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FAQ: "Rogue Sites" on the Internet

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Ricardo Hector Gonzales

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Jul 11, 1997, 3:00:00 AM7/11/97

FAQ: "Rogue Sites" on the Internet?

---FAQ BEGINS---
Last updated: January 12, 1997
Author: ric...@paranoia.com (Ricardo H. Gonzales)

NOTICE: This text may not be reproduced in any form for profit without
the permission of the author. It may be reproduced in any
form provided that no money is being charged.

The question of so-called "rogue sites" on the Internet has recently
become a popular topic of discussion. This FAQ was created in order to
cover frequently asked questions about the "rogue site" label and to
discuss related issues of interest.

1. What is a "rogue site"?

A "rogue site" is the title that in the past was assigned to Internet
sites that were operated by individuals who were intent on harming
the net. The sort of net-abuse they practiced included
packet-sniffing, network floods, and account cracking. Recently,
the title "rogue site" has come to mean any site in which an
individual has an email account with which they can express
opinions anonymously or state an unpopular opinion without the
approval of certain people who would like to restrict these forms
of expression.

Each of these behaviours and methods of dealing with them will be
discussed below.

2. I am a system administrator. Why is my site being called a "rogue
site"?

What likely occured is that one of your users posted a message that
someone else didn't agree with. What could have happened is that
the reader may have been in such strong disagreement that he posted
a message in one of the news.admin.* groups claiming that your site
is a rogue site.

It is also possible that a user on your system posted to several
newsgroups with a message that was unpopular. Or maybe a user on
your system sent unwanted email to people. If one person doesn't
like the opinions or behaviour of your users, then you may
be labeled a "rogue site" by this person and their friends.

3. What is the UDP?

UDP stands for the USENET Death Penalty which is handed out by
an offended person and their friends when they don't like the
user opinions or behaviours that come from your site. It is
a tactic of revenge by use of censorship to try to cut you off
from the Internet. It is an attempt to assert the values of
a person and his friends over free expression.

4. Who are these people who control "Netiquette" and the Internet?

Netiquette is a term that some people use when they mean to
say that there is a type of manners that you must adhere
to when using the net. However, this concept has lots of
problems in practice. There are a myriad of different ideas
about how manners on the net should exist. Some people would
like to keep things like a church where nothing confrontational
or strong may be expressed. Others would like to speak freely
and let others know about what they are thinking, even if it is
unpleasant or not socially conforming. There are of course all
ranges of personality types between this. Because there is not
and single definition for the type of manners that all people
should follow, there is no way to define netiquette, and it
effectively does not exist. Those who claim it exists will
cite a document that someone wrote, but that document only expresses
the netiquette of the author and there will be millions of people
on the Internet that disagree with that opinion.

When it comes to people trying to control the Internet, this is
an easier problem to solve. Because of its distributive and
democratically cooperative nature, no one really owns the Internet.
But there are people who would like to think that they did and try
to control people in various ways. Some controllers try to stop
people who post messages containing certain ideologies, political
thoughts, or that are even critical of the controllers. In some
cases the controllers send forged messages to cancel that articles
that offend them. Often they try to have other people's accounts
removed. But there is a way to stop many of these offenses.

Because many of these people usually have this power through their
jobs, it is proper to have them fired for their abuse of their
position. Going through email to an administrator at their machine
is not likely to be seen by anyone but them. You will need to contact
a person who is in power at that organization and that may take
more work. A possible approach to finding this information is
to post your grievance and a request for information on one of
the news.admin.* groups where there are watchdogs who document
the net-abuse of cabal members. For long time offenders there is
a good deal of public information available about their employers
and private life.

5. Why are certain harmless behaviours deemed illegal by "Netiquette"
standards?

If you understand the fictional "Netiquette" as nothing more than a
system of morality that represents a small number of clamorous
people, you can understand how they tried to make it seem real.
They were effective in coming up with rules and propagating them, but
their netiquette system has no further basis than this. Adding to
the comedy and tragedy of this system is the fact that additional
arbitrary rules have been invented to rule alongside it. An example
of this is the "Breidbart Index (BI)" which is a made-up formula to
determine whether or not a person has posted "too many" messages in
a 45-day span. If a person has exceeded the BI level, people who
want to control the Internet will step in and begin to forge messages
as the sender to cancel the posts that their baseless formula
indicates are in excess. The disastrous thing about this system is
that the formula means nothing because it was simply made up by a
person so that they could claim a reason to control USENET. Anyone
could come up with any other formula and push it was a standard,
thought it would be equally as meaningless. Recently, a newer version
of the BI, called BI2, is being pushed as a stricter limit that will
allow for even more cancels of posts that this group dislikes.

