Re: Entrust Technologies's Solo - free download

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM <dlv@bwalk.dm.com> writes:



>> Entrust Technologies (www.entrust.com) has made Solo available for
>> download, free . . .

>I ask everyone on these two forums

Cypherpunks & Freedom Knights. Both should be very happy to
see strong encryption becoming more widely available.

>to inform Northern Telecom Forgers / Bell North Forgery Research
>/ Entrust that we will boycott their "security" products

Snarky quotes not required. This isn't snake oil. There is plenty of
solid analysis behind these products. Check references on Entrust
web site.

>as long they continue to employ the child-molesting
>pedophile Chris R. Lewis - the biggest forger on Usenet.

What this scum is actually upset about is Chris Lewis cancelling
spam. He calls that "forgery" because the spammer's name goes
in the sender field of the cancel message. Nonsense.

Dimitri, the "forgeries" are going to continue until someone comes
up with a better way of dealing with spam. If you have suggestions,
post them to some of the news,admin.net-abuse.* groups or to
the Freedom Knights list.

The crap about pedophilia is also, of course, nonsense. It seems
to be a favorite slur lately with several grossly misguided people
who think calling people they dislike pedophiles is a way to
"defend freedom of speech".

At 11:55 AM 7/30/97 -0400, Sandy Harris wrote:
> Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM <dlv@bwalk.dm.com> writes:
>>> Entrust Technologies (www.entrust.com) has made Solo available 
>>> for download, free . . .
>
>> I ask everyone on these two forums to inform
>> Northern Telecom Forgers / Bell North Forgery Research/
>> Entrust that we will boycott their "security" products
>> as long they continue to employ the child-molesting
>> pedophile Chris R. Lewis - the biggest forger on Usenet.
>
> [...]
> What this scum is actually upset about is Chris Lewis cancelling
> spam. He calls that "forgery" because the spammer's name goes
> in the sender field of the cancel message. Nonsense. . . .
>  -  Sandy Harris

Forgery is a crime and such acts are not justified.

Jai Maharaj
jai@mantra.com
Om Shanti

At 12:09 PM 7/30/97 -0700, Paul Pomes wrote:
> At 6:46 -1000 on Wednesday, July 30, 1997, 
>
> Dr. Jai Maharaj wrote:
>> Forgery is a crime and such acts are not justified.
>
> "Crime"? . . .

Yes, the removal of data from computer networks
through forgery is a crime. People who do so are criminals.

Jai Maharaj
jai@mantra.com
Om Shanti

At 4:03 PM 7/30/97 -0700, Paul Pomes wrote:
>> Yes, the removal of data from computer networks
>> through forgery is a crime. People who do so are criminals.
>>  -  Jai Maharaj

> Not if it's done through the normal operation of the protocol.
>  -  Paul Pomes

While there is a tendency to reconcile atrocities if they
are perpetrated long enough, there is serious doubt that
forgery and censorship are among them -- no, not in a world
that is beginning to learn about true freedom.

Jai Maharaj
jai@mantra.com
Om Shanti

>> Forgery is a crime and such acts are not justified.
>> - Jai Maharaj

> Spamming is a crime (theft of computer resources) 
> and sometimes such acts may be justifiable self-defense.
> - Martin Pool

The commission of crimes such as forgery and censorship is 
not an acceptable excuse to stop the flow of information, even 
if the free flow is perceived by some as a crime.

Jai Maharaj
jai@mantra.com
Om Shanti

"Dr. Jai Maharaj" <jai@mantra.com> writes:
> The commission of crimes such as forgery and censorship is 
> not an acceptable excuse to stop the flow of information, even 
> if the free flow is perceived by some as a crime.

I define usenet spam as "the same message posted to more
than 10 newsgroups without crossposting."  By this
definition, spam has very little information content.  It is
almost totally redundant.  Instead of posting 1 message,
1000 messages are posted.  The 2nd through 1000th message
add no more information than the first.  This would not be a
problem if the network had infinite bandwidth and storage
capabilities.  However, finite bandwidth and storage means
that every flow of spam "information" necessarily restricts
the flow of other information.  If the network were at full
capacity and you were forced to make a choice of what
information would flow, what would it be?  Would you cancel
the 999 redundant copies of a 1000 group spam, or would you
cancel 999 random non-spam messages?  I know, you would
upgrade the network, but that is not viable.  It will
always be possible to generate more spam than the network
can handle.

Here's an analogy--consider a small physical bulletin board
on a university campus that is divided up into sections for
different categories of bulletins to help organize the
postings.  The sections might be "official university
announcements", "concerts and movies", "clubs", "for sale or
trade", and "miscellaneous".  There is a sign at the top of
the bulletin board that reads "Bulletin Board Rule: Only one
copy of an a flyer may be posted."  This is a public
bulletin board--anyone can hang things on it.

Now, let's say someone comes along and decides to plaster
the entire bulletin board with 25 big blue sheets that each
read "Make Money Fast!  Call 555-1212 for details!".  These
25 big blue sheets cover up most of the other announcements
on the bulletin board.  Let's also say that whoever made
these big blue ads used "free" university photocopiers,
where the cost of each copy is paid for by the university.

Personally, I would consider it quite a service if someone
ripped down 24 of these big blue sheets and put them in the
recycling bin, leaving only one remaining sheet either on
the "for sale or trade" or "miscellaneous" portion of the
bulletin board.

I claim that this analogy is reasonably close to the
usenet: the bulletin board has limited space (bandwidth), is
divided into topics (newsgroups), has some rules of use
(netiquette), and has some distributed costs associated with
using it (everyone pays indirectly for the copy machine).
Since this is an analogy, and not the actual usenet, there
will be differences between the real-world bulletin board
and usenet.  I'm sure these will be pointed out to
demonstrate why taking down the 24 blue sheets is censorship
and limits the free flow of information.

What about the information on the bulletin board that is
covered up by the 24 blue sheets?  Is that information not
effectively censored by the blue sheets?  On usenet, spam
takes up server space that could otherwise be used for
legitimate articles, thus causing those articles to expire
much faster than if there were no spam.  The legitimate
articles are "covered up" (censored) by the spam.

Is it "free expression" to walk into a restaurant and start
yelling and screaming so loud that no one else can carry on
a conversion?  Even if it is, you'd better be prepared for
the management to ask you to leave.  If you fail to comply,
they would likely call the police and have you removed for
disrupting their business.  What if you yell just loud
enough to be annoying to everyone in the restaurant, but
they can still converse if they make an effort to ignore
you?  Any reasonable restaurant management would still ask
you to quiet down.  The "management" of usenet has made a
simple request: don't post the same message to 1000
newsgroups or your messages will be asked (or forced) to
leave.

I agree NoCeM is better than cancelbots.  But I think
objective cancelbots (anything posted to more than 10 groups
and not crossposted is cancelled, etc.) are better than a
server full of spam.

-Rob
-- 
Robert W. Brewer  PGP 2048-bit Key ID: 03E0E635
Jesus rules!      FP: 6327 8034 7BDA D144 B40C C5E2 F760 13BB

> almost totally redundant.  Instead of posting 1 message,
> 1000 messages are posted.  The 2nd through 1000th message
> add no more information than the first.  This would not be a
> problem if the network had infinite bandwidth and storage
> capabilities.  

1. When a message is cross-posted using the "newsgroups:" line only one 
copy is sent to the news-spool and is seen in all the relevent newsgroups.

2. Bandwidth requirements are no justification for censorship, unless you 
own the equipment you are removing the messages from, even then it is 
reprehensible.

        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

A good post.  Your notice-board analogy was reasonable.

How about this as a stop gap measure: rather than sending cancels for
spams posted to multiple newsgroups, simply modify the distribution.
That is cancel all but one groups worth of articles, and then modify
the Newsgroups line to cross-post to all the groups the article was
originally posted to.

That way you are not as such "cancelling" anything as a net result,
but are just "compressing" your news spool or downstream feed, no
information is lost (other than the information that the poster is
clueless and doesn't know how to cross-post, which is now disguised by
a compression agent trawling through the news spool fixing things up).

