How I deal with the enormous amount of spam

[Tom Roberts]

I use Thunderbird to read Usenet. Recently sci.physics.relativity has
been getting hundreds of spam posts each day, completely overwhelming
legitimate content. These spam posts share the property that they are
written in a non-latin script.

Thunderbird implements message filters that can mark a message Read. So
I created a filter to run on sci.physics.relativity that marks messages
Read. Then when reading the newsgroups, I simply display only unread
messages. The key to making this work is to craft the filter so it marks
messages in which the Subject matches any of a dozen characters picked
from some spam messages.

This doesn't completely eliminate the spam, but it is now only a few
messages per day.

Tom Roberts

[Dlzc]

On Monday, January 29, 2024 at 6:03:55 PM UTC-6, Tom Roberts wrote:
> I use Thunderbird to read Usenet. Recently sci.physics.relativity has
> been getting hundreds of spam posts each day, completely overwhelming
> legitimate content. These spam posts share the property that they are
> written in a non-latin script.

And I use Google Groups, and wade through all the spam, and report each and every message as spam to Google. Theoretically, this means they no longer get any search engine hits via Google, unless Google lies (and is also as incompetent as their programmers).

Only have to put up with it for four more weeks...

David A. Smith

[palsing]

I would like to do the same thing, so I installed Thunderbird... but setting it up to read newsgroups is beyond my paltry computer skills and is not at all intuitive. If anyone can point to an idiot-proof tutorial for doing this It would be much appreciated.

\Paul Alsing

[Dlzc]

On Monday, January 29, 2024 at 7:02:05 PM UTC-6, palsing wrote:
> I would like to do the same thing, so I installed Thunderbird... but setting it up to read newsgroups
> is beyond my paltry computer skills and is not at all intuitive. If anyone can point to an idiot-proof
> tutorial for doing this It would be much appreciated.

Google search result:
https://kb.iu.edu/d/arrn

David A. Smith

[Nico Kozák Pásztori]

add this to Subject and/or Author, to exclude "matching regex"

^.*[\p{Thai}].*$

have a nice day. I love Hungary so very much. The only true country in
europe.

𝗛𝘂𝗻𝗴𝗮𝗿𝘆_𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝗱𝘀_𝘁𝗼_𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗱_𝗘𝗨_𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁_𝘁𝗼_𝗱𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘆_𝗶𝘁𝘀_𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝘆
Budapest has continued to object to a planned aid package for Ukraine
ahead of an EU summit this week
https://r%74.com/news/591459-eu-hungary-ukraine-aid-blackmail/

There is nothing democratic about the EU. A fake powerless parliament. 1/3
of deputies in the pay of Soros. Quite sickening.

The West has become a retched despotic Dictatorship, and cultural
destroyer. Hungary, do you need any other motivation to leave it?

Everyone can see now that western nazis operate like mafia.

Stay strong Hungary! WE are proud with YOU!

[Richard Hertz]

Use this website. It's spam free, and you can get a free account there:

https://www.novabbs.com/tech/thread.php?group=sci.physics.relativity

[Physfitfreak]

On 1/29/2024 7:48 PM, Nico Kozák Pásztori wrote:
> There is nothing democratic about the EU. A fake powerless parliament. 1/3
> of deputies in the pay of Soros. Quite sickening.

Why hadn't you "Russians" found that out in 1917? You didn't even know
that before invading Ukraine.

You're like babies. You need direction, and like babies, you try to get
your directions from people to your west.

Fuck you Hanson!

[J. J. Lodder]

Maybe you need a better provider?
I do see some spam on E.S., but not enormous amounts of it.
BTW, it also helps to kill all crossposting,

Jan

[Timmie Császár Barabás]

whatever, but please be careful. He is not that pretty.

[Ross Finlayson]

Yeah, it's pretty bad, or, worse anybody's ever seen it.

I as well sort of mow the lawn a bit or mark the spam.

It seems alright if it'll be a sort of clean break: on Feb 22 according to Google,
Google will break its compeerage to Usenet, and furthermore make read-only
the archives, what it has, what until then, will be as it was.

Over on sci.math I've had the idea for a while of making some brief and
special purpose Usenet compeers, for only some few groups, or, you
know, the _belles lettres_ of the text hierarchy.

"Meta: a usenet server just for sci.math"
-- https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math/c/zggff_pVEks

So, there you can read the outlook of this kind of thing, then while sort
of simple as the protocol is simple and its implementations widespread,
how to deal with the "signal and noise" of "exposed messaging destinations
on the Internet", well on that thread I'm theorizing a sort of, "NOOBNB protocol",
figuring to make an otherwise just standard Usenet compeer, and also for
email or messaging destinations, sort of designed with the expectation that
there will be spam, and spam and ham are hand in hand, to exclude it in simple terms.