Peter da Silva has recently been pushing for even stricter USENET
article cancellation rules. He wants to cancel anything posted to
more than 3 groups, though in some cases posting up to 2 dozen groups
may be an appropriate distribution method. This doesn't seem to concern
him, nor does the extreme unpopularity of his opinions and actions,
which are seen as a threat to USENET by many.

The actions of the people who send forged cancel messages have
severely harmed the net. In reaction, several organizations are
looking for ways to bypass their actions to keep free expression
possible, while adding features such as ad hoc moderating/advising
to increase the value and openness of USENET.

What must always be remembered is that the responses to net abuse
that are being used now (forged cancels, following the Breidbart
index or other arbitrary scemes, etc.) only address symptoms
and never the cause of the actual problem. Any reliance on them
only serves to make the actual problem worse while no methods
of stopping abuse are being developed. Those who attempt to
enforce their methods on the net remain fixated on an old and
useless paradigm and do not see the larger picture. They end
up causing more problems than they solve and should be avoided.

6. How can I stop the cabal so that my users and I may speak freely?

The first thing you will want to do is to remove the power that
certain individuals have claimed for themselves. They have no
right to this power and should be removed from their positions
because of their abuse and harm to the Internet.

David C Lawrence (ta...@uunet.uu.net)

He attempts to control all aspects of USENET group creation
and deletion. This means that he decides whether or not to
send approval for a group creation or cancelation of a group
that he does not approve of. This stifles attempts by interested
people to have a "Big 8" group created to discuss timely matters.
His control limits or completely destroys all attempts to gain
decent message propagation across USENET, confining group
discussions to obscure "alt" groups that are rarely propagated
well, or at all, on most systems.

Chris Lewis (cle...@ferret.ocunix.on.ca)

He sends thousands of forged cancels a month to destroy posts that he
and his friends dislike. He claims to be doing a service and gets
very angry when people point out that he is cancelling articles that
they wanted to see or that he had no right to cancel.

John E. Milborn aka JEM (j...@xpat.com)

He's another person who is proud of his forged cancel messages and
thinks he is a crusader for content control. In a strange sort of
way it is true that censorship and cancelling other people's articles
is content control, but that's nothing to be proud of. He has
recently claimed to have ceased his forged cancels, though forged
cancel messages continue to flow from someone using his address.

Robert Braver (rbr...@ohww.norman.ok.us)

This guy joined the bandwagon and loves to send forged cancel
messages too. But I bet he'd be upset if someone sent forged
cancel messages in his name if they disliked his posts.

Jan Isley (j...@bagend.atl.ga.us)

As a major USENET vote keeper, he was exposed for vote fraud and
shamefully stepped down from that position. Since then he has been
less of a public threat to USENET though he still operates behind the
scenes. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of resistance to the idea
of having new elections for all of the newsgroups that were created or
denied because of the massive vote fraud he perpetuated. He also
has proclaimed himself the only authority on what posts are not
permitted in the local atl hierarchy which resulted in another count
of Isley being called a censor and control freak.

7. As a user, how should I deal with users' behaviours at a "rogue site"?

It is possible to act appropriately to each of the behaviours that
label a site to be a "rogue" one. Sometime it is most appropriate
to not act at all. Here are common recommendations:

Symptom: User expressed an unpopular opinion in a USENET group.
Solution: Discuss the opinion instead of trying to label that site
as a "rogue site" or having that user's account removed.

Symptom: User posted a "disruptive" message in a USENET group.
Solution: The definition of a "disruptive" message seems nearly
impossible to achieve in practice. There has never been a
message posted that could not be skipped or ignored, therefore
there hasn't ever really been a "disruptive" message.
Disregard the message or email the user if you feel
compelled to communicate. This is not an indication of
a "rogue site".

Symptom: User posted a useless message, such as "MAKE MONEY FAST".
Solution: Sadly, most of USENET consists of useless messages. This is
just one example of the sort of message that is useless to
some people. It is not permissible to cancel a message
simply because it serves no pragmatic value to you. Others
might find it useful. Disregard the message or email the
user if you feel compelled to communicate. This is not an
indication of a "rogue site".

Symptom: User posted an unpopular message to several groups.
Solution: Use a filtering service for USENET content (see "How
do we fix USENET" below)

Symptom: User mailed unwanted messages to several people.
Solution: This is not a USENET problem, so should not be discussed
in any news.admin.* newsgroups. However, to keep this
sort of question from being asked in an improper group,
it will be answered.