Sound reasonable?

If news admins, or others getting involved with issuing forged cancels
are not willing to do this it suggests that they are making judgements
about the content of the posts as well as claiming to want to save
bandwidth.


Another longer term way to improve the situation is to charge some
small token amount per article, just to encourage people to use it
with some intelligence (use cross posts rather than separately
reposting to each group).

It is also entirely possible for people to have 'bots which auto-post
in response to articles matching keywords, or matching authors.
(We've seen a few of these on cypherpunks).

If people want to make a nuisance for others by spewing random garbage
via bots to newsgroups, they could post mega bytes of stuff per day
and swamp the content.  What can you do about this?  Charging a small
amount per post, or per megabyte would provide a small disincentive
for this type of behaviour.  However it would never reflect the true
cost to USENET bandwidth as a whole.

One interesting idea which has been floated on this list in the past
is for authors to have their free posting rate moderated by other
peoples ratings of their posts.

One way to implement this is for other people to pay the author for
their articles a penny if they like the article.  That way people who
write things which others find interesting to read get subsidized
posting.  Is it still free speech if you have to pay for your posts if
you're arguing for an unpopular minority?

Also, this might be an interesting information market model because
technical experts might even find themselves with a well paid job of
answering technical questions in newsgroups.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

On Thu, Jul 31, 1997 at 08:16:59AM -0400, William H. Geiger III wrote:
[...]>
>>One way to implement this is for other people to pay the author for their
>>articles a penny if they like the article.  That way people who write
>>things which others find interesting to read get subsidized posting.  Is
>>it still free speech if you have to pay for your posts if you're arguing
>>for an unpopular minority?
>
>This will not work!!!

I agree.  If charging for mail would eliminate spam, then I should not
be getting the mailboxfull of physical junk mail I receive every
morning.  Postage benefits the MAIL CARRIER, not the recipient, and it
is in the best interests of the mail carrier to carry MORE mail, not
less.  So, e-postage will almost certainly cause more spam, not less. 

[...]

>It should be noted that the Bandwith issue is a red-herring.

However, I think your argument here is faulty, because bandwidth is in
fact oversubscribed -- the whole system depends on each end subscriber
not using all their bandwidth all the time.

> The bandwith
>of the USENET has been *PAID IN FULL* by every subscriber to an ISP. The
>ISP customers pay for their connections to their ISP who in turn pay for
>their connections to the Access providers who inturn pay for the Backbone.
>The PIPE has been paid for what goes over it not an issue. If all I want
>to do with my T1 connection is ship *.jpg files via ftp 24/7 that is no
>ones busines but my own.

Not really.  A T1 line, for example, can handle maybe 40-50 28.8 modems 
going full blast, but a small ISP over a T1 might have 200 customers.  
This goes right on up the line -- at every level bandwidth is 
oversubscribed, and successful operation of the net depends on 
certain statistical usage patterns.  So, while it isn't written down 
in a contract anywhere, what you are really paying for is peak 
bandwidth, not sustained bandwidth.

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

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

In <19970731095523.04336@bywater.songbird.com>, on 07/31/97 
   at 09:55 AM, Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> said:

>>It should be noted that the Bandwith issue is a red-herring.

>However, I think your argument here is faulty, because bandwidth is in
>fact oversubscribed -- the whole system depends on each end subscriber
>not using all their bandwidth all the time.

>> The bandwith
>>of the USENET has been *PAID IN FULL* by every subscriber to an ISP. The
>>ISP customers pay for their connections to their ISP who in turn pay for
>>their connections to the Access providers who inturn pay for the Backbone.
>>The PIPE has been paid for what goes over it not an issue. If all I want
>>to do with my T1 connection is ship *.jpg files via ftp 24/7 that is no
>>ones busines but my own.

>Not really.  A T1 line, for example, can handle maybe 40-50 28.8 modems 
>going full blast, but a small ISP over a T1 might have 200 customers.  
>This goes right on up the line -- at every level bandwidth is 
>oversubscribed, and successful operation of the net depends on  certain
>statistical usage patterns.  So, while it isn't written down  in a
>contract anywhere, what you are really paying for is peak  bandwidth, not
>sustained bandwidth.

Well the ISP may have 200 customer for the T1 line but they woun't have
200 dial up lines per T1 (at least not one that wishes to stay in business
long). Now how many dial-up lines per T1 a ISP will have will depend on
the traffic analysis for his customer base. There is nothing wrong with
oversubscribing his bandwith because he knows that all his cutomers will
not be on-line all the time using 100% of their 28.8 dial-up bandwith.
What an ISP does have to provide for is enough bandwith to be able to
handle the amount of dial-ups he has available. If an ISP has 200 dial-up
lines then he best provide enough T1's to be able to support them.

The same is true for Access providers. If an access provider is servicing
20 T1's then he best have the bandwith to the backbone to provide the
bandwith that he has sold. He is collecting the $$$ to provide the service
he is obligated to provide it.

Now if an access provider does detailed analysis of his traffic and
determins that he needs only 4 T3's to provide service for 20 T1's and
therefore reduces his costs that's fine. But if one of his T1 customers
traffic increases he is obligated to add more bandwith on his end to
handle it.

This is what the whole bandwith issue comes down to. ISP & Access
providers atempting to maximise profits for given resources. This doesn't
nullify their obligations to their customers. If they sell T1 bandwith
24/7 to their customers then they are required to provide that service if
their customers demand it. The current movement to blaim users for using
the resources that they have been sold is wrong. It is no different that
if a car dealer sells you a 100,000 mile warrenty on a car then renigs on
the contract because he really didn't expect you to drive 100,000 miles
with it.

- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html                        
- ---------------------------------------------------------------

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Version: 2.6.3a
Charset: cp850
Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000

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ptUd8h4rAYmaomAw5ydJzPaiUSHEE+Vw5eMc9lKCJYlVvs4e31lgFC0Da4jaDuKK
IC2e1CUIq5Rn585BHtdg8CqAtw37q/7LUkCBmGfTjg106VPrvDVqK0bN5dncA2lD
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"William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:
> Well the ISP may have 200 customer for the T1 line but they woun't have
> 200 dial up lines per T1 (at least not one that wishes to stay in business
> long). Now how many dial-up lines per T1 a ISP will have will depend on
> the traffic analysis for his customer base. There is nothing wrong with
> oversubscribing his bandwith because he knows that all his cutomers will
> not be on-line all the time using 100% of their 28.8 dial-up bandwith.
> What an ISP does have to provide for is enough bandwith to be able to
> handle the amount of dial-ups he has available. If an ISP has 200 dial-up
> lines then he best provide enough T1's to be able to support them.
> 
> The same is true for Access providers. If an access provider is servicing
> 20 T1's then he best have the bandwith to the backbone to provide the
> bandwith that he has sold. He is collecting the $$$ to provide the service
> he is obligated to provide it.

Unfortunately a lot of ISPs - both local and national - have done exactly
that - oversubscribed to the point of defrauding their customers.

A friend of mine subscribed to his local ISP - the usual deal, $19.95/month
for unlimited use.  One day he gets a phone call from the ISP's owner asking
(in a rather irate manner) if he's running 'bots or "keepalive" or why he's
spending so much time tying up the modem.  The friend replied that he's doing 
neither of those things, but he does spend 5 or 6 hours every day browsing
the Web and reading newsgroups.  The ISP owner wasn't happy. Soon the friend
began to experience loss of carrier whenever he was connected via PPP during
the evening. He called up the ISP and asked if he's just dropping his carrier.
The ISP would neither confirm nor deny, but repeated that the friend stays
online "too much". At this point the friend told him to close the account
and moved to a different ISP.

We used to have a shell account at a local ISP who had non-stop problems with
their disks, their news server, their modem pool (ringno-answer, can't busy
out the brokenmodems....) We left them last year; I understand that now their
system has completely broken down and they're blaming it on some mythical
"spammers" rather than their incompetence.

> 
> Now if an access provider does detailed analysis of his traffic and
> determins that he needs only 4 T3's to provide service for 20 T1's and
> therefore reduces his costs that's fine. But if one of his T1 customers
> traffic increases he is obligated to add more bandwith on his end to
> handle it.
> 
> This is what the whole bandwith issue comes down to. ISP & Access
> providers atempting to maximise profits for given resources. This doesn't
> nullify their obligations to their customers. If they sell T1 bandwith
> 24/7 to their customers then they are required to provide that service if
> their customers demand it. The current movement to blaim users for using
> the resources that they have been sold is wrong. It is no different that
> if a car dealer sells you a 100,000 mile warrenty on a car then renigs on
> the contract because he really didn't expect you to drive 100,000 miles
> with it.

Ah but they have a great excuse - the mythical "spammers".  We really meant 
to service a 300-modem pool through this T1, but the spammers stopped us from
doing that.  Reminds me how the Soviets in 1930s blamed all possible problems
(and there were lots of real problems) on "saboteurs", and how the Nazis in
the same time frame blamed all of their (real) problems on Jews.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

On Thu, Jul 31, 1997 at 12:25:59PM -0400, William H. Geiger III wrote:
[...]
>
>Now if an access provider does detailed analysis of his traffic and
>determins that he needs only 4 T3's to provide service for 20 T1's and
>therefore reduces his costs that's fine. But if one of his T1 customers
>traffic increases he is obligated to add more bandwith on his end to
>handle it.

He has several other options.  Most importantly, he can terminate the
agreement.  This gives the customer a choice -- find another provider,
or moderate their use.  As I said, this stuff sometimes isn't written
in the contract, but it's there, nonetheless. 

>This is what the whole bandwith issue comes down to. 

Thinking about this a little more, however, this whole line of
reasoning has almost nothing to do with the bandwidth problem
associated with spam, and is a complete red herring.  Granted that you
have contractually guaranteed that you get full time 24/7 28.8 modem
access, and you have paid for it.  I can still completely flood your 
bandwidth with stuff you don't want.  Granted that at your machine 
you can throw away the stuff as fast as your receive it.  But you 
aren't receiving the stuff you want to receive, because I have 
completely choked your line.  

Spam can be thought of, therefore, as essentially a low-level denial 
of service attack.

What is overlooked in the free speech debate is that speech always 
has a physical manifestation, and that physical manifestation may in 
itself cause harm, regardless of the semantic content of the speech.  
For example, I could rupture your eardrums by putting a megaphone 
next to your head.  And I can cause you economic harm by flooding 
your mailbox with stuff you don't want.  I have a right to speak; you 
have a right to not pay attention.  I don't have the right to force 
you to pay attention.

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

Kent Crispin writes:

> I agree.  If charging for mail would eliminate spam, then I should not
> be getting the mailboxfull of physical junk mail I receive every
> morning.  Postage benefits the MAIL CARRIER, not the recipient, and it
> is in the best interests of the mail carrier to carry MORE mail, not
> less.  So, e-postage will almost certainly cause more spam, not less. 

I dunno about the last part of this, but I agree with the basic point
(yes, I agree with Kent! It's a miracle! :-).

I used to think differently, but I've become convinced that the cost
of e-postage isn't going to be high enough that it'll be much of a
control.  Network bandwidth used for the purpose of email transport,
even with increased spamming factored in, is simply too low to justify
charging much for it.  It will still be *way* cheaper than surface mail.
So unless the percentage of people who delete it instantly, sight-unseen,
is higher than I suspect or new tools make it easy to filter out all
spam, it's going to remain economically advantageous for the spammers
to target broadly.


-- Jeff

> > I agree.  If charging for mail would eliminate spam, then I should not
> > be getting the mailboxfull of physical junk mail I receive every
> > morning.  Postage benefits the MAIL CARRIER, not the recipient, and it
> > is in the best interests of the mail carrier to carry MORE mail, not
> > less.  So, e-postage will almost certainly cause more spam, not less. 

Hashcash is a more elegant and simple solution to UCE: most UCE is sent 
by small companies looking for a cheap way to get big exposure, they 
aren`t going to have the hardware to generate partial hash collisions for 
every address they want to mail, it would be prohibitively expensive for 
them to buy fast hardware to generate the collisions. Of course large 
companies who can afford to buy, or already have, mainframes will be able 
to send UCE, but most large companies are smart enough to realise that 
with the response rate gained from UCE, the reputation capital lost 
through sending it, and the valuable mainframe time used to generate the 
hashcash, it all adds up to a big shit sandwich.

Adam Back:   I haven`t read the hashcash paper/description for a while, 
can you give us some figures on how much processor time is required to 
generate hashcash for a 10,000 recipient spam, for n recipients?

Sudden and very exciting idea:

What if we could find a way to make the amount of hashcash required grow 
exponentially with the number of recipients? Of course the spammer could 
then find the optimum number of recipients and divide the list of 
addresses to be spammed into blocks of that size but that is a waste of 
sendmail time, also a waste of bandwidth and the overall time would 
probably still be prohibitively high.

        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

On Sun, Aug 03, 1997 at 10:28:28AM -0400, frissell@panix.com wrote:
>At 09:29 AM 8/2/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
>>In more general terms: A "free market" fundamentally grants more
>>control to those with more money.  
>
>In a free society, the "poor" have more money (collectively) than the rich 
>and outbid them for resources all the time.  

I'm not sure what you mean by "free society", since earlier writings
by you and others indicate that you believe that no such thing
currently exists (certainly not here in the US), or indeed has ever
existed.  Consequently, your statement here must be false on its 
face, since the poor have never been in a "free society".

Even so, your statement is not an argument against what I said in any
significant way, but rather is a corollary -- the trend for the rich
to get richer and the poor to get poorer, if extrapolated to the
extreme, still results in a very small number of people controlling
more wealth than all the rest of mankind.  What intrinsic 
characteristic of completely unrestricted markets do you see that 
naturally contervails this trend?

> Were this not so, communities of 
>the "poor" would never increase in size and yet they do.

Doesn't follow at all.  The poor can increase in numbers, and just 
get poorer.  You can see this all over the world.

>It is also much easier for the poor to get money in a free society than for 
>the powerless to get power in the sort of societies you favor.

Doubtful.  I favor free societies.  Realistic free societies, that is. 

>I can teach a poor person in America today the simple ways to triple or 
>quadruple his income. 

I don't believe you.  Oh, in isolated cases perhaps.  But not as a 
general lesson you can give to any Joe Poverty, and suddenly make 
him middle class.

But once again I am struck by the thought that, contrary to much of 
the sentiment expressed on this list, you actually believe that 
America today is a *true free society*.  Have you turned in your 
cpunks credentials?

> I could not teach a resident of France or Germany or 
>Japan a simple way to triple or quadruple his "influence" on his government

But are you then  implying  that you could in the US!?!?

>and indeed a tripling of such influence would give him much less than a 
>tripling of income.

No doubt about it.  :-)

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

Just commenting on some stuff I missed earlier:

Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes:

...
> Another longer term way to improve the situation is to charge some
> small token amount per article, just to encourage people to use it
> with some intelligence (use cross posts rather than separately
> reposting to each group).

Problem is, a "small token" for some may be a lot of money for someone
else. A poor person may be unwilling to part with 5c; a rich person or
a corporation may still be willing to spend a million dollars on an
advertising campaing (selling something or warning about the second
cumming of Jesus).  The way the things are now, everyone is equally
free to post and if you're into reputations, they can build one with
the contents of their writings, not the amount of money they can
afford to spend on posting.

> It is also entirely possible for people to have 'bots which auto-post
> in response to articles matching keywords, or matching authors.
> (We've seen a few of these on cypherpunks).
>
> If people want to make a nuisance for others by spewing random garbage
> via bots to newsgroups, they could post mega bytes of stuff per day
> and swamp the content.  What can you do about this?  Charging a small
> amount per post, or per megabyte would provide a small disincentive
> for this type of behaviour.  However it would never reflect the true
> cost to USENET bandwidth as a whole.

I'm sorry, I don't see how posting megabytes of noise every day can
swamp the content. Moreover, if such actions were indeed cause a problem,
they would not be eliminated with payments. Some people would be willing
to spend money to "flood" the net with what you consider to be "spam" -
because they're rich or because they have access to a large advertising
budget. The solution is for you to make sure you're using a reader that
lets you find the content from

A while ago I read an interesting story about the behavior of German
tourists with cars in Czech republic.  The Czechs used to discourage
their own population from 1) speeding, 2) parking in inappropriate
places by imposing fines.  The fines were a lot of money for the locals,
but small change for the Germans (because of the screwed up exchange
rates for the most part). The Germans would speed on the local roads
and park their cars where they obstructed traffic since the fines
were no deterrent.

Natrurally, there's a huge difference between an inappropriately parked
car and a Usenet article. If you can't get our of your garage because
some tourist's car is parked in your driveway, it's a problem. If a
usent article is "inappropriately posted", you can just ignore it.

> One interesting idea which has been floated on this list in the past
> is for authors to have their free posting rate moderated by other
> peoples ratings of their posts.
>
> One way to implement this is for other people to pay the author for
> their articles a penny if they like the article.  That way people who
> write things which others find interesting to read get subsidized
> posting.  Is it still free speech if you have to pay for your posts if
> you're arguing for an unpopular minority?

Now that is another very interesting suggestion from Adam.

Instead of discouraging the behavior you don't like, encourage the
behavior you do like.

A shareware-like concept - send e-cash donations to the posters of
usenet articles that you like and whom you want to encourage.

Make 1 cent the standard "tip" for an article that you read and liked.
Feel free to send more if you like an article a lot. Don't send anything
if you don't like the article or if you've killfiled the author.

> Also, this might be an interesting information market model because
> technical experts might even find themselves with a well paid job of
> answering technical questions in newsgroups.

Or the ones who post good porn in alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.
Reward the ones whose postings others do want to read. Yes,
an excellent idea if you can work out the details.

I invite Adam and David to subscribe to the freedom-knights mailing list
(send 'subscribe freedom-knights@jetcafe.org' to majordomo@jetcafe.org)
if you want to continue this not-quite-crypto discussion there.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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

On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:

[...]

> I'm sorry, I don't see how posting megabytes of noise every day can
> swamp the content.

You don't recall the poetry feastavil?  What about the sex groups for the
less popular fetishes?

> Moreover, if such actions were indeed cause a problem, they would not be 
> eliminated with payments. Some people would be willing to spend money to
> "flood" the net 

Here we aggry, porn4pron and others will still make a proffet from
spamming.  Infact puting a cost to posting creates a biase aggainst
unpopulare options and towards spam.  Indeed such a payment system would
make the problem worce.

> Instead of discouraging the behavior you don't like, encourage the
> behavior you do like.

[Nods]  The good old blow job prinisipul.

> I invite Adam and David to subscribe to the freedom-knights mailing list
> (send 'subscribe freedom-knights@jetcafe.org' to majordomo@jetcafe.org)
> if you want to continue this not-quite-crypto discussion there.

I have attempted to do so in the past,  and will attempt to do so again.

- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett

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? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:

> On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
>
> > I'm sorry, I don't see how posting megabytes of noise every day can
> > swamp the content.
>
> You don't recall the poetry feastavil?  What about the sex groups for the
> less popular fetishes?

Can you hurt a person by sticking needles in a doll representing this person?
Possibly, if the person really believes this.

Why do people try to flood newsgroups with shit? (We can agree that some
do try to, whether they succed or not). Most of the time it happens because
some asshole is trying to take ownership of an unmoderated newsgroup and
disses people whom he's trying to silence.  Some of the assholes resort
to forging cancels; most limit their censorship to postmaster complaints,
false accusation of "spamming", and occasional mailbombs.

Examples from the Net.Scum rogue collection: Scott Kellog from Sematech
falsely accuses various people of "spamming" his newsgroup, but hasn't
been caught forging cancels yet.  On the other hand Bob Curtis has taken
over alt.smokers.cigars and forges cancels for articles that merely
question his "ownership" of the newsgroup. Do read - it's very enlightening.

The biologist Garrett Hardin published an essay, _The Tragedy of the Commons_
in _Science_, Dec 13, 1968.  Many misguided people have NOT read the eassay,
but like to cite it.  They argue that according to Hardin, Usenet would be
used more "efficiently" if every newsgroup had an "owner" - a self-appointed
"mediator" (their favorite title - don't know what asshole first came up
with it). They try to assert property rights where they can't be enforced
and succed only in pissing off a lot of people whom they tried to censor.

If you were told that a formerly common meadow is now owned by a self-
appointed asshole who disses you, would you litter on the meadow, shit
and piss on it, and possibly dump toxic radioactive waste on it?  When
the self-appointed "owner" pisses off a lot of people, some of them
will - especially since they can get away with it.

This reminds me of the encosure movement in medieval England that sought
to make the use of common lands more "efficient" by privatizing them -
causing numerous peasants extreme misery.  Read your history.

The good news is that newsgroup floods don't really hurt anyone except
the egos of the assholes who claim to "own' the affected newsgroups.

> > Moreover, if such actions were indeed cause a problem, they would not be
> > eliminated with payments. Some people would be willing to spend money to
> > "flood" the net
>
> Here we aggry, porn4pron and others will still make a proffet from
> spamming.  Infact puting a cost to posting creates a biase aggainst
> unpopulare options and towards spam.  Indeed such a payment system would
> make the problem worce.

I like the idea of encouraging news readers to send e-cash (possibly via
anon remailers) to the posters whose writings they like and would like to
see more of.  This is a generalization of the discussion we had on the
cypherpunks list a few months ago, how companies could send e-cash to
Usenet posters who say good things about their products.

Porn4porn posts A LOT of crap in alt.sex.* and admits that it's crap.
It then asks the readers: instead of wading through our crap for free,
why not pay us to get the prn you're looking for?  And my response is:
why not just killfile the idiots, or why not choose to not select
their crap for reading - it's easily identifiable.

Do you remember all the talk about "intelligent internet agents" who were
supposed to look for stuff we're interested in - like the one that would
learn the user's tastes for music, and suggest more music that he'd
probably like; the one that learned the user's scheduling preferences to
manage his appointment calendar; well, here's an excellent idea for an
AI project for a master's thesis - write an agent that learns what the
user likes to read and finds it on Usenet (irrespective of where it's
posted) and doesn't bother showing the user what he doesn't want to read.

> > Instead of discouraging the behavior you don't like, encourage the
> > behavior you do like.
>
> [Nods]  The good old blow job prinisipul.

Yep. Works great with kids and animals.

> > I invite Adam and David to subscribe to the freedom-knights mailing list
> > (send 'subscribe freedom-knights@jetcafe.org' to majordomo@jetcafe.org)
> > if you want to continue this not-quite-crypto discussion there.
>
> I have attempted to do so in the past,  and will attempt to do so again.

There's some interesting discussion going on there in addition to my xposts.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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

On Wed, 6 Aug 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:

[...]

> Why do people try to flood newsgroups with shit?

I can see a number of resons

1) For profet (pron4porn ect)
2) To prevent discution that thay do not like (Sientology, the poatry
feastivil.)
3) To the amusument of there small minds (trollers ect)
4) By accedent (ARRM, other spews)
5) Out of shear madness  (Dr Rouger Rabbit)

[...]

> Examples from the Net.Scum rogue collection: Scott Kellog from Sematech
> falsely accuses various people of "spamming" his newsgroup, but hasn't
> been caught forging cancels yet.

<snide>
But lieing is free speach isn't it? 
</snide>
As long as he is not forging cancels I don't see anything wrong with the
little troll having some fun.

>  On the other hand Bob Curtis has taken
> over alt.smokers.cigars and forges cancels for articles that merely
> question his "ownership" of the newsgroup. Do read - it's very enlightening.

IRC Bob Curtis was sent away with his tail between his legs.

> They argue that according to Hardin, Usenet would be
> used more "efficiently" if every newsgroup had an "owner"

I don't see anywhere that being suggested.  Most peaple suggest that
Usenet would work better if peaple stopped abuseing it.

I don't trust the newsgroup care peaple any further then I can kick them.
In fact I have been encourgaing them to stop.

[...]

> The good news is that newsgroup floods don't really hurt anyone except
> the egos of the assholes who claim to "own' the affected newsgroups.

And the newsevers and the regular readers.

[...]

> > Here we aggry, porn4pron and others will still make a proffet from
> > spamming.

[...]

> I like the idea of encouraging news readers to send e-cash (possibly via
> anon remailers) to the posters whose writings they like and would like to
> see more of.

A local bank (to me anyway) offers e-cash.  I'll see how I can contrabue
to makeing the usenet a better place.

[...]

> And my response is:
> why not just killfile the idiots, or why not choose to not select
> their crap for reading - it's easily identifiable.

Its not realy.  All you get is a war where your spamer becomes more
sofistercated in there spaming to avoid the filters.

> Do you remember all the talk about "intelligent internet agents" who were
> supposed to look for stuff we're interested in

I belave this is the idear behind  Mr Hayes' newsreader.

[...]

> > I have attempted to do so in the past,  and will attempt to do so again.
> 
> There's some interesting discussion going on there in addition to my xposts.

I have again requested entery.  No responce yet.

- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett


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? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:

>
> On Wed, 6 Aug 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
>
> > Why do people try to flood newsgroups with shit?
>
> I can see a number of resons
>
> 1) For profet (pron4porn ect)
> 2) To prevent discution that thay do not like (Sientology, the poatry
> feastivil.)
> 3) To the amusument of there small minds (trollers ect)
> 4) By accedent (ARRM, other spews)
> 5) Out of shear madness  (Dr Rouger Rabbit)

The good news is that they can't harm a newsgroup by flooding it.
One can identify some of the reasons and try to eliminate them
to reduce floods. The self-appointed "owners" of unmoderated
newsgroups are one such reasn.

> > Examples from the Net.Scum rogue collection: Scott Kellog from Sematech
> > falsely accuses various people of "spamming" his newsgroup, but hasn't
> > been caught forging cancels yet.
>
> <snide>
> But lieing is free speach isn't it?
> </snide>

Is exposing someone as a liar and a crook censorship?

> As long as he is not forging cancels I don't see anything wrong with the
> little troll having some fun.

People who complain to postmasters about the alleged contents of other
people's Usenet articles, especially those who falsely accuse others of
"spamming", complain about "abuse" they haven't witnessed but saw others
allege, etc, are net-abusers and deserve to be exterminated by any means
at our disposal.

> >  On the other hand Bob Curtis has taken
> > over alt.smokers.cigars and forges cancels for articles that merely
> > question his "ownership" of the newsgroup. Do read - it's very enlightening
>
> IRC Bob Curtis was sent away with his tail between his legs.

Have I "censored" Bob Curtis?

By the way, Bob is alive and well, moderating his own little "moderated"
newsgroup, and recently published a piece about his experience with
forging cancels in a paper magazine - full of lies. The last forged
cancel I found is about a month old - for a kibo@thecia.net article.

> > They argue that according to Hardin, Usenet would be
> > used more "efficiently" if every newsgroup had an "owner"
>
> I don't see anywhere that being suggested.  Most peaple suggest that
> Usenet would work better if peaple stopped abuseing it.

I don't believe you haven't seen this said. Perhaps you don't read
news.* or don't understand what's being said there.

> I don't trust the newsgroup care peaple any further then I can kick them.

Years ago I used to occasionally mail posters saying friendly and polite
things like: "I saw your article posted in <forum X>, and it occurred to me
that you might have gotten more interesting responses if you had posted it to
<forum Y> (in addition or instead)". Now people have no manners. Recently
someone I know (call him Y) forwarded me an e-mail from Y. I know both X and
Y on the net; they didn't know one another. X posted a technical question on
a comp.* newsgroup that's been "split" and rmgrouped a few months ago. X's
news master hasn't processed the rmgroup, and X had no idea that the
newsgroup's been split. Y (whom I used to respect somewhat before this
incident) flamed X rather rudely)for having posted in a "bogus" newsgroup.
(Interestingly, the article, not cross-posted, propagated to Y's server,
showing how little effect David C Lawrence's rmgroups have these days.)

Cabal supporters are promoting the view that posting in newsgroups they
describe as "bogus" (i.e., the ones that David C Lawrence has rmgrouped,
or the alt.* ones that they don't want sites to create) is a form of
attack on the Cabal, resulting (at least) in obnoxious flames.

> In fact I have been encourgaing them to stop.

Your encouragement is irrelevant, since they don't give a fuck what you or
anyone else tells them. The technical solution is to render them even more
impotent than they are now - e.g., educate admins about the complaining
Net.Scum, and ignore their forged cancels.

> > The good news is that newsgroup floods don't really hurt anyone except
> > the egos of the assholes who claim to "own' the affected newsgroups.
>
> And the newsevers and the regular readers.

Not if the news servers are adequately equipped for such inevitable and
frequent eventualities, and the regular readers are armed with adequate news
reading software. If you live in a mosquito-infested area and refuse to
install nets on your windows, who's to blame?

> > I like the idea of encouraging news readers to send e-cash (possibly via
> > anon remailers) to the posters whose writings they like and would like to
> > see more of.
>
> A local bank (to me anyway) offers e-cash.  I'll see how I can contrabue
> to makeing the usenet a better place.

Perhaps it's another idea for the son-of-rfc1036 - a header specifying the
e-mail address for donation of e-cash (which could be the original poster
or some 3rd party charity)

A newsreader when it sees this header could ask the reader if he wants
to send e-cash and thow much.

This is a neat idea which I encourage people to adapt.

> > And my response is:
> > why not just killfile the idiots, or why not choose to not select
> > their crap for reading - it's easily identifiable.
>
> Its not realy.  All you get is a war where your spamer becomes more
> sofistercated in there spaming to avoid the filters.

The spammers are becoming more sophisticated in response to forged cancels.

> > Do you remember all the talk about "intelligent internet agents" who were
> > supposed to look for stuff we're interested in
>
> I belave this is the idear behind  Mr Hayes' newsreader.

Doesn't mean someone else can't work on it too. It's a good project for
an M.A.thesis - perhaps even a PhD thesis if they can do A LOT of work
on the subject.

> > > I have attempted to do so in the past,  and will attempt to do so again.
> >
> > There's some interesting discussion going on there in addition to my xposts
>
> I have again requested entery.  No responce yet.

Dave, if you see a subscription request from David Formosa for the f-k
list, could you please process it?  Thanks

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

On Sat, Aug 02, 1997 at 09:31:20AM -0500, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
> Just commenting on some stuff I missed earlier:
> 
> Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> ...
> > Another longer term way to improve the situation is to charge some
> > small token amount per article, just to encourage people to use it
> > with some intelligence (use cross posts rather than separately
> > reposting to each group).
> 
> Problem is, a "small token" for some may be a lot of money for someone
> else. A poor person may be unwilling to part with 5c; a rich person or
> a corporation may still be willing to spend a million dollars on an
> advertising campaing (selling something or warning about the second
> cumming of Jesus).  
>
> The way the things are now, everyone is equally
> free to post and if you're into reputations, they can build one with
> the contents of their writings, not the amount of money they can
> afford to spend on posting.

In more general terms: A "free market" fundamentally grants more
control to those with more money.  Postage of whatever variety turns
the medium over to those with more money.  That would, in my opinion, 
fundamentally alter the character of email in a strongly negative 
direction. 

This, by the way, is one of the fundamental problems with the
proposition that a free market is the appropriate response to every
social issue -- in many arenas a broad primary goal is allowing equal
opportunity to each individual.  

In a "free market" a fundamental feedback loop is that inequality of
distribution of wealth increases -- this obviously follows from the
fact that it is easier to make money if you have money.  With wealth
goes control.  Thus, the ultimate end of completely unfettered free
markets is fascism, where the wealthy run the government.  This is
another manifestation of the fundamental conflict between democratic
ideals and unfettered free markets. 

Naturally, rich, indolent technologists tend to favor schemes that 
will put them in control. :-)

[...]

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes:
> In more general terms: A "free market" fundamentally grants more
> control to those with more money.  Postage of whatever variety turns
> the medium over to those with more money.  That would, in my opinion, 
> fundamentally alter the character of email in a strongly negative 
> direction. 

OK, lets say we make emails free, unmetered, but they _must_ include a
valid token for 0c.  (OK Dimitri?)

Next we choose a threshold say 1000 posts per day.  Seems hard to
imagine anyone generating manually over 1000 emails per day.  That's
more than 1 per minute for a 10 hour day.

Next when you sign up for this new email postage system, you have to
hand over a $100 deposit.  The 0c payments are anonymous.  But if you
spend over 1000 of them in one day, your identity becomes known (via a
mechanism like that used for Chaum's off-line double spending
detection protocol).  You loose $100.  To you, the spammer, the posts
cost 10c each.  Your account is disabled until you pay another $100.


However there are a number of practical problems with the above scheme:

- How do we stop spammers buying unwanted 0c postage stamps from
people for under 10c a stamp?

- Sounds like an online protocol, will be high bandwidth requirements
at the bank(s)

- How do we stop banks cheating and spamming or selling spammers
postage more cheaply

Doesn't look like it could work, unless anyone has any ideas to fix-up
a distributed protocol which can acheive something like this, and
preserve anonymity at the same time.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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

On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Adam Back wrote:

> Next we choose a threshold say 1000 posts per day.  Seems hard to
> imagine anyone generating manually over 1000 emails per day.  That's
> more than 1 per minute for a 10 hour day.

I bet this mailing list generates traffic of that order.  I would not wish
to see legitimite mailing lists shut down to stop the spam.

The best soultion given so far is Cause's suggestion of modifying the fax
law so that we can sue the spammers.

- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett

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David Formosa <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> 
> On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Adam Back wrote:
> 
> > Next we choose a threshold say 1000 posts per day.  Seems hard to
> > imagine anyone generating manually over 1000 emails per day.  That's
> > more than 1 per minute for a 10 hour day.
> 
> I bet this mailing list generates traffic of that order.  I would not wish
> to see legitimite mailing lists shut down to stop the spam.

The idea is that you would exempt from postage mailing lists and
people you know.

So what happens?  Spammers target mailing lists instead.  Already
happening to some extent.

Then what?  We have to use NoCems for mailing lists, or rating
services, or judicious use of the 'd' key.

> The best soultion given so far is Cause's suggestion of modifying
> the fax law so that we can sue the spammers.

Law, and suing and the internet don't mix.

Eg. Say I spam you via an anonymous remailer.  So now who are you
going to sue?

Spammers use remailers already.

So your suggest has dire consequences for remailers.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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

On Sun, 3 Aug 1997, Adam Back wrote:

> David Formosa <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:

[...]

> > The best soultion given so far is Cause's suggestion of modifying
> > the fax law so that we can sue the spammers.
> 
> Law, and suing and the internet don't mix.

You got to be jokeing, what about alomost every AOL vs. Cyberpromo or
Compuserve vs. Cyberpromo or all thouse other ISPs against Cyberpromo.

> Eg. Say I spam you via an anonymous remailer.  So now who are you
> going to sue?

The spammers if there advertising a servese will need someway for me to
contact them.  Some way for me to get the goods.  Just anonomising the
email will not hide there identy.  Any way pushing spammer email though
most email remailers will cause them to crash from sheare volume.

- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett

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David Formosa <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:
> On Sun, 3 Aug 1997, Adam Back wrote:
> 
> > David Formosa <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > > The best soultion given so far is Cause's suggestion of modifying
> > > the fax law so that we can sue the spammers.
> > 
> > Law, and suing and the internet don't mix.
> 
> You got to be jokeing, what about alomost every AOL vs. Cyberpromo or
> Compuserve vs. Cyberpromo or all thouse other ISPs against Cyberpromo.

It happens, but IMO it's an inefficient dumb way to go about business.
The more modern net based enterprises will use more efficient
non-governmental solutions, and their more efficient conflict
resolution mechanisms will allow them to out-price, and eventually
cause the dinosaurs to go bankrupt, or to adopt similarly efficient
approaches.

Government backed legal systems are inefficient.  A purely anonymous
transaction where both parties identity is well concealed is much more
efficient.  There is no one to sue.  Fighting legal suits is
expensive, especially in the US.

The high rates go to the unproductive members of society, government
court officials, over-priced lawyers, etc.  This drives up all prices
through insurance premiums.  The company has to pass on the cost of
the legal system to their clients.

Mutually negotiated arbitration as part of the contract of sale is
much more efficient.  Third party arbitrators holding with a copy of
the contract, a deposit from each party in escrow, and a reputation as
a fair arbitrator is much more efficient.  Either party breaks the
contract as decided by the arbitrator and they loose their deposit.

Some people are using arbitration services now as an alternative to
the government legal system.  This is a form of automatic
privatisation of the legal system.  The government legal systems are
facing free market competition.

It'll probably help if the arbitration service is anonymous also, else
some idiot will fall back to the government backed legal system and
raise the prices of arbitration through the insurance costs they'll
have to factor in case of being themselves sued in a government court.

> > Eg. Say I spam you via an anonymous remailer.  So now who are you
> > going to sue?
> 
> The spammers if there advertising a servese will need someway for me to
> contact them.  Some way for me to get the goods.  Just anonomising the
> email will not hide there identy.  

True.  But how do you prove to one of these inefficent government
courts that it is indeed the spam beneficiary who posted the spam.

What if he says "I didn't do it"?  He's probably right, he probably
paid Spamford to do it for him.  Or perhaps someone doesn't like the
company and does a spam with their contact information just to cause
them trouble?  I'm sure it's happened before.

I'm not sure it's so easy to identify the spammer.  You can't sue the
person who's number is at the bottom.  What about the politician who's
home phone number got spammed to alt.sex.* as a phone sex number.

So to the government mentality when they bump into this problem, it
means that they will try to prevent anonymity.  They'll want you to
use their new fangled PKI to have either no anonymity, or else
escrowed anonymity, where the government gets to see who everyone is.

> Any way pushing spammer email though most email remailers will cause
> them to crash from sheare volume.

That's also not a good thing.

The danger with using government to attack spammers, is that this is
the net, and we don't want governments involved in regulation of
content, nor in attempting to enforce "identity escrow", "internet
drivers licenses" or anything else.

This is the likely long term or even possibly short term outcome of
calling for help from government to sort out spammers.

We can sort them out ourselves without the need of government
intervention, thanks kindly.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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

On Sun, 3 Aug 1997, Adam Back wrote:

> David Formosa <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:

[...]

> > You got to be jokeing, what about alomost every AOL vs. Cyberpromo or
> > Compuserve vs. Cyberpromo or all thouse other ISPs against Cyberpromo.

[...]

> Government backed legal systems are inefficient.  A purely anonymous
> transaction where both parties identity is well concealed is much more
> efficient.

I have truble seeing this working protocol wise,  what is to stop me
taking the money and running (or the product and running).  For some
things such as text and grafics it is possable to use a bye a bit type
protocol.  But for something like the password to the GAK database you
would have have trubble negosating the protocol without someone getting
ripped off.

>  There is no one to sue.  Fighting legal suits is expensive, especially
> in the US.

[...]

> Third party arbitrators holding with a copy of
> the contract, a deposit from each party in escrow, and a reputation as
> a fair arbitrator is much more efficient.

So the escrow agent will get sued instead of you. These agents will have
to pay massive insurance rates and thuse be very expencive to use.

There seems to be an underlieing object of this schem to screw the lawers.
While this is a wounderfull aim I don't think that this schem will do it
as most escrow agents are lawers or soliciters.

> It'll probably help if the arbitration service is anonymous also,

I don't see how you can mainige the joint targets of anonymousaty and
reputation in this schem.  I would be interested if you can.

[...]

> > The spammers if there advertising a servese will need someway for me to
> > contact them.  Some way for me to get the goods.  Just anonomising the
> > email will not hide there identy.  
> 
> True.  But how do you prove to one of these inefficent government
> courts that it is indeed the spam beneficiary who posted the spam.

Look at there email logs, paychecks to Spamford ect in the discovery
phase.

[...]

> > Any way pushing spammer email though most email remailers will cause
> > them to crash from sheare volume.
> 
> That's also not a good thing.

I didn't say it was.  Most likely the anon-admins will make use of
throtelers to stop e-spaming (I beleave thay do this for mail bombs)

- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett

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? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} said:


>The best soultion given so far is Cause's suggestion of modifying the fax
>law so that we can sue the spammers.

Thus giving gubmints the toe in the door they are so desperately looking 
for to regulate/license/control the online world.

The first thing you would see after passing such a law (if indeed the 
original legislation itself didn't contain the provision) would be a 
requirement for identification of all accounts and account holders. 
Anonymous email and anonymous remailers would be the first victims.

Then there would be a license fee introduced to cover the costs of such a 
system (internet drivers license?), followed by calls for censorship 
which would now have much greater pseudo legitimacy. This would be only 
the crest of a very big wave. 

Spam is conveniently dealt with using procmail and other filtering tools. 
Admins generally will deal swiftly with denial of service attacks.

I'm having a problem with leaves from the neighbours trees blowing onto 
my front lawn. I think the government should DO SOMETHING.

At 03:52 PM 8/3/97 +1000, Charles wrote:
>   ? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} said:
>>The best solution given so far is Cause's suggestion of modifying 
					[Cauce , by the way....]
>>the fax law so that we can sue the spammers.
>
>Thus giving gubmints the toe in the door they are so desperately looking 
>for to regulate/license/control the online world.
>
>The first thing you would see after passing such a law (if indeed the 
>original legislation itself didn't contain the provision) would be a 
>requirement for identification of all accounts and account holders. 
>Anonymous email and anonymous remailers would be the first victims.

Hear, hear!  The fax law says precisely that you can't send a fax
without correct identification of the sender, and an email equivalent
law would do the same.  (Anonymous remailers wouldn't necessarily be
banned, as long as they identified themselves correctly; if anything
this would probably encourage deployment of remailers, mainly by spammers,
which is a mixed blessing.)  Also, there are several Supreme Court cases,
such as McIntyre vs. Ohio, that strongly uphold the right to anonymous
publication; the fax law probably violates this, though I doubt it's been
taken to court.  The issue of the cost to the receipient of junk faxes
was the justification for the junk fax laws; I've heard that
Spamford himself was the junk faxer who they were a response to,
though I haven't seen any verification of that, and of course
widespread caller-id could have taken care of the problem without
requiring a Federal law.

One obvious implementation of identification would of course be a
Key Management Infrastructure...  They might not do it, not only because
it would require everyone to change their email programs, but more
seriously because it would require everyone to use encryption-capable
mailers (or at least signature-capable), and even with 40-bit escrowed
mail, it makes eavesdropping much more work.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)

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


    stewarts@ix.netcom.com said:

>which is a mixed blessing.)  Also, there are several Supreme Court cases,
>such as McIntyre vs. Ohio, that strongly uphold the right to anonymous

I envy the constitutional protections you have. We have no such 
protections and courts have found no right of free speech exists in 
Australia (ie if the High Court was correct of course). I'm assuming 
McIntyres case was a constitutional challenge.

>One obvious implementation of identification would of course be a
>Key Management Infrastructure...  They might not do it, not only because
>it would require everyone to change their email programs, but more
>seriously because it would require everyone to use encryption-capable
>mailers (or at least signature-capable), and even with 40-bit escrowed
>mail, it makes eavesdropping much more work.

Also if that did come to pass the casual user would become much more 
interested in crypto and probably ask why his crypto-enabled mailer was 
dum-ed down. Hmmmm...interesting.

Somehow I think the gubmint would be very wary of such a possibility; but 
who knows.

Comment for the list copy of this mail:
(Just on the matter of mailers, for anyone running X take a look at
exmh if you haven't already. This gives a nice graphical interface
and pgp is integrated into it making reading/writing encrypted mail
as simple as clicking a button. Combine it with xemacs and you have a
very powerful email system. Pegasus for Win95, and I think Win3.1 is
a freeware mailer for which a freeware add-on for pgp integration is
available)

 -- 
   .////.   .//    Charles Senescall             apache@bear.apana.org.au
 o:::::::::///     PGP mail preferred            apache@quux.apana.org.au
>::::::::::\\\     Finger me @bear for PGP PUBKEY      Brisbane AUSTRALIA
   '\\\\\'   \\    Apache





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At 06:32 AM 8/3/97 +1000, ? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
>On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Adam Back wrote:
>
>> Next we choose a threshold say 1000 posts per day.  Seems hard to
>> imagine anyone generating manually over 1000 emails per day.  That's
>> more than 1 per minute for a 10 hour day.
>
>I bet this mailing list generates traffic of that order.  I would not wish
>to see legitimite mailing lists shut down to stop the spam.
>
>The best soultion given so far is Cause's suggestion of modifying the fax
>law so that we can sue the spammers.
>
Take bugtraq which has over 12,000 subscribers. Each post to bugtraq would
send out 12,000 emails so it would cost aleph one 1200$ per post to his
list. I dont think anyone would want to run a mailing list under these
sorts of conditions. Or say you run a normaly small mailing list with only
a few subscribers. One evil person could send just a few hundred emails to
you cost you money. The same goes for anon emails. Anyone not wanting to
take the chance of ending up spending $100 or more at the whim of any 14
year old with a copy of upyours or not wanting to have to pay for providing
a free public service would simply give up and shut down his mailinglist.

sar <sar@cynicism.com> writes:
> At 06:32 AM 8/3/97 +1000, ? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} wrote:
> 
> >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> >
> >On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Adam Back wrote:
> >
> >> Next we choose a threshold say 1000 posts per day.  Seems hard to
> >> imagine anyone generating manually over 1000 emails per day.  That's
> >> more than 1 per minute for a 10 hour day.
>
> Take bugtraq which has over 12,000 subscribers. Each post to bugtraq would
> send out 12,000 emails so it would cost aleph one 1200$ per post to his
> list. I dont think anyone would want to run a mailing list under these
> sorts of conditions.

The way such pay for email systems as I see them would interface with
your existing email system is that you would have a list of addresses
which you would be happy to receive email from for free.

Clearly a the list address for a list you subscribed to is an address
you would put in your "receive email without postage" list.

Mail from email addresses not on this list would be expected to
include a valid 0c postage stamp.  If they don't include the postage
the mail gets bounced together with a nag about installing the system,
and possibly a manual way for them to send you the email in spite of
the system

(Note most spammers use non-replyable email addresses, because they
don't want you to know their ISPs address, because their ISP will yank
their account as soon as they figure out what they're up to.)

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

>Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes:
>> In more general terms: A "free market" fundamentally grants more
>> control to those with more money.  Postage of whatever variety turns
>> the medium over to those with more money.  That would, in my opinion, 
>> fundamentally alter the character of email in a strongly negative 
>> direction. 

More to the point, if you're charging prices that don't reflect the
true costs of the activities, it'll catch up with you after a while;
either the Tacky People will find a way to siphon money out of the system
by some variant on spamming, or it won't have the same community you're 
looking for, because it's only used by people willing to pay extra for 
the service, or because the information flow that used to be provided free
gets stifled, or somebody will offer a competing system that offers 
similar features at a lower cost, or whatever.

