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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.
The Geek Union was stupid.
/. discussion.
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
Narrative
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.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
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.
. . . 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.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
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).
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.
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.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
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.
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.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')