Proposed Usenet Death Penalty for Australia's Largest ISP

supine writes "David Ritz has issued a request for discussion on applying a Usenet Death Penalty to Australia's largest ISP, Bigpond (and it's parent company Telstra)." This brought back to memory the time when AOL was facing similar charges.

Comments

Big deal.

[josh crawley]

On usenet, there's too many propigation problems anyways. Many of us miss posts done by ISP's within 10-15 class A netblocks. Multiple pulls on multiple servers can help, but there's always that fighting to find the new news server.

I used to pull from alt.control and alt.test and pull news server that looked like a FQDN and then ping tested them. Then it tried to connect and do a test. I then used them as my 'private news server'. Still, you wanna be careful doing this... cause the net.gods live in control groups. Piss them off, and you already have UDP.

BTW, what's with all these slashdot server errors?????

Re:Big deal.

[Motherfucking Shit]

I used to pull from alt.control and alt.test and pull news server that looked like a FQDN and then ping tested them. Then it tried to connect and do a test. I then used them as my 'private news server'. Still, you wanna be careful doing this...

If anyone's interested in open news servers without doing the probing themselves, check out NewzBot. The site tracks a database of news servers accessible to the public. You can even search to see which servers carry a particular group. There aren't as many "big" servers (30K+ groups) as there used to be, but if your ISP's server misses an article, chances are you'll find a server at NewzBot that has it.

Re:Big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no cabal

Re:Big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, what's with all these slashdot server errors?????

I heard it's because they use open source.

Re:Big deal.

[FunkyChild]

It's all part of the new subscription deal. It's not a bug, it's a feature!

Re:Big deal.

[evilviper]

BTW, what's with all these slashdot server errors?????

Apparently, Slashdot posted a story about the changes they were making to the slashcode. Unfortunately, they included a self-referential link. Hence, slashdot was slashdotted. :-)

Re:Big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck the net.gods. They're just a bunch of pussy nerds living in their parents basement.

Re:Big deal.

[srichman]

On usenet, there's too many propigation problems anyways. Many of us miss posts done by ISP's within 10-15 class A netblocks.

Considering there are no ISPs in the world with 10-15 class A address blocks, it isn't surprising that you're not getting any posts from them.

Here's the current allocation of class A ipv4 address blocks. Note that only two organizations have more than 10 class A addresses. These are ARIN and APNIC, which are registries that do IP address space assignment.

Re:Big deal.

[srichman]

Nevermind; I'm an idiot. I misread your "within" as "with". Sorry.

Re:Big deal.

[Usenet Perfomance Ar]

alt.control and alt.test aren't newservers, so what where you pulling? alt.control isn't a control group either. net.gods? TINC ( there is no cabal ) First Reply to the thread by an absolute moron who knows nothing about how UDP's work, why they don't work anyways. Way to go Josh, now the world over can see you for the fake you are.

Re:Big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

On usenet, there's too many propigation problems anyways.

If you have a shitty ISP, then yes, Usenet doesn't work very well. Poor Usenet feed was the main reason I left two "mom-and-pop" ISPs for my current provider, who now outsources Usenet to Supernews.

Supernews does spam cancels (NoCEMs), so I see hardly any spam on Usenet. Now e-mail, on the other hand...How about an E-mail Death Penalty for Bigpond?

Re:Big deal.

[josh crawley]

Yeah, but the cool part of momNpop ISP's is that if they have a news server, you can do all the 'interesting' stuff like create, move, remove groups. It'll take a day for the net.gods to notice.

How about an E-mail Death Penalty for Bigpond?

Amen to that!

And they said...

[thinmac]

The Geek Union was stupid.

Why doesn't stuff of this nature happen more often? Why can't this same logic be applied (through different, although possibly similar means) to other Bad Things that happen on the internet? What could stop Adobe suing Russian hackers? What would put an end to bad patents? What could even stop the application of the DMCA? Large scale, cooperative denial of service (in this case denying to serve them, not flooding their lines) of the institutions which do these things.

As an interesting sidenote, Katz specifically talked about applying this to Australian ISPs in the above linked /. discussion.

Re:And they said...

[Anonymous Coward]

the main problem is everybody is chasing the dollar. people are concerned about these problems, but not concerned to do enough about them. has the dmca affected you? _i_ can play dvds under linux just fine. motivation happens when people are directly affected, i doubt i see that happening to a sizeable number of geeks in the near future, they are compensated way too much to ever think about seriously breaking away from their employer, -especially- in this fucked up economy

also, geeks are really a diverse fucked up bunch, i think it comes from hypersensitivity after years of being picked on. we've got the pro-war killers who just want revenge at -something- because they've been beat up all their life and want something resembling "protection", the ones that will bitch about any progressive idea in an effort to look cool to the people around them, and then the ones that play games all day and never look at the world around them

Re:And they said...

[archeopterix]

Why doesn't stuff of this nature happen more often? Why can't this same logic be applied (through different, although possibly similar means) to other Bad Things that happen on the internet? What could stop Adobe suing Russian hackers? What would put an end to bad patents? What could even stop the application of the DMCA? Large scale, cooperative denial of service (in this case denying to serve them, not flooding their lines) of the institutions which do these things.

Usenet UDP is specific:

1. Few parties involved - Usenet is much more hierarchical than the general Internet. Probably if less than 20 (my guess, it might be wrong) important parties agree on a UDP, it gets enforced. How many entities would have to boycott Adobe (or whoever) for them to actually feel it?

2. Clear and publicly defined "abuse". Spam, rogue cancels & supersedes. You don't get UDP'ed for being nasty to whales or pushing for bad legislation. This makes agreement easier, if not automatic.

Withouth the 2 above conditions, it ends in a parody: Bob from Smallville doesn't show his homepage to Adobe employees, Alice from Podunk drops all mail from Microsoft and the boycotted companies would laugh at this if they only knew that they are "boycotted".

Re:And they said...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the most insightful posts i've ever seen on Slashdot, and i'm sorry you came too late to have it modded up. This is absolute KEY! You said this better than i ever could have.

Re:isn't Usenet dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you haven't been following the ongoing pains of our aussie geeks; they don't have a lot of options isp-wise :-(

Usenset is still Useful

[rf0]

You just need to know which groups to look at. For certain specialist things it can provide decent information and a reasonable community. Also the UDP does work as was shown with blueyonder.co.uk a year ago or so. They were threatened and quickly cleaned up their act when they saw the impact

Not Satisfactory

[Anonymous Coward]

"...a simultaneous UDP of VSNL and SILNET...was instituted for their failure to even begin to control the usenet terrorist who calls himself "HipCrime" ...Currently, VNSL and SILET have enabled port 119 (news)blocks on all outgoing connections from their services with the exception of their own servers. "

I would hardly call this a satisfactory outcome. Anyone with an inkling of knowledge can get around port blocks in a tick. If they are going to invoke a UDP surely the only thing that should lift it would be the prying of the spammers keyboards from their cold dead hands.

Something like that

[Rooked_One]

Something like that takes a lot of participation. Think of it in a punk buster sort of way for quake3, and thats a pretty good metaphor describing it.

I think it would be sort of like communism.... its great in principle but not in practice.

Re:Something like that

[rhaig]

you know not of which you speak.

to be effective "enough" a UDP only needs the participation of a couple dozen of the biggest usenet server admins. And for someone like Telstra, they will participate.

The second phase of this proposed UDP, will only require the participation af a few cancelbots. While some servers ignore cancels, it is to their advantage to obey pgp-signed cancels, and cancels that can be verified as coming from a good source. Those who ignore these cancels, will simply be storing the extra articles themselves, and hurting only themselves and their peers.

OFFTOPIC as hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, could this be less topical? What does this have to do with the UDP?

Re:OFFTOPIC as hell

[drayzel]

Huh?
Offtopic?

Hum... why have UDPs been used or threatend to be used in the past?

Lets see...

Erols.com ... UCE, ie SPAM!
Bell Atlantic, July, 1997 SPAM!
UUnet SPAM!
Compuserve October, 1997, SPAM!
TIAC December, 1997 SPAM!
Netcom February, 1998 SPAM!
MCI2000.com August, 1998 SPAM!
PSINet November, 1998 SPAM!
Starnet IncJune of 1999 SPAM!
HKT (Hong Kong) June of 1999 SPAM!
BBNPlane October 1999 SPAM!
Ameritech November of 1999 SPAM!
VSNL and SILNET (India) December of 1999 SPAM!

In the Usenet Death Penalty article it frequently mentions that these example UDP's happened because the ISPs were major/#1 source for usenet spam. So the admins tightened things up and the spam disapeared from their servers, only to appear on someone elses. Spam just keeps getting worse and worse. UDPs may be a great way to enforce antispam policies, but it doesn't seem to stop the rotting public groups.

~Z

Re:OFFTOPIC as hell

[robzster1977]

not to mention Blueyonder in 2002...

Give it to 'em

[DNS-and-BIND]

I say let 'em have it. The only issue is the possible backlash, and I say heck with it, they're obviously being bad netizens. There's really no discussion to be had.

Other than all the haters posting about 'is usenet still around'...jeez usenet threads are almost as offtopic with haters as the sendmail ones...

Re:Give it to 'em

[Anonymous Coward]

I say the same. screw the backlash, hopefully it'll make telstra look like idiots. "We'll sue these people who volunteer and delete spam and uhhh. then they'll HAVE to delete spam coming from us, yeah. and you'll all have freedom of spam too!"

Telstra/Bigpond are an arrogant ISP

Re:Give it to 'em

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to honestly see them try. Telstra is a large ISP, and they have quite a bit in the way of cash reserve from their tens of billions in profits. If this goes ahead Telstra will be suing their asses in no time flat.

There sadly isn't much a little person can do about this kind of problem.

Re:Give it to 'em

[Anonymous Coward]

Telstra will be suing their asses in no time flat

Suing for what? Doing what Telstra presumably already agreed would be done as a consequence of being irresponsible?

By that logic, I could sue *my* ISP when they kick me off for breaching their TOS.

They have been neglectful of their duties as an ISP. Every other node forced to handle spam coming from them should sue *them* for neglect, or at least bill them for bandwidth, storage, etc.

Re:Give it to 'em

[amuro98]

This was funny?

