@Home Gets the Usenet Death Penalty

A reader wrote to us with the news that an UDP has been declared on @Home in news.admin.announce. You can read it on Deja.com for the full post. Interesting - let's see how long it takes @Home to respond to the UDP. Usually, this gets people attention pretty quickly, and I'll welcome any sort of respite from the spam flood of the last couple months. The penalty is due to begin 17:00 PST, Jan. 18, 2000.

UDP; an example of a self-moderating system

This is an interesting phenomenon - USENET has no central authority and no control centre, so if the UDP has the desired effect, then it's an example of anarchism actually working (for once; note - I'm not in any way an anarchist). It's also support for what your mother told you about bullies and annoying brothers and sisters - "ignore them and they'll get fed up and stop it". Thanks, mum!

Re:What does this mean?

UDP Faq [stopspam.org]
That's the faq for the UDP.
ls: .sig: File not found.

Re:What does this mean?

The Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) is when *all* articles from an offending site are summarily cancelled.

This may sound heavy handed, but from my experience (5 years as an anti-spammer now) the anti-spammers involved make every effort to contact the offending ISP and help them secure their news servers, report abusive users to them, etc. In essence, a UDP is something of last resort.

It should also be noted that this isn't some small cabal (TINC) of people trying to censor others, as participation in a UDP is voluntary. All you need to do to not participate is alias NNTP traffic with the "udpcancel" site in the path. Often however, the benefits of a UDP outweigh the disadvantages, and the UDPed site cleans up their act rather quickly.

Hope this helps.

Yay

This is the sort of thing I like to see. As someone else stated, it's comparable to anarchy working.

I like the idea of people/organizations fending for themselves on the internet. The last thing we need is any government intervening and trying to enforce it. Anarchy may not be suitable for real life, but I think the general concept is perfect for the Internet where the real laws lie in the software. For example, when someone tries to break into your box, you shouldn't call the cops - you should make sure your box is secure and defend yourself. If you're incapable, then buy software to assist you. (note: Please, nobody make analogies comparing this to some crime in real life :) It's just not the same in my book).

Better Link to the article

Here is a better link [deja.com] to the article in question: Keeps from /. 'ing one server.

I'm glad, and it's my ISP

I'm a disgruntled @home user, or in other words, I've been on the service for more than three months. No one at @home takes proper measures to inforce the acceptable use policy. Instead, they cap bandwidth at 5k a second to make their ISP a less viable 'server', inconveniencing every user.

@home costs $65 a month Canadian, and they cut corners everywhere they can. My personal WAN area has between 32 and 40 people on it, and the packet drops are phenomenal. I have been phoning their tech support for thirteen months in a row, and they have told me it's everything BUT a crowded WAN area. They most recently have told me that 'Internet Access' does not include UDP. They do not support UDP, therefore they have no responsibility to control the quality of Internet gaming, despite advertising gaming on their network on television with fullscreen Quake pictures. I have been keeping track and am wondering about the viability of a lawsuit.

As I hinted above, servers are against the rules with @home. Have you ever played on a Quake server with an IP starting with 24.113 or 24.112? That's @home cable. Expect 5 to 50k/s upstreams.

Ever gone to a mp3 search engine? A ton of the sites are 24.113 or 24.112.

@home has been banned from Dalnet, due to excessive numbers of people spamming the network. The Dalnet ops have tried to contact @home about the problem, but they were ignored. The only way to connect to Dalnet for @home members is through gate.dal.net, which has too much lag. My two year old channel dwindled to zero people within a week.

The bottom line is, do NOT sign up with @home if there are any other alternatives. They will hook you in with a high installation fee, and it goes downhill from there. You're on your own. Everyone who has any sense of right and has power at @home must be ignored internally.

Re:People still use USENET?

Reading USENET today requires a bit of patience, good newsreader software, and the 'right' groups.