There are several approaches to dealing with this problem.
The first thing you will want to do is demand that you
be removed from this person's mailing list. If this does
not happen, you will want to complain the administrator so
that you will be removed. If this still does not work, you
might be able to arouse more interest in your request by
bombarding the offending system with megs of garbage email.
Several programs exist to automate this task.

To prevent the annoyance of unwanted email, you might want
to try either or both of these popular approaches:

1) Never post USENET messages that show a legitimate email
address. While this approach is enough for some to label
your site a "rogue" one, it will ensure that no companies
who collect email addresses from USENET postings will be
able to fill your email box with unwanted and unrequested
mail messages.

Since there is usually no legitimate need for anyone to ever
email you from a USENET post you made, this should cause no
problems for you and will prevent future annoyances.

2) Use a mail filtering device that only allows certain
pre-approved addresses to pass through your mail system.
Posts that are not approved can be approved by the sender
if they reply appropriately to an auto-reply that this
software generates. This will filter out all mass emails
from automated software and auto-responders. Software
to do this currently exists or can be created in a few
minutes using procmail, filter, or other mail stream
parsing software.

8. How do we fix USENET?

A major step towards fixing USENET would include removing the people
who control it and have led it into its current condition. But this
is only part of the solution. More toleration, freedom, and
intelligent and thoughtful approaches are also necessary.

Long time net-guru David Hayes (da...@jetcafe.org) has organized a group
called the Freedom Knights which is dedicated to the task of stopping
true net-abuse and supporting free speech. You can learn more about
this group by reading his FAQ for USENET Sites of Virtue
at http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet/virtue.html or you can join his
valuable mailing list by sending a message with
"subscribe freedom-knights" in the body to majo...@jetcafe.org

Dr. John Grubor is heading a team of experts who have proposed the
idea of bypassing human biases by letting a set of intelligent
programs perform all important USENET functions. This will include
all vote taking (to stop the fraud from the controllers), all
new newsgroup creation, and other functions which have run poorly
because of the lack of ethics from the people in charge. Naturally
since programs would run the net (Gruborbots), the people who try
to put themselves in charge now feel very threatened by the
possibility of being powerless and are reacting negatively, even
slandering Dr. Grubor in hopes of smearing his name. However,
people have realized that his proposals remove human bias entirely,
support free speech no matter the topic, and are technologically
superior to current methods. Best of all, they need no individual
to monitor and run them. They serve the will of the people, whatever
that might happen to be, through an automated application of public
votes.

There is also a method of USENET filtering that is far superior
to both the forged cancel messages that certain people send and
the proposed NoCeM method. There is at least one company that
is developing it commercially and I do not wish to discuss
their efforts. It will revolve around something that is completely
different from the current USENET operations in that it allows for
any number of ad hoc moderators. It will allow a diverse set of
opinions instead of permitting the noisy and hostile crowd on
news.admin.* to effectively run USENET with their arbitrary and
self-serving policies. It will allow anyone to create any USENET
group they like instead of requiring approval from David C
Lawrence (ta...@uunet.uu.net). It will prevent forged cancels from
being sent (a popular approach used by several people to stop
messages they don't like). It is the natural evolution away
from the behaviors that are clearly abusive and disruptive
in their intent.

The future of USENET is in our hands and we must stop the people
who are trying to control it my holding all of votes and often
committing fraud, directing its path so as to keep them in power, and
acting openly hostile towards watchdogs who point out their ethical
oversights. A more open system without the same small group of
people fighting for control would be better for everyone involved.

---END OF FAQ---

Kevin Podsiadlik

unread,

Jul 11, 1997, 3:00:00 AM7/11/97

A rebuttal to "FAQ: "Rogue Sites" on the Internet?" by Kevin J. Podsiadlik
<kjpo...@cyberramp.net>

Last updated May 10, 1997

Original FAQ by Ricardo H. Gonzales <ric...@paranoia.com>

Note: Mr. Gonzales' FAQ is reproduced here in its entirety, as posted to
news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, and is marked by the lines beginning with ">".
Direct responses to the questions posed, as answered by Peter Da Silva
<pe...@nmti.com>, are on lines beginning with "*". Additional commentary by
this author is on unmarked lines.

E-mail with corrections, additions, and updates, is more than welcome.
Indeed, it is the very fact that Mr. Gonzales does not accept such
corrections (or alternate views) himself, that led to the creation of
this "counterpoint" document.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

>FAQ: "Rogue Sites" on the Internet?

