Global Alert For All: Jesus is Coming Soon
d...@giant.intranet.com
-Del
------- Forwarded Messages
Date: Sun, 6 Feb 1994 01:17:49 -0500 (EST)
Sender: ietf-r...@ietf.cnri.reston.va.us
From: Paul Robinson <PA...@tdr.com>
Subject: What goes around, comes around
Message-Id: <01.1994Feb06.01h0...@TDR.COM>
From: Paul Robinson <PA...@TDR.COM>
Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA
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The following was posted on a local BBS about the recent incident on the
network.
ANDREWS NEWS
Staff member suspended for network abuse
by Wendy Wein
Clarence Thomas, systems administrator for "Redwood," the
administrative computer, will be temporarily suspended from his job
because he sent a 5,500 character religious message to between
1,200 to 1,500 news groups across the world through the Internet.
This act violated the system's purpose, giving Andrews
University a bad reputation among the Internet users. Over 1,200
complaints came over the Internet to the Andrews computer science
department demanding justice.
According to Mailen Kootsey, chair of the academic computing
committee and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Thomas will
be suspended from his position for a week. His status will be
reviewed at the end of the time period. During this week Thomas
will not have available access to the network computers.
Sometime between five and eight o'clock Monday evening,
January 17, Thomas sent his three-page message titled "Global Alert
for All: Jesus is Coming Soon," from the Andrews computing center
to the news groups which are accessible through the Internet, a
computer system which connects computers throughout the world.
These news groups deal with different individual topics. For
example, if a news group is about cars, then only information about
cars should be sent to that news group. Some people subscribe to
more than one group and some universities and organizations are
subscribed to almost all of them. Thomas sent his religious message
to all of these groups.
People who were not interested received this message, some
more than once. Some organizations received 1,200 to 1,500 copies.
For many of the subscribers religious input was not accepted very
well. This message took up their time and money.
The message accumulated 5.5 kilobytes of disk space. Within an
hour after the message was sent, Daniel Bidwell, administrative
contact for the network at Andrews, received Internet messages from
the East coast.
In two hours they came from the West coast and within four
hours, complaint letters came in from other countries. The letters
made statements such as "This is not what I am paying for" and
"Will this guy be stopped?"
In addition to the news groups, Thomas also sent his message
through a mailing list, filling others' electronic mail. This could
have been changed by sending it to only a few news groups so fewer
copies could have been distributed.
"If he sent his message through a news group which dealt with
religious issues then everything would be fine," said Bidwell, "No
one would have known."
There are no laws against Thomas' actions, yet he violated and
broke some of the unwritten rules of society. That is why many
people are unhappy.
This act created poor reactions towards the university.
Thomas' intent was to spread the good news of Jesus' return to all
those he could reach. Thomas was trying to witness to others, yet
instead of creating joy in peoples' heart, he only created anger
and resentment. "He was doing the right thing in the wrong way,"
said Bidwell.
Some of those who wrote to complain said that they agreed with
the message, but that Thomas delivered it wrongly. This message has
created bad public relations for the church at another's expense.
The letters that were received included threats. They wanted
Thomas fired, or else the Internet connections from the Andrews
campus could be "taken." People are now writing and finding ways to
contact President Lesher. Not only have strangers called, but also
a large amount of Adventists claiming that something must be done
to save the church's sacred reputation.
On Monday morning, January 24, Rob Barnhurst, Thomas's
supervisor and director of the computing center, Ed Wines, vice
president for finance, and Kootsey, met to discuss the incident.
They decided to send out an apology through the Internet,
explaining that they did not condone Thomas's act and will try to
keep this from happening again.
Thomas graduated from Andrews with a computer science degree.
Those at the computer science department feel that he knew better
then to send out that many copies. "It was clearly, very definitely
abuse," said Ray Paden, chair of the computer science department.
"He broke the guidelines for the Internet and violated the net
etiquette. The trust was violated."
-->
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Paul Robinson - Pa...@TDR.COM
Voted "Largest Polluter of the (IETF) list" by Randy Bush <ra...@psg.com>
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The following Automatic Fortune Cookie was selected only for this message:
Good day for overcoming obstacles. Try a steeplechase.
------- Message 2
Subject: Re: What goes around, comes around
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 06 Feb 1994 01:17:49 EST."
<01.1994Feb06.01h0...@TDR.COM>
Date: Sun, 06 Feb 1994 13:49:31 EST
From: Craig Metz <cm...@thor.tjhsst.edu>
In message <01.1994Feb06.01h0...@TDR.COM>, you (re-)write:
>ANDREWS NEWS
>
>Staff member suspended for network abuse
>by Wendy Wein
> People who were not interested received this message, some
>more than once. Some organizations received 1,200 to 1,500 copies.
>For many of the subscribers religious input was not accepted very
>well. This message took up their time and money.
> The message accumulated 5.5 kilobytes of disk space. Within an
>hour after the message was sent, Daniel Bidwell, administrative
>contact for the network at Andrews, received Internet messages from
>the East coast.
Just to note a major error here, the message accumulated 5.5KB of
disk space... for EACH newsgroup it got to for EACH site that carries that
group. We carry a paltry 353 groups. That's 1,941.5KB of storage for this
one single message, posted by a script separately to every news group that
this user had access to. We're behind a 14.4k link, so with overhead, this
message sopped away bandwidth for about a half hour. A site with a full news-
feed of, say, 1,500 groups would have to dedicate 8,250KB of storage and, at
14.4k, about an hour and a half of connect time. (This is not at all an
uncommon case: A lot of sites get full or nearly-full feeds via UUCP, some
even making long-distance calls to do it. I really pity those who were paying
by the minute for that user's big mistake.)
IMO, the worst part of all this is that events like this are becoming
more, not less, frequent. Signs of bad things to come as the net reaches the
global masses...
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