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?????

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.

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: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.