Telstra has been a source of internet abuse for years. Email spam, usenet spam, probes/attacks/virii - they have it all, and they don't care.

I know people who are already blocking email from them. What's the big deal about dropping their uesnet posts?

Re:Give it to 'em

[amuro98]

Sue for what??

If I run a news server, and don't want posts from Telstra on it, guess what? I'm perfectally entitled to do so.

My server, my rules.

If my users don't like it, they can go elsewhere.

If Telstra doesn't like, too bad. No one has the obligation to carry packets from anywhere else.

I would think if this goes through, Telstra will be facing lawsuits of their own as their users sue THEM for failing to provide services.

Re:Give it to 'em

[Bad_Feeling]

Huh? "alittle" isn't a word either? sorry i know this is off topic.

Re:Is slashdot messed up for anyone else?

[kfg]

I'd tell you, but I keep getting blank pages and server errors, so I guess you've got to figure it out on your own.

KFG

Re:isn't Usenet dead?

[XJoshX]

You've obviously never tried to grab the newest oscar screener SVCD DVD rip the day after it was sent out..

It comes in quite useful at time like these..

OMG

[Matrix2110]

They broke the code!

Re:OMG

[Matrix2110]

They seem to have fixed it a day later.

Nice job, I wish Microsoft could do as well as Slashdot.

No, I am not a karma whore. I just can see excellence under my nose.

I am now going to give /. a subscription because I belive in it.

I block ads on a regular basis, however a certain user convinced me that /. is worth keeping and supporting.

Re:Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, between Bush and Bush's army, that is kind of true. Wait a minute....

Re:Is slashdot messed up for anyone else?

[unitron]

It means that we'e about to invade Iraq and Ashcroft's first move is to disable Slashdot during the distraction.

Yeah, I'm getting '500' errors. Apparently the slashserver is coming down with the junior version of the flu that everybody's kids are bringing home from school this week.

Re:RPN

[Anonymous Coward]

s/\$1/$i

Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[btempleton]

It amazes me how much emotion spam brings out. I hate it as much as anybody, but that's not enough to violate fundamental principles, including the one that it's not moral to punish the innocent to get at the guilty, particularly when you deliberately punish the innocent because by association, they can be forced to put pressure on the guilty or those who can punish the guilty.

It's like starving out a country to depose a dictator. Whoops. :-(

It's just not something you do, and spam, while a royal pain in the ass, doesn't cut it. I wouldn't punish the innocent to get Usama bin Ladin, let alone spammers.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[PigleT]

"to violate fundamental principles, including the one that it's not moral to punish the innocent to get at the guilty,"

That rather depends on which version of ethics you're using at the time, doesn't it? There are considerably more valid users of usenet *outside* Telestra's borders than there are within, all of whom suffer from Telestra's bad approach to spam. Given that the whole reason for the UDP suggestion is persistent continual large-scale offence from them, it's not as though they've not had the chance to repair their ways. Cutting off a few for the sake of the greater good is very much a valid "moral" choice.

"I wouldn't punish the innocent to get Usama bin Ladin, let alone spammers."

OBL's daily activities don't impinge on you in any way, until you get an odd-one-out. Spammers' activities *do* impinge, through ISPs having to pass on bandwidth costs to someone, ie their users.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[pla]

it's not moral to punish the innocent to get at the guilty
Historically, a UDP benefits the innocent-at-the-offending-provider (aside from a temporary iconvenience) just as much as it benefits the rest of the net. And, as far as I can recall, no UDP has ever lasted longer than a week, so we don't exactly talk about a long-term problem here.

Or, to put it in a different (more familiar to the modern, non-usenet-oriented world) light, consider how much legit users in .tw, .kr, .ru, and recently .il suffer as a result of their ISP's sloth... If we had an email equivalent of the UDP (EDP?), perhaps we wouldn't all have to block those addresses by default, no doubt to the great relief of non-spammers in those regions.


As an aside... DAMN! Someone fix Slashdot! I've typed this same blob in about five times so far, because I keep getting logged out, my messages dumped (blank screen loads), and bizarre error message. Aurgh!

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[gbjbaanb]

when you're older, and have little kids, and your daughter says 'daddy, can I be banged by a 12 inch cock like the lady says in my email', perhaps you'll change your mind.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[bgog]

This happens all the time. If a few members of a high-school basketball team keep brawling with the opposing team and the school does NOTHING. Eventually that school will not be allowed to play until they clean up their act. This my not be fair to the players who don't fight but it is reasonable.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, if you want kids it's your responsibility to care for them. I don't like children, and I don't see any special need to care for children. This whole "won't somebody please help the children" is really beginning to piss me off, and I am someone who used to be very politically correct.

If you want to help anyone, help the old folk who have been working their asses off to make a more comfortable world for you and me, not the whiny little shits who cry for more and haven't put a dime in. Children are nothing more than immature adults, with all the potential to do very much good or very much harm.

There are a dozen valid arguments against spam, and, "It will hurt the children," is not one of them. Your argument is about as shit as arguing against child porn "in case other children see it".

(And before you ask, I'm 22, not 65.)

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like starving out a country to depose a dictator. Whoops. :-(

thats what USA does. whoops.. the FBI will be with you shortly.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[sabaco]

Perhaps. Or perhaps I'll think I need to take better care of my children. Or that I should educate them better.

It is sorta like when that buffy musical episode came out (yeah yeah, what can I say, I think willow is hot) and all the rightwingers were upset because of the "sex" scene when willow sings to tara. They felt it should have been censored because they thought it suggested lesbian sex. All that time I'm thinking, why would you let your "little" kids watch a show about monsters killing people anyway? Are you concerned they aren't having enough nightmares or something?

Now I know people are going to say that it isn't the same, blah, blah, blah, and of course it isn't the exact same situation. The premise is the same though. If you aren't comfortable with the safety of something like this, then you shouldn't be letting your kids on it. I don't think little children need their own email account at all. I mean, if you child is young enough not to know what "banged by a 12 inch cock" means, why does she need her own email account? But if you believe they do you should take steps to make sure that it is being filtered properly or that your child understands what is coming at her.

Or maybe you need to educate her on where not to use her real email address. Personally, I have an email address that is listed on my web site, (which is listed on google so it isn't like it is impossible to find the site... I've even had friends search for things and find my page unintentionally) and yet I have gotten 4 spams in the last 4 years, all of which are just home-business spams, not porno spams.

I also have an email address I sometimes use for mail testing. It is a hotmail address, one which is not posted on any webpage anywhere, (and I specified that it should not be listed on hotmail's directory) and which I've only used to send a couple of mails to about 3-4 people. Yet it receives 5-10 porn spams a day. So now I know not to use hotmail for my email (as if there was ever a question).

Anyway, I'm getting side tracked. I want to know why you are letting your little children have unfettered access to the internet (which *you* perceive to be a dangerous place) without giving them any sort of education at all about what to avoid or how to protect themselves.

Consider it another way. Would you let your child walk around by herself in Central Park at night? No, probably not. That doesn't mean we should ban people from central park, or even that we should ban people from central park at night. It might even be perfectly safe to be there. I perceive that as being a dangerous situation, so I'd make certain that my children don't do it. Is that really so unreasonable?

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[evilviper]

I wouldn't punish the innocent to get Usama bin Ladin, let alone spammers.

Ah, yes... The 13 year-old decides to tell the world how to do things.

There is no such thing as innocent. If you live in a waring country, you are supporting that country's war. The same goes for spammers. If you are getting service from an ISP, you are supporting that ISP's activities.

Saying you should not punish the innocent is like saying that those who buy child porn should not be punished, only those who are actually making the child porn. The same thing applies to drugs, illegial gambling, etc.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[gbjbaanb]

for the record, I don't have kids, my argument was hypothetical.

I still think you need to reevaluate your desire for freedom of speech (under any circumstances) with the needs of a civilised and well adjusted society. I know the perils of email spam, I know that 1 spammer getting your address can sell it to thousands of spammers, I have an account I never used and its full of spam. I also have another that I use everyday and its just starting to get spammed - perhaps its because I used it as my sourceforge address. In fact, when can I be sure I have an account that isnt going to be eventually caught by a spammer? never. So should I stop using email? Its a catch-22 situation, the email account I use everyday is going to get caught eventually, because I use it everyday.

The point, though, is that porn is not good for kids, and you don't have so much control over kids as you think you'd have. they get to see stuff at friend's houses, look over your shoudler which you're reading your mail, use the computers at school, etc etc. So.. is freedom of speech so important that kids will get to see this filth?

your central park analogy is flawed in 1 respect - email is an everyday thing. Like walking down the street. And there are poor drivers, lunatics with guns, muggers, gangs of youths out there - if your analogy held, either you'd give up email altogether or would never go outside your front door.

Sorry for the long posting. I do feel that there is no control over the crap I get in my mailbox and some of it is truly offensive. Whilst I agree that no-one should be persecuted for their beliefs, no freedom of speech argument should protect the people sending those emails out.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[Shugart]

It's like starving out a country to depose a dictator. Whoops. :- It's more like punishing someone who knowingly allows terrorists to operate within their country as long as the terrorists' targets are others.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[PerryMason]

Well as a Bigpond customer, I can tell you that there really won't be many people inconvenienced by Bigpond being UDP'ed as the service provided is SO dismally poor that anyone who uses Usenet already has a pay account somewhere else.

Not that I ever go there (and when I do its for that articles) but the alt.binaries.* groups have about 50% completion and retention rates that ensure that anything that's larger than 1 part is guaranteed to be ungetable, PAR or otherwise.

IMHO its a deliberate plan on the part of Telstra to ensure that people don't use the service. Quite simply you make the service so bad as to be useless; people stop using it and hey presto you can justify dropping an expensive, revenue losing, part of internet service providing. If anything, they permit the level of spam they do to guarantee that the bulk of it isn't filtered before it hits their servers.

I say this as a Usenet user of many years and a Bigpond user for 4 of them. Their's is quite simply the worst feed I have ever used.

On the other hand, they have the most incompetent bunch of techos I've ever had the displeasure to work with, so it could just be they have no clue how to run a newsfeed.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[Enfors]

It's like starving out a country to depose a dictator. Whoops. :-(

No it's not. Users of said ISP can switch ISPs. Citizens in dictatorships can't (usually) move to a different country.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not allowed to say that! :-)

There is no such thing as innocent. If you live in a warring country, you are supporting that country's war.