NOOBNB: New Old Off Bot Non Bad, Curated/Purgatory/Raw triple-feed

(That and a firmer sort of "Load Shed" or "Load Hold" at the transport layer.)

Also it would be real great if at least there was surfaced to the Internet a
read-only view of any message by its message ID, a "URL", or as for a "URI",
a "URN", a reliable perma-link in the IETF "news" protocol, namespace.

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math/c/zggff_pVEks

I wonder that there's a reliable sort of long-term project that surfaces
"news" protocol message-IDs, .... It's a stable, standards-based protocol.


Thunderbird, "SLRN", .... Thanks for caring. We care.


https://groups.google.com/g/sci.physics.relativity/c/ToBo6XOymUw

[ProkaryoticCaspaseHomolog]

Tom Roberts wrote:

> I use Thunderbird to read Usenet. Recently sci.physics.relativity has
> been getting hundreds of spam posts each day, completely overwhelming
> legitimate content. These spam posts share the property that they are
> written in a non-latin script.

What puzzles me is that there seems to be no economic motive for
posting such huge volumes of spam. Modest amounts of spam might get
read. Spam in the expected language of the reader might get read.

The only reason for posting spam of this nature would be deliberate
mayhem, since it was not intended to be read.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2024-01-30 00:03:43 +0000, Tom Roberts said:

> I use Thunderbird to read Usenet. Recently sci.physics.relativity has
> been getting hundreds of spam posts each day, completely overwhelming
> legitimate content. These spam posts share the property that they are
> written in a non-latin script.

I don't see any of those. Maybe news.individual.net suppresses them
before they reach me.

>
> Thunderbird implements message filters that can mark a message Read. So
> I created a filter to run on sci.physics.relativity that marks messages
> Read. Then when reading the newsgroups, I simply display only unread
> messages. The key to making this work is to craft the filter so it marks
> messages in which the Subject matches any of a dozen characters picked
> from some spam messages.
>
> This doesn't completely eliminate the spam, but it is now only a few
> messages per day.

I don't see even a few.



--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 36 years; mainly
in England until 1987.

[ProkaryoticCaspaseHomolog]

Richard Hertz wrote:

> Use this website. It's spam free, and you can get a free account there:

> https://www.novabbs.com/tech/thread.php?group=sci.physics.relativity

Thanks!

[J. J. Lodder]

Much better to get a real newsserver instead,

Jan

[J. J. Lodder]

It is a kind of DOS attack,

Jan

[Ross Finlayson]

One fellow reached me via e-mail and he said, hey, the Googler spam is
outrageous, can we do anything about it? Would you write a script to
funnel all their message-ID's into the abuse reporting? And I was like,
you know, about 2008 I did just that, there was a big spam flood,
and I wrote a little script to find them and extract their posting-account,
and the message-ID, and a little script to post to the posting-host,
each one of the wicked spams.

At the time that seemed to help, they sort of dried up, here there's
that basically they're not following the charter, but, it's the
posting-account
in the message headers that indicate the origin of the post, not the
email address. So, I wonder, given that I can extract the posting-accounts
of all the spams, how to match the posting-account to then determine
whether it's a sockpuppet-farm or what, and basically about sending them up.

[Dlzc]

On Saturday, February 3, 2024 at 11:37:28 AM UTC-6, Ross Finlayson wrote:
> On 01/30/2024 12:54 PM, Ross Finlayson wrote:

> ... how to match the posting-account to then determine

> whether it's a sockpuppet-farm or what, and basically
> about sending them up.

Its too late to save Google Groups front end.

They post and another account posts a follow-up on the same message within less than a minute. It is human-based based on the pace of posting. It IS a sock-puppet farm.

David A. Smith

[Volney]

Definitely, but what is the motivation or goal of the spammers? It
doesn't make sense.

[Ross Finlayson]

Ah, the sockpuppet.

"Hi sockpuppet how are you today?"
"The guy hiding under here has his arm entirely up me, I'm not doing this."

Clearly the posts themselves are generated by a mail-merge, which
you're probably familiar with or I am as "here's a list of addresses,
and here's a little document with placeholders, the templates
get merged the substitution placeholders interpolated their
expression to the matching parameters, then print that out
the printer but be careful printing the labels in the special
stick-on label paper in the printer and you wouldn't want that
poor quality adhesive would result jamming your printer".

Anyways though it's clear that every now and then one of the
parameters goes missing and it shows "Template" or "Missing"
or whatever, it's just a usual sort of blast-fax mail-merge setup.

