice of massive spamming or blocking cable users from direct Usenet access (they can still use Deja) for a few days, I pick the block. Who knows, @Home might even clean up their act before the UDP goes into effect. Historically UDPs are usually released before the deadline for that very reason.
> So basicly people are getting a bug up thier a**
> that a minority of @home users are spammers.
No...they have a bug up their ass that a minority
of @HOME users are spammers AND @HOME
is not doing anything about it.
UDP is invoked AFTER usenet admins have alerted
and really tried to get an ISPs attention and
feel that their complaints have "Fallen on Deaf
Ears".
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
While this is a nice, big paragraph, and I like big paragraphs, don't get me wrong, I fail to see the democrary.
@home runs on a zerocracy. There is no response to anything. I would have more luck praying.
Please see my original message stating that this is the reason for not only my personal problems, but for the banning from Usenet and the k-lining from Dalnet.
Usenet Death Penalty applies only to USENET news, not to e-mail. Your e-mail is safe.
"Hey...you've got weasels on your face" -- Weird Al
Here is a (poorly rendered) table of network classes:
Class Maximum Maximum bits in-----
Class Number Networks Hosts NetID HostID
A 1-127 127 16,777,214 7 24
B 129-191 16,383 65,534 14 16
C 192-223 2,097,151 254 21 8
Hmm...how is client and server setup elite? That's classic networking protocol. You'd just as soon argue that the Web is elite, since you have to have a browser and get to the server.
The content on a news server is entirely up to the news admin's whims. Some have all the groups, others filter out the high noise groups. If you don't like what your ISP news server has, you find a public server or you get another ISP. Example, the one I'm on has their server with a selection of groups and access to a full group server if you ask for it. You just have to look for what services you best. Some people want full access, others don't.
Spam in email != Spam in Usenet. Spam in Usenet is semi-permanent and echoes across all the servers. It can't be deleted, merely ignored or cancelled before it gets there (and cancellation requires yet another message be sent, eating up more bandwidth). Spam in the mailbox can be deleted easily, in comparison. It's because of the way spam wastes Usenet server space that it's viewed as a beast.
Please learn the facts before posting off half-cocked.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
You've obviously never had anything to do with running a news server. The news spools can get HUGE if you keep articles for any length of time. RAID is an absolute MUST. A spam on usenet takes up resources on every usenet server in the world.
Usenet spam is a lot worse than email spam. I have seen newsgroups that were about 20% actual messages and 80% spam. If s/n isn't enough argument, consider every news server needing an extra 9G U2W SCSI drive for the spam and the extra bandwidth (that costs some real money BTW).
The problem with open proxies is that any spammer anywhere can use them to hide their identity so they don't get their account cancelled. There's nothing eletist about that. I can't think of any ISP that doesn't provide you with usenet as part of the basic service. The only people who really need the proxies are the spammers.
As for Lucifer, at least if you tell him you're not interested, he goes away. Besides that, although his prices are outrageous, he, unlike many spammers, actually delivers the promised goods and services. [/humor].
> The reasoning seems to be that open relays
> aren't a bandwidth muncher, but a web site that
> gets twelve hits a month is.
Web sites are also easier to find.
Any moron can write a script that looks around
for web servers. You actually have to know what
a relay is before you can scan for open ones.
Probably just clueless admins.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I've tried Bell's HSE, and it pissed me right off. Try masquerading with pppoe and you'll see what I mean. Any time you try to send more than 1k upstream in a single packet, the modem disconnects. I've had absolutely no problems with @Home service in Toronto, I just hook up it to my machine, set the ip address and it works. I don't have to try to figure out why the modem is disconnecting all the time and fiddle around with pppd, mtu and pppoe settings.
I think you're wrong. THere are technically feasible ways to minimize the amount of spam, etc leaving your network. If you do not take the basic precautions then you are asking for trouble. I work at a few million odd user ISP and we have nowhere near the spam problem other companies have. We don't allow non users to relay and we don't allow our users to relay off others. Same with our news system. On the other hand I've seen a single @Home user attempt to relay 900,000 spams off my servers. ??? Qmail accept and disregard is a beautiful thing. Really let's the user hang himself.
@Home is merely being told that they need to get their act together. Loudly.
-
Kashani
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
read the UDP FAQ.
I'm not going to post it again as it's been posted several times in thei thread and also in the usenet article.
Call and complain. @Home hasn't been listening to complaints. That's the whole problem. Maybe this will make all of their customers complain and they might see some $$$ floating away from them. Maybe then they'll listen to complaints
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
Check out for history and more info (warning put on your sunglasses before going to this site!):
http://www.sputum.com/cns/index.html
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
All I can do is suggest everyone do the same. The office in PA is (215) 981-8531. You may or may not get someone knowledgable right off the bat, so be polite (but really, you should be polite anyway!). You might want to even check out the Canons of Conduct from the Linux Advocacy mini-HOWTO for some good pointers.
Good luck!
Um, read the UDP FAQ, item 10 in particular. In short: It's not DOS, it's simply an organized boycott, which is perfectly legal. UUNet threatened legal action when they got UDP'ed, and the Justice Dept. and the FBI just laughed at them.
If you want a good dejanews interface that's free of the crap and all the advertisements,
copy this old dejanews search form to your home directory
and bookmark it from your browser. This search form was saved from my cache when deja ruined their interface. It has none of the voting crap and your search will just yield the facts and what you are looking for.
Substitute cancer for the ebola virus. Now the people with the virus are coming over to your house every day. You don't kill them, you quarantine them. These spam messages are being carried on whatever usenet server you use. If there is too much spam (on any newsgroup) your server may just decide that usenet isn't worth the space it takes and get rid of it.
Vermifax
Vermifax
Logout
newsgroup. So, L. Ron is not really "beloved" there. Rather to the contrary: the regulars of the newsgroup were in a years lasting war against Church of Scientology, where the CoS tried every possible trick to disrupt the newsgroup, and the newsgroup developped ever more ingenious countermeasures. Not using those countermeasures would basically have meant giving up the group entirely.
Say no to software patents.
Actually, a more accurate comparison would probably be that AOL spammers are a bigger chunk than ALL @home users, combined.
Somebody else made a great point. I seriously doubt that AOL would ever get UDP'd...
But hey, if they did: imagine all the bandwidth that would be freed up.
Sure, I have a thankless job. That's okay. I have a lot of (non
Actually, I believe it was Al Gore
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
@Home can't sue admins for controling their news feeds. That would be like suing a person to turn on their TV or radio to tune in their station.
I just called my friendly @home customer service rep (she actually *was* friendly!) and asked her about the UDP problem. She was not aware of it, but she escalated the call and found out that the issue has been elevated to the corporate level and it is hoped things will be addressed before the UDP goes into effect. It seems they have started taking a lot of calls over this.
-Jeff
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Likewise, since @Home is not enforcing an adequate level of order, their communication privileges are suspended.
It's just a matter of self-defense.
PS: I'm an @Home customer, and I'm GLAD that the UDP is in force. Maybe it'll finally get @Home abuse to DO something.
Do we close highways when a few people speed?
I think the highway methaphore is somewhat flawed. These people aren't speeding, they're blocking the highway.
There are numerous newsservers out there that spammer can just switched over to
True. But why should that deter us from trying to waste the bandwith we're all paying for?
In my opinion the sysadmins of ISP's have a right to try and stop misuse of their network in their clients interest. If my (or your) ISP has to buy bigger hard drives and more communication bandwith to cope with spam, guess who's going to pay for it?
The solution is easy don't support them.
I have never reacted to spam other than to complain to provider of the spammer. So you can say I haven't ever supported a spammer :) but I fail to see how this can deter people from spamming. Spammers need to learn that bandwith costs money, and they're really spending other people's money.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Bad analogy.
Would you drive on a highway where people could drive down the wrong side of the road at 100 mph? I think not. Spam has the same effect; it makes the whole system unworkable. Certainly a Usenet death penalty should not be invoked unless the circumstances are extreme. This would seem to be the case with @Home.
Personally, think that spammers should be covered with honey, doused with flesh eating bugs and left out in the desert to fry. Now that's extreme! A UDP is not.
AT&T/TCI/@home, and cfu--the municipal utility. I called both, and it was five bucks a month cheaper on both my cable and my internet with the muncipal utility--and one bill with everything from sewer to internet (hmm, depending upon your taste, those could be the same).
/home elsewhere. I think I've only seen it go above 500k/s download once, but it seems to me that it stayed near that when I was uploading the disk.
Free installation and first month (from both, I think) due to the shortage of modems at the time. Now I pay $25 total for service & modem. They want an extra $5 if you want a second computer (but it seems you provide your own hub & wiring), and the terms of service explictly prohibit sharing an IP with linux or that dark-side program (but how could they tell?).
I have no idea how to configure it. I put in my two install disks for FreeBSD, and it took care of absolutely everything. Since I wanted to massively rearrange the hard drive, I called and got an ip that I could grab, changed the address in in my old configuration, and stashed about a gig of
Competition in cable is such a wonderful thing.
Oh, and the deciding issue wasn't that it was $5/month cheaper, but that I called both places, and the cfu folks knew what was going on, while the @home folks could barely figure out which out of state tech support might be able to answer questions . . .
Usenet is not elitist. You don't have to get a client to access usenet news. I used to telnet directly into usenet server's port 119 to read and post from there. You can do this by:
telnet nntpserver.domain 119
even in Windoze. I would even say the server's raw interface is user friendly. If you want help, just type help followed by return. Its a beautiful interface and is compatible with almost anything that can display text. With a good terminal and some scripting, it can be the most productive environment for digesting news.
What is the response to the UDP from the major players out there? Will Deja, AOL, etc. honor the UDP? For this UDP to have any teeth, it needs to be honored by the major ISPs and news services.
Sue for what? Usenet works like this: "Hey, I'll post the articles from your server on mine if you post my articles on yours." By refusing to accept articles from a host, you are in NO WAY breaking any law or hurting that host. Their equipment is not touched, their connections are left intact. What you propose is like saying Pizza Hut should sue me because I refuse to eat there. Give me a break.
OK, not exactly on this topic (if you say "offtopic" they don't mark you offtopic :) but in a related and interesting coincidence:
I just now got a message from BugTraq saying that their mailing list has gotten blocked by ORBS because their ISP blocks ORBS probes. I think (I'm not an expert on this) that ORBS (anti-spam police) is probing to see if above.net's sendmail will allow "open relaying", but above.net blocks the probes. So, ORBS is treating the ISP as if they allow open relaying... does ORBS have "proof" that some machines in that domain are relaying, or is this a "play ball our way or screw off" (you know, kinda like cookies on Slashdot :) move?
Here's the email (I've corrected some errors to make it readable):
After a (somewhat funny) conversation with a bewildered @Home help desk lackey, I was told that noone in _entire office_ (including his supervisor) knew what I was even talking about. I was directed to e-mail abuse@home.com.
The following is the text of my e-mail message to them. I would encourage other @Home customers to write letters of their own. Perhaps @Home will get the point and begin acting more responsibly.
-----email follows-----
to: (several addresses, repeated in body of msg.)
from: (Chris Stearns)
--
I would like to know what @Home intends to do about the Usenet UDP that is scheduled to begin on Tues, Jan. 18 at 1700 PST.
Usenet access (reading and posting) is one of the services I pay @Home for. Now, because of @Home's continuing reluctance to address the abuse of its mail servers by spammers, my Usenet postings may be blocked by various sysadmins, who have elected to reject all traffic originating from within the home.com domain.
This would be an unacceptable interruption of service. @Home has an obligation to ensure that the services I subscribe to are available to me.
Futhermore, @Home has an obligation to ensure that its mail servers are not being abused by spammers. The requests for action that have been forwarded to @Home (by myself and others) are apparently being ignored. My own requests have been met with excuses. David Ritz, the originator of the UDP, details largely the same experience when describing his attempts to contact @Home. These responses from @Home - deferral, ignorance - are not good enough.
The remedy to this problem is completely within @Home's ability to to enact. I am a paying customer who wants to know what is being done.
Tell me, what are you going to do to clean up your act? When?
I have attached a copy of the UDP notice, originally posted by David Ritz in news.admin.net-abuse.usenet. This message, as well as the original notice, has been mailed to abuse@home.com, abuse@corp.home.net, news@corp.home.net, noc@corp.home.net, abuse@rogers.home.net, and Internet.Abuse@shaw.ca
A timely response would be appreciated.
Chris Stearns
(email address omitted)
(UDP notice was attached here)
-------end email message------------
Happy writing!
Chris Stearns
Just wait until AOL has high speed access like @home. I think AOL will have the UDP brought against it.
Ask Slashdot - google for stupid people.
You just came up with a great idea here. Let's think about this. What happened if AOL was UDPed for just ONE day? I'd love to see the stats on how much spam DOESN'T come out. hmm..
After AOL is banned from USENET for one day, let's ban anonymous coward posting for one day on here. Let's see one article where we hear a variation on a TV theme and 2000 other ACs(probably the same person) giving props to him/her/it. It would be like browsing at a threshold of 2.
