Re: Newsgroup spam ➡ a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

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Newsgroup spam ➡ a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

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Newsgroup spam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

Spamming of Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates e-mail spam. The first widely recognized Usenet spam (though not the most famous) was posted on 18 January 1994 by Clarence L. Thomas IV, a sysadmin at Andrews University.[1][2] Entitled "Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon",[3] it was a fundamentalist religious tract claiming that "this world's history is coming to a climax." The newsgroup posting bot Serdar Argic also appeared in early 1994, posting tens of thousands of messages to various newsgroups, consisting of identical copies of a political screed relating to the Armenian Genocide.

The first "commercial" Usenet spam,[2][4] and the one which is often (mistakenly) claimed to be the first Usenet spam of any sort, was an advertisement for legal services entitled "Green Card Lottery - Final One?".[5] It was posted on April 12, 1994, by Arizona lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, and hawked legal representation for United States immigrants seeking papers ("green cards").

Usenet convention defines spamming as "excessive multiple posting", that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). During the early 1990s there was substantial controversy among Usenet system administrators (news admins) over the use of cancel messages to control spam. A "cancel message" is a directive to news servers to delete a posting, causing it to be inaccessible. Some regarded this as a bad precedent, leaning towards censorship, while others considered it a proper use of the available tools to control the growing spam problem.

A culture of neutrality towards content precluded defining spam on the basis of advertisement or commercial solicitations. The word "spam" was usually taken to mean "excessive multiple posting (EMP)", and other neologisms were coined for other abuses – such as "velveeta" (from the processed cheese product of that name) for "excessive cross-posting".[6] A subset of spam was deemed "cancellable spam", for which it is considered justified to issue third-party cancel messages.[7]

In the late 1990s, spam became used as a means of vandalising newsgroups, with malicious users committing acts of sporgery to make targeted newsgroups all but unreadable without heavily filtering. A prominent example occurred in alt.religion.scientology.

Prevalent in recent times is the MI-5 Persecution spam, which is well known across many newsgroups. These rambling postings often appear as clusters of twenty or more messages with varying subjects and content, but all related to Mike Corley's perceived surveillance of himself by MI5, the British intelligence agency. These rambling messages used to state the originator as MI5V...@mi5.gov.uk. Lately (December 2007) the spammer has taken to altering the "from" address and subject line in an attempt to get past newsgroup "kill" filters. This UK-based spammer readily admits that he has mental illness in several of his postings. See also The Corley Conspiracy.

The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "spamminess". The use of the BI and spam-detection software has led to Usenet being policed by anti-spam volunteers, who purge newsgroups of spam by sending cancels and filtering it out on the way into servers. This very active form of policing has meant that Usenet is a far less attractive target to spammers than it used to be, and most of the industrial-scale spammers have now moved into e-mail spam instead.

Google Usenet News Archive

Unfortunately, the advent of the large Usenet archive kept as part of the Google Groups website, has made Usenet more attractive to spammers than ever. The goal in this case is not just to reach the members of a newsgroup, but to also take advantage of the fact that Google gives a higher pagerank to websites that are referred to by these messages, which are catalogued and mirrored in multiple languages at Google's top-level domain. Critics have suggested that Google has ulterior motives for "turning a blind eye" to the problem since the websites being pointed to use Google ads, which potentially generate revenue for both the spammer AND Google. The spam is extremely unfair to the companies paying Google and the spammer for an ad-click, as the most prevalent current spam (2010) is trying to trick readers into clicking on web ads by referring to them as images and saying that a link is hidden in them "due to high sex content" or that a link hidden in the image (Google ad) will take them to a "PayPal form" that will give them money.[8][9]

While most newsreaders filter the spam at either the server or user level, Google does not filter spam out of its Usenet News archive. Google does, however, offer spam filtering for groups that decide to abandon Usenet and form a moderated Google Group, which gives another reason why Google would turn a blind eye to spam in its archive of Usenet News.