Yet, here it's as what appears to be a ton of different compromised
Google accounts, as to whether they're associated with the names
and emails of the posts at all, is unclear. So, there's an idea to
make a little database matching up posting-account according to
the Google G2 injector that appears to be injecting them to Usenet,
helping illustrate that such-and-such accounts are at best compromised
and probably collusive, where of course we wouldn't want the innocents
they may be to suffer just because their account is compromised. (Or, ....)


Or, "gee, thanks OAuth".

[Roscoe Hatukaev]

that's not spam, my friend. Can't you do english. That's why amrica bombed
Yugoslavia in three months. They have a better life standard under the
communism, than amrica couldn't even dream of. The CNN even tell its in a
video 𝗼𝗻_𝘆𝗼𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗯𝗲. They were shocked, realizing it. All people with food on
their table, with work (not "jobs"), 30 days paid vacation, free
education, pension as 60 and so on. You dirty capitalist. That's the
reason. The terrorist state of NATO bombed 𝘁𝗵𝗲_𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆_𝗽𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 to europe, for
the reason of de_industrialize and under_develop.

𝗘𝘅-𝗨𝗸𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗮𝗻_𝗣𝗠_𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗻𝘀_𝗭𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗸𝘆_𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁_‘𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲’_𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗳𝘁
Yulia Timoshenko has predicted that a proposed mobilization measure could
lead to “public confrontation”
https://r%74.com/russia/591787-ex-ukrainian-pm-tymoshenko-mobilization-
bill-confrontation/

[Ramses Fenstermacher]

yes sure, hear it in another language.

𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙘𝙚_𝙒𝙚𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙡,_𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙧_𝙤𝙛_𝙩𝙝𝙚_𝘼𝙛𝘿_𝙥𝙖𝙧𝙡𝙞𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮_𝙜𝙧𝙤𝙪𝙥_𝙞𝙣_𝙂𝙚𝙧𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙮
https://bi%74%63hute.com/video/a1yqKPJziio9

disse regime hates deutchland!

[Physfitfreak]

Hehe :)

Hanson, haven't you learned your lessons? Of course not. In talking with
Vulva, you're talking to a first rate Sheep. That Sheep loves to be a
sheep.

[J. J. Lodder]

They do it to show that they can do it.
Vandalism just is,

Jan

[The Starmaker]

Let me see your little script. Post it here.



--
The Starmaker -- To question the unquestionable, ask the unaskable,
to think the unthinkable, mention the unmentionable, say the unsayable,
and challenge the unchallengeable.

[The Starmaker]

Here is a list I currently have:

salz.txt
usenet.death.penalty.gz
purify.txt
NewsAgent110-MS.exe
HipCrime's NewsAgent (v1_11).htm
NewsAgent111-BE.zip
SuperCede.exe
NewsAgent023.exe
NewsAgent025.exe
ActiveAgent.java
HipCrime's NewsAgent (v1_02)_files
NewsCancel.java (source code)

(plus updated python versions)



(Maybe your script is inthere somewhere?)



Show me what you got. walk the walk.

[Dlzc]

On Saturday, February 3, 2024 at 11:48:05 AM UTC-6, Volney wrote:
> Definitely, but what is the motivation or goal of the spammers? It
> doesn't make sense.

Cheap, brainless search engine optimization. The more places a site is advertised, the more likely it will be to get indexed for search, and the higher its ranking.

David A. Smith

[RichD]

On February 3, Dlzc wrote:
>> Definitely, but what is the motivation or goal of the spammers?
>

> Cheap, brainless search engine optimization. The more places a site
> is advertised, the more likely it will be to get indexed for search, and the higher its ranking.

Yes. But can't Google thwart this tactic, if they're notified,
by removing all the indexes? Punishment!

Of course, this means someone with access to the search
code, the crown jewels - that won't happen without good reason -

--
Rich

[RichD]

On February 3, Dlzc wrote:

> Cheap, brainless search engine optimization. The more places a site is advertised,
> the more likely it will be to get indexed for search, and the higher its ranking.

If i were a hacker, a real TCP guru, I'd write a script to harvest all the spam
URL links. Then another script to spawn processes which hit those Web
sites, manufacturing continuous download requests. A massive denial of
service attack.

alas, I lack such programming skills - but for sure, there are folks with such
acumen. Maybe one of them is a Usenet customer,,,

--
Rich

[ProkaryoticCaspaseHomolog]

You don't need a flood of posts to do that.
This is simple vandalism for fun.

[Dlzc]

Disagree, and I've said why the flood is necessary. Someone is paying for it. Someone is getting paid to do it. The need is flood. This is not the only newsgroup targeted. I monitor nine different groups, and have had to report spam in seven of them (one of them 3x the daily spam in this newsgroup)... the others get little traffic, so are unlikely to be crawled for cross-indexing.