You need patience, of course, to wade through junk posts, as well as the self-imposed week or so of lurking before posting rule. You need to find resources in the group, as most good NGs have FAQs about what and what not to ask. And you need to realize that reply times from USENet are much slower than other possible methods (IRC, web boards), but generally are going out to a much wider audience and will have a better chance to be answered correctly.

A newsreader with a killfile in today's USENET is a must. You also would like one with good filters that can rank messages based on subject or author. This helps highlight what you're interested in rather than wading through the rest.

But more importantly than the above is having a strong newsgroup to participate in. It takes a while for a ng to develop it's community, but once it's in place, most are pretty good. Examples that I read include comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc, and rec.games.roguelike.nethack/.adom. On the other hand, if there is no clear leadership/common posters, or the like, or the subject matter is of the right type, you get groups that are mostly organized anarchy: alt.html, alt.tv.simpsons, alt.games.half-life, etc.

But in generally, most of the non-alt groups will be good; the regulars are knowledgable and will try to answer a well-worded question to the best of their ability.

Unfortunately, USENET is really only practical for those with T1 connections or shell accounts with their newsreader - most groups get 100+ messages a day, and if you wanted to read all the messages with a standard dialin and newsreader, it could easily take 10 minutes per newsgroup per day to download that information. That's why web discussion boards have gained popularity. However, IMO, it will not replace the quality of help I generally get from USENET.

If someone tries to break into your box ...

I agree that to "call the cops" is overall a pretty useless thing to do if someone tries to break into your system.

However, the right answer to security isn't to "buy software" either. As Bruce Schneier is fond of pointing out, security is not a checklist feature: it's not something that can be slapped onto the side of a fundamentally poorly-designed system.

"Poorly-designed" here refers not only to the software and other instrumentality, but also to your administrative methodology. Administrative methodology has to do with the things you do as routine system upkeep. Do you monitor security-related mailing lists (CERT-CC, BugTraq)? When setting up a new system, do you close unneeded services? Do you make a habit of knowing everything that should be running on your system, and noticing when things that shouldn't be there appear? Do you run security audits against your system? Do you regularly check for security updates to your software and install them?

My new favorite security procedure: Go to a script-kiddie Web site, download some k00l t00lz (cracking tools, DoS utilities, etc.) and wield them against your own system (over your own network) ... see what happens. Keep abreast of the newest script-kiddie fads and they won't surprise you.

Security is a way of thinking -- some would say a way of life. It's not something you can just buy a program to install.

Re:@Home should sue sites not carrying its news tr

UUNet attempted to do the same thing two years ago when they got UDP'd. Their lawyers, and the government also, told them that they had no case.

We aren't attempting to destroy @Home, we're simply not carrying their packets on USENET - which we aren't obligated to do anyways. They could only sue us if we had a contract requiring us to carry any and all spam from them.

UUNet thought they were all that with lawyers too, and when they tried, the number of people supporting the UDP nearly doubled in anger.

Lawsuit?

According to the FAQ [stopspam.org] that one gentleman posted, UUnet got this in 1997, and threatened legal action. That was stupid, infeasible, and generally clueless, and was laughed out in short order. However, the internet was not really Big Business then, with Big Pockets and Stupid Corporate Lawyers (tm). How stupid is @Home? Might they try a lawsuit? Yes, it would kill them and not work anyway, but stupidity knows few bounds...

UDP

apologies to OT.

Ironic UDP is same acronym for thin layer communication protocol User Datagram Protocol (UDP) which is thinner than TCP/IP.

One UDP connects.
Another UDP disconnects.

I like the irony.



Corrinne Yu
3D Game Engine Programmer

Re:I'm glad, and it's my ISP

have you ever tried to get something other than windows to work with pppoe?

Yes. With some elbow grease it works under Linux and OpenBSD. Probably works under FreeBSD and NetBSD also. But, it's gonna take a bit of the old RTFM.

Re:@Home should sue sites not carrying its news tr

@Home should sue any site that refuses to carry its traffic (at least those subject to US courts).