Let's gather some data from these rash actions for just one day. Imagine the interesting Slashdot articles that could come from that.
If you wish to comment on Usenet-related issues, it behooves you to learn a little bit about what Usenet is and how it works.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
--Quote begins--
give everybody access to bandwidth and things go wrong
--Quote ends--
As I've said before, it's the issue of broad access that makes many of the big commercial services an incomplete Internet experience. You get so many people who act up that it ruins it for everyone. A friend of mine left AOL because he's an avid IRC person, and aol.com is k-lined on most servers. AOL was convenient, but the stigma ended up being too much and they lost another customer...one who honestly wasn't an AOLamer.
Usenet kill files, IRC server k-lines, Spam filters...all over people lock out entire companies because they're sick of the garbage. You can't really have a complete Net experience with them. The big companies don't take the time to police what's going on, and often don't bother to respond to complaints. It takes something like a UDP to wake them up, and that's only because the UDP usually gets in the news. My advice remains, if you can find a local ISP with good service, stick with them and avoid the corps. The BS you have to put up with because of the other lamers who get on big companies like AOL and @Home isn't worth it.
My opinion, of course.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
Are you a spammer, Anon Coward?
>You may want to keep in mind that the spam nazis >are pretty wacko themselves and go to inordinate >lengths to stop spam.
Such as? I've seen LOTS of claims about what these supposedly EEEVIL despammers do, but noone's ever substantiated them.
> They don't even care that innocent companies
> will suffer.
@Home is not an innocent party here. Things have to get really dire before a UDP is considered..
> Think I'm exaggerating? Well consider this, an
> internet site not responsible for *any* spam
> leaving its network may qualify for
> listing on the RBL, IOW being blackholed.
> I know. Been there, done that.
BS. You need to submit traced spam, send it to the RBL folks who contact (by phone) the maintainers of the submitted server and then they MAY enter it in the RBL if there's no hope of the mail server operator getting a clue.
You haven't "been there, done that" at all. You're just pushing spammer FUD.
> Check http://www.mail-abuse.org/ if you have any > doubts.
...and expose you as a clueless tool??
You've never adminned a news server, have you? Until you do, please remember your opinions have about as much value as your usenet admin experience.
Use killfiles, content filters, etc.
Um... That what the UDP is. It's a sort of killfile for mail admins so spam won't kill their servers.
The UDP is also a 'weapon of last resort'. Beleive me, it would be a LOT easier for all concerned if @home would just do the right thing, police their own network, and actually enforce their own Acceptable Use Policy.
Don't like the UDP? Tell it to @home.
I can get on almost any DalNet server and my hostmask shows *.home.com clearly, not even just the IP.
Try liberty.dal.net (my favorite), raptor.dal.net, or qis.dal.net (I think). These are just a few I connect to daily... and BTW, I'm an op on a channel that gets into the mid-500's so I know what I am talking to about. And yes, lots of @Home people in there too.
Possibly it was your subnet banned at that time though, since I got cable just 11 mts ago now and hadn't had trouble since then. I was on dialup previous to that.
BTW, I know what you are talking about with clogged networks... I've been told there was 64 machines going through the router that I am on. 64!! When I got on total was 3!
@Home is going commercial, and this happens when people flock to one thing or another. Obviously, because of the story, more and more stupid people are getting on also. I hope that they get banned, I really do. I hate spam also, though I've learned to ignore it, unfortunately.
- 8Complex
With programs like this.
Bounce Spam
I also understand that some unix and linux email programs have a "bounce" capability built in. I guess some might say this increases the problem by increasing the amount of traffic and bandwidth used. But my guess is that the spammer's servers and network would be the only ones to suffer any real slowdown and then maybe they would stop.
Off topic, but I'm curious: What kind of performance do you get from Brasnan?
I subscribe to the bresnan service (Ishpeming, MI) and it seems sub-par. I'm getting rates of 45KB/s (yes, that bytes) only on sustained transfers and it often just goes dead. It's been shown that the servers are at fault but Bresnan is too cheap to upgrade while the neighboring city of Marquette is getting much better service.
Is Ishpeming's service just local or do you get a disappointing connection also?
I think the Web is just elitist in general. Anyone
who wants to read pages must obtain a browser. You
must have access to the servers. Even then its not
100% likely that you will be able to find a server
with the information you want.
Ok...now for the sarcasm-impaired.....
Of course you need a "client" what kind of
argument is that? You could just telnet to the
nntp port and speak nttp by hand, but guess what?
that is a pain in the ass.
Find a particular server? How is it any differnt
from email? Should every ISP just automatically
allow anyone, free of charge, to have an email
acount on their server?
The server your ISP has doesn't have all the
groups you want? That is your ISP (or whoeevr
runs the server) fault. Complain to them. I know
that here where I work, we are willing to add
any group to our feed that is requested by a user.
> that @home people are operating "open proxies" I
> assume that this means that they are allowing
> public access from the outside world. Well my
> friend what is wrong with that?
Open Proxies are not open usenet servers. An
open proxie is a proxie server that ANYONE can
connect to. This allows ANYONE on the net to
"Hide" their real adress by connecting to the
proxie and having the proxie connect for them.
The problem here is that A) 99% of the time this
is NOT the intent of the machines owner but a
mis-configuration that others are taking
advantage of. B) This allows spammers to post
spam to email and usenet without ANY audit
trail to track them back to their ISP. This
means that it APEARS like the person with the
relay is sending the spam.
> Is it's presence that bad that it actually
> causes people to react like it was a cockroach
> or maybe a demon? I
You know...if it was JUST the fact that I get an
ocasional email advertisment I wouldn't care.
However, spammers are much worst than that.
Do you know what a spammer can do to an
unsuspecting network? They connect to a mail or
usenet server and start BULK sending thousands of messages. Often in mail with BCC so that they send
one message and the server expands it and sends
thousands.
This can saturate unsupecting networks and bring
useful work to a halt. Not to mention disk
space. If a spammer sends a 2k message here...to
all 10,000 of our users...that means roughly
20 MB of storage space. Maybe thats not terrible,
but if several spammers do it every day or two...
it adds up FAST.
> I think if the mythical Lucifer were to appear > in front of one of these people they would most
> likely get more irritated or enraged at the spam
> than their most hated enemy (for Christians).
Love to nitpick...
since when do ALL christians believe litterally
in a Devil? I know many who don't and would say
any references to one are merely symbolic to
make a point rather than references to an actual
being.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Not to mention a UDP doesn't stop incoming messages to @Home...it just doesn't allow you to post out. You can still READ Usenet, you just can't contribute until the UDP is lifted
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
We don't close highways because we have police to control them. The internet cannot be controlled in this way (partially due to it's international, borderless structure that takes it out of the relevant jurisdictions).
If you look at the UDP FAQ (linked to in the email mentioned in the article), you will see that most of the UDPs do not go into effect, and when they, it's generally for a very short period of time. I would say your average, honest internet user doesn't get [too] hurt by this action.
This is hardly old-school draconian society: apparently @Home has been approached regularily about this problem. They have done their customers a disservice by not being a responsible service provider. This isn't a police force in effect: the participants of the UDP are free to make up their own minds and not participate if they desire. It sounds more like a form of democracy within anarchy! If you think that this is draconian, would you mind suggesting another method equally as effective?
im an @home user(and att employee, incidentally), and i frequently lurk and post to various ng's.
if i cant post from here, on @homes servers, can i just set up an nntp server for my own use and post via it ?
by the way, we do have an abuse list, and it is generally *very* long. from what i see, were playing whack the mole keeping all of the abuse to a minimum.
USENet: you need to get rid of the spam
@Home: we need more moderators, our men are working double shifts as it is. we can do it with more moderators
USENet: the newsgroups do not share your optomistic appraisal of the spam
@Home: we need more men!
USENet: well than perhaps you should tell that to the newsgroups when they impose the UDP
@home: the ng's are imposing a UDP?!
USENet: yes
@Home: we shall double our efforts
No, breaking into someone's computer shouldn't be treated like a physical assault. Not even close IMO.
But it SHOULD be treated like a property crime. After all, it is costing the victim money. If something of value is copied or destroyed then the victim is financially hurt. Say what you will about closed source, but it still holds a market value.
Hell it doesn't even have to be source code. People store all kinds of information on computers (credit cards, anyone?). Sure, this stuff should be secured, but there's no denying the fact that harm is done if someone steals it.
Even if nothing is done aside from breaking in the victim still loses. Why? He has to invest time (= money) in resecuring / reinstalling his machine.
Don't try to glorify computer intrusion as a harmless activity. It's not.
For what it's worth, I agree that sysadmins should work together to solve problems as much as possible before involving the authorities. It's generally a faster way to take care of the problem. But, when the abuse warrants it, either through damage, or through repeated activity, I have no problem contacting law enforcement to resolve the issue.
Best regards,
SEAL
Actually, as someone pointed out, it has already been done. Although the mailserver admin must add a few things to his setup in the config file, things such as
;)
:)
http://www.orbs.org (and)
http://maps.vix.com/rbl/
already implement this.
I work at an ISP, and we co-locate hundreds of boxes for customers. ORBS is quite effective, and so is MAPS.
I remember a while back, a customer was completely clueless on how to setup a mailserver. Rather than ASK how to do it (we would have setup his sendmail, it doesn't take long), he instead set up his mailserver as an open relay, no restrictions, and forwarded all mail onto the main server. Since he was "inside" our company network, as he was colocated, our mailserver accepted his mail. (this oversight has since been corrected.
Therefore, as they always do, spammers located his box quite quickly and spam mail poured through his server. The traffic load was caught by one of the admins within an hour or so, and the IP of his box was blocked from our mailserver, but it was too late and the damage had already been done.
Since the colocated customer was relaying into our main mail server, ORBS placed our primary mail server on their list. A good percent of our mail (I'd say about 40% or so) was returned to us by ISP's subscribing to the (free) ORBS database, with a nice note stating that our mailserver was on the ORBS spam list and therefore the messages could not be delivered. heh.
One of our admins completed the process with ORBS to remove our server from their list, and after they verified there were indeed no possibilities of relay, they promptly removed us from their list.
ORBS did indeed adjust their records quickly, and our mail returned to normal status the next day, with no blocking.
So ORBS and the MAPS RBL do indeed work quite well. I'm glad they're there, and that they do indeed function. We had a lot of headaches from customer calls, etc asking what the HELL was wrong with our mail servers, but in the end, it served its purpose and we corrected our customers mistake.
Click here to get info on signing up for MAPS RBL, and/or here to get info on signing up for ORBS.
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
If I remember correctly, AOL was at least threatened with a UDP, if not actually UDPed, several years ago...
Spammer vs. anti-spammer has been going on a long time, and is likely to continue.
Welcome to the "September that never ended"
You do ticket them and/or revoke their licenses.
@Home has repeatedly been asked to fix their problem (ticketing....) Now, their being told that they're not allowed to drive until they fix their bus.
AFAICT, @home users will still be able to read newsgroups, they simply won't be able to post. (And sense not being able to post doesn't affect porno and warez collection, I don't expect to see too many @Homers complaining about this.)
Not to say that all @Homers only collect Porno and Warez on newsgroups, but...
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Optus@home is released here soon.. hopefully this won't affect us?
-- when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
And more.
The point is not to just try and shut off spammers from sending mail; except for some certifiable net.kooks, they're mostly trying to get you to buy something, and therefore eventually they have to have a fixed presence somewhere. The RBL tries to cut off those fixed presences.
What they're trying to do is to make every Internet service have a policy against any of their customers being involved in spam.
OK, so we do know ths ISP. However, the spammer can set the user account to absolutely anything. Therefore... One goes to the ISP, and nicely asks them to check this out. They would have logs of who was on when, and could probably figure out who actually did it (to them, you see, the remote would be the spammers own machine. They know who they gave which IP to, and can figure out the identity of the spammer). If they didn't keep the logs, they could watch for him to resurface (ie keep logs temporarily and deal with it if he does it again). This would almost certainly be acceptable as a response, and would get them off the hook.
If the ISP is uncooperative, then all that can be done (from the next level up) is to blackhole the ISP. Only the ISP can really know who the spammer was, so theu have to deal with it, or ignore it. If they ignore it, I guess the people at the next level have the right to recommend blocking and to block it for themselves. If you read the post, individual news-carrying sites have the choice if a) whether or not to follow UDPs at all or b) to follow them, but exempt this one. How to do so was described. So if you like spam or think this is too extreme (maybe it is, I haven't hear whan @Home's response was or how many warnings they got) find a news-carrier who is not going to follow it. Or run nntpd yourself, and don't follow it.
So it's a lot like the system right here at slashdot. Read at -1 if you want, or don't if you can't stand trolls and spam. Individual choice (except that you do have to be the person running the newsserver and using up the resources to be able to make the choice.
At least, that's my understanding of the setup, but I don't actually run a usenet server, so any innaccuricies are hereby disclaimed. If I'm wrong, would someone reply and say so.