David A. Smith

PS. I wish they would have made the cutoff Feb 2nd, 2024. Or even Dec 31st, 2023.

[Tom Roberts]

On 2/3/24 7:40 PM, RichD wrote:
> If i were a hacker, a real TCP guru, I'd write a script to harvest
> all the spam URL links. Then another script to spawn processes which
> hit those Web sites, manufacturing continuous download requests. A
> massive denial of service attack.

I could easily write such a script. But without control of a
1,000-member botnet (or preferably larger), the traffic load it could
generate would be useless.

Of course, that would be illegal, and against the terms of service of my
ISP.

Tom Roberts

[Dlzc]

On Sunday, February 4, 2024 at 10:25:40 AM UTC-6, Tom Roberts wrote:
> On 2/3/24 7:40 PM, RichD wrote:
> > If i were a hacker, a real TCP guru, I'd write a script to harvest
> > all the spam URL links. Then another script to spawn processes which
> > hit those Web sites, manufacturing continuous download requests. A
> > massive denial of service attack.

> I could easily write such a script. But without control of a
> 1,000-member botnet (or preferably larger), the traffic load it could
> generate would be useless.

Could use fewer computers, and a random number generator for a timer to trigger when each post event was operated. Could have the script set up new accounts as required, that'd provide some randomness. But it is cheaper to pay 3rd world personnel to spend a few hours each day, and provides easier ways of getting past the various forms of "bot detection". They are on the staff for other tasks as well, no doubt.

I just wish Google actually did what they claim they do, and spam reports DID something real. I no longer (on Google Groups) get to see headers, is some of this spam being injected via Google Groups, or is it all via usenet servers?

A half dozen different commercial sites, paying "the same outfit" (or at least cheap clones, using identical methods) to promote their websites, draw in traffic.

David A. Smith

[Ross Finlayson]

On 02/03/2024 02:46 PM, The Starmaker wrote:
> The Starmaker wrote:
>>
>> Ross Finlayson wrote:
>>>
>>> On 01/30/2024 12:54 PM, Ross Finlayson wrote:

I try to avoid sketchy things like hiring a criminal botnet,
there's the impression that that's looking at 1000's of counts
of computer intrusion.

With those being something about $50K and 10-25 apiece,
there's a pretty significant deterrence to such activities.

I've never much cared for "OAuth", giving away the
keys-to-the-kingdom and all, here it looks like either
a) a bunch of duped browsers clicked away their identities,
or b) it's really that Google and Facebook are more than
half full of fake identities for the sole purpose of being fake.

(How's your new deal going?
Great, we got a million users.
Why are my conversions around zero?
Your ad must not speak to them.
Would it help if I spiced it up?
Don't backtalk me, I'll put you on a list!)

So, it seems mostly a sort of "spam-walling the Internet",
where it was like "we're going to reinvent the Internet",
"no, you aren't", "all right then we'll ruin this one".

As far as search goes, there's something to be said
for a new sort of approach to search, given that
Google, Bing, Duck, ..., _all make the same results_. It's
just so highly unlikely that they'd _all make the same
results_, you figure they're just one.

So, the idea, for somebody like me who's mostly interested
in writing on the Internet, is that lots of that is of the sort
of "works" vis-a-vis, the "feuilleton" or what you might
call it, ephemeral junk, that I just learned about in
Herman Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game".

Then, there's an idea, that basically to surface high-quality
works to a search, is that there's what's called metadata,
for content like HTML, with regards to Dublin Core and
RDF and so on, about a sort of making for fungible collections
of works, what results searchable fragments of various
larger bodies of works, according to their robots.txt and
their summaries and with regards to crawling the content
and so on, then to make federated common search corpi,
these kinds of things.

[Ross Finlayson]

It's like "why are they building that new data center",
and it's like "well it's like Artificial Intelligence, inside
that data center is a million virts and each one has a
browser emulator and a phone app sandbox and a
little notecard that prompts its name, basically it's
a million-headed hydra called a sims-bot-farm,
that for pennies on the dollar is an instant audience."

"Wow, great, do they get a cut?" "Don't be talking about my cut."

Usenet traffic had been up recently, ....

I think they used to call it "astro-turfing".
"Artificial Intelligence?" "No, 'Fake eyeballs'."

[The Starmaker]

Ross Finlayson wrote:
>
> On 02/04/2024 09:55 AM, Ross Finlayson wrote:
> > On 02/03/2024 02:46 PM, The Starmaker wrote:
> >> The Starmaker wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Ross Finlayson wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> On 01/30/2024 12:54 PM, Ross Finlayson wrote:

I have NewsAgent111-MS.exe

I seem to be missing version 2.0

Do you have the 2.0 version?