The UDP is a community action. @Home was not a good neighbor, and now they can't borrow the weed whacker. There is no obligation to carry a particular companies usnet articles. There is no obligation to even allow IP packets from @home into their networks (except for their upstream provider who IS under contract).

Besides that, there are very few 'smaller' sites out there. Most ISP's that don't own their own national network outsource their usenet service.

For those who don't understand the seriousness...

...you clearly did NOT read the original declaration of an impending UDP. Things were qualified rather carefully, and in particular, a listing of the 100 news servers that were the origin of the most spam to usenet was listed.

EVERY DAMN ONE OF THEM WAS AN @HOME NEWS SERVER.

The AUP Enforcement department for @Home has had their thumbs stuffed up their asses for long enough. The throw the book at anyone who dares have a web server showing the default Apache page on it, but never do a damn thing about open relays, which are a much bigger threat. The reasoning seems to be that open relays aren't a bandwidth muncher, but a web site that gets twelve hits a month is.

In all honesty, they'll probably ignore this UDP since the summary cancellations will mean they will no longer have to forward so many complaints about Usenet spamming to /dev/null.

Re:I'm glad, and it's my ISP

I'll be the middle of the road @Home user in this discussion. I've had it for 5 months, and am pretty happy over all. I wouldn't go back to dial-up for anything, but I've had problems as well. Mostly with nightly outages for the first month I had it, which have since been resolved. My only other gripes are that they limit you to a maximum of 3 IP addresses, and I need 4.

YMMV, as I'm on a node which had a total of five users, last time I checked. I've seen downloads of up to 120K/second, which is pretty damned fast. The uploads aren't speedy, but certainly better than dial-up and I'd estimate them at about 20-30K a second in my experience. I haven't tried to run many server apps off of it or anything, but I have no problems with the speed.


---

Re:Not just news, but net in general. Helps pirate

> Lack of authority is Bad. This same anarchistic
> quality you praise so much also keeps an ample
> supply or w4r3z and kiddie pr0n available to
> anyone on the 'net. Is this what you are
> supporting.

Some, like myself, would argue that neither of
these is imnherently bad. (while I am against
forcing children into sexual situations for
any reason- especially something as base as
capital gain, I see nothing wrong with the
act of transmission of pictures themselves)

Noone is being hurt by these simple transmissions
of data. Noones rights are being abused. I see
no real problem.

Its simply the free exchange of information. Is
that what you are against?

See the MAPS Realtime Black Hole List

It'd be nice to see this extended to other services, I'm not sure how feasable it would be. I suppose a centralized procmail filter database would be feasible.

Take a look at the Realtime Black Hole List [vix.com]. This is a DNS-based hack that publishes the domain names of sites that allow spammers to send through their mailservers - in a form that lets mail transfer agents do a quick DNS inquiry and dump mail if it is coming from such a site.

Interestingly, it's an example of anarchism in action. Anybody can publish such a list. Anybody can hack their sendmail to use such a list - and pick any such list they chose. (As far as I know there's only one such list at the moment - probably a sign that it's doing a good job.)

The RBH client code is included in current Linux distributions. (I saw it as a {recommended} sendmail configuration option in Red Hat 6.1, for instance.) I've heard estimates that about 60% of the email inboxes in the world are now behind mail transfer agents that subscribe to RBH and thus bounce mail from any site on the list.

Re:IP Discrimination!

do not agree. Just because there are users who abuse the internet and usenet groups the entire domain is black listed

I remember when AOL opened its floodgates upon the internet. No only did they put a big POST button in their software and not educate their users what usenet was, they had a little bug in their software. Each post would be duplicated seven times. Putting the entire aol.com domain in my killfile returned the newsgroups back to an enjoyable state. In fact, it would be over a year before I ever saw an intelligent post from the aol.com domain. I wasn't missing much by filtering them out.