>Last updated: January 12, 1997

>Author: ric...@paranoia.com (Ricardo H. Gonzales)

>NOTICE: This text may not be reproduced in any form for profit without the
>permission of the author. It may be reproduced in any form provided that no
>money is being charged.

>The question of so-called "rogue sites" on the Internet has recently become
>a popular topic of discussion. This FAQ was created in order to cover
>frequently asked questions about the "rogue site" label and to discuss
>related issues of interest.

For convenience, here are the questions which this FAQ attempts to answer:

1. What is a "rogue site"?

2. I am a system administrator. Why is my site being called a "rogue site"?

3. What is the UDP?

4. Who are these people who control "Netiquette" and the Internet?

5. Why are certain harmless behaviours deemed illegal by "Netiquette" standards?

6. How can I stop the cabal so that my users and I may speak freely?

7. As a user, how should I deal with users' behaviours at a "rogue site"?

8. How do we fix USENET?

>1. What is a "rogue site"?

>A "rogue site" is the title that in the past was assigned to Internet sites
>that were operated by individuals who were intent on harming the net. The
>sort of net-abuse they practiced included packet-sniffing, network floods,
>and account cracking. Recently, the title "rogue site" has come to mean any
>site in which an individual has an email account with which they can
>express opinions anonymously or state an unpopular opinion without the
>approval of certain people who would like to restrict these forms of
>expression.

*A rogue site is a site whose administrators are unable to prevent, condone,
*or even promote abusive behaviour on the net.

The "unable to" phrase, of course, only modifies "prevent", not "condone" or
"or even promote".

The last sentence in Mr. Gonzales' answer spells out that which I will
charitably call the "misconception" upon his entire FAQ is based. The fact
is, a very small but noisy group of people, some of whom are mentioned later
in this FAQ, continually make complaints about certain sites being wrongly
called "rogue".

They do this regardless of how obvious the evidence against their claim is;
in one recent incident, when a vandal cancelled every post in the
news.admin.net-abuse.* hierarchy, these people started complaining that they
were "singled out" for "content-based" cancels, even though the people they
routinely accuse of this were equally victimized. When confronted with the
evidence they fall silent, waiting for the next opportunity to jump up and
yell censorship. Their hope, apparently, is that one day their targets will
finally slip up, leaving their credibility smashed and the administration of
Usenet open to a new leadership, preferably their own.

>Each of these behaviours and methods of dealing with them will be discussed
>below.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

>2. I am a system administrator. Why is my site being called a "rogue site"?

>What likely occured is that one of your users posted a message that someone
>else didn't agree with. What could have happened is that the reader may
>have been in such strong disagreement that he posted a message in one of
>the news.admin.* groups claiming that your site is a rogue site.

>It is also possible that a user on your system posted to several newsgroups
>with a message that was unpopular. Or maybe a user on your system sent
>unwanted email to people. If one person doesn't like the opinions or
>behaviour of your users, then you may be labeled a "rogue site" by this
>person and their friends.

*You have been unresponsive to requests that you prevent your site being
*used for abusive behaviour.

Mr. Gonzales makes the notion of a "rogue site" sound rather like a bad
joke. And it can be, if the label is given by a person with neither the
credibility nor the power to back it up.

However, there are sites that are quite seriously considered "rogue". Two
such sites are Cyberpromo.com and Nancynet.com. These sites consistently
make their response to complaints about abusive behavior, more of the same.

If your site is seriously labeled a "rogue site", you will be very much
aware as to why, and will have received detailed advice on what to do in
order to avoid this label, from system administrators of other sites. Ignore
this advice at your own risk.

As stated earlier, the posting of "unpopular" messages has nothing to do
with this designation.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

>3. What is the UDP?

>UDP stands for the USENET Death Penalty which is handed out by an offended
>person and their friends when they don't like the user opinions or
>behaviours that come from your site. It is a tactic of revenge by use of
>censorship to try to cut you off from the Internet. It is an attempt to
>assert the values of a person and his friends over free expression.

*There are two UDPs. The original, now referred to as "passive UDP",
*involves aliasing out sites so that messages from them are not propogated.
*Later, a more active UDP involving sending out cancel messages for all
*messages from a given site was proposed. There is no evidence that either
*of these have actually been implemented, and these days it's more black
*humor (caused by the fact that it's pretty much impossible to do anything
*about rogue sites) than anything else.

And above all, it is not something just anyone can hand out. It requires (or
rather, would require) widespread consensus and cooperation in order to have
any effect. Mr. Gonzales' "offended person and their friends" could no more
hand this out than they could fire a ballistic missle at the offices of the
offending site.