I'll trade you.

I'll give you my python version with (GUI)!!!! (Tinter)


let's trade!


don't bogart

[The Starmaker]

I seem to be missing this version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051023050609/http://newsagent.p5.org.uk/

Do you have it? you must have!

[Ross Finlayson]

On 02/04/2024 12:53 PM, The Starmaker wrote:
> The Starmaker wrote:
>>
>> Ross Finlayson wrote:
>>>
>>> On 02/04/2024 09:55 AM, Ross Finlayson wrote:
>>>> On 02/03/2024 02:46 PM, The Starmaker wrote:
>>>>> The Starmaker wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Ross Finlayson wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 01/30/2024 12:54 PM, Ross Finlayson wrote:

Nope, I just wrote a little script to connect to NNTP
with a Yes/No button on the subject, tapped through
those, and a little script to send an HTTP request to
the publicly-facing return-to-sender in-box, for each.

Here's all the sources you need: IETF RFC editor.
Look for "NNTP". How to advise Google of this is
that each domain on the Internet is supposed to
have an "abuse@domain" email inbox, though there's
probably also a web request interface, as with regards
to publicly facing services, and expected to be
good actors on the network.

Anyways if you read through "Meta: a usenet server
just for sci.math", what I have in mind is a sort
of author's and writer's oriented installation,
basically making for vanity printouts and generating
hypertext collections of contents and authors and
subjects and these kinds of things, basically for
on the order of "find all the postings of Archimedes
Plutonium, and, the threads they are in, and,
make a hypertext page of all that, a linear timeline,
and also thread it out as a linear sequence".

I.e. people who actually post to Usenet are sometimes
having written interesting things, and, thus having
it so that it would be simplified to generate message-ID
listings and their corresponding standard URL's in the
standard IETF "news" URL protocol, and to point that
at a given news server or like XLink, is for treating
Usenet its archives like a living museum of all these
different authors posts and their interactions together.

I.e., here it's "belles lettres" and "fair use",
not just "belles" and "use".


It seemed nice of Google Groups to front this for a long time,
now they're quitting.

I imagine Internet Relay Chat's still insane, though.

Anyways I stay away from any warez and am proud that
since about Y2K at least I've never bootlegged anything,
and never uploaded a bootleg. Don't want to give old Shylock
excuses, and besides, I wrote software for a living.

[The Starmaker]

Ross Finlayson wrote:
>
> On 02/04/2024 12:53 PM, The Starmaker wrote:
> > The Starmaker wrote:
> >>
> >> Ross Finlayson wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On 02/04/2024 09:55 AM, Ross Finlayson wrote:
> >>>> On 02/03/2024 02:46 PM, The Starmaker wrote:
> >>>>> The Starmaker wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Ross Finlayson wrote:
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> On 01/30/2024 12:54 PM, Ross Finlayson wrote:

Anyways, I don't know who was talking about "any warez" or "bootlegs",
since I was refering to programs and scripts that reads:


"FREE, which means you can copy it and redistribute"
"Similarly, the source is provided as reference and can be redistributed
freely as well. "

HipCrime's NewsAgent (v2.0) is FREE, which means you can copy it and
redistribute it at will, as long as you give credit to the original
author. Similarly, the source is provided as reference and can be
redistributed freely as well.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051023050609/http://newsagent.p5.org.uk/


You seem to be too much 'in your head', on a high horse...



"FREE, which means you can copy it and redistribute"
"Similarly, the source is provided as reference and can be redistributed
freely as well. "


So, show me that wicked script you wrote : "funnel all their
message-ID's"
by people you call spammers who 'funnel' their products and services
through Usenet newsgroups.


You are sooooo wicked.



and a nanofossils

[wugi]

Op 30/01/2024 om 1:03 schreef Tom Roberts:

> I use Thunderbird to read Usenet. Recently sci.physics.relativity has
> been getting hundreds of spam posts each day, completely overwhelming
> legitimate content. These spam posts share the property that they are
> written in a non-latin script.
>
> Thunderbird implements message filters that can mark a message Read. So

Better than that: why didn't you choose "delete"?

> I created a filter to run on sci.physics.relativity that marks messages
> Read. Then when reading the newsgroups, I simply display only unread

Not needed in case of choice "delete".

> messages. The key to making this work is to craft the filter so it marks
> messages in which the Subject matches any of a dozen characters picked
> from some spam messages.
>
> This doesn't completely eliminate the spam, but it is now only a few
> messages per day.

I've done that too, but then there came a tsunami of indonesian
latin-script spam...