Then other ISP's unloaded the masses onto usenet. Newbies are a fact of life, but usenet was then carpetbombed with scams and what was to be known as spam. It was unreadable. Filtering everything with the .com domain helped, but that removed some good posts too. It worked for a while and made the groups readable.

I have seen the usenet death penalty used. And it works! It keeps me from having to filter, because it forces responsiblility for those who wish to become part of the usenet community.

Re:Do you *think* about the users you hurt? Bonehe

If you look at the history of the UDPs, we have yet to find a UDP that has lasted longer than five days.

We hurt millions of users for five days to remove billions of crossposted spam from millions of Usenet servers - and also as retaliation for @Home's little alias of [e-mail] to /dev/null.

Have you ever run a Usenet server? Do you have any idea of the pure amount of GARBAGE from spam and advertisements that will suck up entire T3s 24/7? If you want a better analogy, this is little different than when Iraq invaded Kuwait and didn't respond to demands to stop; most of NATO got together and pounded on them.

Given the choice of massive spamming or blocking cable users from direct Usenet access (they can still use Deja) for a few days, I pick the block. Who knows, @Home might even clean up their act before the UDP goes into effect. Historically UDPs are usually released before the deadline for that very reason.

Re:I'm glad, and it's my ISP

I thought I'd start this by pointing out that I have @home in Canada as well, I'm not sure if you're on Shaw, Rogers or Codgeco(sp?) but I have found from discussing with people on the various services that the quality of your service is rarely directly @home's fault and more likely the way your cable company handles it's own end.

I thought I'd post a more positive perspective on my @home experience.

First off I've had the service for around 2 1/2 years now, I had it when it was still known as 'The Wave' because @home was too busy at the time to handle expansion into Canada. I pay around 40$ a month Canadian with tax. My stream caps are 300k/s down, 50k/s up (Up from 100k/s down and 50k/s up when I initially signed up) and I routinely do transfers at these rates. I live in Metro Toronto and I would estimate I easily have over 100 people on my segment, if I were to guess I would say it is probably higher, more like 200. During prime time I do notice more packet loss, but I guess I just accept this, just as I accept that if I go to work during rush hour I will have to contend with more people on the train and it won't be as easy to get a seat etc. I do play quake, everquest without significant problems.

As to @home's handling of open relays, well @home may be bad but my personal cable company (Rogers) seems to actually be developing a clue. They recently did a scan of machines and notified people running mailservers who failed the spam relay check that they would have a week to fix their relay or their service would be disconnected until they could prove to the abuse people that it was fixed. As a side note Rogers allows small personal servers for mail etc, but don't expect to be running the next slashdot affiliate off it :). I found their handling of this incident suprisingly well done considering the horror stories that come up on the Unix@home mailing list about abuse departments disconnecting people because their machine showed open ports for mail and www even though they were only running things for personal use.

I don't use IRC so I really can't comment on that.

My bottom line I guess is, all of @home is not created equal. Check around, ask other people who have been on the service in the area what they think, look and see if you have a local @home users group and see how their general attitude is towards their provider.

I just spoke to an @Home rep on the phone....

I'm getting @Home service installed this Friday (ordered it last week), and then I see this announcement, so I called up the local sales rep. Eventually I was propagated high up enough to talk to someone clueful out of their head office in Philadelphia by the name of Tom. He had heard nothing about this, but sounded rather concerned after I explained the consequences of the DP (as he should). He had me mail him the posting to new.admin.announce and said he would contact them folks over in the _real_ head office in CA.

All I can do is suggest everyone do the same. The office in PA is [phone]. You may or may not get someone knowledgable right off the bat, so be polite (but really, you should be polite anyway!). You might want to even check out the Canons of Conduct [linuxdoc.org] from the Linux Advocacy mini-HOWTO for some good pointers.

Good luck!