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
This, as I understand it, is the purpose of a UDP.
You hurt the company (a few execs) by pissing off the millions of users. @home has already shown that they ignore repeated requests by other admins to stop the abuse, hopefully they will listen to their customers.
What traffic I, or any other admin, allows to pass through our networks is our business. Our companies own the equipment and we maintain it. I can block any and all traffic coming from @home if I so choose.
It's the exact same way I look at it. Government is inherently a bad thing; like any administration it forces a huge overhead on society sucking up an awful lot of tax money just to pay to keep itself alive and then more money to actually do stuff. Unfortunately in this day and age it is necessary to keep people from killing themselves.
I've always been optimistic that someday people will evolve to the point where governments will no longer be necessary at all, though I really doubt I will be seeing this happen in my lifetime.
People just aren't ready to rule themselves.
~Chris Carlin
That, and not the quantity of spam, is what gets the USENET Death Penalty rolling.
It doesn't help that there are maybe five people in the entire @Home company nationwide who know what the hell they're doing, and your chances of talking to one of those people are about the same as your chances of calling the White House and talking to the President. As with The Phone Company, @Home takes pains to make sure that their precious techies aren't bothered with anything as mundane as helping customers.
Easy way to get hung up on by @Home "technical service"... "Hello, I'm running Linux and ...".
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Use the URL:
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/home_ps.shtml to get to the old DejaNews PowerSearch form.
They appear to have re-enabled this feature over the past couple of months.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
There's a small problem with the picture used to depict "spam", as in junk e-mail and the like. It depicts a can of SPAM luncheon meat , which is a registered trademark of Hormel foods.
Hormel's position on this matter is best expressed by the following quotation from their "Spam and the Internet" page:
This means Hormel don't like pictures of cans of their SPAM luncheon meat used in conjunction with junk e-mail and the like.
I suggest that the logo for "spam" be changed for those legal reasons. Perhaps we could change it to the picture of a pig from O'Reilly's book "Stopping Spam", or some similar porcine picture that's suggestive of "spam".
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
. In fact, it would be over a year before I ever saw an intelligent post from the aol.com domain.
There are no intelligent posts from aol.com. You must be mistaken.
Besides, only @home can really tell who the spammer is. see My other comment
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
Then it's not Supernews that is going to be refusing to propagate. It's going to be people down the line.
:)
If a company wants to legally make sure everyone can read its usenet postings, then it would have to contract with every ISP and newsgroup server in the world.
There's no one for @Home to sue. Go read the faq for the UDP.
~Chris Carlin
Deja it is.
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
I really have to ask, does anyone know is SPAM profitable? Are these just un-informed idiots that really don't know that they're wasting their time? Does anyone have information on this?
Furthermore has anyone even _heard_ of someone that bought something because of SPAM?
Are these people just the deranged/hopeful side of the net?
if the UDP has the desired effect, then it's an example of anarchism actually working
the UDP FAQ certainly claims a large number of successes, among them:
Erols.com had been a thorn in the side of usenet for a long time. With a change in policy after discussion of a UDP against them, they now have a very high reputation among both the usenet and email community.
Bell Atlantic, near the end of July, 1997, was a major spamhaus. Word got to them that they were being considered for a UDP. Spam dropped dramatically almost instantly, to their credit. No UDP was necessary.
UUnet, which was the largest single spam producer around the beginning of August, 1997, [...]announced and apparently instituted a much tougher AUP against spamming, and nuked a couple of the most persistent spammers that usenet has ever seen. Numbers again have fallen dramatically, and we all hope that UUnet continues with this policy.
October, 1997, Compuserve
In December, 1997, TIAC appeared absolutely unwilling to deal with any of their ongoing spam [...] UDP was announced with the 5 business day waiting period before institution. Although their owner continued to make excuses and argue about their culpability as well as bluster and threaten legal action, by the time the deadline had arrived, they had "cleaned up their act" to the point that the UDP was no longer necessary, and the deadline was extended for another 5 days to watch the numbers. After that additional 5 day period, the stats had stayed low, and the UDP deadline was lifted.
About 10 others between these dates.
In December of 1999, a simultaneous UDP of VSNL and SILNET, the two main carriers in India, was instituted for their failure to even begin to control the usenet terrorist who calls himself "HipCrime" and who forges, cancels, floods, and supercedes thousands of articles on a nearly daily basis in an attempt to blackmail the entire world into doing things his way - his way being a usenet without spam cancels. Currently, VNSL and SILET have enabled port 119 (news)blocks on all outgoing connections from their services with the exception of their own servers.
So, it looks like there is good evidence that this will work, given the past history of success.
My Mum told me to hit them!
what does it mean to "alias" NNTP traffic? Specifically, what does the following from the UDP mean?
I used to work for @Home. One of my duties was reading mail sent to news@home.com and handling requests/complaints/whatnot. Anyone who proclaims that @Home is being *lazy* about fixing their problems is _just plain wrong_. @Home employees work their asses off to deal with the problems associated with being a large ISP. Unfortunately, there are just not enough @Home employees. When I worked there, every UNIX admin was spread thin. We all wore a million different "hats" and there never was enough time to deal with everything. @Home is a magnitude larger than it was when I was there and I'm pretty sure things have not improved.
:-)
As for the spam problem, the people at blame are the corporate types. This is a management issue, not a technical issue. This problem could be fixed by blocking inbound packets to customer IPs on port 119/TCP. Unfortunately, port blocking is more involved than just making changes to routers. Policies have to be re-written which, when you are @Home, necessitates lawyers, meetings, and the like. @Home has bigger fish to fry. Like what, you say? Customers who crack government machines, e-mail spammers (who generate a larger backlash than usenet spam), smurfers, script kiddies, irc abuse, customer-to-customer abuse, people who host commercial sites on their cable modems, people who put porn sites on members.home.net (their homepage server), etc., etc. It's only to be expected that USENET complaints are near their bottom of their abuse priority list. If you could only see the volume of mail that abuse@corp.home.net generates, you'd understand.
Chris
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I used to be a system operator of a dial-up BBS (bulletin board system), back when FidoNet was pretty much the only way to get online to any kind of WAN in places like back-woods New Hampshire, USA, where I live.
One of the things I've always liked about FidoNet over UseNet was that people were held accountable.
If you broke an echo's rules (an echo is like a newsgroup), the moderator of that echo could ban you from the echo. (Fido moderators are more like IRC channel operators then UseNet moderators).
If you got banned enough times, most system operators would simply ban you from the echos entirely.
But it got better. If a system's operator was unresponsive, or a system was a continual source of twits, the FidoNet feed to that system could be cut.
If other systems in the area kept refeeding him any, that entire network (local geographical area) would be cut.
Seems a little heavy-handed if you are used to Internet anarchy. But I think UseNet's system of waiting until things have deteriorated to the point of uselessness doesn't work, and a system that doesn't work isn't a good system. FidoNet preemptively cut off the garbage-makers. It was all run by the lose organization of system operators, was very grass-roots, and generally operated on concenus. It worked pretty well.
In a way, FidoNet has a cabal, and was better for it, IMNSHO.
Of course, the big-time (the Internet) has pretty much killed it off these days, so we'll never know how it would have scaled compared to Usenet.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The @Home newsfeed is practically useless anyway. The amount of articles and the retention time in some groups (rec.music.makers.guitar for example) pales in comparison to what you can get from a Remarq NNTP server. Example - I have a Remarq subscription, but I sometimes retrieve articles from @Home's servers just to see if they've improved. @Home will return ~800 headers for certain groups vs. ~3000 from Remarq for the same group. Pathetic.
>what does it mean to "alias" NNTP traffic?
Okay, every posting to Usenet have a "Path:" header in it, and each site that processes the post ads its name in, so you can see what path the post took.
Now, the way a UDP works, the cancel messages that are sent (which "cancel" other posts, or remove them from news servers that process them), those cancels have the string "udpcancel" in the path.
So, if you want to ignore the UDP, you could "alias out" that string, and your news server would drop those cancel messages and only those cancel messages. The term alias essentially tells the news server "hey, the system 'udpcancel' is an alias for this host, so ignore posts that contain that string". It's a hack, but it works. :-)
This site seems a tad (heh) out of date. Are there any similar sources for information that keep up to date?
I want to refuse all and any kind of article coming from the UDP perpetrators. How can I go about doing this?
--Small Usenet Admin.
The point is that @home has not been supportive in helping to identify or block the 1% of their users that are screwing it up. This lack of support is why @home is getting the UDP.
IMHO I think that the same problem is with gun control and gun manufacturers but I am not going to ramble on.
way OT ... the other UDP :)
...
... great for game communication ... foolhardy for everything else
:)
... boy am I glad to stumble upon the motherload of geek/nerd which is /. .... lots of people interested in the dorky things that I have interest in ....
Agree that UDP is highly unreliable, with flimsy checksum as semblance of data confirmation
but in case of game data (admitted a limited application) we really don't need uber hand-shaking at TCP/IP level for continuous broadcast of position delta baseline difference.
UDP is the minimalist approach to small packet (high data to header ratio) sending
I am coding to UDP right now, and am perfectly happy, though I am not maintaining life threatening data across the universe
P.S. Even more OT
Corrinne Yu
3D Game Engine Programmer
Adding "=dnc" gives you the much more readable 'DejaNews Classic' version.
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp? AN=571636137
--
All Glory To The Hypnotoad!
What is ironic is that I set my moderation setting way too high and AC posts get filtered out ...
... maybe I shouldn't post then since I can't possibly make the time to read - 1 posts upward ...
my apologies that I probably don't have time to read posts under 3 or 4
Corrinne Yu
3D Game Engine Programmer
all the docs indicate that the MTU's must be set to 1500
runnin 1426 here, ipmasq works great
you know reading the docs can makes things much easier
Huzzah and kudos! i applaud you sir!
That's not a valid counter-arguement, because of the warnings to @Home. If a system has open mail relays that spammers are using and I notify the admins, I would expect the admins to shut the open relays. That's basic courtesy, not to mention something that saves wear and tear on your system. Any admin worth their job should appreciate this concept - ignoring requests by others to fix a problem such as this is insulting and isolationist. The UDP is (partly) the apparent desired end result of @Home's actions - they ignore the rest of the internet and the rest of the internet ignores them. Finally, it is trivial for @Home to close these mail relays, and pressue from @Home's customers to end this UDP should encourage @Home to take the necessary actions.
itachi the incoherent
Wrong, UDP's are not lightly administered, @Home has refused to do anything about the problem, therefore the News admins have to do the next best thing. to use your own analogy the Gunmakers have done absolutley nothing to stop the guns falling into the wrong hands, even after baeing asked to do so repeatedly. The aim is not to hurt the regular users, it's to force @home to do something about the problem, once they do the UDP will be lifted.
You got a point, but it's terribly hard to deal in absolutes. For the moment, can't we just agree that spam is bad? =)
It's a difference of degree. I agree with you that *some* porn is unhealthy, but so are cigarettes. It's like this.
Spam FORCES its way onto users. People are CONVINCED to seek out porn.
So you see, to stop spam, we have to stop it from arriving. But to stop the addictive nature of unhealthy things, we have to stop the CONVINCING. Banning cigarettes (or alcohol, or porn) is not the way to control smoking. Attacking the source of the brainwashing (the companies), is.
Porn is especially sensitive because sex is a natural instinct. It's hard to draw the line at what people wouldn't naturally crave in the absence of the porn industry. Given, people wouldn't naturally crave cigarettes if they had never been under the effects of nicotine. But people are going to seek out sex (and probably sexually explicit materials) unless they are convinced *against* it. See what I mean? =)
I hope that made some sense. I think it did, but since I know what I mean already, I have an unfair advantage.
the people who answer those emails are a group called KANA(i think the name may have changed recently), and i work pretty closely with them.
thier job is pretty much the same as mine; acct maintanence, billing, troubleshooting, etc.
these guys are AT&T employees, not @Home employees, and have absolutly NO control over abuse issues. the most we can do is refer it to abuse@home.com
so, knowing this, please do not email the good people at that address.
thanks
The ISP's could be thought of as members of the UN (maybe Usenet Nations?)... they do occasionally agree to do things, such as economic sanctions and what not. That doesn't seem like anarchism to me. There is a semblence of organization.
cheese_wallet
They sent money to a spam-friendly ISP. Without those millions of customers' revenue, the ISP would not be able to support the spammers' terrorism.
If you do business with scum, you're going to get a little dirty. That's why I don't pity the Windoze users when they BSOD. (Or at least I try not to show any compassion.) They put money into Microsoft's pockets instead of hiring good people. They brought it all onto themselves, and made the world a slightly darker place for the rest of us too. Fuck 'em.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
How embarassing.