Kevin Podsiadlik

unread,

Jul 11, 1997, 3:00:00 AM7/11/97

A rebuttal to "FAQ: "Rogue Sites" on the Internet?" by Kevin J. Podsiadlik
<kjpo...@cyberramp.net>

Last updated May 10, 1997

Original FAQ by Ricardo H. Gonzales <ric...@paranoia.com>

(Second of two parts)

6. How can I stop the cabal so that my users and I may speak freely?

7. As a user, how should I deal with users' behaviours at a "rogue site"?

8. How do we fix USENET?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

>6. How can I stop the cabal so that my users and I may speak freely?

>The first thing you will want to do is to remove the power that certain
>individuals have claimed for themselves. They have no right to this power
>and should be removed from their positions because of their abuse and harm
>to the Internet.

*The disorganized groups of people Ricardo refers to as the Cabal do not
*prevent free speech. As proof, nobody's keeping him from posting his FAQs,
*even though by his own definition of how this imaginary Cabal behaves they
*would not be allowed.

Once again, as stated above, their employers are quite aware of their
activities. If they thought anything was wrong with them, they would have
long since been "removed from power" by now.

>David C Lawrence (ta...@uunet.uu.net)

>He attempts to control all aspects of USENET group creation and deletion.
>This means that he decides whether or not to send approval for a group
>creation or cancelation of a group that he does not approve of. This
>stifles attempts by interested people to have a "Big 8" group created to
>discuss timely matters. His control limits or completely destroys all
>attempts to gain decent message propagation across USENET, confining group
>discussions to obscure "alt" groups that are rarely propagated well, or at
>all, on most systems.

Mr. Lawrence is hardly a one man band. There is a very involved and
complicated process which is the currently accepted method for USENET group
creation and deletion. The are known as the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers[8].

>Chris Lewis (cle...@ferret.ocunix.on.ca)

>He sends thousands of forged cancels a month to destroy posts that he and
>his friends dislike. He claims to be doing a service and gets very angry
>when people point out that he is cancelling articles that they wanted to
>see or that he had no right to cancel.

Actually largely true, except for "gets very angry" bit. It is rather
doubtful that he gets mail complaining articles about what people "wanted to
see". If they didn't see it, how do they know the article existed? Most
often, such complaints stem from the occasional routing inconsistencies that
have been part of Usenet since its inception.

Also not mentioned is the fact that most agree with his assertion that he
provides a service. If they did not, they would not make use of it, and he
would not have the authority he does. Again, see the Anti-Spam site[6].

>John E. Milborn aka JEM (j...@xpat.com)

>He's another person who is proud of his forged cancel messages and thinks
>he is a crusader for content control. In a strange sort of way it is true
>that censorship and cancelling other people's articles is content control,
>but that's nothing to be proud of. He has recently claimed to have ceased
>his forged cancels, though forged cancel messages continue to flow from
>someone using his address.

A quite out-of-date entry indeed. Mr. Milborn is no longer on the spam
cancelling scene.

>Robert Braver (rbr...@ohww.norman.ok.us)

>This guy joined the bandwagon and loves to send forged cancel messages too.
>But I bet he'd be upset if someone sent forged cancel messages in his name
>if they disliked his posts.

Obvious conjecture. Indeed, if it hasn't been obvious by now, this entire
FAQ is simply the personal opinion of the author and reflects his own
prejudices. His home page[11] reflects some of his other prejudices.

>Jan Isley (j...@bagend.atl.ga.us)

>As a major USENET vote keeper, he was exposed for vote fraud and shamefully
>stepped down from that position. Since then he has been less of a public
>threat to USENET though he still operates behind the scenes. Unfortunately,
>there is a great deal of resistance to the idea of having new elections for
>all of the newsgroups that were created or denied because of the massive
>vote fraud he perpetuated. He also has proclaimed himself the only
>authority on what posts are not permitted in the local atl hierarchy which
>resulted in another count of Isley being called a censor and control freak.

As one charged with such an important task, one is naturally confronted
with considerable animosity from those on the losing side of a given vote.
Regardless of when Mr. Isley had chosen to retire from vote tallying, there
would have been some coincidental controversy occuring to which some,
rightly or wrongly, would decide there was a connection.

As for the atl.* hierarchy, many regional and local hierarchies are small
enough that one single server is considered the canonical source for its
feed. When this is the case, the person who owns and runs that server is
quite within his right to decide what messages are stored on it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

>7. As a user, how should I deal with users' behaviours at a "rogue site"?

*Encourage people to act responsibly.

