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"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.
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
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.
There's something you might miss, when reading a "bablefished" translation of the RfD: The RfD asks the admins to issue an UDP for the de.* hierarchy in Usenet, not banning AOL completely (which would be a quite senseless thing to discuss about in a de.*-only RfD).
It is not even clear, which kind of UDP should be issued, a passive one (where the newsfeeds won't take any postings coming from AOL) or an active one (where any AOL-Postings will be canceled on sight).
Furthermore the RfD talks about many issues, which aren't related to Usenet at all (not reacting on messages sent to abuse@aol.com, sending UCE from AOL test accounts), so many admins (and users) can't agree on issuing an UDP for those points.
Next: The actual reason for posting this RfD is a guy (calling himself Seltzer-McKensey) who is actually destroying four newsgroups in the de.*-hierarchy (de.etc.finanz.*) by posting hundreds of postings there monthly. AOL doesn't react to this (neither by calling them, nor through e-mails sent to abuse@aol.net). They tried to ban him from posting, but this guy just switches to his next AOL-CD and goes on posting.
But through this guy alone, the technical funtionality of Usenet is not harmed, so that's no reason for an UDP. And many of the admins and users in Germany (or in de.* which is international) take the same standpoint. There's idiots with each ISP, AOL has the problem of their non-restricted testing accounts.
Now, before anyone accuses me of standing in for the enemy ;-) - I would like to see those AOL test accounts being restricted (no posting without verification of the person who uses an account), I also would like AOL to actually react to mails to abuse@aol.net, not just having their ignorebot giving me replies. And that they can restrict those accounts has been shown some weeks ago: Without being a verified user with AOL, you can't send any e-mail attachments.
But I don't think that the mentioned points in the RfD qualify for issuing an UDP (and I don't quite see, what an UDP limited to one hierarchy could do). UDP is the last resort against an ISP, and I don't see, that this last resort should be used against AOL at the moment.
If UDP, then hierarchy-wide and not local to one hierarchy. If UDP then for reasons everyone will understand, but not for those. Otherwise there should be an UDP against deja.com right now, for the same reasons (or take any other company which allows webbased posting without checking on the users).
Ralph
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.
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.
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