RoadRunner Co-Opting "Organization" Headers

Dusty Rhodes writes: "AOL-Time Warner cable Internet Provider RoadRunner has begun co-opting the 'Organization' line of Usenet headers, replacing whatever information a user enters with 'Organization: Road Runner - (location).' All RoadRunner customers nationwide, including business customers, have had their organization identity hijacked with no disclosure whatsoever, much less an opt-in or even an opt-out. Nothing in their TOS or AUP. Nada."

Comments

This has been going on for years

[Arcturax]

I've noticed this for a long time now. A lot of ISP's are doing that. I don't mind too much since my organization is "Crime" but it is a bit annoying yes. However if you want much better news service at not too much a year, try Newsguy. I used them back when I did a lot of usenet posting and for like $25/year (its gone up a bit since then) I was able to get non-binary access to all my favorite newsgroups. If you want access to binaries you have to pay a bit more, but the service is very customizable to fit your needs. They filtered out 95% of the spam and kept articles for a month, while roadrunner is lucky to keep them a week and seems to have cut corners on spam filtering. So I'd suggest if you are serious about usenet, buy your access (its less then $5/month for basic access) and get higher quality news feed with less spam and full control over those important headers.

Re:This has been going on for years

[dattaway]

I have used newsguy since they were named zippo.com (guess the evil company that sued for the name) and can say their usenet service is very reliable. Binaries are complete and you have a choice of the NNTP protocol or a fancy point and click web based interface that automates multipart decoding. RR may run a good newsserver, but I still keep newsguy to suppliment the spool.

Newsguy also has impressive spam fighting filters. Even my newsguy email account hasn't had one spam email since I signed up since 1997.

Re:Could just be a foul-up

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Not to pour water on a good conspiracy theory, but are people sure this isn't just a misconfigured nnrpd.conf (or equivalent)? ... all it would take is for some admin to foul up a config line.

The same mistake, made everywhere at once? From the article:

replacing whatever information a user enters with "Organization: Road Runner - (location)."
All RoadRunner customers nationwide, including business customers, have apparently had their organization identity hijacked

Re:You think that's bad?

[analog_line]

Nothing on the Internet is anonymous. Even "anonymizers" just make it difficult to find the source, not impossible. If you want anonymity, stay the hell off the Internet. Everything you do can be traced to you. If you hadn't figured this out before, wake up. There is no right to anonymity. There shouldn't be.

Incorrect, they don't post the location

[ben_degonzague]

For the last year (probably even longer) I have noticed RR putting Road Runner in the Organization field on the header. I've never seen them put the actual city name however in the header. This is not late breaking news.

I can't beleive this made the front page on slashdot. First of all the story is false (at least in the upstate New York RR service) second, what's the big deal? For me, I use my full name when posting to newsgroups. Plus with RR you get a fairly static IP address (mine hasn't changed in the last year), how can you be anonymous with that?

RFC850

[Fastolfe]

From RFC850:

2.2.9 Organization The text of this line is a short phrase describing the organization to which the sender belongs, or to which the machine belongs. The intent of this line is to help identify the person posting the message, since site names are often cryptic enough to make it hard to recognize the organization by the electronic address.

What exactly is the problem here? You can't use your vanity Organization header with their news servers anymore? This is hardly a "rights" issue as implied by the YRO category, it's just a policy change issue on the part of RoadRunner. If you don't like it, let them know, but I wouldn't expect them to change this policy as it's a perfectly legitimate use of the Organization header. Use another news service or insert your own X-Real-Organization header if you're concerned about what's in the headers. If RoadRunner had been doing this from the start, nobody would be complaining. Many ISP's do this today.

The bottom line is that from the Internet's point of view, your ISP and network provider is RoadRunner, so it makes perfect sense to label you as being part of that "organization" in this context. It is both within the letter and spirit of NNTP. To allow you to use your own vanity Organization header would only add confusion and defeats the spirit of the header.

Re:RFC850

[John Hasler]

"The bottom line is that from the Internet's point of view, your ISP and network provider is RoadRunner, so it makes perfect sense to label you as being part of that "organization" in this context. It is both within the letter and spirit of NNTP."

Nonsense. My ISP is merely a contractor selling me the service of forwarding my Usenet aricles into the rest of Usenet. I am not in any way part of their "organization".

"To allow you to use your own vanity Organization header would only add confusion and defeats the spirit of the header."

To use my own "Organization" header reduces confusion by identifying the organization to which I and my machine belong. Replacing it with one which erroneously identifies me as belonging to my ISP adds confusion.

What?

[The Asmodeus]

Ok, I'm a RoadRunner customer. I read this and immediately went out to check my posts. Nope, didn't see the text added in any of them. Even posted a new post and still no text.

So, either it's not happening in all areas are this yet another bogus "It was posted on the web so it has to be true" story.

Re:Run your smtp server

[Phroggy]

If they are blocking port 25 outbound, you can do what I used to do when the fuckers at earthlink did that.

Keep in mind that the reason Earthlink does this is to prevent stupid people from sending spam that doesn't go through Earthlink's servers, and from running open relays that spammers can use. Yes, it's inconvenient for some people, but you can configure Sendmail or whatever to relay everything through smtp.earthlink.net, or do what you've done and relay through an outside server on a different port.

What exactly does smtp.earthlink.net add to the headers that you find objectionable?

The problem is that the majority of people out there are screwed by this and do not have enough knowledge to take recourse against it.

The firewall was set up exactly because the majority of people out there do not have enough knowledge to prevent others from abusing their systems to send spam. So, what would you propose as another solution to the spam problem? Keep in mind that Earthlink has over 200,000 DSL customers and several million dialup customers.