This means there no such thing as terrorism. How will the US justify it's actions without terrorism.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[A55M0NKEY]

In this case, the innocent are going to be punished anyway, either subscribers to the UDPd ISP get punished by not being able to post, or everyone gets punished by having their legitamate news service degraded into uselessness by spammers. It's not punish the innocent to get at the guilty, it's more like surgery to remove a cancer - sure you have innocent skin cells cut with a scalpel, but that allows the surgeon to remove a malignant tumor that would otherwise kill every cell in the body.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[Dogtanian]

If you want to help anyone, help the old folk who have been working their asses off to make a more comfortable world for you and me

Although your advice would have been not to bother (unless you mean your parents specifically), right?

not the whiny little shits who cry for more and haven't put a dime in.

Damn right. 6-month old babies are greedy scum. Put 'em to work!

Children are nothing more than immature adults, with all the potential to do very much good or very much harm ...particularly when they grow up, which is a good reason against treating them like s**t now.

There are a dozen valid arguments against spam, and, "It will hurt the children," is not one of them.

Not in your world, anyway. Still, I'm wary whenever anyone starts using the protection of children in an argument- usually to justify some right-wing draconian moralist bulls**t that's ultimately little to do with children.

I am someone who used to be very politically correct. ....then...(And before you ask, I'm 22, not 65.)
Let me guess... you just graduated, or are about to, and the reality of your "ideals" hit you- "damn! I didn't realise I'd have to pay for that!"

By the way, you come across as being far closer to 65 than 22.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[TKinias]

Oh, look... An Aryan troll... Put away your white hood for a moment and pay attention.

scripsit JonTurner:

(If it weren't for the English Channel, friend, they would have taken England in the 6th century.)

I'm amazed at how ignorant of history people can be... Let's see:

• The Hejirah was AD 622. Hard to see how they could have been threatening England before the religion was even formed.
• The Islamic armies crossed into Spain AD 711.
• The Islamic invasion of Europe was defeated by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours AD 732.

Yes, that's right -- by a Frenchman. If it weren't for the cowardly, afraid-to-fight, always-surrendering French, the entirety of Western Europe would have falled to the armies of the Khalifat in the eighth century.

If, somehow, you believe that living under Muslim rule doesn't "impinge", you're clueless.

Have you lived under Muslim rule? I have. I lived for three years in an Arab country in which Islam is constitutionally the state religion -- and I happen not to be a Muslim. Were there things that sucked, like it being illegal to buy beer on Mohamed's birthday? Sure. I'd definitely rather live there, though, than in many places in the American South. Whatever impact backward religious restrictions there were restricted me less than those in some counties in Texas would. The problems the Arab world faces with liberty are due to the oppressive military dictatorships which the U.S. has kept in power, not to the people's faith.

Next time, stop and think before you shoot off your stupid mouth.

I am confident that you will do the rest of us the same honor.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... I would say they are actually pressuring guilty "co-consprirators" (uncooperative ISPs). Users are unfortunate collateral damage, but in this case damage IS fairly limited.

So, although you still do have somewhat interesting point, I think you are overreacting to this particular case. In general moral problem of coercing innocent by-standards to get to big bad enemey is an interesting dilemma, of course.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[brank]

it's not moral to punish the innocent to get at the guilty

1. A UDP doesn't directly punish users, guilty or innocent. It punishes the ISP, who is guilty of harboring spammers. The users choose to do business with that ISP, and if they choose "wrong" they should either switch or put pressure on the ISP to change. This is exactly what happens.
2. Nor does it indirectly punish innocent users. Historically, it's just a temporary inconvenience: a few days without Usenet. This is traded for a universal long-term benefit. Non-spamming users of an ISP benefit as much or more after the ISP has kicked out the spammers because their servers have a lighter load.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[PigleT]

"Oh yeah, the inconvenience of spam is much worse than the murder of thousands of innocent civilians."

I'd like to know where you think I said anything like that.

"Please defend your "doesn't impinge" statement before the friends and family of the 3000+ people murdered in the World Trade Center attack."

I have no need to do any such thing, as you obviously didn't bother reading the bit about "daily activities" and "one-off"s.

"Next time, stop and think before you shoot off your stupid mouth."

If you lack for water with which to cool your head, try one of those things called a "toilet".

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[Troed]

You must be from the US ..

.. only americans are _that_ ignorant, while still believing they are right.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[btempleton]

So the users of this ISP are people who are knowingly supporting spammers?

Look this "don't punish the innocent to get at the guilty" isn't something I just made up. It's a fundamental principle of justice, leaarned over centuries. It applies even to murder. It doesn't have an "except to stop spam" rider on it.

These people will have their postings blocked and they know nothing of what's going on. They will not get error messages saying their posting was deleted, will they?

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[btempleton]

Really, so if you participated in a thread that week on the net, posted a number of messages you put a bit of thought into and spent some time on (OK, it's USENET, but bear with me) and you discovered at the end of the week that the reason nobody resopnded to your messages was not that they were boring, but because they were autocancelled because you had picked an ISP that had some users other people don't like -- you would not feel anything had been done to you, that it was all your own fault for not picking another ISP?

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[dubl-u]

I don't like children, I don't see any special need to care for children. [...] the whiny little shits who cry for more and haven't put a dime in

Quick reminder: You were once a child, and enjoyed the many protections and benefits that come with that state. To say that others shouldn't have them is a bit hypocritical.

Granted, a lot of people hide their agendas behind "save the children" rhetoric, when they really mean, "save me from thinking" or "save me from dealing with something that makes me feel uncomfortable". This is also hypocritical, and, as Mark Twain knew, it ends up being bad for the children.

The only thing we all have in common is an unbroken line, eons long, of ancestors who took the time to have children. Suggesting that having children is some sort of quirky personal choice ignores the last few hundred million years of history and the essential nature of life itself.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[dubl-u]

it's not moral to punish the innocent to get at the guilty,

Do you object to boycotts? They certainly punish the innocent 99% of a company's employees to get at the tiny percentage of malginant or clueless decision-makers, and they also can harm the company's other customers.

Personally, I think that it's bad to punish innocents, but it's also bad to allow innocents to suffer. In the case of a boycott like this, I think punishing the people who are, perhaps unintentionally, supporting a company whose actions harm innocents is an acceptable tradeoff. Not good, but less bad than any immediate alternatives.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[amuro98]

UDPs are merely a suggestion to Usenet admins to not carry articles from a specific ISP. It's not something forced upon the server unless the admin takes action. Of course, not many ISPs provide usenet servers themselves, but outsource to dedicated providers, like Supernews. You can bet many of these larger providers will pay attention to an UDP since they're probably already using spam-cancelling services to control the problem anyways.

As for an email "UDP", there are public blacklists galore. SPEWS seems to be the most effective right now, but there are also blackhole lists that cover entire ISPs like CW, or Rackspace, and entire countries, such as china, or russia.

Again, these have to implemented by the admin or the individual user. And again, there's nothing the affected ISP(s) can do if you decide to refuse their traffic.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[amuro98]

What about the innocent people at the ISPs that are receiving all this garbage from Telstra? Don't they matter?

The UDP is a reccomendation for usenet admins to refuse posts from a certain ISP.

If the admin decides to enact the UDP, that is his choice. He is not obliged to carry traffic from anywhere, nor is anyone else obliged to carry traffic from his network.

The internet works only because of give and take. Be a bad neighbor, and don't be surprised if people stop talking and listening to you.

As for the users of Telstra, they'll still see their own posts showing up on their local server(s) - that is unless Telstra decides to participate in the UDP themselves (this has happend before!) The only difference will be that servers following the UDP will see zero posts from Telstra.

If anything, the effects on Telstra will be pretty mild. They'll still see posts from the outside, they'll still see their own posts.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[amuro98]

First, your posts would only be autocancelled on servers that are following the UDP.

No UDP has ever had 100% participation.

Second, if I found out my ISP was under a UDP, I'd ask my admin why things were allowed to degenerate to this point? UDPs don't happen overnight. Telstra/Bigpond has been a major problem *FOR YEARS*. Surely, they can't claim ignorance on this issue after 1000s of complaints. It's clear that they are aware of the issue, but prefer to do nothing about it.

If my ISP was making no motions to correct the problem, I would obtain an external usenet account, and deduct the fee from my ISP's payment. Afterall, usenet access was one of the services they were to provide, it's broken, and they're not fixing it.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[mattACK]

Pretty troll. Nice troll.

Look, if you want kids it's your responsibility to care for them. I don't like children, and I don't see any special need to care for children. This whole "won't somebody please help the children" is really beginning to piss me off, and I am someone who used to be very politically correct.

How this post is insightful I don't know. Interesting, maybe, but still wrong. It is the responsibility of the collective society to raise and provide for children. This is "left-leaning" and "liberal", but also "reality". You may bitch about paying taxes to fund schools when you have no children, but the alternative is uneducated children dragging society down in street crime and woeful literacy rates (inner cities, anyone?). I don't think it is anyones responsibilty but my own to meter my children's television and entertainment. And I do protect them from what I consider the "unheathy" portions of society. Sadly, email is one of them. I don't want my boys getting invited to check out "Angela on her webcam" or reading of "super ejaculation distance" so they don't get email.

They CAN browse the web, but I forbid name resolution. I add sites I approve of to their computers of via a hosts file. They are young enough that I can get away with that for now.

And to say that no child deserves protections after you just got done having them yourself is selfish, at best.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[WNight]

Companies understand only money. The only way to hurt them is to make the users leave. Those users are a part of the problem themselves. They won't switch companies (and tell the old company why). They'll sit comfortably until someone or something forces a change.

Personally, I think assault is the right way to deal with spammers. A baseball bat to the chest is fitting treatment for people who know they're hurting everyone and keep on doing it just to make a buck. If a few of them met with painful ends the rest would think twice.

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[brank]

I'd be angry at the ISPs who canceled my posts at first, but once I learned more about why they did it I'd just be angry at my ISP. It got itself into the situation in the first place.

I don't like the idea of blaming users for choosing the "wrong" ISP, which is why I put "wrong" in quotes. I'm not saying "you're either for us or against us," but if an ISP is causing a problem and the users who are aware of the problem support its misbehavior, they are a part of the problem.