A junk free dejanews search form

If you want a good dejanews interface that's free of the crap and all the advertisements,

copy this old dejanews search form to your home directory [attaway.org]

and bookmark it from your browser. This search form was saved from my cache when deja ruined their interface. It has none of the voting crap and your search will just yield the facts and what you are looking for.

Something Seems to be Happening at @home

I just called my friendly @home customer service rep (she actually *was* friendly!) and asked her about the UDP problem. She was not aware of it, but she escalated the call and found out that the issue has been elevated to the corporate level and it is hoped things will be addressed before the UDP goes into effect. It seems they have started taking a lot of calls over this.

-Jeff

If you are a BugTraq subscriber...

If you are a BugTraq subscriber, you might want to know...

OK, not exactly on this topic (if you say "offtopic" they don't mark you offtopic :) but in a related and interesting coincidence:

I just now got a message from BugTraq saying that their mailing list has gotten blocked by ORBS because their ISP blocks ORBS probes. I think (I'm not an expert on this) that ORBS (anti-spam police) is probing to see if above.net's sendmail will allow "open relaying", but above.net blocks the probes. So, ORBS is treating the ISP as if they allow open relaying... does ORBS have "proof" that some machines in that domain are relaying, or is this a "play ball our way or screw off" (you know, kinda like cookies on Slashdot :) move?

Here's the email (I've corrected some errors to make it readable):

Subject: Administrivia: ORBS

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 11:09:22 -0800
From: Elias Levy
To: [e-mail]

It seems the folks at ORBS (orbs.org) have decided that since our mail server is hosted at above.net, and above.net is filtering [ORBS's] probes since [Above] claims they are a DoS, ORBS is adding any mail servers connected via above.net (including ours) to their spam relaying list, regardless that our servers have never performed relaying functions. I've emailed them but so far they have not responded. You may wish to email them ([e-mail]) and voice your dissatisfaction. Of course if our email to you is being blocked by ORBS then you will probably not receive this message ;-)

- Elias Levy
Security Focus

My personal response regarding @Home

After a (somewhat funny) conversation with a bewildered @Home help desk lackey, I was told that noone in _entire office_ (including his supervisor) knew what I was even talking about. I was directed to e-mail [e-mail].

The following is the text of my e-mail message to them. I would encourage other @Home customers to write letters of their own. Perhaps @Home will get the point and begin acting more responsibly.

-----email follows-----

to: (several addresses, repeated in body of msg.)
from: (Chris Stearns)

--
I would like to know what @Home intends to do about the Usenet UDP that is scheduled to begin on Tues, Jan. 18 at 1700 PST.


Usenet access (reading and posting) is one of the services I pay @Home for. Now, because of @Home's continuing reluctance to address the abuse of its mail servers by spammers, my Usenet postings may be blocked by various sysadmins, who have elected to reject all traffic originating from within the home.com domain.

This would be an unacceptable interruption of service. @Home has an obligation to ensure that the services I subscribe to are available to me.

Futhermore, @Home has an obligation to ensure that its mail servers are not being abused by spammers. The requests for action that have been forwarded to @Home (by myself and others) are apparently being ignored. My own requests have been met with excuses. David Ritz, the originator of the UDP, details largely the same experience when describing his attempts to contact @Home. These responses from @Home - deferral, ignorance - are not good enough.

The remedy to this problem is completely within @Home's ability to to enact. I am a paying customer who wants to know what is being done.
Tell me, what are you going to do to clean up your act? When?

I have attached a copy of the UDP notice, originally posted by David Ritz in news.admin.net-abuse.usenet. This message, as well as the original notice, has been mailed to [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], and [e-mail]



A timely response would be appreciated.


Chris Stearns
(email address omitted)


(UDP notice was attached here)

-------end email message------------


Happy writing!
Chris Stearns

Re:Spammers will always Prevail

We don't close highways because we have police to control them. The internet cannot be controlled in this way (partially due to it's international, borderless structure that takes it out of the relevant jurisdictions).