--
Wage Slave Journal
yes
This is exactly why cable should not be a monopoly. In Canada @home has a grip on the whole cable market (there are CRTC proposals in place that are trying to fix that, but nothing's happening for now), so every cable subscriber in canada will be affected pretty much (with the exception of smaller ones in private cable areas, like dccNet here Delta BC). If people had options, they could be using another ISP that gives 2 shakes about nettiquite and would not be affected.
certainly, those specs are potent radioactive carcinogens of the mind.
Hello, just thought I'd like to mention, if you're in Canada, a very good alternative to @home is Bell's Sympatico High Speed service, it uses the Nortel 1Meg xDSL modems and I've had very good service for a reasonable cost ($39.95).
So why can't they get it across their god damned thick skulls that NOBODY WANTS TO SEE YOUR SPAM!?
If you ever find the answer to that question along with an appropriate clue stick, I will nominate you for any award of your choice.
Someone please moderate the above post up.
The above author UNDERSTANDS the situtation.
Maybe the lower price is because @home has real competition here. You can get DSL service starting at $445 a year ($38/month CDN, ie. $26/month US)
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Hmmm... rogue cancels from @home... let's extend the UDP a few more days.
Let's agree to disagree.
Just one question. How do us "worth reading" posters get our say, when our IPs have been banned... In my case I just use my work's IP.
But what of the people who can't afford to switch or get anything else??
This is forcing a stressful situation on a person who did not commit any crimes.
This
You could just telnet to the nntp port and speak nttp by hand
BTW, doing this effectively turns telnet into your news client, so either way, you're still using one.
-B
Hi there. Let's pretend that I administer a server. My bosses know what spam is; they chew me out when I get some. They tell me my job is to prevent spam from reaching them. So, I implement UDPs when they come out. I tell my bosses I'm stopping spam. They commend me. They own the server. Who are you to tell me what to do? Who are you to tell me I'm wrong for abiding by my contract and doing what the boss tells me?
Take that and multiply it by however many servers carry news feeds, and you've got the UDP. This isn't a central authority. This is lots of individual sysadmins who don't want to deal with posts from a domain, so they block that domain on the servers that they have a legal, ethical, and moral right and obligation to administer.
To be an illegal DOS attack they'd have to trick a server into canceling the articles against the wishes of the operator of the SERVER. Canceling messages against the wishes of the originator of the MESSAGE is fair game - because the operator of the SERVER is not required to carry the messages. The cancel requests themselves are advisory, not mandatory (though their processing is automatic, so the server operators must accept or reject them by policy rules rather than manually).
The cancel messages are formed in such a way that the operators of the servers can easily chose (by configuration options) to accept or ignore them.
Even better, the operators of the servers can selectively accpet or reject cancels from a particular instance of the UDP, certain classes of them, or UDPs in general (without regard to the policy on non-UDP cancel messages).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Is there a nice site that allows people to share their killfiles and spam filters? It'd be nice for me to be able to head to rec.arts.poetry or similar, and have a killfile maintained by the community (in the same way that Waldherr's Junkbuster has a community maintained blocklist.
Perhaps as an extension to NNTP, an FAQ, Killfile, and other info links would be available in the info for the group (as meta fields), allowing people to not have to wait for the FAQ to be posted, etc.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
UUNET was UDPed about a year and a half ago. Right now, their spam levels are barely a tenth of what they used to be before the UDP.
The last four times a UDP was called, it never actually went into place, after the waiting period. The recalcitrant provider always figured out how to get their collective sh*t together, and the UDP was called off.
--
I haven't read Usenet on a regular basis in several years. I just got tired of wading through all the noise to get to anything useful. One day I just got tired of updating my killfile... Now, I just go to Deja whenever I'm looking for specific information on a topic.
/. has developed a decent model that makes it relatively easy to find the few gems that are posted. I don't always have the time to read every post. I just think it's a better model than Usenet (even if I have to put up with a few creative trolls). In some ways it reminds me more of the old BBS days.
/. that cater to other tastes?
However, I find the community oriented web sites to be more useful --
So, what other sites are out there? I know that I'm a nerd, but there is more to life than geek news and Natalie Portman. Are there any other community oriented web sites like
"He was a wise man who invented beer." -- Plato
Firts of all... I notice several people mention that they know how many people are on their WAN. How dod you check for something like that?
:)
I'm an unhappy @home user. I was happy when I got it about 1.5 yrs ago but now it's too damn slow. I get 15K from most sites during the day and thats just too damn slow.
Is there any way to optimize linux for @home? Any TCP/IP stack options you recommend for setting? MTU maybe?
Anyone else from *.slnt1.on.wave.home.com?
Nick
--
GroundAndPound.com News and info for martial artists of all styles.
> how the bloody hell can you pretend that kiddy
> porn, or any pornography at all, isn't bad?
The WORST thing that has EVER happend when an otherwise mentally stable individual has downloaded or otherwise VEIWED ANY sort of
pornography, is quite simply that they had to
clean up a sticky mess from masturbating.
Downloading, viewing, and exchanging porn is
fine in my eyes.
> pornography is a sick capitolist industry
> praying on human frailty and weakness.
> Porno=materialism, plain and simple. It chains
> you to a meaningless material world, much the
> same as money etc.
I can certainly sympathise with yout hatred of
capitalism. It *IS* one of the most destructive
systems I can think of. However, all porn does
is give a person visual material with which to
fantasise. Fantasy is perfectly natural, and is
a healthy part of sexual expression.
> It kills off the intellectual sect of the mind
> and prays upon the strictly animalistic side of
> it.
Humans ARE animals. I, personally, think that
embracing and satifing "animal instincts" is
an important part of leading a balanced life.
To do any less is to deny our animal nature and
in the end to live in a world of self-delusion.
> sn't the spam simply another form of "free
> information"?
While free flow of information is fine with me
and ism in and of itself, a good thing. It is
not an end that justifies all means. Just as sex
is a beautiful thing, forcing sex on another
person (ie rape) is an ugly thing. Spammers
steal network resources to advance their own
capitalist interests.
> Honestly, who here hasn't ever accidentally
> come across pornography?
Here I agree with you. Yes, the techniques that
are used to advertise porn is just as bad as
spammers. Their use of incorrect descriptions is
distastefull at best.
However, underhanded buisness practices are not
pornography. It is their buisness practices that
are wrong, not their "wares". I, personally,
refuse to do buisness with ANY company, no matter
what they are peddling, that engages in these
practices.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> Gotta a problem with the spammers? Go after THEM, you lazy
> bastards. Don't fuck everyone else over on the premise that
> the site is responsible for all traffic it forwards.
HOW? My ISP has rules against spamming built right into the contract by which I get my service from them. If I violate their anti-spam rules they charge me a whole bunch of money and then cancel my account. There's not a whole lot I can do about it if they do, because those are the terms of my contract, and they're right there in black and white, and if I don't like it I can find another ISP. So far so good.
But what happens if a guy who subscribes to another ISP spams me or mail bombs me? One time I got mail bombed by some ass with an account at Southwest Nell. So I emailed SWBell's abuse department and sent them copies of all the emails with which he jammed up my pop in-box. Since SWBell is a reputable company and my bomber was in violation of their terms of service, they cancelled his account. But keep in mind that MY ISP couldn't do a damn thing to this guy, since what he did, while obnoxious, is not illegal.
Now there were spammers running out of @Home accounts, right? People from all over were complaining to @Home, but @Home took no action. Again, since there was no violation of the law, @Home was not exactly required to do anything to the spammers. If @Home values the spammers's business more than it values the cooperation that is necessary to make Usenet work, or if they are too understaffed or lazy to enforce their terms of service, that's their privilege. It is also MY ISP's privilege to not copy posts from their news server into my ISP's news server.
You say "Go after THEM," "THEM" being the spammers, but unless they do something legally actionable (such as broadcasting death threats, etc.) no one can touch them. The only people who could restrain spammers with @Home accounts are the management of @Home, and the one and only reason @Home can do anything to stop the spammers is because those spammers are in a contractual relationship with @Home.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Just one question. How do us "worth reading" posters get our say, when our IPs have been banned... In my case I just use my work's IP.
You contact your ISP and explain to them their lack of control over abuse coming from their servers has inconvienced their customers. And politely insist they fix the problem.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
This is an opt-out database. This is the very thing the spam-fighters are trying to fight against.I'd be more impressed if they used an opt-in option, like NoCeM.
As a news admin, I'm sure you realize there are a large number of news sites, rightly or wrongly, running on auto-pilot, with no one paying attention to them unless the disk fills up. Choosing to honor the UDP isn't a choice on their part, and it's nothing their users are aware of.
Is that true? I would think that the aliasing technique discussed in the FAQ would cause such message to not be propagated by the news server in question, because it thought it had already passed them on...
Bob
--
Robert Snyder rsnyder@toontown.erial.nj.us
ICQ #20900813
I really have to ask, does anyone know is SPAM profitable? Are these just un-informed idiots that really don't know that they're wasting their time? Does anyone have information on this?
Furthermore has anyone even _heard_ of someone that bought something because of SPAM?
I've received SPAM that I believe to be quite profitable and which probably attracts a large number of users to the sites being advertised. My e-mail address is listed on several business brokerage sites, and every day I get e-mail advertising new sites. I don't visit them because SPAMMers must die ehm, I mean, I don't support their use of that advertising medium, but I bet lots of other people whose e-mails are up on similar sites would. This is targeted SPAM and not quite the random stuff you're talking about, but....
...for those companies whose business it is to spam for OTHER companies. How many spams have you seen that are like "MILLIONS OF EMAIL ADDRESSES" etc? No doubt there are direct-(e-)mail companies out there, who sign up businesses to their customer rolls, and send out spam for them. These are the ones with the tricky bastards working for them, who know the tricks of hacking email headers, using unprotected relays, etc. Your average Mom & Pop Spammer wouldn't last long in the waters, methinks. Basically, most spammers are spamming for other people, not themselves... and these are the bastards to go after. You may want to pick up the phone and call up whatever number is on a spam to get "100% herbal viagra" or whatever - but instead of screaming "You fucking spammers!!!" at these people... maybe try and clue them in on what they signed up for. The fewer people who buy into the BS that spamming companies feed to them, the quicker said companies will go out of business. THAT'S a good way to fight spam :)
The RBL isn't forced on anyone -- individuals and companies adopt it by choice. They have the legal right to choose to refuse to do business with anyone who refuses to do anything about spammers.
If you're affected by this, you chose to do business with someone who doesn't do anything about spammers. That's your choice.
One thing I have noticed while working with the modems on Rogers@Home, is that the modem itself has an IP address in the 10.x.x.x block. Anyone else seen this? They aren't accessable from outside the @Home network though... And BTW, i'm in Vancouver, and I pay $40 a month. I've moved around a lot lately and I haven't noticed a lag in bandwidth...
that you're only added to the RBL if any of those things happen AND YOU DO NOTHING.
If you're a spammer yourself, if you stop spamming, you won't be on the RBL.
If spammers use your services, then if you change your policies to prohibit spammers and take some steps to enforce that policy, you're not on the RBL.
You get on the RBL if the mail abuse people tell you your service aids or abets spam and you tell them 'why is this my problem?'
If the UDP were a passive, mass refusal to carry traffic from @home, I would support it. But active seek and destroy to all news posts originating from @home? That's a DOS attack on the (mostly) innocent users of @home. It is wrong
Actually, the way I understand it is that administrators only send @home posts to the bit bucket as they come into their own systems. This prevents all downstream servers from getting them but still allow other admins that don't honor the UDP to pass them along on their merry way. So some people will still be getting the posts. I don't think that anyone is actually wiping the posts off of servers that they don't control.
As you can see by my email address above, I'm one of the users that will be affected by this, but I'm in full support of this action. I plan on letting @home know that I am not pleased with their lack of action on this matter and will be urging other users to also express their opinions. All in a polite, non-flammable way of course.
Do this don't do that Can't you redesign.
My 2(where'd the cents symbol go?),
Anonymous Coward
But what of the people who can't afford to switch or get anything else??
:)
If someone can afford the $40-60 per month for a cable modem, then they can afford $20/month (note: that's a $20-40/month savings) to sign up with a modem ISP that does take the necessary precautions so they don't get UDP'd. Or they can get an account at Deja (or others) and post through there.
The point is, if @Home can't take care of their servers, everyone on their network is hurt. If there's any argument on this issue, poverty isn't one of them.
Hmmm well I supose your right. However the entire
internet is based on client server architectures.
As such I assumed the argument was that getting
a client is some big deal and some tough step.
In truth its as easy as telnet.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Sludge wrote:
As I hinted above, servers are against the rules with @home.
Actually... You should go pull up the service agreement and read it again. It seems they've amended it recently. I was looking at it over the weekend, and all I could find was a section in "Service Characteristics" subsection "b" that basicly says "If you run a http or ftp server, someone may hack your box. Don't blame us." This surprised me, because it used to say "No servers of any kind. Period!". I'd post my SLA/AUP but it specificly restricts me doing this.
Your service agreement may read differently. In my area, @Home has lots of bandwidth. I've hit 550Kb/sec. on ftp downloads. (There's like 3 of us on the segment... :-) There's a 128k upload cap, which may account for the server restriction being removed. YMMV.
