FAQ: Introduction to Net Abuse
Ricardo Hector Gonzales
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQ)
Introduction to Net Abuse
---FAQ BEGINS---
Last updated: September 4, 1996
Author: ric...@paranoia.com (Ricardo H. Gonzales)
URL: http://www.paranoia.com/~ricardo/faq.html
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.
1. What is the purpose of these newsgroups?
2. Who may participate in discussion?
3. What is the autocyberretromoderation bot?
4. What is this talk about secret votes that happen on USENET?
5. What is in store for the future of the net?
6. What are proposals for dealing with massively crossposted articles
and flames?
7. Why do people oppose general censoring of posts?
8. What do people propose doing with cancel messages?
9. How should newgroup creation be handled?
10. How can censorship be removed from moderated groups?
_________________________________________________________________
1. What is the purpose of these newsgroups?
The news.admin.net-abuse newsgroups exist to document and discuss
cases of possible network abuse. This included excessive posting,
inappropriate cancellation of postings, mail bombing, denial of
service attacks and other related behaviors. By bringing these issues
out in the open to discuss their impact, we can best determine how to
understand and handle these if they do indeed constitute net abuse.
2. Who may participate in this discussion?
Everyone is permitted to participate in this discussion, though it is
suggested that people move away from making warrentless complaints and
instead take action to fix problems. People very frequently whine
about what's wrong with the net but rarely do anything positive to
contribute to fixing it. Those who do try to fix problems usually only
attack symptoms rather than the cause of the problems. As long as
people give respect to net whiners like Chris Lewis, Tim Skirvin, Jan
Isley, Peter duh Silva, and the rest of their kook associates, nothing
will ever be solved. Pretending that these people can solve problems
by whining and harassing system administrators and putting stock in
their efforts is a long-term plan for failure.
3. What is the autocyberretromoderation bot?
The autocyberretromoderation bot is a mechanism to combat net abuse by
people who forge posts as others or attempt to cancel posts that
aren't their own. Most reasonable individuals don't take kindly to
people who forge their identities to remove other people's posts, no
matter how helpful the forge posters think their service is.
4. What is this talk about secret votes that happen on USENET?
Nearly all moderated groups have something to do with the USENET
cabal. This organization is known for several cases of unethical
conduct where their attempts to control USENET were uncovered by cabal
watchdogs. Among the things they have been caught for is massive vote
fixing on group creations, several times rejecting the creation of
groups they disliked and discarding votes to force negative outcomes.
They are also involved with the moderation of several important USENET
policy groups, which allows them to determine what sort of ideas can
be expressed or not expressed. If an idea is proposed for expression
that would cause them to lose some control or is something they don't
agree with, there's little chance that it will gain their approval and
be posted.
5. What is in store for the future of the net?
The greatest threat that exists to the net today is the control freaks
who want to limit postings that they do not agree with or find
"proper" for groups they think they control. Groups are made up of
interested people. They are not static entities based around one
person's personal ideology (except for the possibility of certain
alt.fan groups founded for the discussion of extremely dull
personalities). There is no way for one person to determine what
others reading the group may want to see. What one person interprets
as a "flame" may be what another finds to be a learning experience
that provides an alternative perspective shedding light on a viewpoint
they haven't considered previously.
6. What are proposals for dealing with massively crossposted articles and
flames?
There are two obvious ways to handle this. The first is to use a
killfile. The second is to use an intelligent newsreader that can
filter articles based on the header, so that the user can set what
number of crossposted groups is excessive, thus skipping an article
that exceeds this threshold. NoCeM on the client side might work if
the cabal divorced themselves from running the system, but when run on
the spool it multiplies their potential for net abuse.
7. Why do people oppose general censoring of posts?
Because it is impossible to determine what information, even in a
blatant spam, is useless to all people. 99.9% of posts on USENET are
worthless to some people, but that doesn't mean that they should
cancel them and deprive others of the right to read them. Using a
filtering service that is nondestructive to the USENET feed is the
only method that is endorsed.
8. What do people propose doing with cancel messages?
All Internet service providers should configure their news software to
ignore cancel messages and to not propagate that group so that damage
is minimized from the rogue sites that still honor cancel messages.
The cancel system has been so thoroughly abused that it has lost all
credibility. The addition of NoCeM on spool will make the forged
cancelling and censorship problems even worse unfortunately, though
NoCeM on the client side is relatively safe if not run by the cabal
and their cronies.
