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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If every admin would utilize the MAPS, the ORBS database, and participate in these UDPs, the world would be a remarkably spam-free place.
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
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.
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:
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