Temkin
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1 005-200-335915.html?tag=
I think it says on the UDP FAQ they linked to in the original article that this situation has already been amicably resolved (which is to say Ameritech got off its collective a** and fixed the problem)
Choosing to honor the UDP isn't a choice on their part, and it's nothing their users are aware of.
Aren't they making the choice by choosing to run whatever certain news server or set of scripts to handle these control messages? The articles said @Home averaged 11,000 cancel messages a day. That would take what, 6-10 employees every day to look up the articles, read them, and decide if they should be cancelled? Even then, they can auto-pilot those, and forward important control messages (like an UDP) to an admin for manual control.
Anyway users pretty much choose with their money whether they accept an ISP's behavior/decisions. If my little town of 15,000 can have 3-5 modem ISPs, I'd guess it's that way in much of the US.
>I am coding to UDP right now, and am perfectly happy
hm... lending a hand for a known project or experimental stuff for future ones?
admitted, Im overly curious...
we have a business partner that charges for access to their news server. This is the personal newsreader service. You can point tin or trn or nutscrape at it and read news that way without ads. That's why they charge for it.
and if I thought we could get away with it, I'd kill the ads myself. but you're right, I don't have anything to do with that. And unfortunately we need the ads to pay my salary.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
As for the packet loss issue you have mentioned... I have come up with a solution to get @home back into gear...
In October, I have created a shellscript to keep log of ping requests (every few seconds) to the @home gateway and DNS servers. This would then give me a total downtime in minutes for the month.
The month of October has shown an @home downtime of 2206 minutes on my server (logs are available)
After calling to complain at the end of the month, they gave me a measly $2.40 credit (or something like that)..
The Month of November improved slightly and gave me a downtime of only 1906 minutes (about 15% downtime). Still extremely poor.. I called and complained. Spoke with a supervisor this time. He was kind enough to give me a free month.
Then comes around the month of December. After speaking with people from the Rogers@home users association and informing them of the program I made to get people to use it (back in October)... I have noticed a significant improvement in downtime and packet loss.. Downtime has improved to just over 200 minutes (close to 0% !!).. A Lot Better.. As for January, so far I only have about 100 minutes of downtime which is very good relative to a few months ago.
If anybody would like some more info on this cheap shellscript I made, or in yelling @ supervisors to get free months (apparently they can give you 1 month credit for every 3 months of non-stable connections), feel free to email me.
Take out the 'no.spammers-xyz' in my e-mail and you've got my address..
I'll be happy to send out this shellscript I created for linux as long as I get credit for the creation..
Of course, they forge-approved it to two newsgroups that I moderate, and my 'bots cancelled it.
Aah, well, I reposted it in news.admin.net-abuse.policy. Enjoy, folks.
- Tim Skirvin (tskirvin@killfile.org)
Its not in deja.com yet, and I didn't want to reproduce it here to avoid possible copyright issues, so here is a link to it.
Why bother? They don't answer e-mail to abuse@home.com, and it would appear that they don't *act* on that e-mail, either.
Instead of contacting anyone else there, I've simply started redirecting my customers to other broadband providers that *do* take their abuse mail seriously.
I'd bet that I've cost them somewhere between seventy and one hundred customers in the last six months. Conservatively, and assuming I don't redirect any other potential customers, and I've cost them only 15 customers per month over the last six, at $35 per month per customer, I figure they've already lost over $10,000 in potential revenue simply because every time someone mentions high-speed internet access, I direct them to a provider *other* than @Home.
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
After my complaint email was sent, I received an automated reply stating:
a)that I would likely not ever hear anything from them regarding this matter, and
b)that they would take no action unless I included my system logfiles and other detailed information.
As a comparison point, I offer my experiences with Pacific Bell Internet Services (pbi.net), @Home's largest competitor in my area (San Jose, CA):
After a similar incident, PBI sent me an automated response, followed by a hand-written email (oxymoronic?) indicating that the user had been contacted and warned that further attempts would violate his service agreement and be grounds for termination of service. A few days later, I received a second personalized email including an explanation of the incident and an apology from the attacker (who explained that this was an accident - he was trying to test his own security and didn't realize his tools were running against a wider range of IPs).
While I don't expect this high level of service as a rule, it made me feel good about my choice of ISP.
The next thing will be spam that posts to message boards...or Slashdot spammer.
SPAMMING SHOULD COME W/ the REAL DEATH PENALTY
What's illegal about it? I own a network. I don't want packets from your network to enter mine. It's for me to determine. I have no contract with you to carry your packets. Allowing your packets to go into my network is a PRIVILEGE that I give you that can be taken away at my whim. All of it legal, since I own the pipes that carry your packets.
It's up to the individual ISPs to choose whether they process Usenet Cancel messages or not. If an ISP would be against this embargo against @home Usenet messages, they would simply change their software to ignore the cancel messages and still propagate the @home spam (this is if they are accepting Cancel messages in the first place).
As a single user, you have no idea how much bandwidth and space this spam takes up. We're talking gigabytes and terrabytes of wasted space on a DAILY basis.
You're probably ready to cry out: "But the Internet is based on mutual exchange of packets! If an ISP blocks packets from another ISP, it goes agains everything the Internet stands for and was built for!" Not really. Their needs to be a degree of respect between ISPs. @home disrepects other ISPs by flooding their networks with spam, even after multiple requests to fix the situation. Why respect someone who not only doesn't respect you, but spits in your face and causes you harm in doing so?
"But this hurts the little guy who uses @home who uses usenet". Look at the big picture. This hurts the little guy everywhere. The surgeance of spam has been flooding bandwidth everywhere. ISPs need to upgrade their pipes so that legitimate traffic can flow thru with little lag. When an ISP needs to install a few extra OC3s, not because of growth within their network but because of spam (which gives them no extra revenue), prices go up. As with most companies, most ISPs will not absorb the cost. They'll pass it on to their customers who in turn pass it on to average Joe User who dials up on a modem.
And one last thing. Who gives a flying $$#@# if a few million people can't use Usenet for a few days? How will they be hurt? By not being able to continue their flame war over baked avocados? Will people die or suffer physical harm because they can't post for a few days? Hell no. So who cares if they can't post for a while (if it gets to that point). It's not going to change my world (other than not having to wade thru so much SPAM, which is going to be quite nice for a change). At most some newsgroups will be dead because they are moderated and the moderator sits on the @home network. No big deal. It won't stop the people of this world to stop breathing, eating, sleeping (ok, some addicts may suffer from lack of sleep) or living. So those who are up in arms about this, calm the hell down and think how this really impacts you and the world: It doesn't. And if you think it does, then you might want to step away from the computer and try living in the real world for a while to get your priorities straight.
It's better to burn out than to fade away!
I just double checked the SLA/AUP available externally on @Home's website, and it still includes the server restriction. The one available from my house via "http://www" does not contain the server restriction. YMMV!
Temkin
Dude thats exactly what they are doing! The only people who have the power to go after these spammers is @HOME! @Home has not done this. The have a poorly set up network setup which has lots of loop holes for spammers.
... Lets not even get itno the gun shows issue.
If your an @Home customer and you want to send mail go to dejanews.com
Moderators take this message (and my reply down).
John
PS They are suing gun companies as they are negligent in allowing people access to guns. They intentionally make guns that can easily be made full automatics,
As seen on athome.announce:
Many of you have been posting your questions and concerns
in reference to the proposed Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) which
would block the @Home Network from posting to USENET. I have attached
our official response to the Usenet community and the press here but
wanted to bring attention to a couple of points that are raised here:
- This afternoon we began a network wide scan targeting open proxy
servers.
- If an open server is identified, the customer associated will be
blocked from posting to Usenet until such time we are assured that
the proxy software is secured.
------------------------------
To the USENET community:
In response to the recent UDP call for @Home Network to be removed
from interacting on the USENET, we are submitting an official
response
with a proposal of short term and long term news spam prevention
initiatives. Excite@Home is very committed to participating
respectfully on the Internet, and we have taken previous requests for
action seriously.
We have found that the primary source of our excessive USENET posting
history comes from subscribers who have installed proxy software
incorrectly. Unbeknownst to the customer, this mis-configuration has
allowed outside access to the @Home news servers, and has resulted in
our subscribers becoming spam relays. Because these various IP
addresses create holes in our network, spammers have taken advantage
of this mis-configuration, and have posted thousands of newsgroup
messages through our news machines.
As of today, we are stepping up our involvement and taking more
aggressive action by performing frequent network wide scans of our
customer base to target proxy servers. Once these customers are
identified, we are suspending their news service immediately.
Re-enabling will not occur until we are assured that their machines
are secure. We feel that this proactive effort will dramatically
decrease the amount of extraneous news traffic originating from
home.com.
We are committed to promoting better Excite@Home participation on
the
USENET, and we are in the process of modifying our current news
product and news architecture. We are also implementing more user
education as a parallel initiative.
With these new tactics in place, we are asking for an extension to
our
USENET access beyond the 18th of January and we are confident that
the
USENET community will see positive news statistics coming in the next
few days.
David Jackson
Manager, Network Policy Management
Excite@Home
Carol
Newsgroup Policy Specialist
Excite@Home
@home has not done it jobs to the Usenet community and should be punished, why should @home get all of this pity because their users wouldn't have Usenet access. Maybe the users should have thought about how bad @home's spam policy was when they signed up, then they could have expected this and could only blame themselfs. Or they could sue @home for not providing a service they payed for...I would if my ISP got a death sentence( or at least drop my account)
"Ignorance is Strength" --1984 *Ajax*
I've been an @Home subscriber for several years. I was one of the first half-dozen or so in my part of the Metro Area to get the service: I'd been anticipating it for months, excited by the enormous potential of broadband Internet access. In some ways, @Home delivered on their promises. However, there were, and are, glaring examples of neglect and incompetence. @Home's Usenet feed has been at the top of the list since day 1.
@Home's usenet philosophy has always been single-pronged: speed is the one and only aspect of Usenet that @Home has administered effectively and, on regular occasions, they've failed in this respect. As far as I can tell, @Home could care less about any Usenet issue beyond that single one. Many of @Home's servers have pathetic retention. Incomplete capture of multipart messages is a problem on most, if not all, of @Home's servers. Occasional outtages leave Usenet users high and dry. Lack of communication and/or response on the part of @Home tech support regarding Usenet issues is another principle complaint. @Home's lack of interest in usenet extends to the inclusion of new groups: in my experience, @Home only adds new groups if those groups are specifically requested by @Home subscribers. Most other major ISPs I've used have had enough motivation to regularly update their groups.
I was not aware of the @Home-Spam connection, but it doesn't surprise me in the least: it's completely in keeping with my observations of @Home's Usenet (mis)management.
OT.
... am coding to 3D game engine project after Unreal-engine-Duke Nukem Forever.
....
:) )
Since you are not an anon coward
Not too experimental, had all the R&D fun now, am knee deep in nitty gritty of rounding implementation of "all the other stuff"
though still all by my (happy) lonesome
(above post would make no sense to most people, don't ask
Corrinne Yu
3D Game Engine Programmer
I've used @Home with Cox in San Diego for something like 2 years at this point. Outside of the #%^#^ 128Kb outbound cap (vs. 400KBs pre-cap), the service has been good - I've had one or two outages over that entire period, maybe 10 hours total - you won't get a contract specifying that kind of uptime with a dedicated line without a LOT of money & effort! While I don't often see >1.1MB/s transfers, that's more the remote server than anything else; I frequently see 800KB/s+ agregate. I've never had a setup problem in spite of the fact that it's only been the last 2 months that I've had a computer in my house running a supported OS.
If you'd actually read about UDP you'd understand that all reasonable and some unreasonable attempts to contact the isp are made before it happens. The ISP is not responsive to the internet community at large or does not have effective measures to deal with them.
You should call up @home and tell them you don't like the spammers. That's the whole point of the list. @home not doing what they should, and the usenet community at large is using the power of denying them access to pressure them to fall in line. The only reason that creates pressure is because customers, like you, want access to usenet. It's a rather simple thing.
I wouldn't have thought that there was enough cause to conclude that the AC is a spammer herself (feminine pronoun used arbitrarily). It is possible that she is merely vehement that All Third-Party Cancels Are Wrong, no matter the cause. Given the assortment of other posts thread which are expressing the same opinion, scattered amongst about 3 or 4 different subthreads, she must be very vehement...
Also, I'll note that she appears to have altered her posts based on further information, and now seems to has no problem with denying service to messages originating from @Home; she is merely insisting that cancels not be used. I'll leave it to others to address whether this is possible, or address why cancels ought to be used anyway.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Depending on your software, the implementation varies, but the mechanism is the same. UDP cancels are posted such that they look like they came from a site called udpcancel. You need to set up your software to reject articles with "udpcancel" in the Path: header.
The faq mentions somehting about this towards the bottom, but it's not really obvious.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
I'm on an @home cable modem, and I say good! If @home won't be good neighbours, then they shouldn't be allowed into Fred's backyard for beer and BBQ.