--
guido wugi

[xip14]

I was galvanized into action
undertook wild gyrations
parkoured my person
postured like an incompetent photographer
writhed in fecklessness
and spiraled out of control

*/
*/
*/
*/

[The Starmaker]

Anyways, there is only one person that know what 'nanofossils' means,
and that is Ross Finlayson.


I just realized that Ross Finlayson doesn't know of NEWSAGENT.


Anyways, ...

"Anyways"???? Who talks like that?


Anyways..


the problem of the 'flooding' is not the spammers, it's the 'scientific
community'. They caused the problem.
They removed the feature that NewsAgent used to get rid of ALL flooding
and spammers. But, but, the
members of the scientific community could not trust their own members to
use it against them.

If one member of the 'scientific community' disagreed with another
member of the 'scientific community'...they were removed!


Too much power.


I called it...God Mode.

[The Starmaker]

Using NewsAgent in God Mode was great! Ecept...if you didn't know how to use it
properly you can make a mistake and remove *EVERYONE'S* posts by accident.

Everyone just completely disapeared!


Oops. i made a booboo.


Like that Twilight Zone episode where everyone disapears by a click of a watch.



Where is everybody? MAJOR KILLFILE!

So, which is worse?

[The Starmaker]

You know what GOD MODE Killfile is? That means you not only killed filed everyone, but you also sort of
turn everyones esles killfile on. Nobody sees nobody.


It's like the Atomic Bomb of Usenet!


(only yous guys make bombs like that)
(then yous get angry when everyone has the atomic bomb)

typical.

[ProkaryoticCaspaseHomolog]

J. J. Lodder wrote:

> ProkaryoticCaspaseHomolog <tom...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Richard Hertz wrote:
>>
>> > Use this website. It's spam free, and you can get a free account there:
>>
>> > https://www.novabbs.com/tech/thread.php?group=sci.physics.relativity
>>
>> Thanks!

> Much better to get a real newsserver instead,

What newsserver would you recommend for an iPhone?

Google Groups worked pretty much the same on desktop
as on iPhone or iPad, likewise novabbs. I can dictate
extended posts with very few errors. Everybody jokes
about how stupid voice recognition is, but Apple does
a pretty good job once you learn its idiosyncrasies.

[Ross Finlayson]

How to get a grip on the Gogole spams since six months ago or so
seems to be along the lines of trawling the newsgroups, pulling
down their posts since about that date, then extracting from
each one whether it has "KINDLE EPUB EBOOK" or Thai code,
has that mostly they can all be identified because they make
an X-Content-Transfer-Encoding base64 header, then that the content
is sort of inscrutable block unless its uncoded.

So it looks like it's possible to identify only off the subject
and other headers, then pretty definitively off the format,
which ones are these spams.

Then each one of these has a Google posting account in
one of the Google headers.

Injection-Info: google-groups.googlegroups.com;
posting-host=146.70.11.7; posting-account=hJ31DwoAAADGk9KnJ0tR36KM3U7DAsJC

It's that posting-account that basically is the abuser's,
whether or not it's an innocent dupe's after something like OAuth,
is undetermined.

Another sort of indicating bit is that they start with

X-Forwarded-Encrypted / X-Received / X-Forwarded-Encrypted / X-Received

pointing at some SMTP id's, what with regards to that looks like an SMTP
gateway,
what with respect to what might be alternate forms of message injection,
while the Path of each of the posts indicates as coming from
postnews.google.com .
Not all do, though.

Those though look like usual Google posters' posts, so it seems like
an automation of some Groups API on the Google side.

So anyways the idea is to

get the list of groups on a usenet server, GROUPS
get the count of headers since a few weeks ago
get the overview of headers
find likely spams
make a list of spammed groups
get the spammed count of headers since October
get the spammed overview of headers since October
find likely spams
pull down the headers
extract the posting-account


then part of the challenge is not including any threaded replies,
in the sense that some people replied to these posts in their rejection,
to make sure that an algorithm to mark spams is avoiding
Type I/II errors or the false positive/negative. I.e., such posts
in their replies, in their own content, don't have the same
characteristics.

(Or anything that contains bit ly links or "common exact-links in the spam".
Also all those "Case Analysis and Case Study Solution" spams,
look kind of similar. In fact when the spam started up I thought to
myself "hey I wonder if that's those 'Case Analysis and Case Study
Solution' spammers". )

For example on 10/2/23 ,I replied to a spam, so looking at it,
b0796889-551b-4637...@googlegroups.com
I would want to disambiguate spam reply rejections, from spams.
I'm not sure yet if the spams with same subject headers are
actually threaded replies or just have same subject, I imagine
that they just have the same subject header and aren't threaded replies.

So, there would basically be for cross-checking "likely spam"
(not replies, no references) and "likely not-spam" (replies, references).


Otherwise it does look just like one of the spams, with a
Content-Transfer-Encoding and that, but not the "encrypted SMTP"
bit.

"Note: Meta title tags should typically be around ...", is
one of the blast-fax mail-merge prompts that slips out,
with the idea of that finding that quote in the source
code will probably indicate the origin of the software.

So, the idea is to key off of posting account, then compute counts
for these sorts relations

posting-account -> email-address
posting-account -> targetted-group

then to compute how many spams were sent, by who, to where,
and whether posting-account <-> email-address is 1-1 or fraudulent,
then result a neat list of posting-accounts to batch up in a sort of
report and send it up to Google as a curated sort of spam report.

Then there's an idea that thus results a sort of spam rule,
about making "federated spam rules" type of a thing,
with regards to things like "spam blacklists" and these
kinds of things, and heuristics or rules, vis-a-vis, that
neural net classifiers are inscrutable and instead there
is to be a sort of "open quality rules" for relating messages,
to groups.

So, we can identify the spams, and, sort of to their origins.
Across all the Usenet groups.

[The Starmaker]

As I mentioned above,

the problem of the 'flooding' is not the spammers,
it's the 'scientific community'. They caused the problem.

They removed the feature that was used to get rid of ALL flooding...

Why? Because of the War of the Gods.

If one member of the 'scientific community' disagreed with another

member, or especially if he had a higher IQ...they were removed!

War of the Gods.

I will have no other gods before me...they think of themselves.


Albert Einstein was a Jewish Supremacists.

If you disagreed with him, you were called
"not man of science" and "not Jewish".

Of course his people would blacklist yous.


So, put back the feature that gets rid of the spamming flooders and
watch what will happen to the rests of yous.


It will be again...The War of the Gods.


And I will not have any Gods before me either.


off wit your heads!

Only those below average intelligence should dominate the Usenet!

anything above dat...banished!

[Physfitfreak]

On 2/11/2024 2:37 PM, The Starmaker wrote:
> As I mentioned above,
> the problem of the 'flooding' is not the spammers,
> it's the 'scientific community'. They caused the problem.
> They removed the feature that was used to get rid of ALL flooding...
>
> Why? Because of the War of the Gods.

So a comic book is resposible for that?

--
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
www.avast.com

[gharnagel]

> ProkaryoticCaspaseHomolog <tom...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Richard Hertz wrote:
> > >
> > > Use this website. It's spam free, and you can get a free account there:
> > >
> > > https://www.novabbs.com/tech/thread.php?group=sci.physics.relativity
> >
> > Thanks!

I'm using it, too, since Google increased their "security" which locks me out
but still allows all the spam!

> Much better to get a real newsserver instead,
>

> Jan

My question is, will one still be able to post to novabbs when google pulls
the plug?

Gary

[Ross Finlayson]

I notice the spamming is making some experiments in actually
using threaded replies to some of its spam, it's another sort
of usual thing that makes for a model of something like
"Grice's maxims of good-faith communication", vis-a-vis
"bizarro Grice and how he identifies with spam", about
figuring out how to have most usual sorts of correlation,
that run in fixed bounds and don't need remote resources
nor necessarily large ones, but that can rely on a currency
of known-bad sources and hashes or stamps of patterns that
are highly correlated, here mostly though all the little
spams are little self-contained spoo to pooh-pooh,
about designing reference implementations and reference editions
of common, standardized, and dirt-simple Internet protocols,
then also including that they evolve and the latest front-ends
for things like DANE, and related efforts in DKIM and DMARC,
and other usual sorts conventions of the opportunistic good-faith
sort, then as well just treating a publicly-facing port as a
sort of known problem and having a little fire-bulkhead for each.

[Dlzc]

> I notice the spamming is making some experiments in actually
> using threaded replies to some of its spam,

It is crossposting. Increases web depth, improves the "quality" if the hit / link. "This shows up on multiple sites..."

Been happening for YEARS, and this most recent spate I've noticed it within the first week of its start. You can have your bots / grunts locate other threads with similar content, add (or not) a few more links, and post to the same or a different newsgroup.

David A. Smith

[Ross Finlayson]

It's sort of interesting, to think about how to make
Internet services, like e-mail and messaging here,
what were originally designed "non-adversarial",
"co-operative", say, and then there was "netiquette",
and a flood of noobs like myself or it was 1995,
though I suppose I bulletin-boarded at 1985,
but it was about thirty years ago.

So anyways these days there's basically how to figure
out how to adapt the same protocols, because, the tooling
and the standards and the maturity, for publicly-facing
services, and the ability to rely on security through
obscurity, or not, that basically the expectation
has inverted.