See also

Sporgery
Cancelbot
References

Templeton, Brad. "Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse". Retrieved 11 July 2006.
"20 Year Archive on Google Groups". Google. 2003. Retrieved 11 July 2006.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9401191510.AA18576%40jse.stat.ncsu.edu
"History of Spam". Mailmsg.com. Archived from the original on 26 March 2006. Retrieved 11 July 2006.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2odj9q%2425q%40herald.indirect.com
"velveeta" from The Jargon File 4.4.7
FAQ: Current Usenet spam thresholds and guidelines at faqs.org
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/eb8005557ad288f2/aa7523840180dafa?lnk=gst&q=high+sex+content#aa7523840180dafa
http://groups.google.com/group/cakewalk.coffeehouse/browse_thread/thread/336167892f7ac19e/b5581be337345d54?q=paypal+form
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newsgroup_spam&oldid=735587772"
Categories: SpammingUsenet
This page was last modified on 21 August 2016, at 19:38.
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Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and the Gut Microbiome

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Psychiatry Advisor > Conference Highlights > APA 2016 Coverage > Likely


Connection Between Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and the Gut Microbiome
Dinko Kranjac, PhD, Medical Editor Dinko Kranjac, PhD, Medical Editor

May 17, 2016
Likely Connection Between Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and the Gut Microbiome
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ATLANTA, Georgia – A rapidly emerging field of research indicates that approximately 100 trillion microbes and more than 3 million microbial genes in the human gut may play a significant role in human health and disease.1,2 It is also becoming evident that the intestinal microflora regulates brain function and behavior, and may thus influence the pathophysiology of various neuropsychiatric disorders including anxiety, depression, and autism.3,4
Now, preliminary findings of research presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in Atlanta, Georgia, indicate a likely connection between obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and a disrupted gut microbial milieu.5
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This chronic, relatively common, and frequently debilitating psychiatric syndrome is characterized by recurrent intrusive thoughts (obsessions) that trigger anxiety and prompt repetitive mental or behavioral acts (compulsions) performed by the affected individual to control or diminish that anxiety. Despite intense research efforts and recent advances in understanding the condition, the exact etiology of OCD remains largely undefined, therapeutic agents are only modestly beneficial, and the clinical need is significant.6
Michael Van Ameringen, MD, a professor within the department of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues performed a microbiome analysis in untreated patients diagnosed with OCD (n=11) and compared the data to typical healthy volunteers (n=12). In addition, the study participants completed the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS), the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised (OCI-R), the Montgomery Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), and the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS-21) diagnostic questionnaires; individuals with OCD scored significantly higher than control participants on all measures of OCD, depression, anxiety, and stress. It is worth noting that in this sample, comorbid generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), major depressive disorder (MDD), social anxiety disorder (SAD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or tic disorder was established in 40% to 60% of patients diagnosed with OCD.
The researchers extracted DNA from stool samples. They identified bacterial diversity using targeted high-throughput sequencing of the V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene, a well-established technique regarded as the gold standard in distinguishing bacterial subtypes. (The 16S rRNA gene is highly conserved between species of bacteria, and V3 is a hypervariable region that can be used to differentiate microbial communities.7)
In general, the samples collected from individuals diagnosed with OCD show lower abundance and lower diversity of microbial populations, as compared to the samples from typical control participants.
Click here for more research from the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.
References
Khanna S, Tosh PK. A clinician's primer on the role of the microbiome in human health and disease. Mayo Clin Proc. 2014; 89:107-114.
Collins SM, Surette M, Bercik. The interplay between the intestinal microbiota and the brain. Nat Rev Microbiol. 2012;10:735-742.
arandi SS, Peterson DA, Treisman GJ, Moran TH, Pasricha PJ. Modulatory effects of gut microbiota on the central nervous system: how gut could play a role in neuropsychiatric health and disease. J Neurogastroenterol Motil. 2016;22:201-212.
Parracho HM, Bingham MO, Gibson GR, McCartney AL. Differences between the gut microflora of children with autistic spectrum disorders and that of healthy children. J Med Microbiol. 2005;54:987-991.
Van Ameringen M, Turna J, Kaplan KG, Anglin R, Patterson B, Surette M. A pilot study evaluating the gut microbiome in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder versus healthy controls: preliminary findings. Poster presentation at: 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association; May 14-18, 2016; Atlanta, GA. P6-132.
Bokor G, Anderson PD. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. J Pharm Pract. 2014;27:116-130.
Huse SM, Ye Y, Zhou Y, Fodor AA. A core human microbiome as viewed through 16S rRNA sequence clusters. PLoS One. 2012;7:e34242.


http://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/apa-2016-coverage/ocd-and-the-gut-is-there-a-connection/article/496849/