I'll be calling and emailing tech support telling them to clean up their act, be assured of that.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
maybe we should implement a self-filtering :) seems :)
:)
system for slashdot and all its
"haha...i rewl..first post!" or maybe
its kinda like the +b in every irc room
for the ip (*!*@*.ipt.aol.com)?
to work quite well for irc..heh although
i think this is kinda wierd to kill soo many
users..kinda like telling Sprint that they
cant make any more telemarketing calls (ya..
i get those all the time too
nuf said
Evan..
aka the mouse..
or maybe just mitemous..
take your pick..
but i'll shutup now..
bye..
what are you reading this for?
Buy a server. Buy a USENET feed. Refuse to process cancel requests. Sell the service to like minded individuals. If there are enough of you, eventually, the UDP won't mean a thing. You're free to specify what messages you accept on your own hardware. As are others.
Usenet has been around a lot longer than DNS
(back when people only used a hosts file) and
the surge of email and the need for blocking of
that spam thru tightened rules and MAPS/RBL/ORBS
stuff.
For us old farts when they announce an active
UDP after a year(365 days) of trying to get
@home to get their excreta together that means
Usenet as a community/group has had enough.
Participation in a UDP is voluntary but generally
unanimous. This is not about censorship but about
"Until you can put your affairs in order we will
leave you alone, to let you work this out. When
you are ready to be part of the community again
we will welcome you with open arms".
A UDP is really a serious indication that the ISP hasnt tried or was/is unwilling to try and fix the
problem. And that every attempt was made to help
them and alert them to this problem that was
affecting everyone else.
Would it take you a year to fix a bug in your
system?
>You've never adminned a news server, have you?
I was going to post the same. I guess it's obvious.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
>activity, I have no problem contacting law enforcement to resolve the issue.
Oh yeah, they'll be all over that puppy.
"Don't worry about a thing, sir. Me and my partner, Officer Krupke, will take care of things. Let's see, first we'll secure the crime scene. Hey, Scott -- er, I mean, Officer Krupke, do me a favor and bring up a shell on the router. Let's bring down some services and quiet things down in here. Sir, could you turn down that Xamp over there? Thanks."
"All right, people, I've got root here now. Anybody needs a whole in the firewall will have to go through me. I'm gonna start my investigation now. Let's see here, what does the syslog say?..."
Yeah, that makes sense.
RP
...that's still no reason to abuse their good humor.
Somewhere in the past, I recall reading a thread about this very topic. The thread included some posts from the folks in charge at Hormel. The overall tone of their remarks was lighthearted and humorous. They were amused that their "trademark" had been appropriated. They commented on how many emails they had gotten on the subjsect and so forth...
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
This is what *should* happen ro rogue ISP's. If they allow spam, make sure they can't spread it. This company has done a lot of things for the Net business, most of them wrong.
A former employee posted earlier, talking about how @Hone's employees were spread too thin to handle the abuse. The way I read that, it sounds more like the execs got greedy. They expanded the company more quickly than it could realistically handle, which is why the employees were so overloaded. The bosses called a bad tune, now it's time to pay the piper. I have no sympathy for a business that gambles like that and gets burned. I do feel sorry for the employees, but that's another matter entirely.
Besides which, I don't expect this UDP to last very long. Either @Home will clean up its act, or it'll wither under the stigma of being UDP'd. Either way, their fate is in their own hands. They can bouce back, or they can screw themselves royally, but either way they will do it. No one else. I have a lot of trouble with people who are told again and again that there will be consequences for doing bad stuff, but then when those consequences finally do come about people say it's unfair. It is unfair for the legitimate @Home customers, who are going to get screwed. @Home should have realized that sooner, because they face the possibility of a class-action suit if the UDP goes into effect. Even if there's no suit, people will simply leave (and thus not be hurt by the UDP anymore, which is why I'm still supporting it; the ligitimate customers can get away from the UDP's adverse effects).
And it is an attack. It it not a "boycott" as so many seem to say
Umm, maybe i just fell down the stairs a few too many times when i was a kid but how can this possibly be a DOS attack? Usenet doesn't work like email in that messages don't get bounced, they just don't get propagated - so you won't see bouncemail flooding back to @home (ironically, they probably have the bandwidth to handle it.)
Secondly, it is not possible for a news daemon to actively delete posts off another server - that would be what we hardcore "31337 h4x0rz" like to call a "gaping security hole."
The UDP is simply an active agreement between SA's stating that we won't pass spam from one network onto another.
If the UDP were a passive, mass refusal to carry traffic from @home, I would support it.
So...you support it then?!
--FluX
What's tiny, yellow, and VERY, VERY dangerous?
a canary with the super user password
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
<FLAME>
I'm very sick of hearing about that. It's one of those things that all the whiny technophobe pissants say whenever they feel threatened. It's them puffung up their feathers whilst nerveously looking behind them for the backing of their mob of average upstanding citizens, only to see they they've all gone home to play videogames and drink beer. Sorry, somebody's gonna get his head kicked in. Better run to mommy 'cuz you're afraid of the big bad boogey man.
</FLAME>
Seriously though. I think that people who do make these claims are getting things a little out of porportion. Most breakins are never noticed, because the person who was entering the system was polite and just needed a jumping off place to go to another network. As for the crimes against property argument, that may be so, but i see two problems with this.
One, i think the amounts that get thrown around in these cases are usually overstated by a factor of about 100 to 1000 in the media, and espescially by law enforcement. Why? To get up a good lynch mob. If they used the real values, nobody would give a damn.
Two, i think that crimes against property are overpunished, and crimes against people are underpunished. You're likely to serve more time for stealing a car than for beating your wife. Do you suppose a couple of password crackers really belong in with hardened criminals?
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
They will recieve twice as many complaints from customers demanding that they do something to have the UDP overturned.
If they ignore that, the complaints will gradually tail off as people switch to xDSL.
I'm taking a wait and see attitude for now. Let's see what they do if anything. I would expect some sort of a response from someone in the next few days.
Gunmakers have done absolutley nothing to stop the guns falling into the wrong hands, even after baeing asked to do so repeatedly.
To clarify one teensy point: the arms manufacturers sell to federally-licensed dealers, not directly to the public. It is a violation of Federal law for a manufacturer to sell directly to the public. Therefore, it is illogical to ask the manufacturers to stop selling into the "wrong hands". By law, they can only sell to BATF-approved and licensed dealers.
If the BATF is licensing dealers who repeatedly sell to bad guys, then it is the duty and responsibility of the BATF and the federal court system to deal with the irresponsible dealers.
Hopefully this UDP will give them a slap in the face and wake them up. They are stupid enough to route 192.168.0.x and many other internal IP address through the router. To make things worse, recently the amount of SPAMS in email has increased as well, some are generated using sequential email address generator, others just generated on their mail server.
Come on Rogers, WAKE UP!
- Etam
I spoke to a tech for Shaw@Home and he read off a "press statement" to me. It went "blah blah blah... @Home is aware... taking action... to prevent... no interruption to user service... blah blah". I asked for an copy of the "press statement" but he said that it was an confidential memo (that he was allowed to read to me?).
if at first you don't succeed, shoot the consultant who suggested you try in the first place...
That is precisely, almost verbatim from the FAQ, what a Usenet Death Penalty IS.
Maybe you should read up on the subject before you attack; it saves you face, and reduces my stress level, thus reducing the amount of coffee I drink at work, thus increasing my life expectancy and saving my company money! WOW! *grin*
I wonder how long it will be before ORBS probes somebody (without his consent, of course) who, as it turns out, has to take his site's security very seriously, and he gets ORBS kicked off it's ISP?
Seriously, if ORBS isn't careful, it could end up looking for a new ISP. I can see how they could easly get kicked-off for DOS attacks and attempted computer break-ins.
My @home service has been great and largely trouble-free. I use it on Linux and have been very happy. Of course, I hope the UDP wakes the @home folks to their lax security.
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Keep up the good work then Corrinne, I'm looking forward to it.
.plan file about an orthogonal basis function, right? I just grinned because that's not usually what you see in those. ;)
I have thought, for the past couple of years, that a new protocol should be outlined especially for game packet transfer - something compact that can be more tailored to a gaming environment's needs. Or is UDP serving you alright?
Also, if I remember right, you were the person who once wrote the delightfully excited
Take care,
Many of you have been posting your questions and concerns in reference to the proposed
Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) which would block the @Home Network from posting to USENET. I
have attached our official response to the Usenet community and the press here but wanted
to bring attention to a couple of points that are raised here:
- This afternoon we began a network wide scan targeting open proxy servers.
- If an open server is identified, the customer associated will be blocked from posting
to Usenet until such time we are assured that the proxy software is secured.
------------------------------
To the USENET community:
In response to the recent UDP call for @Home Network to be removed from interacting on
the USENET, we are submitting an official response with a proposal of short term and long
term news spam prevention initiatives. Excite@Home is very committed to participating
respectfully on the nternet, and we have taken previous requests for
action seriously.
We have found that the primary source of our excessive USENET posting history comes from
subscribers who have installed proxy software incorrectly. Unbeknownst to the customer,
this mis-configuration has allowed outside access to the @Home news servers, and has
resulted in our subscribers becoming spam relays. Because these various IP
addresses create holes in our network, spammers have taken advantage of this
mis-configuration, and have posted thousands of newsgroup messages through our news
machines.
As of today, we are stepping up our involvement and taking more
aggressive action by performing frequent network wide scans of our
customer base to target proxy servers. Once these customers are
identified, we are suspending their news service immediately.
Re-enabling will not occur until we are assured that their machines
are secure. We feel that this proactive effort will dramatically
decrease the amount of extraneous news traffic originating from
home.com.
We are committed to promoting better Excite@Home participation on the
USENET, and we are in the process of modifying our current news
product and news architecture. We are also implementing more user
education as a parallel initiative.
With these new tactics in place, we are asking for an extension to our
USENET access beyond the 18th of January and we are confident that the
USENET community will see positive news statistics coming in the next
few days.
David Jackson
Manager, Network Policy Management
Excite@Home
Carol
Newsgroup Policy Specialist
Excite@Home
most people who are spamming do it through servers
that are open in some way or anonymously, so
how will cutting off a whole server accomplish
anything ?
Parents are legally responsible for the acts of their minor children. Jr. abuses the @Home account, Dad (or Mom) pays. It's called responsibility, folks.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
@Home is not an ISP. @Home is a brand. My ISP is Shaw(.ca), yet I'm part of @home.
I shall make no comments as to shaws position on spam, I don't know what it is, because to me it has not been an issue. But, I believe it is a serious injustice to cut off home.com when it is an umbrela for what are really a large number of independant ISP's with an agreement on content. Even the AUP is not entirly consistant between ISPs.
Any attempt to block home.com news is inappropriate and should rather be done on a specific ISP basis.
The problem is that people can't control themselves, and so we need the government. It's a matter of an evil cancelling out another evil.
Why is it evil? Well by evil I meen negative... evil is perhaps too strong a word. ANYWAY, the reason government is something that should be avoided is that it has to drain energies off of society. We have to work to pay for its existance. Even if we didn't have to pay taxes of any sort, it would still take government workers to run it spending energy then.
If government wasn't necessary it should cease to exist so all of the energy could be returned to the people instead of being thrown to
Perhaps another way to put it is that government is just a correction to a direction... any correction takes energy. When there is nothing else to correct, the energy can be put to better use. Of course I doubt government will die that easily, but now I'm just rambling late at night
~Chris Carlin
I've found even the modified search forms (there are several floating around) hard to use given Deja's current breakage. The real lifesaver for me is dejasearch, a command line utility. Throw it a search and it saves the result set to a file which you can then browse. Find it here at Freshmeat.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
How are you doing with your services?
;)
Im currently on GTE dsl. Im getting 756kbit/s downstream and 128kbit/s upstream.
Other than the fact that it's expensive and used to suffer from frequent outtages (this seems to have been resolved), i'm satisfied enough with the service. It could be better.
They offer dynamic ip, which makes me pretty dependent on dynamic dns, but the upside is that i can have as many ip's as i need.
Supposedly there's some kind of frame relay/ quality of service system that ensures that i get the proper amount of bandwidth (no more, no less)
and it seems to work ok.
Tech support is... well tech support
Expect to get charged service fees here and there if you request small changes. Expect to get bounced around alot. But if you're persistant, you'll get it completed. Their infrastructure seems kind of new, but it's slowly improving.
Oh, and sometimes my network latency gets up to 100ms but that's about it.
Altogether I'd recommend gte dsl to everyone.
That's why I don't pity the Windoze users when they BSOD. (Or at least I try not to show any compassion.) They put money into Microsoft's pockets instead of hiring good people.
Yeh, but what about all us software pirates?
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The true problem with 'kiddie porn' or porn with (often VERY) underaged children is that, unless we're talking 16-17 year old here, children are not mentaly or physicaly ready for sex. A lot of underaged porn is created for the european pedofile market and much of the time it involves kidnapping and coercing (often raping) children to have sex. Drugs are also quite often used to.