It used to be like "gamma rays might flip a bit".
These days it's "it's mostly dreck".

What was the Type I / Type II errors, false positive
and false negative, or vice-versa, has inverted,
while at the same time, the internally-facing is
still considered non-adversarial, and the standards
advise their interoperability (and quaint charm).

So, I've been wondering how to make it so to
standard up, "personal Internet services", when
for example in the old days one might publish a
Mail Exchanger resource record to DNS, and have
it be available often enough that usual email delivery
retries would succeed, vis-a-vis leaving a box connected
to the Internet where it will be randomly assaulted regularly.

So, over on sci.math, one thing I've been tapping away
at since a brief study of about 2016, and some more
recently, is how to make, "reference implementation",
of things like Usenet backend or NNTP/IMAP/HTTP,
and "reference edition" of things like "30 years of sci.math".

Then there are considerations with respect to the
federation of Usenet hosts, or the paths, and
the curation of the raw data, figuring those
are "internally-facing" yet that the data's too raw,
and a suitable amount of front-end armor, a sort of
sentinel and doorman approach, the goal of which
is to let in want and keep out not-want. (And
to not be included at all when un-necessary.)

All this of course should also follow being a
good "network actor", even when others aren't,
while being "self-sufficient", and not just
selling out or buying in to rackets of various sorts.

So anyways I've been tapping away on sci.math in
the thread "Meta: a usenet server just for sci.math",
about how to make it so that even relatively non-technical
sorts, could arrive at just what they need, to stand up
their own backings for Usenet and Email and the like,
that's designed in its ecosystem with this modern sort
of perspective of "Type 1 Type 2 mode inversion",
while still being just plain standard and so richly
functional as this plain threaded forum is.

[Dlzc]

On Saturday, February 17, 2024 at 11:51:07 AM UTC-6, Ross Finlayson wrote:
> It used to be like "gamma rays might flip a bit".
> These days it's "it's mostly dreck".

They are dreck peddlers, trying to stand out amongst the other dreck peddlers. Google is doing us a favor by stopping indexing (at least) new posts. Clearly, reporting the spam to Google is doing nothing immediately that I can see.

David A. Smith

[The Starmaker]

So, where do you people get the idea AFTER Feb 22, the flooding will
stop???


Are yous saying it's all coming from Google Groups source website???

[Dlzc]

No. They are saying that when Google stops crawling USENET for content, any spam posted to USENET will be invisible to search engines (or at least the Google search engine). The advertisers don't get paid, so wasting time posting to USENET becomes pointless.

David A. Smith

[Hooker Tzaran Balanowsky]

not sure you undrestand the procedure. The flooding comes most likely from
google itself, wanting 𝘁𝗼_𝗱𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘆_𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘁. Making money out of it.

otherwise they could stop it long ago. Obvious a wanker 𝗸𝗵𝗮𝘇𝗮𝗿 𝗴𝗼𝘆 from
amrica, their own 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 configuration. They shit together. It's a satanic
club.

[Volney]

The Thai casino spam is from Google and will (should) stop.

Any spammers not spamming through Google can continue to spam, but if
Google is no longer indexing Usenet, it will no longer be profitable for
them.

[Ross Finlayson]

I think it's a sham for "spam-walling the Internet".

I.e. "Aw you got spammed, good-bye. Good luck standing
up any publicly-facing service." It seems a lot just like
the any other sort of protection racket bit.

I mean it's "thousands of fake Google accounts", ...,
or "gee thanks OAuth", maybe it's just the terrible
decision to keys-to-the-kingdom by thousands of stupid
gamblers who click-through a creds-farm to see a breast,
like "Are you sure?", "Are you sure you can't read English?".
Either way they're dupes.

If you look at something like narkiv or novabbs, they
just put some filters on their INND or what and not much spam there.

On the usual hired Usenet providers they are statedly anti-spam,
and there's some cancel-bot activity going on them, though for
example it gets out variously, each Usenet site can have its own
policy. Seems the idea is "don't post links".

So, it's sort of varying as a patch-work. There's lots to it,
though.


It was nice of Google to front to Usenet these years,
what'll be missing will be "easy search", so the idea
is to make "a Library/Museum Browse, Exhibit, Tour, Carrel"
type experience, "fuller search".


Hopefully there'll be a revival. Have you ever seen
a tent revival? Sometimes those can get pretty good.


I'm trying to figure out standard files for standard protocols
for reference implementations and reference editions,
of bring-your-own or brew-your-own, Usenet and this kind of thing.
Over on sci.math it's called "Meta: a usenet server just for sci.math".

Currently it's name idea is like "usenet.science", but, it's variable.