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: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: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: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(

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: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?

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: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: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: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.

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: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: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

[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.