The truth is that underaged pornography destroys the very real lives of very real people. If your looking at under 14s most of them didn't have a choice in the matter. When you're checking out Hustler, Playboy, one of the many European hardcore porn mags, you're seeing people who were payed to be photographed. When you look at child pornography, you're usually looking at someone who didn't know better or who was threatened and beaten to do what they're doing.
Jay
Oh no, the RBL is much more powerful and deadly than that. It stands for Realtime Blackhole List, and as I understand it, the 'Blackhole' part really means what it says: all packets, and I mean ALL packets, from the blackholed host(s), including their routers, are sent DIRECTLY to hell (/dev/null) by ALL routers which subscribe to said list. This means that the guilty hosts are _completely_ dead as far as the Net is concerned. :)))))))
Because of its power, the folks who maintain the RBL insist on very, very stringent rules before they'll blackhole anyone, remembering that spammers are an example of the breed of demihuman we call 'unsociable', and who are therefore quite likely to try to blackhole, for example, anybody who's voluntarily taking part in a UDP against them. They are the dirtiest fighters out there, and spam is an example of their tactics. If they could use chemical or biological weapons against us white hats, they would do it in a heartbeat.
To learn more, go here:
http://maps.vix.com/rbl/
White hats have great power as long as we stick together against the bullies, just like we used to do in the playground!
Join the UDP if you can!!! It will bring @home back into the fold faster if you do, and any _innocent_ users of theirs will therefore be relieved sooner.
"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Dave Clark, IETF
And exactly what harm is coming to the subscribers? They can't get their alt.sex.stories feed for a few days? How's about we look at the harm caused to countless ISPs who host news servers around the world. Spam has been estimated to account for approximately 15% of the total traffic on the internet. When that spam is posted on Usenet, it is being copied to thousands of computers. The amount of space that spam takes up on news servers alone, not even counting email, just news, can be measured in terrabytes. This causes ISPs to have to upgrade their servers and bandwidth to levels far higher than would otherwise be necessary.
Of course, who cares about a bunch of ISPs being financially harmed, suffering very real losses to their business, when @Home subscribers are being inconvenienced and may have to resort to using Deja.com to read Usenet messages? As an end user, I care ! Who do you think gets passed the cost of the otherwise unnecessasary upgrades? Who do you think suffers a degradation in connection quality due to the massive spam traffic going through the Internet? Who do you think gets a reduced Usenet feed because the FIFO (first in, first out) nature of most news servers causes spam to expire legitimate traffic sooner than it should. We, the collective users of the Internet, do! And I'm one of the lucky ones; I don't have to pay for the amount of time that I'm connected. But many people do, and they are forced to remain online for much longer than necessary because their news reader or email reader doesn't know spam from any other message and downloads it all.
Spammers force us all to pay for their advertising; they are far, far worse than pickpockets, because pickpockets are far less widespread and don't steal from millions of people at a time. And the only people that can do anything about the massive onslaught of spam coming from @Home users is @Home; I can't stop them, you can't stop them, the collective readership of Usenet can't stop them. Only @Home can do anything about it, and if they choose to turn a blind eye and let hundreds of people steal from me and every other user of Usenet then fuck em, their business can go straight into the toilet, and the faster the better, because every day that they are connected to the Internet, they are allowing hundreds of scumbags to steal money directly from backbone providers, ISPs and end users. The average @Home user has to use another news service for a while until @Home pulls their heads out and gets with the program. I'll take the lesser of two evils and support the UDP.
Deosyne
> The WORST thing that has EVER happend when an otherwise mentally stable individual has downloaded or otherwise VEIWED ANY sort of pornography, is quite simply that they had to clean up a sticky mess from masturbating. Downloading, viewing, and exchanging porn is fine in my eyes.
You're ignoring the fact that for child porn to be produced, a child has to be abused. And often hurt badly (physically and/or mentally) in the process. "So what's wrong with redistributing stuff that's already been produced?" you ask...
1. Its an invasion of the child's privacy. They didn't ask for their picture to be taken in sexual situations, and I'm sure they don't want millions of people observing them in these situations. Once they get old enough to understand, the fact that pornography of them is widely available has got to be disturbing. Not to mention the fact that it makes them a target for further abuse - a kid who doesn't tell about one time is less likely to tell if it happens again.
This also applies to adult porn produced non-consensually.
2. Increased demand leads to increased production. Which leads to more kids getting victimized.
Not to mention you're assuming that the people who view porn are otherwise mentally stable. In many cases this may be true. But in some cases it is going to lead to further problems. Probably moreso in the case of child pornography, since people who view child pornography are probably much more likely to have further problems. After all, to have a child pornography habit, they have to already A. be attracted to children, and B. Have either the lack of willpower to ignore their impulse to view pictures of children being abused, despite what their conscience tells them, or they don't have a moral problem with it to begin with.
Consensual adult pornography is a different story. While I still have problems with it (many of the women involved have been raped/abused in the past, or are feeding a drug addiction, or otherwise have low self worth which is being taken advantage of), it is *their choice* to have their picture available.
This really pisses me off. I notice no more spam from @home than anywhere else. Spam is simply here to stay anyway. As an @home user and frequent poster to various discussion groups I'm a bit irked to say the least. I've noticed a lot of other posters from @home in those groups also. We don't spam and we simply discuss on topic things. Before this guy gets his UDP thing done, I think someone should figure out the spam to non spam ratio of @Home usenet posts. Also, in case a lot of people don't know, @home is a cable internet provider and many of us have static ips. I have a hard time believing that @home is the originator of so much spam that it would cause someone to take action when any post i make could be traced back to me and me alone very easily, or any other @home user. I find that I hold myself even more accountable than I would otherwise because of this. If someone took the time to figure this out before jumping out and making rash decisions, I bet they'd see a huge growth in the amount of @home users which I'd warrant would account for increased spam, if there even is legitimately such an @home spam problem. I don't think the ratio would be any higher than for any other providor. N
First of all I would like to say how happy I am with my @Home service. I am capped at 100kb a second up, and routinely get 250kb+ download even at peak times. I also have noticed no packet loss as I am an avid gamer. Unfortunately these speeds make it easier for people to post large amounts of material on the news servers. That is spam, but I think it is more a result of users taking advantage of their fast connection rather than @Home's deliberate negligence. Hopefully there is a way to keep legitimate satisfied users (like me) on newsgroups. I'd hate to see a few people abusing their service ruin it for the rest of us.
Not Troll, moderators...he caught you on an interesting point. This guy isn't providing us with fact (which would be informative), only his opinion (which, at best, would be interesting; I'd have to side with the AC on this one in that knowing quakeaddict's Usenet habits just aren't that interesting to me). Read the mod FAQ, insert quarter, and try again.
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
@home in canada is notorious however. I have heard how bad it is but you might try thinking that perhaps it is that cut corner isp in Canada, not @home as a whole.
The few times that I had trouble with my connection a person was out from Cox cable that day. The guy was very nice and did some things and replaced my cable modem. A day later when the thing was still happening he figured out from the time of night that it was happening it that it coincided with the dew coming. He went out to the box and noticed that a sleeve on the cable connection was cracked. After fixing it i have had very fast error free service for close to 2 years.
If there is a better ISP than this it must be in someone's dreams only or perhaps in heaven. Every other user of @home around Omaha, Ne, has had similar experiences that I have talked with.
Oh, and if this guy gets this thing through, I'm going to do some research and if I find that lots of spam is coming from primenet.com (his isp according to the post on deja.com that the article refers to) I'll move for a UDP against them. Two can play at his little blanket-udp-like-this-is-1978- and-the-few-hundred-people-who-might-be- spamming-are-representitive-of-100s-of-thousands- who-are-not-Udp-crap.
You just wait, Mr. I can control usenet.
N
I sympathize with @home (and especially for the many users). UCE is a very very difficult problem and if you think it will go away just by banning @home then guess what will happen when everyone dumps 56k and switches to DSL or cable modems? UCP for everyone! Then again, usenet is crap even without the spam
---
ok that was quick. After reading this http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=570620876&fmt=tex t I've decided that this drastic action is in fact justified. It's unfortunate for the innocent users as this kind of service is very expensive and other alternatives may not be available at their location.
---
What I've *never* seen is this famous internet kiddie porn. (though I haven't really looked for it). How come, do you think?
Producing child pornography is illegal almost everywhere. (though some enforce the laws quite losely). Thus there is almost always a case against whoever outs it on the net. Thus you don't want the wrong people (cops) finding it.
Point being, the justice system actually has a case, so it is not really a "internet problem"
"Regular" porn is a completely different story. You and I may dislike it, but IT IS NOT ILLEGAL!!!
You want to ban porn? Fine! start with defining what "porn" is. Picures of intercource? Genitalia? General nudity? Bare legs? Women without a veil?
We can (and ought to) stop porn sites with illlegal (unmoral) business practices, just like spammers, but separate business practice from content. Spamming for a "good cause" is still spamming. Putting intercource videos on a site where it is legal is still legal.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Why not UDP the phone company until they stop drug deals from happening over their wires?
Hrm, interesting. I'd change it to "Why doesn't the phone company UDP people for causing damage to their network".
Oops, hold it, they can and do. If I hook up equitpment to the PSTN that is incompatible with their network, they have the right to suspend my service until such time as I come back into technical complience with the standards.
Usenet is doing something very simliar. The instant that @home comes back into technical complience, they will be allowed back on the net. They need to close some open proxies.
Till then their users can use Daja (the phone booth on the street corner.
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
If you don't like it, get an account with an ISP who plays by the rules.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://www.orbs.org/bugtraq.html
If this is the same poster who's posted in a number of other threads, what she (generic pronoun) is objecting to is not path filtering, but third-party cancels. Path filtering alone is known as a passive UDP; what @home is being considered for is an active UDP where ALL posts from @home are being cancelled by spam-cancellers. Part of the reason for the objection is, if I remember correctly, that in an active UDP, news admins who aren't intentionally participating in the UDP will still have @home postings removed, because they haven't configured their news server to restrict third party cancels. This is different from a passive UDP inasmuch as only those news admins who have consciously decided to participate in the UDP will drop the messages.
Personally, I think that any news admins that have a significant feed, that is accepting just any old third-party cancels, is going to have a crippled news feed anyway, due to the actions of cancellers with less "noble" agendas (e.g. Scientologists' various attempts to shut down alt.religion.scientology); so inadvertently participating in UDPs is the least of the problems such a news server has. But the practice of third-party-cancelling posts that aren't spam should be questioned, and the questioner deserves a reasoned and well-thought-out response. Which I'm not really qualified to give.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Pan is nice, rather stable, and going in the right direction, however it lacks several things to be actually usable: a killfile and a search facility. Without that, it's impossible to do anything useful in the crowded Usenet.
slrn supports Grouplens, but apparently this project isn't accessible anymore. They've moved to a commercial (closed source) model, and there does'nt seem to be any kind of public access. But I might be wrong.
That is the problem with a zero variable cost system like email or usenet. You can send as many messages as you like, and if you get just a small percentage response, that can make for a viable business.
Look at phones. Here in Ireland, where there is a charge for local telephone calls, you don't get companies cold-calling you to sell you something. It may make Internet access more costly, but it has one advantage atleast.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
ORBS is an automated service. If your server is an open relay (the tests ORBS employs are the best around), you will be put into the list automatically. Yes, you will be notified about this. But there is no way to stop or delay this block, unless you fix your servers.
On the Bugtraq issue, read this page
And yet here we have hordes of slashdot posters positivly rejoicing that EVERY @home user is going to be censored.
Sigh. One more time, slowly.
It is not censorship to prohibit the operation of sound trucks in residential neighborhoods in the middle of the night.
It is not censorship to stop someone from spray-painting a message on your front door.
It is not censorship to keep your e-mail account secured so that script kiddies can't use it to announce "YOU ALL SUCK".
It is not censorship to reject messages from a spamhaus.
What part of this progression eludes you?
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I think this is a very good thing. Over the past years spam and abuse have been on the rise, but the UDP has been on a decline. Back when it first started I would here every week about some network that couldn't control it's users would get a UDP slapped on em, now this is probably the first one I have heard in about 2 years!
I think this is a really good thing, if they can not behave or control their network in a productive manner, they should be "banned" from using (abusing) other servers on the Internet.
I also think it should carrry over more, have a RBL thing that not only blocks news feeds from abusive networks, but also email, web, irc, everything. Just choke out their whole dam 'X' class from moving data over
Then again, their would have to be an honest commitee that thoughly investigates and decides how and who doesn't go into the List...
If they can't control their network in a reasonable way, they should have that privlage taken away. I would also like to see a M(ail)DP put on American Online, have you notice the spam coming from their dial up lines? Look at the next spam you get, 9/10 it will come from one of the AOL dial up lines, those fscking bastards.