BTW, UDPs don't happen just because other people didn't like a user. The ISP has to have a consistent record of polluting or damaging Usenet and not caring about the communal resource. If you found out that your ISP was valued their bottom line over providing good service to their customers and the integrity of the network, would you not feel anything had been done to you?

Re:Punish the innocent to get at the guilty

[btempleton]

The principle of not punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is not modified with waivers like, "unless the guilty are really guilty" or "unless doing so would be really effective against the guilty."

(I'm commenting not just on the post above but on many of the replies to this thread.)

And it's also not modified by "I will find some reason to rationalize to myself that they are not really innocent, because they should have known better than to patronize the bad ISP or associate with the wrong fellow users."

If you found your internet connection cut off because other people on your ISP misbehaved, I think most people would be royally pissed.

We have stood up proudly saying "Don't blame the ISP if the users are posting porn" or "Don't blame the ISP if the user is running a kazaa client." Most people here have fought hard against the CDA, DMCA takedown orders, the Verio shutdown of Thing, the German and French attempts to threaten sites like eBay and Yahoo because of bad things their users are doing, to force those companies to block or stop those users.

But when it comes to something we don't like, such as spammers, we are ready to blame and punish the ISP and all the ISP's innocent users.

I'm sorry, but this is a terrible hypocracy. And what I don't get is why spam makes people so emotional that they would participate in this hyporcacy.

Do you believe in an end to end network where you don't punish the midpoints for the data sent by the endpoints? Or don't you?

How can slashdot have proud trumpeting of Doc Searls' new essay on how the internet is all about end to end on the same page with "delete messages from users at ISPs that don't deal with spammers as we want."

Now this is a day old /. thread so I doubt anybody is reading this any more, so I won't post further, but I think people need to look at this hyprocracy.

Good! And keep them banned.

[Anonymous Coward]

If only we could also have smtp bans for domains that don't have a valid abuse@ address. This includes many of the larger telcos around the world and annoys me to no end. Spamhouse in a netblock rented to spamhouser by telco. Quite often none of them even have a clear abuse handling system. Clearly the messenger is the problem not the spammer. They know it, they don't care and just try to deter people from complaining.

Talk about netizenship.

Re:Good! And keep them banned.

[Pathwalker]

If only we could also have smtp bans for domains that don't have a valid abuse@ address.

Have you checked rfc-ignorant.org?

Re:Good! And keep them banned.

[Anonymous Coward]

Accord to them, we therefore need to SMTP ban slashdot.org!

Re:Good! And keep them banned.

[FattMattP]

Be aware that some of these can block email from entire countries. .uk for example is blocked in one of the rfc-ignorant.org lists because the company that handles the registration database doesn't make domain contact information available.

Re:Good! And keep them banned.

[jschrod]

Then start by lobbying vendors that they ship sendmail aliases and Exchange with all RFC-proposed mboxes.

As long as Sun et.al. won't have them as default, domains won't make them available. Most sysadmins struggle to keep the MTA alive, and don't know shit about proper configuration.

Re:Good! And keep them banned.

[Pathwalker]

They use a different code when that block an entire domain so you can ignore that block if you want to.

I don't block on it anyway, I just use it as part of my spamassassin score.

Usenet Used to be Useful

[Apple Acolyte]

. . . Until I figured out that's where a lot of spammers get their addresses, and until my ISP's gateway got flakey. In my opinion, Usenet largely gave way to the prevalence of web boards, which are far more inviting and appealing to users. I used to spend time on comp.sys.mac.system, for example, but MacNN Forums became a superior option. The major problem is, Usenet failed to evolve along with the rest of the Internet. One would think, though, that if it weren't for /. Usenet would be more popular than it is today. Usenet is pretty geeky, after all.

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[DNS-and-BIND]

And this has exactly what to do with the impending UDP for Telstra?

P.S. those web boards have no memory, irritating interfaces, long load times, and stupid graphics.

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[PigleT]

"One would think, though, that if it weren't for /. Usenet would be more popular than it is today. Usenet is pretty geeky, after all."

Hmmmm. And evolution leads to less geekiness and this is a good thing?

If the rise of web-based discussion systems means all the AOL weenies get *off* Usenet, I suppose that's a good thing. But don't say Usenet hasn't "evolved" as though it were a bad thing. After all, there's nothing to stop you setting yourself up with a perfectly decent news-reader and actually talking to people on it, even on windoze, is there?

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[MrFredBloggs]

"out that's where a lot of spammers get their addresses"

So use a fake email address! Duh! It goes against netiquette to ask for replies to be emailed to you anyway, and if you really need to give out your address, obfuscate it. (You really should have a filter on your email program which rejects all emails NOT containing a word/phrase of your choice anyway - at least, on the addresses you give out publicly.)

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[edremy]

Usenet failed to evolve along with the rest of the Internet.

I find this an odd comment. With a decent newreader (MT-Newswatcher for you Mac folks), USENET has features that web boards can only dream of: it's still years ahead of anything else on the web for discussion. Can you imagine how much nicer /. would be with the ability to create intelligent scorefiles with color-coding? Or no more waiting for a web page to load? No blinking ads covering half the page?

Through Google (nee Deja) I can get USENET postings back to the early 90s almost instantly. Web boards often don't archive, so everything there is lost after a few months

I can't get USENET at my current work (save through Google) so I spend time on /., K5 and FARK. Other than the Photoshop contests on FARK, I can't think of anything any of these boards does better than trn+a good news feed did back in 1990.

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[Anixamander]

If the rise of web-based discussion systems means all the AOL weenies get *off* Usenet, I suppose that's a good thing.

Me too!

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[FunkSoulBrother]

Usenet needs a "quote" function. Crap like this:

> On Mon, 03 Mar 2003 22:05:51 GMT, Timberwoof
> wrote:
>
> >In article ,
> > "Ice Queen" wrote:
> >
> >> "Mike" wrote in message
> >> news:rlm56vck5u6mcfm0n4guvm0e1b9be2dfvm@4ax.com...
> >>
> >> > even AFTER my war, I STILL find the need to support my Country AND my
> >> > President when called upon. With, or WITHOUT "proof absolute". I don't
> >> > know, maybe I feel it's just part of the price we pay to call
> >> > ourselves "Americans". I hear the whispers of doubt in my own soul,
> >> > but I feel the need to stand and fight when called, right or wrong,
> >> > not as part of Nationalism. But as payment for being free.
> >>
> >> If that's not nationalism, then what do you think nationalism is? A
> >> weird
> >> disease "other" people get? What you just posted is practically a textbook
> >> definition of a nationalist statement.
> >
> >
> >Let's just do it this way...
> >
> >> > even AFTER my war, I STILL find the need to support my Fatherland AND my
> >> > F?hrer[1] when called upon. With, or WITHOUT "proof absolute". I don't
> >> > know, maybe I feel it's just part of the price we pay to call
> >> > ourselves "Germans". I hear the whispers of doubt in my own soul,
> >> > but I feel the need to stand and fight when called, right or wrong,
> >> > not as part of National Socialism. But as payment for being free.
> >
> >Think about all those Germans who heard the whispers of doubt, yet went
> >along with Hitler, and then tell us that we must do the same.
> >
> >
> >[1] Godwin has long since been invoked by comparing Saddam to Hitler.
>
> Not to rejoin this circus, but I AM glad to flush out your belief
> that the U.S. Government is akin to Hitler & Germany! Good Lord, I
> thought our history was just a tad better than that? Ah, what do I
> know. On with the show...Mike

Is unreadble! And thats only four layers of ">>>>". Some discussions get even more.

Some basic bold and italitcs would be nice. I'm not asking for unlimited html functions or pictures or stupid smiley face emoticon pictures, but a few functions that are standard (and unobtrusive) in most web forums would be nice.

I agree that the features you mentioned about usenet are nice, but there is no reason why they have to be the be all and end all.

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

My newsreader (slrn) colors each level of quotes differently. Thus I find it very easy to parse the above. The only problem is when some moron uses a character like # to quote instead of the very standard >.

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[elemental23]

You're looking right at your "quote" function. By default, any reasonable newsreader will automatically quote the post you're replying to, beginning each line with a ">". It's then up to the poster to trim the quoted text to a reasonable amount, usually just enough to give readers an idea of what they're replying to.

Some newsreaders will provide color coding for different levels of quotes. My preferred newsreader, Microplanet Gravity (for Windows), lets me configure the color, font, style, of quoted text however I want to differentiate it from the new text. Mozilla's newsreader gives you even more control if you dig into userContent.css.

The best thing about Usenet is that it's plain vanilla text. It's up to the client software to display it according to the reader's preferences.

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Usenet failed to evolve along with the rest of the Internet.

That's a feature, not a bug!

USENET has features that web boards can only dream of

Like the amazing Plain Text(TM) technology! Loads super-fast! Easy to search!

No blinking ads covering half the page?

And no browser-choking HTML designed by someone with a hard-on for <TABLE>. Seriously, I can't use most web-based message boards (this one included :) without Proxomitron to block out the crap.

Web boards often don't archive, so everything there is lost after a few months

Yes! This issue just came up on another message board that I visit. No archive :(

Re:Usenet Used to be Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

And, on usenet, you choose the discussion, not some lame editor posting a dupe of a lame story...

Re:isn't Usenet dead?

[den_erpel]

If they remove the ISP that the spam originates from, the spammer will just find new ISPs.

Sure, but I think you're missing the point. It would serve as a clear warning to other ISPs with simular non existing ignore-abuse-mails policies. I am with an ISP with such a policy and it is sometimes d*mned frustrating (especially when you compare with their competitors). The last thing they pulled was letting a former employee use personal customer data for personal profit and spamming (I assume it's the guy that came to make my pc 'surf-ready' and entered with the words Ah, this is Linux, I can't do anything here, as if his services were needed or requested).

I'm pretty certain that my abuse mail about this got redirected to /dev/null again X(

ROUGE!

[muzzmac]

From the linked RFD: "At that time, I was attempting to de-peer Matt Middleton's rouge spam feed, in October, 1998." Cool. A "rouge" spam feed. The french commies are behind the spam! I knew it!