9. How should newgroup creation be handled?
Dr. John Grubor, one of the original forces behind the creation of the
net has proposed an excellent system that will solve the problems of
corruption and inadequacy in the current newgroup creation system. His
proposal has basically three steps and cuts through the complicated
and unnecessary delays that currently require up to a year to get a
particular newsgroup approved. The first step is to determine a name
that fits properly in the namespace. Once that is done, a call for
votes is announced and users have to request ballots that are
numerically code in such a way that no user can easily submit multiple
ballots and fraudulently vote multiple times. Then if the proposed
group receives over 100 YES votes, it is created, no matter the number
of people who vote NO. By ignoring NO votes, it is possible to have
newsgroups created for the discussion of minority cultures and other
unpopular topics that have enemies desiring censorship.
Because the net is anti-censorship and pro-expression, any group that
has sufficient public interest should be created, without regard for
how many people would like that topic of discussion to be censored.
We thank Dr. Grubor for his extremely helpful contribution to the
advancements of free speech. New newsgroup creations that function
according to Dr. Grubor's system are being implemented now.
10. How can censorship be removed from moderated groups?
One possible system is to make a parallel group for moderated groups
that can propagate all posts not approved by the moderator. For
example, a group named alt.foobar.moderated would also have a group
such as alt.foobar.rejected, alt.foobar.moderated.rejected, or
alt.foobar.moderated.unapproved. Either of the first two names would
require the moderator to post a message there if he rejected the
submission to his group. The third name scheme could be used if it was
determined that the propagation of submissions should be in the hands
of the users and the user should cross-post to the unapproved group.
This system is being discussed as a way to stop moderators from
censoring opinions that they disagree with and differs significantly
from simply forcing the user to post to a public group because it can
be easily used to show the biases of the moderator.
---END OF FAQ---
Jim Hardy
Ricardo Hector Gonzales wrote:
>
> 9. How should newgroup creation be handled?
>
> Dr. John Grubor, one of the original forces behind the creation of the
> net has proposed an excellent system that will solve the problems of
> corruption and inadequacy in the current newgroup creation system. His
> proposal has basically three steps and cuts through the complicated
> and unnecessary delays that currently require up to a year to get a
> particular newsgroup approved. The first step is to determine a name
> that fits properly in the namespace. Once that is done, a call for
> votes is announced and users have to request ballots that are
> numerically code in such a way that no user can easily submit multiple
> ballots and fraudulently vote multiple times. Then if the proposed
> group receives over 100 YES votes, it is created, no matter the number
> of people who vote NO. By ignoring NO votes, it is possible to have
> newsgroups created for the discussion of minority cultures and other
> unpopular topics that have enemies desiring censorship.
>
> Because the net is anti-censorship and pro-expression, any group that
> has sufficient public interest should be created, without regard for
> how many people would like that topic of discussion to be censored.
>
> We thank Dr. Grubor for his extremely helpful contribution to the
> advancements of free speech. New newsgroup creations that function
> according to Dr. Grubor's system are being implemented now.
This makes a great deal of sense to me. I've been using Usenet for a couple
years but just recently started looking at this group (news.groups) because of
the RFD for soc.culture.expatriate, and I've noticed that some people are
contributing to the discussion and presumably plan to vote on it who aren't
expats. It seems to me that if enough people are interested in a group they
should be allowed to form it, regardless of how many people aren't interested.
Peter da Silva
In article <346A30FB...@gdl1.uninet.net.mx>,
Of course. It's a ripoff of an idea I've been pushing for the past ten years,
since shortly after the sci.aquaria fiasco when it became obvious that the
only legitimate reason for voting against a group was because the name the
proponent was pushing was deliberately bad.
EVERY other excuse: that there isn't enough interest (well, duh, what do you
think the vote's for), that the topic shouldn't be discussed (don't be silly,
it will get discussed regardless), and so on are just stupid political noises.
I even ran a number of votes using a method that replaces NO votes with a poll
on a series of alternate names. The most recent group created with it was
misc.activism.progressive.
Ricardo has, as usual, got the origin of the idea, and the way to go about it,
completely wrong.
--
This is The Reverend Peter da Silva's Boring Sig File - there are no references
to Wolves, Kibo, Discordianism, or The Church of the Subgenius in this document
Hanno Mueller
> >Is that some kind of troll?
>
> Ah yes the frequently asked questions about RHG's "FAQ"
>
> yes.
Looking at his "homepage", it seems that he does not exist. At least,
the two images there look as if they were altered with image processing
software:
http://www.paranoia.com/~ricardo/playa-makeover.jpg
http://www.paranoia.com/~ricardo/mifoto.gif
Hmmm. A virtual personality?
Greetings,
Hanno
Peter Seebach
In article <64fk2o$a9p$1...@usenet48.supernews.com>,
Ricardo Hector Gonzales <ric...@primus.paranoia.com> wrote:
>Several people in Austin can verify that I exist though I think it's
>funnier that people believe in conspiracy theories or think that I am
>the creator of or character of some other net personality.
