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

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.

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.

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: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.