Hi, Slashdot is a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2003 09:07:00 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Apache/1.3.26 Server at slashdot.org Port 80

Too harsh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Death penalty for using usenet? Jeeze MPAA and RIAA are are extreme!

Re:Too harsh!

[maxwell demon]

No, you misunderstand. It's death penalty by usenet. Usenet is to replace other methods like electric chair.

It works like the following: Usenet is scanned for the most boring postings which can be found (f.ex. test postings). Those are then used to bore you to death.

telstra have problems

[gumleef]

I doubt that this will be resolved by telstra if threatened with action; action will have to be taken.

Telstra have been losing money for a while now due to shoddy work in all of their services. Consumers just wont stand for it any longer, and this is strongly reflected by their dropping share price.
I believe they are losing money at such a rate that they refuse to outlay any on ressurecting this current spam problem - that, or they really are ignorant of the problem (due to incompitance).

Re:telstra have problems

[questamor]

Telstra give a shit, I think. When i've dealt with them and only needed to handle one department, the service and people have been fine. The odd problem, but they've been on-par with anyone else.

Problems come up when one department of telstra need to talk to another. There's just no useful communication between groups, no trust from one section to another.

I once had a billing issue I had to contact telstra about. Billing attempted several times to contact the technical dept that did the work. That just didn't happen after 3 weeks, despite constantly calling Billing.

After a day of phoning around I was able to get through to one of the engineering departments who performed phone work for me, and they immediately saw the error and attempted to get back in contact with Billing. It took another month, and *ME* faxing information sent to me by engineering, to actually get anything resolved.

It could have been fixed overnight if there was appropriate communicationbetween departments. I get the feeling telstra like breaking up into little bureaucratic bundles, each with their own world.

Re:telstra have problems

[Wild Wizard]

regarding people and their continuing claims that telstra is losing money please read this link before posting such rubbish in future

Re:telstra have problems

[oni]

I doubt that this will be resolved by telstra if threatened with action; action will have to be taken.

I think we should give the inpectors more time!

Re:telstra have problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Got telstra shares, perhaps? I wonder if shares can go negative ...

Roast the bastards

[azav]

If you've read the link, these idiots are being irresponsible top level members of the community. Inexcusable that such negligence is allowed to go on. Why does it take 5 years(!) to get them to clean up their act and comply to respectible operational procedure for such an influential company.

Roast em.

Re:Is slashdot messed up for anyone else?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the new Google contextual advertsing...

Redo!

[Evil Adrian]

Same thing needs to happen for Usenet that needs to happen for e-mail. They have both grown larger than anyone ever thought they would, and the design was vulnerable to abuse. Ban this, ban that, block this, block that, it doesn't matter, because people whose primary goal in life is to make money by annoying the living shit out of other people will just find ways to circumvent the latest and greatest filter/banning/whatever.

It's time to design newer, more secure infrastructures so we can scrap the old stuff and (hopefully) deal with less of this bullshit in the future.

Re:Redo!

[Anonymous Coward]

good point!

Re:Redo!

[antistuff]

me too!!!!!!

Re:Redo!

[FunkSoulBrother]

[quote]It's time to design newer, more secure infrastructures so we can scrap the old stuff and (hopefully) deal with less of this bullshit in the future.[/quote]

But then you'd break someones crappy 1979 unix newsreader, and we can't have that!

Re:Redo!

[John Hasler]

> Ban this, ban that, block this, block that, it
> doesn't matter, because people whose primary goal
> in life is to make money by annoying the living
> shit out of other people will just find ways to
> circumvent the latest and greatest
> filter/banning/whatever.

Newsguy has effective filters. My newsfeed is completely spam free and has been for years.

Re:Redo!

[Anonvmous Coward]

Man, you've got a streak of interesting comments. Heh.

Are you sure you're not the one on the crack pipe?

BTW, your website sucks. Only somebody on crack would use Tripod to post their favorite songs.

Re:Redo!

[antistuff]

you hurt my feelings.

What It Is

[Unominous Coward]

From the site:

UDP, or Usenet Death Penalty, is a means by which site administrators and others around the world attempt to enforce the cooperative nature of usenet on an uncooperative member of that community...
An Active UDP is one in which every message posted to usenet by the offending site is canceled or failed to be propagated.

If it reduces spam, I'm all for it. I for one have read far too many ads for health plans, penis enlargements, low-interest credit cards and fabulous marketing opportunities!

I use "bugpond"

[ExEleven]

Well I can say that this is bad on my part, but it should be done, i'll just go with another ISP (HERE THAT YOU BARSTEDS IM CHANGING BECAUSE OF YOUR CRAPPY SERVICE). This is a great thing to happen, it will make the internet a better place.

The internet should not be commercial!

Of course it's still useful...

[Anonymous Coward]

...there's still the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* groups. The best source of free porn.

Telstra

[H3g3m0n]

Telstra don't respond to their own customers complaints so i doubt they will respond to some usernet talking about spam. My plan when from an unlimated 256/64 ADSL for about $65 AUD (maby $75), to a 3gb a month $96 one, with 18c an extra over they did speed it up to 512/128 but I think it was probally so people are more likly to go over. If i go 1gb over thats $180 extra. Problem is they had a monoploy over the entire market for ages although thats starting to break with iinet and internode with 12gb plans for the same price.

Re:Telstra

[lgftsa]

I jumped from Bigpond to IINet, and the difference is unbelievable. IINet does block some incoming ports(mail/web/CIFS), but the service can't be beat. A web redirecter and fetchmail are all that's needed.

Re:Telstra

[Anonymous Coward]

"Telstra don't respond to their own customers complaints so i doubt they will respond to some usernet talking about spam."

What the fuck are you gibbering about, man?

"some usernet"?

What planet are you on?

YAW.

Re:Not just annoying

[Bastian]

Span isn't just a pain in the ass. It costs shitloads of money.

I can't remember the amount of bandwidth it takes to keep a news server updated, but it's a pretty big chunk. That makes it expensive to run a Usenet news server in the first place.

Now consider that an estimated 60% of the crap coming out of Telestra is spam, and the issue doesn't just become one of an annoyance. Telestra is costing lots of people lots of money.

Under this situation, I think it is perfectly acceptable for admins to stop listening to the noise Telestra is putting out over the pipes. Frankly, the UDP is the only real defense Usenet has against ill-behaved entities, and it is used rarely, and only when all other options have been exhausted and the provider being UDPd is still refusing to cooperate. Yeah, it sucks for Telestra users, but if they want their Usenet service to return to normal, they can vote with their money by going to another ISP, or they can pressure Telestra to start behaving.

Offtopic Yes I know

[yoshi_mon]

The Shell Provider your pimping has a real neat mail client.

Email Clients (ping,mutt,mail)

Re:Request for discussion?

[Anonymous Coward]

U fale teh spellign!

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Malda dipped his "special taco" in the sour cream again.

(Because you like to suck his dick.)

Re:Not just annoying

[WilliamX]

Add up the traffic in his message, it's not costing anyone "lots of money." That's a fiction used to justify these overreaching actions.

(expecting moderators to use their points abusively on this post, because they don't like what it says. Oh well, my karma will survive it)

Spam is serial murder

[Anonymous Coward]

Do the maths. Spam is everywhere and a quick count, assuming it takes you an extra second to receive, process, waste time on and then determine it is spam and then delete it, it means about 1-5 human lifetimes is wasted each and every day. And it gets worse all the time.

You have to see what this truly is, it wastes enormous amounts of time that due to enormous volume ends up truly killing us.

Many of my favourite newsgroups are smoking craters. Even after filtering my email with Spam Asassing I still get about 100 spams every day.

I see only one solution: public executions using blunt spoons. Now.

Re:isn't Usenet dead?

[jaavaaguru]

The guy from my ISP (blueyonder) who came to install teh cable modem at least knew about Linux and told me what to do to get my linux box online (although it was already set up for DHCP, so it worked anyway). ISPs who send out people without explaining differences between operating systems they might expect to find at a customer's site are going to come across as unfriendly to the customer.

Re:someone care to explain how to USE usenet ??

[rich_r]

http://www.marysia.com/marysia/personal/usenet.htm
Hope it helps....

Re:someone care to explain how to USE usenet ??

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are using Windows, and have Outlook Express on your computer, open it, then here's your todo list:

1. "Tools" menu => "Accounts"
2. "Add" button => News
3. Yadda yadda
4. For the news server, you must find the address of a news server that you have access to. It is likely that your ISP provides one for you. If your ISP doesn't offer one, or if you're too lazy to find out, you can search newzbot for a server.
5. After putting the newsserver in, click next however many times you need, then click finish. Click "Yes" to download the newsgroups from the news account you added.
6. Double click on a newsgroup in the list to subscribe to it.

The newsgroup you selected is now visible on the left. Click on it to read all the messages.

Re:Not just annoying

[gowen]

It's not costing anyone "lots of money." That's a fiction used to justify these overreaching actions.

Except the person who called for it doesn't mention money at all. Just that spam unwanted, and Telstra pump out more spam than non-spam.

Thats it. No fiction, just facts, and a modest proposal to stop propagating their input. (After all, why should ISPs feel the need to help outsiders annoy the ISPs own users. And its not overreaching, they're just saying "If you won't play by our rules, you can't play" -- an axiom of nearly all cooperative activity.

Is Usenet Still Relevant?

[MSTCrow5429]

I can't imagine how bad Usenet would be without UDPs. It's totally overrun by spam as it is. You can't go into any unmoderated thread without seeing hundreds of Lolita and girl/horse sex adverts. I've never gotten a good answer to a tech question from Usenet either. Is Usenet even relevant anymore, being full of spam and the technical illiterates? I find sites such as Slashdot and the Futuremark boards to be much more informative.

Re:Is Usenet Still Relevant?

[You're All Wrong]

Maths question? - sci.math
Crypto question? - sci.crypt
Compression question? - comp.compression
Language question? - alt.usage.english
Linguistics question - sci.lang
Asm programming? - alt.lang.asm

Please waste your time finding out what proportion of posts to the above fora are spam, and report back. It's pretty damn close to zero by the time it reaches my news server (which honours spam robocancels). None of the above are moderated. Kooks, yeah, there are plenty of those, but (a) they're trivial to killfile and (b) you get those on /. and everywhere else too.