>It is possible to act appropriately to each of the behaviours that label a
>site to be a "rogue" one. Sometime it is most appropriate to not act at
>all. Here are common recommendations:

>Symptom: User expressed an unpopular opinion in a USENET group.
>Solution: Discuss the opinion instead of trying to label that site as a
>"rogue site" or having that user's account removed.

Again a red herring. No one involved in this discussion disputes this solution.

*This doesn't get one tagged a rogue site, therefore there's no action that
*need be taken. Note that Ricardo has elsewhere in this document recommended
*attacking the jobs of people he disagrees with.

>Symptom: User posted a "disruptive" message in a USENET group.
>Solution: The definition of a "disruptive" message seems nearly impossible
>to achieve in practice. There has never been a message posted that could
>not be skipped or ignored, therefore there hasn't ever really been a
>"disruptive" message. Disregard the message or email the user if you feel
>compelled to communicate. This is not an indication of a "rogue site".

*A user who occasionally posts a message that's likely to draw bait isn't a
*problem. There have been cases in the past where a large number of users
*working in concert engaged in an extended attack on a group, rendering it
*useless.

In addition to the Anti-Spam site[6], refer also to the incident of the posting
of the "Secret Scriptures" of the Church of Scientology[13].

>Symptom: User posted a useless message, such as "MAKE MONEY FAST".
>Solution: Sadly, most of USENET consists of useless messages. This is just
>one example of the sort of message that is useless to some people. It is
>not permissible to cancel a message simply because it serves no pragmatic
>value to you. Others might find it useful. Disregard the message or email
>the user if you feel compelled to communicate. This is not an indication of
>a "rogue site".

In the case of "Make Money Fast", it's actually fairily simple to control,
since its variations are relatively limited. Furthermore "Make Money Fast"
is not merely "useless to some people", but quite illegal in many countries,
including the United States.

*See http://www.usps.gov/websites/depart/inspect/chainlet.htm .

>Symptom: User posted an unpopular message to several groups.
>Solution: Use a filtering service for USENET content (see "How do we fix
>USENET" below)

Oddly, a "filtering service" is precisely what people like Chris Lewis and
Robert Braver provide. Yet Mr. Gonzales seems to have a problem with their
style. Perhaps it is because they provide the service at the ISP level
rather than at the user level. But this only stands to reason, since it
is the ISP's disks that have to store all these extra messages.

>Symptom: User mailed unwanted messages to several people.
>Solution: This is not a USENET problem, so should not be discussed in any
>news.admin.* newsgroups. However, to keep this sort of question from being
>asked in an improper group, it will be answered.

In fact, the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email was created specifically for
this purpose.

>There are several approaches to dealing with this problem. The first thing
>you will want to do is demand that you be removed from this person's
>mailing list. If this does not happen, you will want to complain the
>administrator so that you will be removed. If this still does not work, you
>might be able to arouse more interest in your request by bombarding the
>offending system with megs of garbage email. Several programs exist to
>automate this task.

Automated bombardment is often a tempting option, but it really is just as
abusive of the 'net as the original mailing. There may well be other,
innocent users of the machine you bombard, and their net-access will be
unfairly interrupted by your attack.

On that principle, "mail bombs", as they are called, are discouraged. On the
other hand, reasonably-sized complaints by a sufficient number of
individuals can have the same effect.

>To prevent the annoyance of unwanted email, you might want to try either or
>both of these popular approaches:

>1) Never post USENET messages that show a legitimate email address. While
>this approach is enough for some to label your site a "rogue" one, it will
>ensure that no companies who collect email addresses from USENET postings
>will be able to fill your email box with unwanted and unrequested mail
>messages.

>Since there is usually no legitimate need for anyone to ever email you from
>a USENET post you made, this should cause no problems for you and will
>prevent future annoyances.

Categorically untrue, apart from the "prevent future annoyances" part. It
will also prevent all social contact as well, but it would seem that this
prospect does not bother Mr. Gonzales.

There are many perfectly good reasons why one might send e-mail in response
to a Usenet post:

When a question is asked, it is considered courteous to respond in private.
Otherwise, as all too often happens, one gets multiple articles which
effectively say the same thing, and are of no interest to the vast majority
of readers, who already know the answer to the question.

Other times, you may wish to make a response that is off-topic to the
newsgroup posted to. Again, the private e-mail option is often badly
overlooked, as can be seen by the ubiquitous phenomenon of "topic drift"
seen in just about every unmoderated newsgroup in Usenet.

Another problem lies in the unreliability of Usenet as a communication
protocol in general. One might wish to send e-mail as a "backup" in order to
make certain that person being contacted reads your message.