If you look at the UDP FAQ (linked to in the email mentioned in the article), you will see that most of the UDPs do not go into effect, and when they, it's generally for a very short period of time. I would say your average, honest internet user doesn't get [too] hurt by this action.

This is hardly old-school draconian society: apparently @Home has been approached regularily about this problem. They have done their customers a disservice by not being a responsible service provider. This isn't a police force in effect: the participants of the UDP are free to make up their own minds and not participate if they desire. It sounds more like a form of democracy within anarchy! If you think that this is draconian, would you mind suggesting another method equally as effective?

I will make that analogy

Why? Because there are two types of crimes frequently seen: personal and property.

No, breaking into someone's computer shouldn't be treated like a physical assault. Not even close IMO.

But it SHOULD be treated like a property crime. After all, it is costing the victim money. If something of value is copied or destroyed then the victim is financially hurt. Say what you will about closed source, but it still holds a market value.

Hell it doesn't even have to be source code. People store all kinds of information on computers (credit cards, anyone?). Sure, this stuff should be secured, but there's no denying the fact that harm is done if someone steals it.

Even if nothing is done aside from breaking in the victim still loses. Why? He has to invest time (= money) in resecuring / reinstalling his machine.

Don't try to glorify computer intrusion as a harmless activity. It's not.

For what it's worth, I agree that sysadmins should work together to solve problems as much as possible before involving the authorities. It's generally a faster way to take care of the problem. But, when the abuse warrants it, either through damage, or through repeated activity, I have no problem contacting law enforcement to resolve the issue.

Best regards,

SEAL

Slashdot's spam logo (Slightly offtopic)

There's a small problem with the picture used to depict "spam", as in junk e-mail and the like. It depicts a can of SPAM luncheon meat [spam.com] , which is a registered trademark of Hormel foods [hormel.com].

Hormel's position on this matter is best expressed by the following quotation from their "Spam and the Internet" page [spam.com]:

We do not object to use of [the word "spam"] to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term.

This means Hormel don't like pictures of cans of their SPAM luncheon meat used in conjunction with junk e-mail and the like.

I suggest that the logo for "spam" be changed for those legal reasons. Perhaps we could change it to the picture of a pig from O'Reilly's book "Stopping Spam", or some similar porcine picture that's suggestive of "spam".

Success of UDP's - Does SPAM work?

I really have to ask, does anyone know is SPAM profitable? Are these just un-informed idiots that really don't know that they're wasting their time? Does anyone have information on this?

Furthermore has anyone even _heard_ of someone that bought something because of SPAM?

Are these people just the deranged/hopeful side of the net?

if the UDP has the desired effect, then it's an example of anarchism actually working

the UDP FAQ [stopspam.org] certainly claims a large number of successes, among them:

Erols.com had been a thorn in the side of usenet for a long time. With a change in policy after discussion of a UDP against them, they now have a very high reputation among both the usenet and email community.

Bell Atlantic, near the end of July, 1997, was a major spamhaus. Word got to them that they were being considered for a UDP. Spam dropped dramatically almost instantly, to their credit. No UDP was necessary.

UUnet, which was the largest single spam producer around the beginning of August, 1997, [...]announced and apparently instituted a much tougher AUP against spamming, and nuked a couple of the most persistent spammers that usenet has ever seen. Numbers again have fallen dramatically, and we all hope that UUnet continues with this policy.

October, 1997, Compuserve

In December, 1997, TIAC appeared absolutely unwilling to deal with any of their ongoing spam [...] UDP was announced with the 5 business day waiting period before institution. Although their owner continued to make excuses and argue about their culpability as well as bluster and threaten legal action, by the time the deadline had arrived, they had "cleaned up their act" to the point that the UDP was no longer necessary, and the deadline was extended for another 5 days to watch the numbers. After that additional 5 day period, the stats had stayed low, and the UDP deadline was lifted.

About 10 others between these dates.