Maybe if you didn't spend so much time in alt.sex.masturbation you'd realise that much of Usenet is still very useful.

YAW.

Re:Is Usenet Still Relevant?

[MSTCrow5429]

There's an alt.sex.masturbation? I didn't know that. How do you know that?

Re:Is Usenet Still Relevant?

[You're All Wrong]

Sheesh, don't be so predictable!

Actually alt.sex.masturbation used to be one of usenet's best waste-of-time newsgroups, as everyone there had a warped sense of humor. Sick jokes, tasteless stories, and general irreverance. All you've got to do is remember to put aside any thought that the penis is in some way something shocking or offensive. Grow up a little, in other words.

I'll let you into a little secret - I was almost tempted to try it once, as it didn't seem to have done the regular posters any harm (well they claimed to masturbate, but we never know whether they really did or not, do we?).

However, quite what it's like now, I have no idea.

YAW.

Re:Is Usenet Still Relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't go into any unmoderated thread without seeing hundreds of Lolita and girl/horse sex adverts.

Hmmm, at first I thought you had a really crappy newsreader that is so bad at recognizing threads that it actually included unrelated spam in them. Then I realized that, apparently, you actually don't even know the difference between a thread and a newsgroup. Well, it's no wonder you haven't gotten a lot out of Usenet -- you must have spent almost no time whatsoever using it. (Or, if you've used it a decent amount you've never listened enough to even know the basic terminology.)

Re:Is Usenet Still Relevant?

[MSTCrow5429]

All you've got to do is remember to put aside any thought that the penis is in some way something shocking or offensive. Grow up a little, in other words.

Um, I'm a gay male...

Hypocritical ?

[tmark]

Yesterday, there was an article about the /. effect and most posters seemed to be arguing that /. should not be liable for /. effect-related charges, on the grounds that if you have a website, you're asking for traffic for the world, and that /. should in no way be responsible for notification of the /.'ed website.

Yet when it comes to spam, most posters here are prepared to swing the heaviest hammer they can find at supposed offenders. But I wonder whether this is hypocritical.

Let's consider the parallels:

• email and websites under consideration are both available to the Net public at large
  
• both spam and the /. effect may be unsolicited. While some sites may seek exposure on /., certainly many did not.
  
• both spam and the /. effect can be great inconveniences, but the /. effect can force the victim to incur huge, one-time charges - at least spam costs are absorbable for the average little guy.
  
• there is no good way to opt-out of spam, and no good way to opt-out of the /. effect
  
• spammers and /. would probably both claim it is beyond the scope of their responsibilities to check whether their targets are willing/able to handle increased load due to their activities.
  
• spam companies make money indirectly from inconveniencing their victims, because they provide some of them with useful information (people do buy things from spammers after all). /. makes whatever money it makes from /.'ing its victims by using the /.'ed website provide content for its own benefit.
  

Is this a classic case of "do what I say, not what I do". ?

Re:Hypocritical ?

[JBMcB]

> email and websites under consideration are both available to the Net public at large

The difference being E-mail is usually considered personal communication, or one to one, where websites and USENET are mass communication, or one to many.

> there is no good way to opt-out of spam, and no good way to opt-out of the /. effect

Block http requests by referrer. /. effect minimized.

> spammers and /. would probably both claim it is beyond the scope of their responsibilities to check whether their targets are willing/able to handle increased load due to their activities.

It can be argued /. is a journalistic source, or an electronic newspaper. If a newspaper runs an article on someone, they can't be held liable for causing that person's phone to ring more often. Spammers are basically advertisers, sort of like telemarketers. If a telemarketer calls you twenty times a day, there *is* legal recourse.

Re:Hypocritical ?

[thrillseeker]

most posters seemed to be arguing that /. should not be liable for /. effect-related charges ... Yet when it comes to spam, most posters here are prepared to swing the heaviest hammer they can find

The slashdot effect is short term and exists because the end-users took an interest in what you presented to the world - if you are unprepared for the populairty of what you've presented that is not the world's fault - find and implement some way to limit the admission, and be happy that what you did had an impact.

But, spam irritates forever and only continues to exist because the middlemen have an interest in presenting the material - the end-users have no interest.

Usenet exists because it links multiple smaller networks. If Usenet is to have any value then the middlemen need to react to the end users complaints. Fortunately the UDP works because there is a hierarchal structure - all big ISPs are equal in their vote and all have an interest in their end-users - those big ISPs that don't have that interest because they have been compromised by the soft-money of spammers are cut off from the network and suffer in the only manner they recognize - financially.

Re:Hypocritical ?

[AsmordeanX]

There is a large difference between email and a website. With a website, not only are you presenting yourself in a public area, you actually want people to look at your site. The problem with the slashdot effect is when 49,000 people all try to have a look in an hour. A website owner would be happy to have every person see the website, but just not all at once. With email, you generally only want mail from those to whom you have given permission to do so. You don't want 49,000 strangers emailing you and you never will. As for opting out of spam vs slashdot. I don't agree. If you are a person who keeps the same address and have been using it for years, it is very hard to stop using the address once it is found by spammers. If your site gets slashdotted, you can just replace the index with a simple text message or just pull the site for a day and return the next day. The only lingering effect is that you might have more average traffic if the ones that got to see your site liked it.

Re:Not just annoying

[You're All Wrong]

Telstra get good money from spammers, it's big business.
That's why almost every UDP either doesn't get past the threat stage, or is effective within 24 hours of its invokation - the ISPs are fully aware of the problem, and can solve it almost instantly, but while they can keep milking spammers they'll keep milking spammers.
It's easy money until the Usenet Cabal points the finger.

If you look at the UDP FAQ you'll see the snivelling language that they use to thank the ISPs after cleaning up their act, but it's bullshit. That's like thanking the bully for stepping _off_ your foot.

YAW.

Re: Threadjack

[Natestradamus]

Given that, what are your opinions about Iraq? ^_^

Re:Not just annoying

[rhaig]

when I left dejanews, we were receiving (pre-filter) about 60GB of news a day. (yes, that's a G ). Post-filtering, it was usually less than 1GB, usually around 950MB. Most of that bandwidth was misplaced binaries. So 59GB a day of spam and binaries in non-binary newsgroups (misplaced binaries is one of the charges in this UDP).

Make no mistake about it, spam and misplaced binaries do cost you money. 59GB/day of wasted bandwidth is not free.

Re:Not just annoying

[WilliamX]

This isn't about overall totals. The UDP against telstra will not effect the overall totals. This is about the effect of this single UDP against this single ISP. The spams/cancels/whatnot that are being complained about as originating from Telstra are a drop in the bucket.

If you want to address the larger problem, find a way to do that. Targetting specific ISPs with overreaching actions like the UDP, which will have such little effect when you look at the broader picture, is an extreme and unnecessary act. It is being done to make those who want to come up with a solution feel a bit better about their failure to come up with one. They can all pat themselves on the bat for their "major accomplishment."

But in the bigger picture, its like stopping a single raindrop from hitting your suede shoes, the flood of the rest of them will still ruin those shoes. So why did you try to stop that single raindrop, and waste time that could have been spent coming up with a way to protect them from all of the rain?

oh!! The Psycological implications!!

[Anonymous Coward]

A bunch of smelly unwashed unemployed bitter socially retarded freaks try and get back at the world the only way they know how, via usenet!! Tell me, and I hate spam as much as anyone else, but if you are a filty unemployed jerk that nobody likes how valuable is that time you claim is "wasted" deleting spam? You should be grateful for the spammers for giving you something to do!!

Too late!!

[Anonymous Coward]

hopefully it'll make telstra look like idiots

They've already repeatedly made themselves look like idiots!

UDP = Censorship

[fudgefactor7]

Look, I hate spam (probably just as much as any of you), but this is censorship any way you look at it. If you have a message, no matter how shitty and spammy it might be and if an unaffiliated third-party choses to eliminate that message from being heard then that's censorship, plain and simple. In addition to that you're harming a whole group over the actions of a few, which is discriminatory.

In short, the UDP is a bad idea, badly planned, and badly executed (no pun intended) by a bunch of crybabies who get their jollies by being the top dog.

Remember a while ago when @Home was under the gun as well? There were quite a few @Home people who went onto the net abuse groups and said (paraphrasing) "if you cancel even one message from the 'home.com' domain, we'll cancel all the messages coming from your domains as well..." You can imagine how pissed off the self styled usenet cops got on that one. There were a handful of people willing to cancel the @Home messages, and over 30 that were willing to cancel the cancelers domains messages--and with dedicated bandwidth and easy access to the same message cancelling software it was a threat worth looking at seriously. Personally, I thought it was a fucking joke. The usenet cops could (and still can) kiss my white, anglo, ass.

In the end, the whole problem was from less than 20 people at @Home, who were notified by @Home to knock off the shit, and they did. So nothing happened.

The whole idea of a UDP is bad, and the 'Net cops are fucking losers who don't know shit.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[lazyl]

From the UDP FAQ:

Isn't this censorship?

No. Firstly, the legal definition of censorship in the USA (where, unfortunately, most of the spammers are, even when they use resources outside the USA) is that it can only be done by the government - private entities can not, by definition, be guilty of censorship. Outside the US, laws are varied. Secondly, even ignoring that definition, and using the uninformed public's opinion of what censorship is [preventing someone from saying something that they don't like], this does not fall under that criteria, either. The articles being canceled or shunned by pathhost aliasing are not picked and chosen by their content - ALL articles from the offending site are canceled or shunned. It has nothing to do with likes and dislikes - it has to do with abuse by one system of all of the other systems on usenet.

Now perhaps you disagree with that, but I thought I'd point it out. Personally I agree with it. Also, if you haven't read the entire FAQ, you should. There are a lote of interesting points made. Please don't bother to reply to this post unless you have. Here's another good one:

So if you cancel everything from the UDP site, don't legitimate people get canceled, too?