On a side offtopic note. AOL has had these spammers (in their words) "hacking" into users dial up accounts and sendout out massive amounts of spam with our domain name in the "From:" header. Needless to say, we have been getting hunderds of spam reports thinking this email came from our site. I contacted AOL many times via email and phone, and one of their postmasters told me "We can not stop this users, they are breaking into user accounts and sending their email from those hacked accounts. You calling up here doesn't help any, send all complaints to abuse@aol.com and we will take it from there. Please don't call back, there is nothing we can do and calling up here only wastes both our times"
It has been over 2-3 months we have been getting spam reports because our domain name is forged in the headers and AOL can NOT do basic spam control on it's own network... sigh
Anyone have any suggestions, I have no money for a lawyer and no legal skills what so ever. Any way to slove this problem on the techinal field?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
excite@home the current administrators of the entire @home systems are 100% worthless at best. I would love to see them kicked out of the system and have the big guys put in place a group that knows the following things...
1. Customers are always right, make them happy at all costs.
2. get off your butt and actually do something.
3. always bend over backwards for the techs in the field instead of whining at them.
@home has the potential to squash everything.. only if they get excite out of it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First off, yes, I'm an @Home subscriber. That said, I must further iterate that I'm not an annoyed @Home subscriber. Service has been adequate.
/. discussions, esp. those dealing w/Anonymous Cowards posting in Troll-ish fashion here, that dealt with the responsibility of controling what's allowed to be posted in an open forum. Doesn't deciding what shall NOT be posted make you responsible (legally) for what IS? Again, there was a name for this, but my memory doesn't work so good at this time of day.
I was reading the UDP FAQ, and came to item 6. I no longer remember the title, but it deals with censorship. They choose to define censorship as something only governments can do. However, I seem to recall past
This may escalate the nerd-quotient, but how about a picture of a viking. :)
the first spam was done by two married lawyers. They received so many mail bombs their ISP's server went down. I guess that quickly became not a viable solution as hard drive sizes and proliferation of spam increased.
> Doin a little brown-nosin', eh?
No, I just thought the above author seemed to correctly summarize the situation.
I could care less about the author's karma. =P
> Golly gee, and here I was thinking that telnet
> was a client. Guess not.
It is...thats the point...anything that connects
to anything is a "client". I was trying to point
out how silly the argument was.
>> Find a particular server? How is it any
>> differnt from email? Should every ISP just
>> automatically allow anyone, free of charge,
>> to have an email acount on their server?
> Well, there *is* the fact that the UDP doesn't >exist in the email world..
You avoid the question. Is or should your ISP be
required to offer everyone free email acounts?
UDP DOES btw exist in email. Ever heard of a
"Realtime Blackhole List"? Feel free to look
it up. Its basically the same thing, a
VOLUNTARY blocking of email from IP addresses
by a wide number of sysadmins.
> Betcha you aren't willing to add
> alt.binaries.mp3s or whatever NG carries mp3s on
> usenet if you don't have it already.
Noone has requested it. The issue has not come
up. Certainly any binaries group needs to be
considered a little more heavily than other
groups, if for no other reason than the amount of
server space needed to physically store its
messages.
> Cable modems, IMHO, should be banned by the
> gov'mt. Everything oughta use DSL. Cable modems
> are such a lousy architecture.
And the government should ban everything that is
lousy? I dunno about you but I am already mad
about how they force me to pay taxes under threat
of force, and then go on to mis-manage my money.
In the words of Thoreau, "the best government is
that which governs not at all"
> B) Well, then I guess the'll find out it was a
> bad idea to run the proxy, because their account
> will get canceled. So what?
Noone is saying that the ISP should be canceling
acounts. Perhaps temporarily suspending or
blocking acounts until they can talk with the
user. They are just asking for some sort of
action to help stop spam. Educate users. Suspend
acounts when needed. Email services do it. Why not
for usenet posts?
>Given what you're responding to, I take it that
> you're saying "yes, spammers are worse than
> demons".
Spammers are not mythalogical creatures. I am
absolutely sure of their existance. The only
deamons I believe in the existance of have names
like "Cron" and "Sendmail".
For the record I am an atheist. So yes, spammers
are worst. Now god on the other hand, him I could
make a case for being worst than spammers, but
only because of the millions his name has been
used to justify the slaughter of.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> You see no real problem with software piracy?
> Excuse me, but as a software developer I would
> ensure that anyone who pirates my software is
> prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I have
> reported employers, companies and sites to the
> SPA for software piracy, and shall continue to
> do so until there are no more WaReZ vermin
> around.
And as a software developer, I do not feel that
I have the right to stop anyone from copying
or using my programs, No matter what the law says.
No amount of copying or use can ever hurt me in
any way shape or form. I have never reported
anyone to the SPA, nor will I ever.
All software which I hold copyright for gets
released under GPL or other Free Software
licence.
Of course...im just plain not a capitalist.
I don't care about the money. Sure I could make
money by writting software and forcing people
under penalty of law to pay for it...but I feel
that is immoral, so I don't do it.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I agree with you tottally. However it is a
completely differnt issue. I do not believe that
that is any sort of reason to regulate the net.
The people who force children into these
situations are horrible and deserve to be
hunted down. However, prohibiting thier warez
does not stop them. They will always be able
to profit.
Whenever you prohibit a product, you increase
its value, and thus perpetuate its market. It
is the dark underbelly of capitalism.
I do not believe that a person who simply views
anything should be persecuted. Go after the
monstors. Kill the root of the problem, not
the symptoms.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
For authenticity, it should include an annoying sound plug-in.
)(:-)
Or, better yet, not.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We apologize for the inconvenience.
As a customer of @Home, I would like vote with my feet, but since they have the monopoly on cable Internet in my area, there isn't really much I can do.
Speaking as one of their 'innocent' (at least in my eyes) users, I whole-heartedly support the UDP against @Home. If there was something I could do to stop the spam I would. As it is, I'm going to get very noisy on my end about them addressing this UDP with all due haste. It isn't like I've posted to USENET in the last four or five months anyway, but I figure it won't hurt to turn up the heat on them from the inside too.
On the other hand, my firewall is pretty reliable. If I could find some open servers that would allow me posting I'd happily avoid the @Home servers entirely.
-Joe
>Not too experimental, had all the R&D fun now, am knee deep in nitty gritty of rounding implementation of "all the other stuff" .... though still all by my (happy) lonesome
Impressive, Im looking forward to the next 3DRealms engine.
The annoying aspect with that rounding stuff however is that it usually turns out to be the larger part of the work...
Of course you shouldnt underestimate the networking thing, Carmack needed four games to get that right, and Sweeney needed many betas.
Some (possibly redundant) hints for UDP:
- bandwidth is king, for analog modems
- if you overload modem bandwidth, you get some nice +1000 ms ping (queueing, same for ISDN)
- modems tend to "resync" pretty often if they are unsure about connection quality (e.g. the connection regularly is gone for 5 secs, and the queues fill up like hell)
- the 28+2/UDP+PPP byte packet overhead is annoying, again for analog modems
- cable modems often seem to have terrible packet loss (seems to be a "broadcast and hope that it doesnt collide and just drop it if it does" principle)
- dynamic bandwidth estimation is much fun (which perhaps is the reason why Q3 and others let the user set it as a static value). You may want to go for the receivers end if you want to try this.
- pps needs to be constant and independent of fps
- "Power Play" wont give any advantage for non-analog users if the ISP has headroom on his subnet and the server is located in that subnet (except for very minor UDP header compression advantage)
Do you read each spam message personally to decide whether to delete them or not, or do you have an automated solution?
How much time or resources are you wasting which could be put to better use (like more newsgroups or longer expiration times)?
All that a recipient of spam can reliably know is the originating ISP (this is know, because the IP of the remote is known in ths logs and must be correct - this IP would be news.isp.net, probably). If this IP were to be incorrect (spoofing) then no data could have returned to the remote and the protocol would have failed, so no spam in the first place.
It dosn't work at that level. All the receiving MTA knows is the IP address of the machine which connects to it. (It can then find out other things, such as DNS address, if the machine responds to an ident query, etc.)
N.B. if the email was relayed by any relay then the recieving MTA knows only about the relay.
Why don't you try flipping the bill for the extra resources it takes to process the spam? Spam costs ISP's money. ISPs are supposed to have a direct connection to a network. This theoretically should not really cost all that much. All of the various businesses and such don't have metered access and are most likely operating on a monthly fee of some sort at the worst.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
You would kill the cable? will you also pay my phonebills? =) I know cable speed only will go down but still its the only relative cheap way to get online. Sure, my ISDN is faster then my cable..sure my ISDN is more secure (something i value more than you might know) but I plainly CANT afford to use ISDN =( as for asdl..cant wait...they said they would start testing here this year. I wouldnt mind paying more then $45 that i pay for the cable, as long as it stays under the $400 that I had in phonebills. Only thing i can do is wait, since im not in a very big city.
"We will give her back her....OLD NOSE!!!" - spaceballs
Didn't I say that consensual adult porn is an entirely different thing from child porn? While I have problems with it, I'm quite aware that it isn't illegal. And I don't think it should be, either.
However, my point was that the original poster claimed there was nothing wrong with the distribution of *any* porn, child or otherwise.
And yes, its true that it is harder to find child porn (especially when you aren't looking for it). That doesn't mean it doesn't happen (I've seen people spamming child porn sites on IRC, as well as channels that make no effort to hide their contents), or that its not a problem.
Forget it man. She's MINE! All MINE!
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
>In general I think usenet is just elitist in general. Anyone who wants to post must obtain a client.
Damn them all to hell. Who do these guys think they are, requiring a software program.
USENET if you are listening, make your self available to those of who don't have your so-called "client" or a computer or a monitor or a nearby powersupply!!! Freedom for the people!!!
:)
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Usenet will be around as long as people enjoy talking, debating, and/or fighting in mostly unmoderated ways...
If you take a look at this graphic, you'll find that the average daily feed for all of Usenet was 80 GB. Per day. Even the text-only discussion groups work out to 4 or so GB/day.
Just 'cause you haven't been there don't mean nobody else uses it.
James
CCI's been doing the standard--trying to stip us of everything but the shirts on our backs everytime contract negotiations come up. This time we managed to squeeze a little increase out of it though.
Suprisingly (to anyone with any knowledge of the internal workings of the company), we're still running strong. I don't know how this works... It seems to defy reason.
IRC server.
Flame all you want, but try running an irc server on a large network for awhile, and then come back and let me know how you feel about computer crimes. Sometimes legal recourse IS the proper solution.
The damage is real and the cost is real. Yes, sometimes it's small. Other times it disrupts service for hundreds or thousands of other people.
Just because the person breaking into a system is polite doesn't mean he fully understands the system. (If that were true, one might argue that there's no challenge to break in). Because he doesn't know the whole system, there's a good chance that something gets changed or tinkered with that has an unintended effect.
It's a crime because you're messing with something that does not belong to you.
Whether property crimes are overpunished is another issue altogether.
- SEAL
@Home has permitted full-time pro spammers to inject their trash onto Usenet, and worse, allow them to have accounts there. People like Tom Saylor, who'll cheerfully pump out a few gigabytes of spam over a weekend. And they don't or won't do a thing about it.
You want some numbers? check out news:slrn87sosl.uh9.sy_nttvr@gurcragnt ba.pbz for the full details, but in summary, for the 4 hour period begining 8 AM 13 Jan 2000:
@Home had 27 of the top-100 NNTP posting hosts
AOL had 3
@Home accounted for 4925 posts and 1301932628 bytes of traffic
AOL accounted for 2448 posts and 4150207 bytes of traffic
Don't you think that's a wee bit excessive? They're only spewing about 8 times the traffic AOL is. Do you think they have 8 times the number of subscribers?
James
You miss the point. Anyone with enough technical sophistication to firewall @home would most likely have enough brains to not let the world relay through their machine.
If someone is blocking @home but not the world, then they can't claim to have misconfigured their proxy and they can be dealt with individually through the abuse@home.com route.
Nah, a good caning would do.
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
I've taken more from the internet than I will ever give back. If someone wants some of my code they can have it. Maybe I'd feel differently if I was more talented?
"Don't open the gates, who the hell needs a wooden horse that size?"
Nah, I think these guys are smart enough to regulate who sees what on there servers. If they didnt want to allow outside access to bofh.rr.com
we would have known.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
Flux, do you even know what an active UDP is?
Read the FAQ:
http://www.stopspam.org/usenet/faqs/udp. html
Pathost aliasing is usually associated with passive UDP, and this is explicitly an active UDP.
Yes, messages do indeed get "actively deleted" off other servers.
That's not, as you called it, "a gaping security hole". It's the normal default functionality of most news server software. You have to explicitly remove that functionality for it to not be there, with most commonly-used news servers.
You might want to read this faq, as well:
http://www.landfield.com/faqs/ usenet/cancel-faq/part1/
thanks for clearing that up for me. i was in fact mistaken. however, i do maintain that the UDP is a fair means of erradicating a SPAM problem.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume