Slashdot Mirror
"Usenet Death Penalty" against AOL
An anonymous reader wrote in to send us an article from
Deja News discussing the fact that German Usenet Admins
have declared AOL Rogue, and are discussing
banning the ISP
to cut down trolls and spam. The RFD ist auf Deutsch,
so you might wanna hit up
Babelfish for
your usual amusingly broken translation.
It's the company, not the users.
First, the extremely large number of users attracts people who
exploit them with spam and much worse. AOL also exploits
users with pop-up ads that are difficult to remove - like having
one's name taken off a junk mailing list.
Most AOL users just use email for communicating with
relatives and friends and are quite harmless. Very few post
anywhere, even within AOL's own chat rooms.
I think Slashdotters need lessons in netequitte. Relative to the
number of posts or readers, AOL's user base is quite civilized.
The solution is to eliminate ISP's and proliferating domains.
Every citizen of the world should be given a domain, but only
one, and every company allowed only one. ISP's would just
be relay points whose services are contracted by phone and
cable companies or whatever is used to carry the traffic, perhaps
providing storage as well for those connecting with set-top
boxes or other devices that are not full computers. In other words
a net address would be a like a post office address now is.
Many domains would remain inactive, for those choosing not
to use the internet, but many others would be activated. Of
course this would require a reworking of the entire infrastructure
of the net, and can't be done overnight. The way traffic
is handled will change anyway, so why not change it in a manner
which facilitates democracy and true free enterprise rather than
what we have now, which is exploitation of users by unscrupulous
parties providing services whose value is vastly overestimated.
This way every individual, or company, would be responsible for
their own email and content, and real point to point communication
would become a practical reality.
Many nerds are opposed to such freedom, because they make
a good living exploiting users by owning or working for ISPs.
What services do ISP's provide, really. What services do
portals provide? Mostly the illusion of friendliness and convenience.
This would also vastly increase the trade for nerds and others
providing contractural services to individual domain owners,
but in a free market and not by exploiting captive audiences
using ISP"s and portals.
Most importantly it would eliminate the sale and hoarding of
domain names, which really should be outlawed. Anyone with
a grain of sense can see that this practice violates every
principle of human rights and international law.
I am all for this, if enough of a movement gets started to teach AOL a lesson, I would be more than happy to also do it at the small ISP I run.
"I am sorry, but we do not accept mail from AOL here"
Damn, that would be so satisfying.
One problem is, there ARE some intelligent AOL users. My favorite poster to a.p.t is from AOL.
AOL users can't mail some ISP's in the Netherlands and I think this trend will continue AOL cleans up it's act. It's a good thing too, if a lot of ISP's decide to ban AOL, it's a choice: either AOL or the "real" internet. I used to get 4x spams per week from AOL users. I used to forward every message with a complaint.. it HAS stopped recently.
friend, that AOL doesn't take action against spammers when notified, and that several Usenet groups are currently being destroyed by spammers using a series of free trial AOL accounts.
From Babelfish, with a little help from me:
Something to add to the discussion: there seems to be a difference in handling abuse of American and of German AOL users. AOL Germany is a subsidiary of publisher Bertelsmann, so it's a different company than AOL US. In the discussion following the posting of the RfD it was mentioned that while AOL US does honor abuse-notifications, AOL Germany doesn't. I can't verify that myself, though.
Another interesting fact is that according to German "netgod" Lutz Donnerhacke AOL Germany is understanding the problem is going to make an announcement to the (de-)abuse-groups, soon.
Finally, the RfD is obviously lacking support of German news-admins so probably the effect, a successful CfV will have, will be minimal. BTW: It is not cleared, yet, if a formal CfV is possible.
- Sebastian Rittau
> controlling content on the internet on behalf
> of their population or any other way of
> "controlling" the internet
So what's the issue here? The issue here is freedom. If I want to go look at porn, or see information on abortion, or read anti-{insert your country here} propaganda, I should be allowed to. Freedom does not include "doing anything you want." I should not be able to degrade the quality of your service.
I should be free to view whatever content I want.
Spam, however, is another matter entirely. An email message sent to my account is not the same thing as a web page sitting out there. An email to me gets to me, and I am forced to wade through it in order to get to the rest of my messages. The spam sent to me actually causes me harm (in terms of lost time, lost bandwith, and lost disk space). A web page sitting out there that I don't want to see doesn't affect me at all.
USENET has rules. For example, posts are supposed to stay on topic, avoid flames, don't cross post to 1000 different groups. AOL users have violated the policies, and AOL refuses to do anything about it. In order to keep the net sane, they've got to be controled. So we have the freedom to read on topic posts and not see ads for sex sites in EVERY newsgroup.
Here's the principal difference, the Austrailian government is an "outside", "foreign" force trying to impose on how much of the internet their citizens can see and use. The German admins are "inside", "domestic" forces making use of the standard internet self-regulatory features that have evolved over the decades (an eternety in internet time).
Think of it this way: Australia is trying to impose a trade embargo on the Internet (and trying to get local businesses to pay for and manage the blockade). The German admins are police trying to get a drunk tourist to stop disturbing the peace.
To put it another way, Austrailia is insisting one group of people (ISP's) censor another group of people (normal citizen's). The Germans are determining what takes up the space they paid for, and announcing it to the world in case others feel like following suit.
That's why most of us support the German admin's actions instead of the Australian government's.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
The problem is that it isn't that simple. Most malicious spammers now use a technique called superceding where they basically overwrite the body of "signal" messages with noise. This makes it look like legitimate posters in the newsgroup are posting spam under legitimate titles. IMHO this is the most vile kind of spam, since not only does it increase the noise of a newsgroup, it actively decreases the signal, and destroys countless discussions. The worst part is that moderation is usually ineffective agsinst this kind of attack.
I read the internet for the articles.
That may be true, but if a cartel of ISP's all decide on a certain policy, you are still totally pimped. In the US there are laws limiting collusion between supposedly competing businesses, but they are rarely effective unless there is blatant price fixing going on.
Banning an ISP because lots of its users are clueless seems like a bad idea to me. First of all, the majority of UseNet problems are from spam, and the majority of UseNet spam does not originate from AOL. AOL is in fact one of the few ISPs actively combating spam, even taking large spammers to court. Earthlink, Mindspring, FlashNet, etc., are all much more guilty in this field. Why don't we ban them all for refusing to clean up their spam problem?
This whole deal seems as absurd to me as the fact that several IRC networks banned all cablemodem providers since a lot of cablemodem users had improperly configured WinGate software that allowed abuse.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
>If M$ refused to support it's customer base
They already do.
> USENET is not the Internet police. No one is.
This has about as much heft as me claiming that no one has the right to tell anyone what to do. It may be true in my way of thinking, but the fact is that a society cannot function like that.
Besides, it's not your systems in question here, so what you think is irrelevant.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Hopefully the threat alone will cause AOL to make some changes. I know it's not the company itself, it's the users, but since they know they have the largest base of newbies they should do something.
What is that something? How about forcing users to take a quiz on netiquette that they must pass before given the ability to post. Even just a major effort to educate their users would be a step in the right direction. Most ISPs don't have to worry about this, but AOL isn't most ISPs.
?
I guess that's why I (and probably many of us love Slashdot). It's reminiscent of the USENET of long ago. It discusses mostly tech topics and topics of interest to fellow geeks. The S/N ratio is pretty high. Newbies (usually in September) were whacked for bad postings after which they fell into line or were filtered out with killfiles (you rarely had to go this far, though). There was zero spam (it was once a usenet axiom that *you* *don't* *post* *ads* *in* *newsgroups*- *period*. [expecting .forsale and later biz.* groups]). USENET had a common culture back then much like Slashdot has a common culture now. Unfortunately it's a catch-22. Success, like when the internet went mainstream, destroys that culture. USENET is a wasteland now. And Slashdot is becoming popular... hmmm... we shall see. At least Slashdot has a control element the anarchastic USENET lacked.
It seems to me that some people here define their freedom by limiting other people's freedom. This is not what i would call freedom.
My freedom ends where yours begins - and freedom always comes with responsibility. You're free to do whatever you want, you're responsible for your actions, you must not limit the freedom of others. It's a simple principle that can and does cause pretty complex situations.
Usually it's obvious, for instance, think about this: Somebody comes along and puts lots of advertisement stickers on my property. No matter how easy they are to be removed, if I don't want them, I shouldn't be bothered with it.
On your property, feel free to put those stickers all over the place, it's your property. Your decision. But leave mine alone, please, as I'll leave yours in peace.
It's about the same situation: ISP's providing boards for discussion and AOL messing it up with ads against the will of the owners. Oh, it's not AOL that abuses the system, it's just some users - so read on:
I am not saying that if people abuse their rights on an online service, we shouldn't punish them. But punishing individuals is not the same as excluding a large internetprovider and all it's clients.
AOL is free to set up its own rules within their service. AOL customers/members are bound by these rules, if they cause trouble, their accounts will be cancelled. Since the service belongs to AOL, only AOL itself decides who can and who cannot access the service.
At the same time, AOL as an ISP is a member of the Internet, not the owner of the net. There are rules and netizens are bound by these rules. If they cause trouble, their ISP's will be involved, too. If the ISP doesn't help enfore the rules but supports the abusers, the ISP will be held responsible, so the ISP will be punished.
Of course that will punish all innocent customers as well. That's the point, those uninvolved people will hopefully realize that AOL has made a mistake, and once enough people increase the pressure, something will be changed. AOL couldn't care less about public newsgroups, but if their users care enough, they'll make AOL care and act.
-- Eavy (: Linux Is Not UniX
The definition of e-mail spam is "unsolicited bulk email": that is to say, an email message is spam if, and only if, it is unsolicited and sent to a large number of recipients. Likewise, a message is usenet spam if, and only if, it is crossposted or multiposted heavily enough (c.f. the Breidbart Index). In each case, the content of the message is totally irrelevant. Spam is characterized by the manner in which it is delivered, and not by the content contained in the message.
The difference between anti-spam efforts and censorship efforts is that censorship by definition uses message content as the sole criteria for rejection, while spam fighters by definition use message delivery parameters as the sole criteria for rejection.
It was easy at first to eliminate spam from AOL. Since 100% of the content from AOL was spam, it was mighty easy to add a killfile. Then it was netcom, etc... Then they got smart and munged addresses.
What bothers me is that AOL is not a true internet provider in the sense that you can't finger a user or use the traditional ntalk to talk some sense into the newbie. AOL lets them hide. The world they know is behind that free CD they got and the protected proprietary services they got. Somehow they found the newsgroups attractive and decided to spam them.
Since there is no way to identify AOL users, the only way I know how to eliminate the crap is to kill it all.
Its not controlling content, but damage control. Its not the type of content, but noise is not useful. Can you think of a use for spam? And there is no way of controlling it, but to cut it off. There are many people who wish to contribute actual content, but when there is a big pipe pushing raw noise into the newsgroups, its utility is diminished. It breaks.
Usenet might break and become no more if spammers are unchecked. The death penalty might be the lesser of two evils.
"...but I used to travel alot and you can always dial in from anywhere. They even have an 800 number which you can use. Check Email, telnet..."
AOL isnt the only ISP that lets you dial in from anyware. Most big ISP's have 50 state dialups and some have 800 #'s. thelist.com has a list of alot of them. The nice thing about going with a REAL ISP is that they have real admins. Most ISP's will take care of problems. One of AOL's problems is with SpamBot's that hang out in chat rooms and pick up your Email( When i had AOL i got 80~100 SPAM's a day...no BS) address. so how does AOL fix this? They just tell people to turn off their Email or dont use chat. Keeping you happy isnt realy importent...you are only 1 user out of 11 Million
As long as the problem user keeps sending $20 a month to them they wont put a stop to it, it is very hard to get kicked off AOL.
I have to return some videotapes...
Well, personally I see a big difference between what the Australian government tries to do, and what the UDP against AOL tries to reach.
In Australia, the goverment wants to limit certain content - the UDP doesn't. For the UDP, if you would like to receive spam, we don't care - but since so many (I use 'so many' very loosely here; so far I haven't heard a single person who LIKES spam) people complain about spam and AOL doesn't do anything about it, the UDP is one way to make them think about it again. Once they change their policy the UDP restrictions will be lifted.
From then on, nobody will care about the AOL users email content as long as they aren't spammed with it; e.g. if some guy on AOL sends out a commercial mass mailing to people who explicitly requested it, noone will mind. But if they allow people to spam the whole community with free online accounts, then something is IMHO very wrong.
What I would suggest as a possible policy change, that would be if AOL would change the status of their CDs in a way, that the new user can surf and read news, but as long as he doesn't pay (and with that fully disclose who he really is), the user should be barred from posting articles and sending email via this account (AOL is certainly big enough to build a second dial-in system which is firewall protected to barr those test users dialling in through this number from accessing the outside world via NNTP/NNRP/SMTP. Everything else could stay open... And once the user pays, his login will be transferred to another dial-in number, that doesn't have these services blocked.
If every admin would utilize the MAPS, the ORBS database, and participate in these UDPs, the world would be a remarkably spam-free place.
One of the strengths of the Usenet was its distributed design, making it suitable for non-persistant links. Today, I'd say that the cost of running a news server with all the binaries groups outweighs the gain from this design, since most sites who could afford a full newsserver have very good links. A cacheing nntpd is much more useful than a full-blown newsserver these days, except for very large ISPs (IMHO).
Web communities with forums are already evolving nicely, and it seems like they will replace Usenet eventually (except for some die-hards, who still insist on using text consoles and low-bandwidth connections and will do so for the next 10 years; no offense intended).
Note that many Internet users who haven't been around for many years aren't very familiar with Usenet anyway, they'll just go looking for stuff on the web instead.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I tend to agree, you either have to be for total free speech, or acknowledge that there are limits as to what constitutes "free speech". I'm bothered when I see websites, (including a certain Linux User Group) have a blue Internet ribbon on one side, and a "fight spam" on the other. To me, that sends a contradictory message. "I'm for free speech as long as I approve of it."
I know people argue that Spam costs them money... please! On my slow dialup connection it takes less than a second to download a spam mail, and even less time to delete said mail. In the US, most ISPs charge a flat monthly rate, so you can't even argue that you are being charged for the time to download it. I know the situation is different in other countries, but other countries don't have the first amendment either.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
In theory. However, I haven't seen that happening. In 1994, before Spam was a problem, I signed up for unlimited access with an ISP, and was paying $19.95/month. Today, I am still paying $19.95/month. If you factor in inflation, then I'm actually paying less today!
Since 1994, the cost of bigger pipes has come way down, today you can get cable modems for about $40, maybe up to twice that for DSL. I expect prices for bandwidth will continue to fall in the forseeable future
I suppose the argument can be made that bandwidth would be even cheaper today than it is if not for spam. This may be true, but such arguments are hard to prove.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
After those few days, all the spammers that were using uu.net at the time, where gone from uu.net. Of course, later new spammers has come to uu.net, but at least now they're aware that it's a problem. (I wonder where they went :).
Perhaps a complete UDP would make AOL actually see the problem? X million annoyed AOL customers have the power to make AOL change that a few sysadms do not have.
- the Crazy Fraggle
Doesn't seem all that long ago that AOL's IRC server was delinked from efnet. And IRC has been a much better place.
Also, what most don't understand, AOL isn't an ISP. AOL is an "on-line service". The difference? AOL is a proprietary network, that just happens to let users have some access to the internet.
