Re: San Francisco Editorial

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Another point re Cantor and Siegel is that there is now a service
calling itself CancelMoose which goes through Julf's anon server in
Finland (anon.penet.fi) to cancel spams.  (Spams are off-topic,
nearly-identical posts to large numbers of groups.) This is what Siegel is
really upset about.  She and her husband are publishing a book telling
businesses how they can use spam posts on usenet as free advertising.
But now CancelMoose is a relatively accepted counter to these
increasingly-frequent spams (pyramid schemes, etc.).  This makes their
book obsolete and really hits them where it hurts.  But they can't sue
CancelMoose because its identity is hidden.

Personally, I don't like the idea of cancelling other people's posts,
spam or not.  I would rather see news readers enhanced to detect copies
of posts I have already seen and delete them.  The awful thing about
Cantor and Siegel's Green Card spam was that they didn't cross-post, they
used a bot to individually post to all groups.  I was shown their
message headers for days.  Ordinary off-topic posts don't bother me much
because I can ignore them easily.  With a better newsreader the Green
Card spam would have been equally trivial to ignore.

The scary thing about cancels is that some proposals have actually been
directed at anonymous posts themselves.  Someone anonymously posted
what purported to be a grisly transcript of the last seconds of the
doomed Challenger crew as they fell to the ocean.  This caused a great
hue and cry and some calls for banning anonymous posts and/or
retroactively cancelling them.  This led to some very amusing events
which Detweiler has chronicled in his FAQ on anonymity, the net result
of which was that the idea was discredited.  But the emergence of
CancelMoose is not an altogether positive event in my view.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6

iQBVAwUBLwnTGRnMLJtOy9MBAQGjFAH/WEzWgAEG4mX9c6yR1iyR2nWq3V1AvUBL
lC1rTlUWUf8YWZDmVAuOkg8AH8nPo3L1e67l66wMrgGedaCD39/3Aw==
=psrV
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Tue, 3 Jan 1995, Hal wrote:

> Another point re Cantor and Siegel is that there is now a service
> calling itself CancelMoose which goes through Julf's anon server in
> Finland (anon.penet.fi) to cancel spams.

	This is a common misconception. Cancelmoose[tm] doesn't use 
anon.penet.fi for cancelling spams -- she telnets directly into the NNTP 
server of a university in Norway. Strangely enough, this is the same 
university where Arnt Gulbrantsen works. Arnt, if you don't already know, 
is the Norwegian hacker who wrote the cancelbots that are being used 
against spams (Canter & Siegel's included). Cancelmoose[tm] is reachable 
through anon.penet.fi for comments, and she always lists the <naXXXXXX> 
form of the address (non-double-blinded)

> The scary thing about cancels is that some proposals have actually been
> directed at anonymous posts themselves.  Someone anonymously posted
> what purported to be a grisly transcript of the last seconds of the
> doomed Challenger crew as they fell to the ocean.  This caused a great
> hue and cry and some calls for banning anonymous posts and/or
> retroactively cancelling them.  This led to some very amusing events
> which Detweiler has chronicled in his FAQ on anonymity, the net result
> of which was that the idea was discredited.  But the emergence of
> CancelMoose is not an altogether positive event in my view.

	Dick Depew and AARM (Auto-Active Retro Moderation). He wanted to 
cancelbot any posting from anon.penet.fi in the Big Seven Usenet hierarchies.
He was promptly beaten down by the net. Feh.

-mbh-

ObCrypto: I've been working on a draft paper that puts forward a proposal 
to make Usenet articles uncancellable except by [1] the original author 
of the article or [2] the system admin who runs the NNTP server the 
article issued from. The problem with this is that it eliminates 
Cancelmoose[tm] and the other spam cancellers, who, IMHO, are Good Things.
--
Michael Handler <grendel@netaxs.com>                        Philadelphia, PA
Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics           s.s.y.g-l-b co-moderator
PGP Key ID FC031321  Print: 9B DB 9A B0 1B 0D 56 DA  61 6A 57 AD B2 4C 7B AF
"They like to watch everything you do / Transmitters hidden in the wall"--JD

On Tue, 3 Jan 1995, Michael Handler wrote:

> 	Dick Depew and AARM (Auto-Active Retro Moderation). He wanted to 
> cancelbot any posting from anon.penet.fi in the Big Seven Usenet hierarchies.
> He was promptly beaten down by the net. Feh.

He was also the one who presented a convincing argument that the one
who posted the alleged transcript was none other than Julf himself; he
(Dick) was getting responses from the perpetrator faster than the
delayed-response mechanism would have allowed...

-- 
Dave Horsfall (VK2KFU) | dave@esi.com.au | VK2KFU @ VK2AAB.NSW.AUS.OC | PGP 2.6
Opinions expressed are mine. | E7 FE 97 88 E5 02 3C AE  9C 8C 54 5B 9A D4 A0 CD

In cypherpunks Hal Finney writes:

>Another point re Cantor and Siegel is that there is now a service
>calling itself CancelMoose which goes through Julf's anon server in
>Finland (anon.penet.fi) to cancel spams.  (Spams are off-topic,

Um, not exactly.  CancelMoose has a mailing address on the anon.penet.fi
server, for the benefit of those who wish to contact him, but the cancels
are injected elsewhere.  I don't believe anon.penet.fi lets you send 
control messages (of which cancels are a subject) thru it.

A letter to the editor is like spitting into the wind in this case.   I
think what's needed is a more constructive affirmative action, ideally
taking Cantor and Siegel to court somewhere.

I know that there was an FCC ruling in 1993 that has saved me LOADS of
annoyance from telephone sales calls, because now if you get such a call
and you formally request to be taken off their dialing lists, you can
actually SUE them if they call you again.  As a result, they now tend to
take you very seriously when you make such a request in a knowledgable
fashion.  Does anyone know if there might be a similar legal case to be
made against net spammers who persist after being warned?  I suspect
that it's easy to make such a case for email spamming, but probably not
for spamming of umoderated newsgroups.

Note that I speak entirely for myself here, not for my employers.  -- Nathaniel

"A letter to the editor is like spitting into the wind", you say.  

Well, yeah...but with enough spit, the wind may change.  So everyone 
should write letters to the editor....and make copies for your 
congressman while you're at it.  This is absolutely the most effective 
action you can take for 64 cents.

> A letter to the editor is like spitting into the wind in this case.   I
> think what's needed is a more constructive affirmative action, ideally
> taking Cantor and Siegel to court somewhere.

   Perhaps it's my libertarian outlook, perhaps not, but I tend to abhor 
using the US government's ``legal'' system for almost any reason.  

   The worst thing about doing this (suing them), IMHO, is that if you 
lost you would create a precedent for all the people who aren't doing it 
because they might consider it illegal or immoral -- far too many people 
consider things that the court okays to be morally okay.  

   Instead, I think it's a great stimulus for better software - there's 
no reason to sue them when it'd be a better thing for the community if 
newsreaders and mailreaders were enhanced to deal with spams.

-jon

( --------[ Jonathan D. Cooper ]--------[ entropy@intnet.net ]-------- )
( PGP 2.6.2 keyprint: 31 50 8F 82 B9 79 ED C4  5B 12 A0 35 E0 9B C0 01 )
( home page: http://taz.hyperreal.com/~entropy/ ]---[ Key-ID: 4082CCB5 )