Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?????
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
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
Cheap UK and US VPS
"...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.
I think it would be sort of like communism.... its great in principle but not in practice.
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..
Click here to read too much about my personal life
Huh?
... UCE, ie SPAM!
Offtopic?
Hum... why have UDPs been used or threatend to be used in the past?
Lets see...
Erols.com
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
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.
If they remove the ISP that the spam originates from, the spammer will just find new ISPs.
/dev/null again X(
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
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Death penalty for using usenet? Jeeze MPAA and RIAA are are extreme!
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).
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.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
"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?
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
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.
evil adrian
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!
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
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.
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
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:
Is this a classic case of "do what I say, not what I do". ?
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.
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.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
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.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
Aw crap, ninjas!
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')