In December of 1999, a simultaneous UDP of VSNL and SILNET, the two main carriers in India, was instituted for their failure to even begin to control the usenet terrorist who calls himself "HipCrime" and who forges, cancels, floods, and supercedes thousands of articles on a nearly daily basis in an attempt to blackmail the entire world into doing things his way - his way being a usenet without spam cancels. Currently, VNSL and SILET have enabled port 119 (news)blocks on all outgoing connections from their services with the exception of their own servers.

So, it looks like there is good evidence that this will work, given the past history of success.

My Mum told me to hit them!

@Home Abuse, as seen from an ex-@Home employee

I used to work for @Home. One of my duties was reading mail sent to [e-mail] and handling requests/complaints/whatnot. Anyone who proclaims that @Home is being *lazy* about fixing their problems is _just plain wrong_. @Home employees work their asses off to deal with the problems associated with being a large ISP. Unfortunately, there are just not enough @Home employees. When I worked there, every UNIX admin was spread thin. We all wore a million different "hats" and there never was enough time to deal with everything. @Home is a magnitude larger than it was when I was there and I'm pretty sure things have not improved.

As for the spam problem, the people at blame are the corporate types. This is a management issue, not a technical issue. This problem could be fixed by blocking inbound packets to customer IPs on port 119/TCP. Unfortunately, port blocking is more involved than just making changes to routers. Policies have to be re-written which, when you are @Home, necessitates lawyers, meetings, and the like. @Home has bigger fish to fry. Like what, you say? Customers who crack government machines, e-mail spammers (who generate a larger backlash than usenet spam), smurfers, script kiddies, irc abuse, customer-to-customer abuse, people who host commercial sites on their cable modems, people who put porn sites on members.home.net (their homepage server), etc., etc. It's only to be expected that USENET complaints are near their bottom of their abuse priority list. If you could only see the volume of mail that [e-mail] generates, you'd understand. :-)

Chris

A lesson from FidoNet

I used to be a system operator of a dial-up BBS (bulletin board system), back when FidoNet [fidonet.org] was pretty much the only way to get online to any kind of WAN in places like back-woods New Hampshire, USA, where I live.

One of the things I've always liked about FidoNet over UseNet was that people were held accountable.

If you broke an echo's rules (an echo is like a newsgroup), the moderator of that echo could ban you from the echo. (Fido moderators are more like IRC channel operators then UseNet moderators).

If you got banned enough times, most system operators would simply ban you from the echos entirely.

But it got better. If a system's operator was unresponsive, or a system was a continual source of twits, the FidoNet feed to that system could be cut.

If other systems in the area kept refeeding him any, that entire network (local geographical area) would be cut.

Seems a little heavy-handed if you are used to Internet anarchy. But I think UseNet's system of waiting until things have deteriorated to the point of uselessness doesn't work, and a system that doesn't work isn't a good system. FidoNet preemptively cut off the garbage-makers. It was all run by the lose organization of system operators, was very grass-roots, and generally operated on concenus. It worked pretty well.

In a way, FidoNet has a cabal, and was better for it, IMNSHO.

Of course, the big-time (the Internet) has pretty much killed it off these days, so we'll never know how it would have scaled compared to Usenet.

Why cable should not be a monopoly

This is exactly why cable should not be a monopoly. In Canada @home has a grip on the whole cable market (there are CRTC proposals in place that are trying to fix that, but nothing's happening for now), so every cable subscriber in canada will be affected pretty much (with the exception of smaller ones in private cable areas, like dccNet here Delta BC). If people had options, they could be using another ISP that gives 2 shakes about nettiquite and would not be affected.

Re:@Home Abuse, as seen from an ex-@Home employee

I feel sympathy for the techies, but not management. The formula is simple, it takes X employees to support Y number of users, regardless of the size of the organization. I can't help but feel they've skimped on employees at the expense of the customers a little too much for their future profitability.

Re:Already Done.. ;)

ORBS is a greater evil.