I don't think anyone seriously believes that you were created by one of
the net.personalities, or perhaps drawn from the markov-chaining selves
of a kook. I think you're a fairly bad AI project. I mean, all of the
classical evidence is there - it is too obvious that you can't actually
parse English text, but just respond to keywords in it, your choices of
words are unnatural, and nothing you do shows any sign of coming from a
human mind.
>It's more
>to my benefit that you keep questioning this so I support the idea
>that I don't exist. After all, I haven't provided proof and so many
>people think they know that I'm someone else so that has to be true.
It is interesting that you have "troll" logic embedded into all of your
posts. I think this is because the kid who wrote you was too layz, and
didn't want to write a "real" analyzer. Instead, he/she wrote simple,
non-logical system, which was probably, almost certainly, a lot simpler
to debug.
>However, you are correct to say that the first photo was altered. A
>friend said I should get a shave and haircut and go to the beach and
>then she gave me a virtual makeover which is the picture online. It
>could use a bright Hawaiian tourist shirt to complete the effect. If
>supermodels can use airbrushed and digitally modified photos then why
>can't I?
Probably because you're not nearly good enough looking to be a "super-"
model. You would be, most likely, more suited to being a "troll-" type
model. This was probably going to lead to, later, a more advanced auto
poster for monthly FAQs - one which the newsgroup maintainers could use
to automatically track down and correct inaccurate posts. Sadly, I see
problems - but I can't tell whether the problems are flawed data, given
the bogus FAQs you were started out on, or basic design flaws.
Anyway, whoever's doing this, please go away, and test your bot on misc
.test, or something like that.
-s
--
se...@plethora.net -- I am not speaking for my employer. Copyright '97
All rights reserved. This was not sent by my cat. C and Unix wizard -
send mail for help, or send money for a consultation. Visit my new ISP
<URL:http://www.plethora.net/> --- More Net, Less Spam! Plethora . Net
Jonathan Rynd
In article <64blgm$3du$1...@usenet11.supernews.com>, ric...@paranoia.com
(Ricardo Hector Gonzales) wrote:
Get back in my killfile.
And, Go Away Troll.
No followups wanted.
--
"Ethical Relativity: The exact same universal laws are always true,
and apply to you no matter what your frame of reference is."
ISP Ratings
Jim Hardy <jimh...@gdl1.uninet.net.mx> wrote:
-
-Ricardo Hector Gonzales wrote:
-
->
-> 9. How should newgroup creation be handled?
->
-> Dr. John Grubor, one of the original forces behind the creation of the
-> net has proposed an excellent system that will solve the problems of
-> corruption and inadequacy in the current newgroup creation system. His
-> proposal has basically three steps and cuts through the complicated
-> and unnecessary delays that currently require up to a year to get a
-> particular newsgroup approved. The first step is to determine a name
-> that fits properly in the namespace. Once that is done, a call for
-> votes is announced and users have to request ballots that are
-> numerically code in such a way that no user can easily submit multiple
-> ballots and fraudulently vote multiple times. Then if the proposed
-> group receives over 100 YES votes, it is created, no matter the number
-> of people who vote NO. By ignoring NO votes, it is possible to have
-> newsgroups created for the discussion of minority cultures and other
-> unpopular topics that have enemies desiring censorship.
->
-> Because the net is anti-censorship and pro-expression, any group that
-> has sufficient public interest should be created, without regard for
-> how many people would like that topic of discussion to be censored.
->
-> We thank Dr. Grubor for his extremely helpful contribution to the
-> advancements of free speech. New newsgroup creations that function
-> according to Dr. Grubor's system are being implemented now.
-
-This makes a great deal of sense to me. I've been using Usenet for a couple
-years but just recently started looking at this group (news.groups) because of
-the RFD for soc.culture.expatriate, and I've noticed that some people are
-contributing to the discussion and presumably plan to vote on it who aren't
-expats. It seems to me that if enough people are interested in a group they
-should be allowed to form it, regardless of how many people aren't interested.
-
True--you'll find those in news.groups to be a closed knit little group--their
votes are rigged anyway so it really doesn't matter. Not very long ago one
of their vote counters--Jan Isley--was caught red handed rigging votes and
forging th email addresses of his opposition to cancel their posts yet
they never even retook the votes after it was publically exposed and they
admitted it. What's really amusing though is that they'll readily admit
they don't want you to advertise a vote to usenet at large (heaven forbid
if the average user had a say in matters!) and they'll openly admit that
the average user shouldn't vote. You see--they think they are somehow
special.
Steve
news.admin.censorship
Mike C.
ISP Ratings wrote:
> -> Then if the proposed
> -> group receives over 100 YES votes, it is created, no matter the number
> -> of people who vote NO. By ignoring NO votes, it is possible to have
> -> newsgroups created for the discussion of minority cultures and other
> -> unpopular topics that have enemies desiring censorship.