Yes. One of the driving forces behind forcing compliance with generally accepted guidelines is that the ISP's own legitimate users (if any) can bring pressure to bear on their rogue ISP. Remember, the UDP is a near-last-resort measure.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[fudgefactor7]

Yes I've read it. And it's still shit. Look, they're playing semantics with definitions. And that's fine if they want to be asses about it (which they are), and it's also fine if they want to justify their actions (which they do). This is 'Net terrorism. It is censorship. Their definition is flawed. It's not only the government that can censor, but newspapers, media, companies, and people. But that doesn't change the fact what they are doing is Wrong and Bad. Additionally, one of the most important statements about the First Amendment ever made was something to the effct of "if nobody can hear you, you don't have free speech." So, in the USA (at least) they're on really iffy territory.

I love their last line there "Remember, the UDP is a near-last-resort measure." Riiiight. Ok, what then would they do next after killing all posts from the UDPed domain?

They don't know, nobody knows. They haven't a clue. They're just being powermongers. Here's a question they never answer sufficiently "Who put you in charge?" Their answer is always the same "We did."

If this were a diplomatic situation, that would be called a coup.

All in all, I give them the finger.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[Nogami_Saeko]

Well I'm on the opposite side of the fence. I've seen UDPs fix problems a lot more often than I've seen them CAUSE problems.

I can only assume that you're not a regular usenet user. I've been using usenet since 1992 and without system admins enforcing UDPs, the whole network would've gone to hell years ago.

Face it, the reason the admins are putting the UDP in is to STOP SPAM. It's not like they want to block legitimate posts from their users.

Get a clue.

BTW: I block entire subnets from my mailserver because I get incoming spam from certain addresses in those blocks. Am I "censoring" people, or am I staging a "coup" if I do that?

Remember, it's my system and I can do what I want with it. The same as any other system admin, there's nothing that guarantees you access, or guarantees your post will be seen. This isn't the post office.

N.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

It's censorship if the *GOVERNMENT* or other entity causes you to not be able to espouse your ideas at all.

Can you still espouse your ideas if you can't use Usenet?

If you wish, you can post your messages in a newspaper classified section, or on a billboard, or you can self-publish a newsletter. Or you could build your own computer infrastructure. Paint it on your forhead.

No one is taking away your right to speak. They are just taking away the ISP's limited access to private computer systems for misbehaviour. If you wreck my car, I'm not going to let you drive it again (or any other car of mine). That's not restricting your freedom of movement, that is keeping an idiot from wrecking my car!

There is no way that this could be classified as censorship. Equating UDP with censorship would be equivalent to saying a temporary roadblock is "False Arrest".

What an absolute moron. Go learn something.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[phorm]

In the end, the whole problem was from less than 20 people at @Home, who were notified by @Home to knock off the shit, and they did. So nothing happened.

The problem is that Telestra isn't doing much to get their users to stop being asses. If more action was done by Telestra in warning/stopping the spammers, there wouldn't be an issue.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[fudgefactor7]

I'll answer your questions in order:

Been using Usenet since 1984, thank you. Regular? Yup.

You asked: "BTW: I block entire subnets from my mailserver because I get incoming spam from certain addresses in those blocks. Am I "censoring" people, or am I staging a "coup" if I do that?"

No, because it's your system you're controlling. The key difference here is that they're not just killing posts from propogating to their servers, but to all of the NNTP servers in the world. You're not couping, but they are. That's the difference. They will use 'cancelmoose' or 'cancelbunny' or some other shit to kill all, and I want to repeat that, all, messages from an entire domain! What you're comparing is apples to oranges.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Censorship is an action by government to prevent the dissemination of information.

UDP is a collective decision to not accept traffic from a particular server or provider.

There's nothing stopping the UDPed provider from running the service, just the people behind the UDP are refusing to propogate the traffic.

A similar situation happened locally (Victoria, BC) when the local library refused to rent one of their rooms to a neo-Nazi/hate-propogandist. There were cries of 'violation of freedom of speech!'... which were complete bullshit. He was someone known to be obnoxious and spouting undesirable, contentious material... and there's no reason a publically-funded institution is required to support that. To paraphrase Heinlein, 'Free Speech means you can say want you want, it doesn't mean we have to give you a place to say it'.

A UDP is backbones and the like agreeing that the UDPed provider is behaving obnoxiously and refusing to listen to him. This is not censorship, it's just refusal to relax standards of behavior and shunning the target of the UDP. It's not even asking him to leave, it's just ignoring him until he decides to behave appropriately.

Shit, I do that with my six year old.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[lazyl]

Ok, what then would they do next after killing all posts from the UDPed domain?

They wait for the ISP to fix it's problems and then they stop UDPing it.

"Who put you in charge?" Their answer is always the same "We did."

What's wrong with that answer? Who do you think should be in charge? "In charge" meaning, who should decide on the rules? Who should enforce the rules? Seems to me that "the majority" is the best answer. Which is eactly what a UDP represents: a majority decision to enforce certian codes of conduct within the community. Or perhaps you're trying to suggest that there should be no rules? That anybody can do whatever they want? If "whatever they want" didn't affect other people then maybe; but that's rarely the case. Here we're talking about some major spam, which severely affects other people.

I believe that within any community, the majority has the right to decide on rules and to enforce them. That's the way communities work. The problems show up when the minorities have the power to impose their will on the community, but that's not the case here.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[fudgefactor7]

The problem is that the UDPers aren't "the majority," they're a handful of over zealous control-freaks.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[fudgefactor7]

"Censorship is an action by government to prevent the dissemination of information."

No, actually censoring is "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable." The fallacy that "only the government can censor" is bullshit of the highest order.

"UDP is a collective decision to not accept traffic from a particular server or provider."

Ideally, yes, but in reality what they will do is issue cancel messages for all outgoing posts from the domain being targetted. This isn't just "hey, let's ignore Bigpond!" it's "hey, let's kill Bigpond's usenet connections!" It's a DoS.

"A UDP is backbones and the like agreeing that the UDPed provider is behaving obnoxiously and refusing to listen to him..."

Again, that would be ideal, but that's not what happens in reality. They are a handful of people deciding that nobody from Bigpond has the right to be heard via usenet. In addition to being censorship it is also discrimination. And, although I enjoy Heinlein, he's not a founding father and his views posted in a book (albeit a good one) are not law and shouldn't be taken as such.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[fudgefactor7]

"It's censorship if the *GOVERNMENT* or other entity causes you to not be able to espouse your ideas at all."

No, actually censoring is "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable." The fallacy that "only the government can censor" is bullshit of the highest order. Why don't you go learn something.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[belroth]

over zealous control-freaks

Err, they're admins, you've given both a job description and a psychological profile. Why sound surprised?

More seriously if you read news.admin.net-abuse.usenet you'll soon realise that a lot of debate and agonizing goes on before a UDP. Often this debate is enough of a warning to an ISP that the UDP isn't necessary. UDPs are definitely a last resort, not a knee-jerk reaction.
Getting a consensus of the admins on nanau (news.admin etc) is considerably harder than herding cats, lurk a while and learn what goes on if you don't already know.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[amuro98]

Is it censorship if I decide I don't want to read your posts and killfile you?

Is it censorship if I decide I don't want to read the posts from your entire ISP and make a killfile entry for that?

No? Then let's continue.

If I am in charge of a usenet server and decide I don't want posts from a certain ISP, am I "censoring" anyone? No. It is *MY* server. It is private property.

Even the news servers belonging to larger ISP such as AOL, or even usenet providers like Supernews are....PRIVATE PROPERTY.

As such, the owners get to decide the rules.

Don't like? Go somewhere else, or start your own server.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[amuro98]

Actually, the library SHOULD have rented the room to the guy.

Libraries are public institutions - not private ones. So long as he wasn't breaking any of the rules or being disruptive to the other people in the place, they have no right to decide what sort of person can or cannot rent a room.

Now, if he came to my house and asked to hold a meeting in my living room, that's different. My living room is private property, and as the owner, I can refuse whomever I want.

Re:UDP = Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

No, actually censoring is "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable."

Right, but do we need to qualify "examine"?
The only thing being examined in a UDP is the source, not the content. Does that constitute censorship? Sure, if you believed that a particular source always created a specific type of content, then you could argue that the two were equivalent and therefore the distinction irrelevant. But that's not the case here.
Put another way, if the local council pulls down all the advertising posters in some public area, are they guilty of censorship? What about if they only pull down "offensive" posters?

Re:Not just annoying

[Anonymous Coward]

And in what fantasy land to you live in where bandwidth doesn't cost money?

Oh, you're a fucking retard, aren't you?

Re:isn't Usenet dead?

[kryptkpr]

Ever heard of Bittorrent?

They put up new [fucking huge] SVCDs all the time, and I've gotten very respectable transfer rates from the BT network (250k/sec or so).

Resounding YES.

[A55M0NKEY]

Usenet is THE place for Lolita Donkey Fuckers and Cartoon bondage anal fuck. MUCH better than the WWW with no popups.

Does this really work

[portwojc]

From the UDP faq

So if you cancel everything from the UDP site, don't legitimate people get canceled, too?

Yes. One of the driving forces behind forcing compliance with generally accepted guidelines is that the ISP's own legitimate users (if any) can bring pressure to bear on their rogue ISP. Remember, the UDP is a near-last-resort measure.

Does that really work? That sounds awfully a lot like the way black hole lists a suppose work. All I hear from that are customers on those blackholed networks complaining about how bad those blocks are. Never have I heard "I called my ISP and put pressure on them to fix the problem".

Re:Not just annoying

[rhaig]

well, reading some of the other comments here, some people are more clueful. UDP'ing isn't just about stopping traffic from one source. It's also about getting other ISP's to cooperate is stopping spam. So this "drop in the bucket" (admitidly, the traffic that is part of the case for the UDP is about 1/10 of one percent of that traffic) will also help convince other admins to cooperate with news admins.

On the other hand, having done the math, 0.11% is still a lot of traffic for one ISP to be generating. If there were only 1000 ISP's, then ok, that's about average, but if you look at sources of usenet articles (Freenix Top 1000) there are 2 bigpond, and 3 telstra servers listed in the top 1000. in the (admitidly old) Feb 2001 stats. What this tells me is that they handle quite a bit of usenet traffic. taking them out of the spam equation should be more than a "drop in the bucket".

Goodbye to BeerGuy and Matilda??? ** SNIFF **

[Picass0]

(alligator tears)

Boy, I know some newsgroups are going to get real empty...

UDP ad.doubleclick..net

[JThaddeus]

I'd love to see these guys get it, along with Orbitz. Kill them and most of my popup woes would go away. I especially hate that fact that, apparently, stuff out of ad.doubleclick.net is not checked against multiple browsers. On my Linux box, Mozilla 1.2.x can hang indefinately trying to pull in some image from those dummies at doubleclick while IE on Windoz works fine.

Re:UDP ad.doubleclick..net

[Phroggy]

Uhh.

You get DoubleClick popup banners in Usenet?

You know in Mozilla you can disable images and JavaScript in mail & newsgroups?

Re:UDP ad.doubleclick..net

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, easy solution:

~>cat /etc/hosts | grep ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
~>

Re:UDP ad.doubleclick..net

[NaveWeiss]

Hi Racheli.
Fuck you.
Bye.

Re:isn't Usenet dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had to deal with Mr. Ritz on several occasions. He is a fucking nutjob. Everyone here wants to just tell the creep: "UseNet is dead, Ritz. Get over it." He used to be big shit "back in the day" but now he is just a bitter old man who gets laughed at when he calls up abuse desks threatening to UDP them. What a fuckhead.

Me too!

[lostboy2]

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Anyway, I like the idea of a UDP. I don't believe it is censorship since an ISP doesn't *have* to honor a UDP cancel. So, for example, a UDP'd user's posts may still appear on deja-news or google groups, for example, if those archives chose to retain them. In many ways, it's no different than blocking calls on your phone. Plus a UDP'd user often can switch to a non UDP'd ISP (not always true, I realize).

Also, while a person may have the right to free speech, that doesn't mean that everyone is obligated to listen to him/her. That's why it's not okay to go around screaming at the top of your lungs in the middle of the night in most neighborhoods -- frat row is a different case, of course :)

Anyway, I think it'd be worth trying. If it seemed like it wasn't working, it could always be repealed.

Re:Me too!

[waspleg]

i dunno where you come from but where i'm from people either a.) call the police or b.) threaten you and in some cases c.) start shooting

if you're going to skulk around at night i suggest stealth ;)

Re:Not just annoying

[Remlik]

Telstra is a government supported monopoly in AU. They really don't have another choice. At least, nothing comparable in price.

Re:AMERICANS MUST DIE FOR A BETTER WORLD FUTURE

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess, French?

And I thought that Usenet was supposed to be free

[discovercomics]

Are we against freedom now... I hate spam as much as the next person but ....first they come for the spammers then they come for the binary groups then they come for the political groups and so it snowballs..... Free USenet its not just for you and me its supposed to be free

Re:And I thought that Usenet was supposed to be fr

[Physics Dude]

No, We're FOR freedom... The freedom to NOT pay to propigate someone else's spam!!! Get a clue!

Re:Not just annoying

[Anonymous Coward]

Your head of state is a corrupt weasel,

Stupid as well.

I hope you're happy.

I'd be entertained(and happy) if he were merely the head of some hick state, as it stands I'm nervous as hell.

NotBush in 2004

USENET IS FOR PERVERTS AND THIEVES

[Anonymous Coward]

see title

Important Stuff:

• Please try to keep posts off topic.
• Try to post new threads with repetitious garbage rather than reply to existing comments.
• Do not read other people's messages, or even the article, before posting your own to increase your chance of repeating others. After all, the editors love duplication!
• Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about, in all CAPS, then leave the body of your message empty.
• Messages critical of the editors or not in agreement with Slashdot Group-think will be moderated down. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page. This way we can claim we don't censor.)

The Patented Slashdot Slippery Slope

[The Ape With No Name]

first they come for the spammers then they come for the binary groups then they come for the political groups and so it snowballs.....

Slippery Slopes are illogical, by defintion, and and, alternately, a way of life for some slashdotters. *sigh* There is no sufficient evidence to demonstrate that they (whoever 'they' are) will proceed from one step to the next down the slope.

The fighting France

[mi]

• The Islamic invasion of Europe was defeated by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours AD 732.

Yes, that's right -- by a Frenchman.

Except he was not really a Frenchman for France did not really exist back then. Europe was a patchwork of different states and statelets, with many parts of today's France being independent or being depending on other suverens (sp?).

Your point was, of course, that French were quite battle-worthy some time ago. This point would've better proven by bringing up the Napoleon's name. Much more recent too :-)

Today's Europe reminds me of ancient Greece during the Roman era. Always complaining about Romans, but too weak to do much on their own. The way Americans feel about Europe also seems similar -- respect for arts and education, laughs at the ... well, you know :-)

Re:The fighting France

[TKinias]

scripsit mi:

Except he was not really a Frenchman for France did not really exist back then.

If you're talking about states, then practically no currently existing state existed in 732. The French monarchy existed more than, for example, the German, Italian, or Danish. (I don't recall if the Merovingian monarchs used the title rex francorum or not--WW-Person gives their title in German as ``König im Frankenreich.'') To the extent that you can talk about any nation existing in the eighth century, it is fair to speak of Franks/French.

Your point was, of course, that French were quite battle-worthy some time ago. This point would've better proven by bringing up the Napoleon's name. Much more recent too :-)

If that were the only point, then yes, Napoléon would have been a better example (It took all of Europe united to bring him down). However, since the poster to which I was responding decided to invoke the mediaeval Islamic threat to Europe, I thought it appropriate to mention that the person who ended that invasion was Frankish/French.

Re:People in Palestine

[Anonymous Coward]

Hitler wasn't a saint. He was the second coming of Christ.

No death penalty - sanctions need more time

[BxT]

Give SPAM a chance!

MOD PARENT UP!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Even in America, people think Bush is an asshole.

Re:Not just annoying

[WilliamX]

Add up the traffic in his message, it's not costing anyone "lots of money." That's a fiction used to justify these overreaching actions.

(expecting moderators to use their points abusively on this post, because they don't like what it says. Oh well, my karma will survive it)

I see that I was correct, moderators just can't resist modding based on their agreement or disagreement with a viewpoint, and moderate down unpopular viewpoints. What a sad commentary.

Re:And I thought that Usenet was supposed to be fr

[rhaig]

It's free to the point in crosses th router port to my network. Once I'm paying for the bandwidth and storage, it's not free anymore. It's mine. And if I don't want to propigate articles that are binary and not in binary groups, that's my business. If I don't want to accept or propigate articles from a certain troublesome ISP, that's my business.

spam costs money to receive. the costs are just hidden as something else.

UDP != Censorship

[belroth]

Unless usenet has changed since I last investigated (it may have that wasn't a crack) there is no contractual obligation between usenet servers, it's a collaborative mechanism. What happens with an UDP is that some (maybe most) of the offending ISPs peers decide that they've had enough and withdraw from peering arrangements, severely restricting the propagation of the ISPs traffic.

The analogy I find useful is to consider like my reaction to certain politicians speeches - when they come on the babblebox I turn over or off - I refuse to listen. They may be able to speak but they don't have to be able to be heard - especially if I have to pay the bill (or part of it).

When Dictators use the Innocent as Shields

[JohnDenver]

I think you're just beginning to stumble on the very harsh reality of this world.

War is all about using innocent people to fight/shield for evil people.

Virtually ALL leaders, generals, dictators, tyrants exploit the concept of human shields, and like sheep, we usually go along with it. If people were smart, we would come to an agreement with our "enemies" and mutually kill the leaders who are using us as thier shilds.

Reality shows us that there no simple answers, let alone perfect answers, to this type of problem. However, History shows us that ignoring/playing into tyrants who use human shields is a big mistake.

From what I've seen, usually the best bet is try to kill/harm as few innocents as possible, but make sure you get the tyrant. In this case, I think it's worth pissing off a few Aussies is worth the benefits to force thier ISP to play by the rules.

If we lived in a perfect world, we would killed Bush, and the Middle East would kill the terrorists

Re:Not just annoying

[amuro98]

That's no excuse for their spam-friendly behavior.

They should still be good internet neighbors, regardless of how much or little competition is in the area.

Otherwise, a UDP will be the least of their worries... If they get onto SPEWS or 1000s of privately maintained blocklists, Telstra will quickly find themselves to be nothing but a very large intranet, cut off from the rest of the world. Usenet may not bring in much revenue, but I can assure you when companies start losing the ability to send email overseas, there's going to be hell to pay...

The internet is slowly being partitioned into two parts. One part will be made up of nothing but the spammers, and the other part will be the internet. Things like UDPs or email blacklists are a way of telling the ISP that they need to make a choice of which side they're going to choose.

How to Stop Spam

[queenb**ch]

Let's imagine that your postman started bringing you 300 letters a a day about penis enlargement, herbal viagra, women who want to meet you, etc. Now, let's add a factor of 10 because you subscribe to some news groups - so now you are getting 3000 letters a day.

You have to hire your neighbors kids to help you sort the stuff. You have to buy a cart to haul it in. Let's say for a minute that you live in an aparment complex with a common mail area. Now all your neighbors are seeing all the email you get about penis enlargements (complete with glossy photos). Now you have this whole embarassment factor going.

The difference here is that the people sending the letters have to buy a stamp. The people sending out the "Visit my web cam" emails don't have to pay anything. Therefore there is not a financial incentive to discourage them. I know one person who is a spammer. He works for 4 hours a day and makes twice as much money in a month as I do in year.

If you want to stop spam, DO NOT RESPOND TO THEIR OFFERS. If you don't buy that toner cartridge, visit the web cam, order the viagra, etc., the finanacial incentive to spam just disappeared. If people weren't stupid and gullible, no one would spam. Moral of the story - Quit being gullbile and stupid.

Queen B

Re:Something like that - Cancelbots

[satsuke]

Though it is precisely the existance of cancelbots that make it important for companies to NOT accept third party cancels .. signed or not.

What about the sometimes nasty people / groups (riaa??) who poison the binary groups with cancels of 1 part out of 10 or 100 so that the entire file is at best corrupt and at worst unusable.

anymore with Usenet .. there are so many commercial providers with peering arrangements out the wazoo that if a message gets to any of them the propagation goes up 100 fold.

Now a UDP if you can lock off they're specific peering providers might be a bit more effective .. and that information is possible to get from some servers if they don't rebuild the header of every message like some are configured to do (seems like Twister is one such program .. or at least it can)

Last Post!

[alpg]

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty,
and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a
scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."
-- Matt Cartmill

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