Some people have "read-only" access to Usenet. How else are they to
participate in the discussion?

Finally, sometimes one might only be interested in the person rather than
the message, say an old friend or relative shows up on the net one day.
Surely you would want the ensuing personal correspondence to be in private.

Indeed, the whole idea of hiding behind fake e-mail addresses smacks of
giving in to terrorism. I personally did so for about a month, and concluded
its effectiveness was not high enough to be worth the trouble. At any rate,
it is the least one can do to at least provide a human-deducible way of
finding out your address, so that normal e-mail conversation is not
disrupted.

>2) Use a mail filtering device that only allows certain pre-approved
>addresses to pass through your mail system. Posts that are not approved can
>be approved by the sender if they reply appropriately to an auto-reply that
>this software generates. This will filter out all mass emails from
>automated software and auto-responders. Software to do this currently
>exists or can be created in a few minutes using procmail, filter, or other
>mail stream parsing software.

In theory, this would seem workable, if a bit antisocial. However, there are
many things to consider. What is the message is urgent? What if the
responder goes on vacation right after sending the message? What if the
responder has a similar set-up on his end, thereby possibly resulting in an
infinite remailing loop?

More practically, what if someone has many potentially legitimate e-mail
addresses. When I was at Michigan State, you might have seen messages from
me at "pods...@salt.cps.msu.edu", "pods...@pepper.cps.msu.edu", or
potentially dozens of other machines on that network. Quite a logistical
nightmare! And likely one that will just as soon be defeated by the mailers
before it is perfected.

For some other solutions to the problem, try the Email Abuse FAQ[14].

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

>8. How do we fix USENET?

>A major step towards fixing USENET would include removing the people who
>control it and have led it into its current condition. But this is only
>part of the solution. More toleration, freedom, and intelligent and
>thoughtful approaches are also necessary.

Whatever approach someone comes up with, someone will have to be in charge
of implementing it. Totally irrespective of who this turns out to be, there
will be people who do not trust the implementers, and will campaign for
their removal "from power". What needs to be made is a logical case against
the current powers that be. This has not been done.

>Long time net-guru David Hayes (da...@jetcafe.org) has organized a group
>called the Freedom Knights which is dedicated to the task of stopping true
>net-abuse and supporting free speech. You can learn more about this group
>by reading his FAQ for USENET Sites of Virtue at
>http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet/virtue.html or you can join his
>valuable mailing list by sending a message with "subscribe freedom-knights"
>in the body to majo...@jetcafe.org

Mr. Hayes has not been seen on Usenet much lately. There exist perceptions
of the Freedom Knights at considerable odds with that above[9]. If you want
to get a really good idea of how Mr. Hayes and his compatriots think, go
ahead and subscribe to the list. Be forewarned of mature content (and
immature attitudes :-).

>Dr. John Grubor is heading a team of experts who have proposed the idea of
>bypassing human biases by letting a set of intelligent programs perform all
>important USENET functions. This will include all vote taking (to stop the
>fraud from the controllers), all new newsgroup creation, and other
>functions which have run poorly because of the lack of ethics from the
>people in charge. Naturally since programs would run the net (Gruborbots),
>the people who try to put themselves in charge now feel very threatened by
>the possibility of being powerless and are reacting negatively, even
>slandering Dr. Grubor in hopes of smearing his name. However, people have
>realized that his proposals remove human bias entirely, support free speech
>no matter the topic, and are technologically superior to current methods.
>Best of all, they need no individual to monitor and run them. They serve
>the will of the people, whatever that might happen to be, through an
>automated application of public votes.

"Dr." Grubor is a long time and well-known eccentric. Just by way of
example, in March 1997, he publicly and repeatedly announced, and I swear I
am not making this up, his intention to gather an army of U. S. military
veterans to invade Canada, with the expressed purpose of assaulting Chris
Lewis (see above).

This threat, like many, many before, inevitably came to nothing. See the
Grubor FAQ[10] for more examples of his behavior. Of note for his penchant
for threatening to file lawsuits against major ISPs like UUNET, which is
somewhat ironic in view of his status as a disbarred attorney and ex-convict.

Furthermore, despite the implicit portrayal above, Mr. Lewis' methods are
largely automatic, and therefore quite "free of human bias". Mr. Lewis only
steps in to correct cancels which are made in error, and to deal with repeat
cases. Gonzales, Grubor, Hayes, et al. vigourously dispute this assertion,
but fail miserably when it comes to providing supporting evidence.