> ->
> -> Because the net is anti-censorship and pro-expression, any group that
> -> has sufficient public interest should be created, without regard for
> -> how many people would like that topic of discussion to be censored.
This is the way new echoes are created in Free Speech BBS nets all the time. This
technique has been used for a number of years to help protect free speech on small
bbs nets. It works well.
:)
I am pleased to see that it has finally "trickled UP" to Usenet.
:)
--
Mr. M.W. Christy (Graphic Artist)
E-Mail at: mailto:mike...@gte.net
Site is at: http://home1.gte.net/mikesea2/
Dr. John Grubor
On 17 Nov 1997, Mike C. wrote:
> Date: 17 Nov 1997 01:31:35 GMT
> From: "Mike C." <mike...@gte.net>
> Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.misc, alt.journalism,
> alt.uunet.anti-trust, news.groups, alt.webgod, news.admin.misc,
> news.admin.policy, news.admin.censorship, alt.politics.datahighway,
> alt.sage.john-grubor, alt.motherjones, alt.cyberspace
> Subject: Re: Somehow Special Was: FAQ: Introduction to Net Abuse
>
>
>
> ISP Ratings wrote:
>
> > -> Then if the proposed
> > -> group receives over 100 YES votes, it is created, no matter the number
> > -> of people who vote NO. By ignoring NO votes, it is possible to have
> > -> newsgroups created for the discussion of minority cultures and other
> > -> unpopular topics that have enemies desiring censorship.
> > ->
> > -> Because the net is anti-censorship and pro-expression, any group that
> > -> has sufficient public interest should be created, without regard for
> > -> how many people would like that topic of discussion to be censored.
>
> This is the way new echoes are created in Free Speech BBS nets all the time. This
> technique has been used for a number of years to help protect free speech on small
> bbs nets. It works well.
>
> :)
>
> I am pleased to see that it has finally "trickled UP" to Usenet.
>
> :)
The trickle always starts with a mailing list. {;-)
>
>
> --
> Mr. M.W. Christy (Graphic Artist)
> E-Mail at: mailto:mike...@gte.net
> Site is at: http://home1.gte.net/mikesea2/
>
"Call them all pedophiles, for freedom of speech!"
Dr. Zeus
On Wed, 19 Nov 1997 12:12:12 GMT, bou...@alt.net (ISP Ratings) wrote:
>ric...@primus.paranoia.com (Ricardo Hector Gonzales) wrote:
> -
> -: > -> Then if the proposed
> -: > -> group receives over 100 YES votes, it is created, no matter the number
> -: > -> of people who vote NO. By ignoring NO votes, it is possible to have
> -: > -> newsgroups created for the discussion of minority cultures and other
> -: > -> unpopular topics that have enemies desiring censorship.
> -: > ->
> -: > -> Because the net is anti-censorship and pro-expression, any group that
> -: > -> has sufficient public interest should be created, without regard for
> -: > -> how many people would like that topic of discussion to be censored.
> -:
> -: This is the way new echoes are created in Free Speech BBS nets all the time. This
> -: technique has been used for a number of years to help protect free speech on small
> -: bbs nets. It works well.
> -:
> -: :)
> -:
> -: I am pleased to see that it has finally "trickled UP" to Usenet.
> -:
> -: :)
> -
> -Unfortunately the net-cops are resisting it because it would mean they
> -would have to allow other people to have free expression.
>
> That's sad really. They claim you can post anything opinion and
>then give as an excuse for their forgery and censorship that it
>is 'offtopic' to a given group yet they'll do whatever it takes to
>prevent users from having the groups that they want. Remember
>what the bastards did with alt.is.too?
>
> -However, with Dr. Grubor's guidance, we are working to enable
> -policies that benefit all net users.
>
> Dr. Grubor's policy will work very well. As the very founder of all
>of CyberSpace (TM) Dr. Grubor knows best on group creation
>matters.
>
alt.god.grubor inserted for filing purposes.
> - We will eventually break through the elitism of the
> -net-cops and their stifling policies.
>
> The news.groups censors have no shame. Recall the
>votes rigged by former vote taker Jan Isley--they were never
>retaken even though he was caught red handed.
>
> Steve
> news.admin.censorship
>
> -
> --Ric G.
> -Official FAQ Maintainer - news.admin hierarchy
> -"Of all the sins with which a man defiles himself in this world, this is the
> -sin with which he is most defiled." - M Shabbat 2:6
>
Rabbi Gonzales, we thank you for you unending support
of Freedom Of Speech.
-Dr. Zeus
ISP Ratings
- We will eventually break through the elitism of the