The internet is like a world-wide library. AOL is me letting someone in my basement and going "if you need a book from the public library, I'll see what I can do"
So what's this have to do with usenet and irc? AOL is like the idiots that go to the public library, take out a book, and rip all the pages out of it before they return it. Banning AOL is like saying "don't screw with out stuff, you want to destory books, do it to yours at home. Now return your library card and have a nice day"
It would be satisfying until...
You do some consulting for a company.
A company of networked consultants.
Consultants many of whom utilize AOL.
From AOL, who send you specifications.
Specifications you turn into a billable product.
Work done, oh no, have to send invoice.
Have to mail invoice to...guess what.
Accounts payable person with...guess what.
An AOL mail address.
Send invoice and wait.
Hey. what's go'in on?
Oh my! You didn't get the reply?
Needed to validate some information.
Information needed to release the check.
Sorry, you'll have to wait until next month,
to be paid for your work.
Think this is made up?
Sorry, its reality!
United States
Actually, considering that that AOL is an ISP, it's probably illegal to form a cartel and block their traffic.
Anyways, how would you feel if AT+T Worldnet, Prodigy, and UUNet decided to block your ISP's traffic?
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The reason I dislike AOL so strongly is their attitude towards the internet. AOL sees it as a natural resource to exploit, rather than a community. They take and take, but they do not accept any responsibility for problems they cause. In the environment of the internet, AOL is one of the largest polluters.
Last year a luser at AOL was running a barrage of Denial of Service attacks on our webserver. I don't know why (s)he did this but I do know that I received absolutely ZERO help from AOL resolving the issue. After a many attempts to talk to someone who could understand what a DoS attack is, I was told the equivalent of "tough luck". They wouldn't give me the time of day unless the FBI was involved.
When we discover cracking activity from other ISPs, those ISPs are usually very helpful in taking care of the problem.
This is just one example, but this newsgroup issue and earlier IRC issues seem to indicate a pattern of behavior. AOL needs to realize that the rest of the net doesn't exist for them to exploit. AOL needs to step up and take some kind of responsibility for the problems they create.
The biggest problem is that they've created an accountability nightmare. No one can effectively deal with an abuser armed with a box of AOL CDs, except for AOL. And AOL doesn't really care.
If the UDP forces them to improve their abuse management, I think that it's a good thing. I don't think they will change until there is damage to their reputation/bottom line.
- OT, who would not recommend AOL to anyone.
I'd say there's one important difference between the Australian govt. and the ISP's in question.
Australia is trying to dictate what every australian ISP, and user is allowed to download, view, read, carry on their computer systems or internet access. Here the people have no choice in the matter neither do the ISP's who to comply with the new laws will have to invest hundreds to thousands of dollars a piece so that they can filter out and block "unreasonable" content and possibly monitor the activity's of their users.
This on the other hand is nothing more than a specific group of ISP's choosing not to carry certain content. As they own the services they provide they also have the right and the freedom to choose what services they do provide and what content they allow to be stored on their servers and harddrives. No different than me placing a filter in my news group reader to filter out and delete any posts from @aol.com, as I have the right and freedom to view and download what I choose.
Because an ISP chooses not to carry certain content, that does effect their users but those users still have a choice, if they feel the ISP doesn't provide enough services they want or need that have full ability to switch to a new one, subscribe to an online news service where they will probably get access to far more groups than their ISP has ever carried, etc.
So the difference is that in the German ISP situation every person involved has a choice, the ISP's have a choice on what they want to carry and pass thru their equiptment, and their users have a choice of sticking with the ISP's new policy's, switching ISP's, or finding their news posts somewhere else.
Australia no one has a choice, the govt. says this is how it will be and short of moving out of the country you will obey the rules and only see what we want you to see.
I use AOL.
i know quite abit about computers (I like to think anyway...)
The reasons are many, kinda long, but I used to travel alot and you can always dial in from anywhere. They even have an 800 number which you can use. Check Email, telnet. Its just really easy. I've had no problems with them.
Thats the problem with AOL is that they make things really too easy. Newbies can do anything. But the AOL admin are not clueless, if you go to use Usenet, they have instruction (unsenet FAQ and Edicite.) right there for people to use. Most probably don't bother to read the instructions (go figure..) They're so big and basically they're turning into the countries biggest ISP. There seems to be less and less AOL content and more internet content now. Its hard to police that many members.
As such, with that TCP/IP connection you can do a lot of things. With their I month free trial, You can get an account, do whatever and be thrown off with out paying.
AOL does bring in people who aren't computer savy into the net. It adds alot to have more non technically oriented people using the internet. They bring a different perspect to NET which is good. The explosive growth of the internet has been helped by AOL getting Main ST. USA onto the internet.
Families like it because for little kids you can block alot of features (web, chat, etc...) I let your kids romp around the relatively safe (abiet boring for adults) AOL stuff.
So in summary you have to take the good with the bad sometimes. throwing of 50 +million people off the internet won't help solve the problem. The problem with just spread to many smaller isps.
/A
Babelfish makes the translation up until 4 para. in, then gives me "**Translation ends here**" with a link to "babelfish.altavista" (an incomplete address.
I get the drift of the paper, however. In the past, and in the future I suspect, AOL will be a force to be reckoned with as far as spam is concerned. They are so fixated on protecting their users from spam (which they can't) that they don't realise that the users are the spammers. This is certainly unfortunate, as the trend does not seem to be a stoppable one. The best thing to do is to stay away from groups that are prone to spam, and stick to the web for your information.
Lowmag.net
It's about time someone decided to ban AOL. Maybe if those of us in the US decided to ban them too, AOL would clean up their act. Ah well, there's always Usenet2.
When I was able to do my own spam-armoring, you got a chance to email me. Now you can only hope I see your reply.
It has got a bit large and unwieldly, hasn't it? Unfortunately, I fear that it's too late to do anything about it. The Great Renaming[1] probably confused a lot of people the first time round (it was before my time, so I don't know how bad it was). How many people will end up hideously confused if we try it again?
[1] Note to newbies: until the mid-1980s, all Usenet groups had names beginning "net.". The current hierarchy ("alt.", "comp.", "soc." etc) was started on a day which is now known as The Great Renaming, when all the old groups got renamed.
Something in this discussion doesn't seem right. Most people were adamantly against the new Australian laws on controlling content on the internet on behalf of their population or any other way of "controlling" the internet, but when it comes to stopping spam it seems that for some people everything is allowed.
If you say that AOL should be banned from USENET altogether, you are in fact not that much different from the Australian government as you pretend to be.
It seems to me that some people here define their freedom by limiting other people's freedom. This is not what i would call freedom.
I am not saying that if people abuse their rights on an online service, we shouldn't punish them. But punishing individuals is not the same as excluding a large internetprovider and all it's clients.
I, for one, think that a lot of people are a bit over-sensitive to spam. They will classify anything they read that does not concern them or has a slight commercial reference as spam. If you don't want to read it there are plenty of ways to avoid it, especially on usenet. I use several filters myself to get rid of the usual crap.
Message on our company Intranet:
"You have a sticker in your private area"
beauty is only a light switch away
The trouble is, this is an extreme action that may well actively harm the net access of a lot of people. I can appreciate the problem, but I don't think this is an acceptable solution.
There are a lot of worthy and intelligent people using AOL. There are also a lot of idiots. Without doubt it's bad to have AOL's anonymous trial-type accounts unlimited. And AOL's own attitude towards this is often vaguely comical.
But, IMHO, the legitimate users of AOL already have enough problems of their own, without having those problems added to by being UDP'ed simply because of the network provider they choose to use. That's insanity. It's overkill. It's fly-swatting with a flamethrower. And it's not, IMHO, the solution.
--