My box doesn not relay outside mail. I get probe attacks, and the wanna-be spammers go away.

ORBS has 17 different spam attempts, keeps trying for 14 days (as per their web site) and then re-tests.

Being mentioned in ORBS has increased the number of outside probe attacks. (In fact they WANT this behavior)

They are unwilling to provide the e-mail message that prompts them to think you are a spam site, and if you complain about them, they add you to the ORBS list as a manual entry.

In fact [e-mail] has now been hit with ORBS. (seems above.net doesn't like the probes and rejects them. So ORBS has them 'on the list')

In short, ORBS is no better than the spammers.

Promoting ORBS is irresponsible.

(OT on killfiles)

Is there a nice site that allows people to share their killfiles and spam filters? It'd be nice for me to be able to head to rec.arts.poetry or similar, and have a killfile maintained by the community (in the same way that Waldherr's Junkbuster [waldherr.org] has a community maintained blocklist.

Perhaps as an extension to NNTP, an FAQ, Killfile, and other info links would be available in the info for the group (as meta fields), allowing people to not have to wait for the FAQ to be posted, etc.
---

It's over

@home just posted a "please don't kill us!" message to a few newsgroups. They're apparently going to play nice now, and all that crap...

Of course, they forge-approved it to two newsgroups that I moderate, and my 'bots cancelled it.

Aah, well, I reposted it in news.admin.net-abuse.policy. Enjoy, folks.

- Tim Skirvin ([e-mail])

Official response from @Home Network

Its not in deja.com yet, and I didn't want to reproduce it here to avoid possible copyright issues, so here is a link to it [remarq.com].

Official Response from @Home

As seen on athome.announce:

Many of you have been posting your questions and concerns
in reference to the proposed Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) which
would block the @Home Network from posting to USENET. I have attached
our official response to the Usenet community and the press here but
wanted to bring attention to a couple of points that are raised here:

- This afternoon we began a network wide scan targeting open proxy
servers.

- If an open server is identified, the customer associated will be
blocked from posting to Usenet until such time we are assured that
the proxy software is secured.


------------------------------
To the USENET community:

In response to the recent UDP call for @Home Network to be removed
from interacting on the USENET, we are submitting an official
response
with a proposal of short term and long term news spam prevention
initiatives. Excite@Home is very committed to participating
respectfully on the Internet, and we have taken previous requests for
action seriously.

We have found that the primary source of our excessive USENET posting
history comes from subscribers who have installed proxy software
incorrectly. Unbeknownst to the customer, this mis-configuration has
allowed outside access to the @Home news servers, and has resulted in
our subscribers becoming spam relays. Because these various IP
addresses create holes in our network, spammers have taken advantage
of this mis-configuration, and have posted thousands of newsgroup
messages through our news machines.

As of today, we are stepping up our involvement and taking more
aggressive action by performing frequent network wide scans of our
customer base to target proxy servers. Once these customers are
identified, we are suspending their news service immediately.
Re-enabling will not occur until we are assured that their machines
are secure. We feel that this proactive effort will dramatically
decrease the amount of extraneous news traffic originating from
home.com.

We are committed to promoting better Excite@Home participation on
the
USENET, and we are in the process of modifying our current news
product and news architecture. We are also implementing more user
education as a parallel initiative.

With these new tactics in place, we are asking for an extension to
our
USENET access beyond the 18th of January and we are confident that
the
USENET community will see positive news statistics coming in the next
few days.

David Jackson
Manager, Network Policy Management
Excite@Home

Carol
Newsgroup Policy Specialist
Excite@Home

Re:@Home Abuse, as seen from an ex-@Home employee

Well, I think you've made a great argument FOR the UDP. If @home considers USENET compaints near the bottom of the list, and they don't even have the capability to police themselves, then they have no business being on USENET at all.

If they ever decide that USENET is important enough for them to clean up their house, then they can be allowed to play again. Until then, I guess they won't.