Finally, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, stopping Grubor from
implementing his own version of Usenet control in parallel with anyone
else's. It would simply be up to the individual sites as to whose method is
more prevalent.

>There is also a method of USENET filtering that is far superior to both the
>forged cancel messages that certain people send and the proposed NoCeM
>method. There is at least one company that is developing it commercially
>and I do not wish to discuss their efforts. It will revolve around
>something that is completely different from the current USENET operations
>in that it allows for any number of ad hoc moderators. It will allow a
>diverse set of opinions instead of permitting the noisy and hostile crowd
>on news.admin.* to effectively run USENET with their arbitrary and
>self-serving policies. It will allow anyone to create any USENET group they
>like instead of requiring approval from David C Lawrence
>(ta...@uunet.uu.net). It will prevent forged cancels from being sent (a
>popular approach used by several people to stop messages they don't like).
>It is the natural evolution away from the behaviors that are clearly
>abusive and disruptive in their intent.

Amusing. "I have a better way, it's really great, it'll solve everybody's
problems, but it's a secret." You have heard of this concept before; it's
called "vaporware".

Also, is it really such a great idea to allow anyone to create a USENET
group for any reason? That is, in fact, allowed in the "alt" hierarchy,
which, in Mr. Gonzales' own words, is "obscure" and "rarely propogated
well". These two facts are not a coincidence.

The whole scheme sounds an awful lot like what we now know as Internet Relay
Chat, a potentially useful method of real-time discussion on the Internet,
which has unfortunately fallen into total and complete anarchy and disarray,
due largely to its "openness".

As an aside, NoCeM's have come into limited use since Mr. Gonzales' FAQ came
into existence.

>The future of USENET is in our hands and we must stop the people who are
>trying to control it my holding all of votes and often committing fraud,
>directing its path so as to keep them in power, and acting openly hostile
>towards watchdogs who point out their ethical oversights. A more open
>system without the same small group of people fighting for control would be
>better for everyone involved.

Much high talk, but little supporting evidence. Indeed, the best answer to
this final question is the shortest:

*Usenet isn't broken.

>---END OF FAQ---

Footnotes:
[1] http://www.dejanews.com
[2] http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html#3.19
[3] http://psg.com/emily.html
[4]
http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&fmt=.&q=%22Emil
y+Postnews%22
[5] http://rsm6000.adm.fau.edu/rinaldi/netiquette.html
[6] http://spam.abuse.net/spam/
[7] http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html#3.12
[8] http://www.uvv.org/
[9] http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/dave-hayes-faq.html
[10] http://kendaco.telebyte.com/dharland/Grubor.FAQ.html
[11] http://www.paranoia.com/~ricardo/
[12] http://spam.ohww.norman.ok.us/winter.htm
[13] http://wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de/~krasel/CoS/spam/info.html
[14] http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/emailfaq.html

[101] By "distinct" newsgroups, I mean newsgroups that can be distinguished
to the extent that there exist posts that would be on topic on one and not
the another, and vice versa. An example of a pair of non-distinct groups would
be "alt.rush-limbaugh" and "alt.fan.rush-limbaugh".

Thanks for material and/or inspiration to:

flu...@macconnect.com
Keith Lynch (k...@clark.net)
Peter Da Silva (pe...@nmti.com)

David McCullough Dobson

unread,

Jul 13, 1997, 3:00:00 AM7/13/97

Why do you call this a FAQ? This is a collection of very strongly held
opinions. People expect FAQ's to be evenhanded and objective. You're
certainly entitled to your opinions, and you're entitled to post them, but
I don't think it's reasonable to masquerade them as a FAQ and pretend that
your take on this is everyone's.

I read your post thinking that I might learn something about how "rogue"
sites are designated and treated, but I learned nothing from your posting
that would allow me to make an informed decision about anything.

--
----------------------------------------
Dave Dobson (d...@umich.edu)
WWW: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dob

Steve Nichols

unread,

Jul 14, 1997, 3:00:00 AM7/14/97

Actually, he was addressing one particular subject: Rogue Sites, not the
entire spectrum regarding Spam. A rebuttal was posted by Kevin Podsiadlik.
From what I have seen, many FAQs posted in various news groups are heavilly
endowed with personal perspectives on a subject as well as contain useful
technical information.
--
My opinions are just that, Mine!
To Reply via e-mail remove the
".NOSPAM" from the address
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My use of this E-mail address does NOT constitute permission for anyone to
send advertisements.

David McCullough Dobson <d...@breakout.rs.itd.umich.edu> wrote in article
<5q96nn$ed0$1...@newbabylon.rs.itd.umich.edu>...

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