Somehow Usenet has survived growing from a system small enough to read
all the mail to a system with gigabytes of traffic per day,
and it's still possible to find some signal among the noise
(though the Web has siphoned off much of that signal.)
And we've grown from tens of thousands of students and defense contractors
on the Arpanet and UUCP and Fido nets and BBSs to tens of millions of 
users on the Internet.  Filtering tools help find the interesting
parts of the global discussion, and make it easier to get rid of
the uninteresting parts.  

The present situation is that the social dynamics and economics are such
that Tacky People can make money by being rude to everyone without being 
interesting in return.  While trying to charge money for communications
may work, I'm inclined to doubt it; the more interesting currency to
try to model is Reputation, which leads to more like an Ender's Game
kind of net, or to semi-closed communities like the Well (is?was?).


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)

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

On Tue, 5 Aug 1997 stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:

[...]

> While trying to charge money for communications
> may work, I'm inclined to doubt it; the more interesting currency to
> try to model is Reputation, which leads to more like an Ender's Game
> kind of net, or to semi-closed communities like the Well (is?was?).

The semi-closed communities are forming even now.  Usenet2, the fur
hyrackies and the hyracky that shall not be named are all examples of
this.

- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett

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On Tue, Aug 05, 1997 at 10:28:02AM -0700, stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:
> >Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes:
> >> In more general terms: A "free market" fundamentally grants more
> >> control to those with more money.  Postage of whatever variety turns
> >> the medium over to those with more money.  That would, in my opinion, 
> >> fundamentally alter the character of email in a strongly negative 
> >> direction. 
> 
> More to the point, if you're charging prices that don't reflect the
> true costs of the activities, it'll catch up with you after a while;

I am, of course, familiar with this line of reasoning :-).  

However, it is arguably the case that the true cost of email *is*
being paid.  The real problem is that email is unbelievably cheap, for
both recipient and sender -- a sender can send more mail than anyone
can read at a very low cost, and a recipient can easily receive more
mail than they can possibly read, again for a very low cost.  

[...]

> The present situation is that the social dynamics and economics are such
> that Tacky People can make money by being rude to everyone without being 
> interesting in return.  While trying to charge money for communications
> may work, I'm inclined to doubt it; the more interesting currency to
> try to model is Reputation, which leads to more like an Ender's Game
> kind of net, or to semi-closed communities like the Well (is?was?).

Yes, virtual cryptographically closed communities.  A concept whose
time has come, perhaps. 

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

>In a "free market" a fundamental feedback loop is that inequality of
>distribution of wealth increases -- this obviously follows from the
>fact that it is easier to make money if you have money.  With wealth
>goes control.  Thus, the ultimate end of completely unfettered free
>markets is fascism, where the wealthy run the government.  This is
>another manifestation of the fundamental conflict between democratic
>ideals and unfettered free markets.
>
>Naturally, rich, indolent technologists tend to favor schemes that
>will put them in control. :-)

I can't fuly agree. In Europe, both communism and fascism started from the
socialists (in fact, the fascist were called National Socialists) and their
premise that a free market cannot bring about the social good (including
equality) they sought, and both accept the "... idea of a political party
which embraces all activities of the individual from the cradle to the
grave, which claims to guide his views on everything, and which delights in
making all problems questions of party...," F.A. Hayek, The Road to
Surfdom. Both favor totalitarian means to this end.

In the case of the Communist, the solution is no private ownership.  In the
case of Fascism, government mandidated oligopoly, which is as far from a
free market as communism.

--Steve

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

On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Steve Schear wrote:

[...]

> >Naturally, rich, indolent technologists tend to favor schemes that
> >will put them in control. :-)
> 
> I can't fuly agree. In Europe, both communism and fascism started from the
> socialists (in fact, the fascist were called National Socialists)

The fascists called themselves Socialists for the same reson that the
main pro logging group calls themselfs _The Forest Protection Socity_ as a
returorical techneek to sucker peaple.

[...]

> and both accept the "... idea of a political party which embraces all 
> activities of the individual from the cradle to the grave, which claims
> to guide his views on everything, and which delights in making all
> problems questions of party...," F.A. Hayek, The Road to Surfdom.

Replace political party with free market and you get the econmic
reationalisum/thatureisum that has chocked socity.  The freandly socilisum
that both the GNU mannifesto and most of the net works on has no such
totalitarian tendencies.

- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett

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David Formosa <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:
> On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Steve Schear wrote:
> > I can't fuly agree. In Europe, both communism and fascism started from the
> > socialists (in fact, the fascist were called National Socialists)
> 
> The fascists called themselves Socialists for the same reson that the
> main pro logging group calls themselfs _The Forest Protection Socity_ as a
> returorical techneek to sucker peaple.

Socialism tends to lead to a fascist society.

> > and both accept the "... idea of a political party which embraces all 
> > activities of the individual from the cradle to the grave, which claims
> > to guide his views on everything, and which delights in making all
> > problems questions of party...," F.A. Hayek, The Road to Surfdom.

That's a reasonable expose' of the similarities.

> Replace political party with free market and you get the econmic
> reationalisum/thatureisum that has chocked socity.  The freandly
> socilisum that both the GNU mannifesto and most of the net works on
> has no such totalitarian tendencies.

The free market is much closer to the freedom of the net than you
might imagine.

eg. Socialism says that the state will steal from by force (guns,
imprisonment, etc follow quickly if you resist the theft) to give to
others who `need'.  Needs are unbounded.  How do you measure `need'?
By who has the most expensive lobyists, who can afford to pay the
highest bribes to politicians?  By who is the laziest and has allowed
their personal affairs to slip into the most disgraceful state.

In a free market economy such `needs' are met by charity.  People give
of their own free will, and give to charitable organisations that they
view as the most efficient at handling the causes they individually
think worthy.

If people don't want to give to this charitable cause, well then it
isn't worth supporting, to them.  If you have to take their charity
and gun point, it isn't charity, it's theft.

Socialism is based on theft.  So is Fascism.  It's forced labour, or
at least forced theft of assetts.

`Social contract' foo.  What social contract did I sign with the
crooks milking the political system?

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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

At 09:29 AM 8/2/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:

>In more general terms: A "free market" fundamentally grants more
>control to those with more money.  

In a free society, the "poor" have more money (collectively) than the rich 
and outbid them for resources all the time.  Were this not so, communities of 
the "poor" would never increase in size and yet they do.  

It is also much easier for the poor to get money in a free society than for 
the powerless to get power in the sort of societies you favor.

I can teach a poor person in America today the simple ways to triple or 
quadruple his income.  I could not teach a resident of France or Germany or 
Japan a simple way to triple or quadruple his "influence" on his government 
and indeed a tripling of such influence would give him much less than a 
tripling of income.

DCF
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On Sun, 3 Aug 1997 frissell@panix.com wrote:

> In a free society, the "poor" have more money (collectively) than the rich
> and outbid them for resources all the time.  Were this not so, communities of
> the "poor" would never increase in size and yet they do.

Death must be popular, everybodies doing it.  If the poor where infact
powerfull thay would be less poor peaple not more.

> I can teach a poor person in America today the simple ways to triple or
> quadruple his income.

Attach your name to the end of this list and forward it to 5 others, in a
few days you will be rolling in cash.

- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett

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On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Adam Back wrote:

> A good post.  Your notice-board analogy was reasonable.

[...]

> That is cancel all but one groups worth of articles, and then modify
> the Newsgroups line to cross-post to all the groups the article was
> originally posted to.

No that is worce,  it would be forgery of the orginal post.  In addtion it
would violate the usenet requirement to avoid modifing the post.

[...]

> One interesting idea which has been floated on this list in the past
> is for authors to have their free posting rate moderated by other
> peoples ratings of their posts.

No this would mean unpopular (but often neccery) peaple would be forced
off usenet.

Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett

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? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:

> On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Adam Back wrote:
>

[detect multi-post]
> > That is cancel all but one groups worth of articles, and then modify
> > the Newsgroups line to cross-post to all the groups the article was
> > originally posted to.
>
> No that is worce,  it would be forgery of the orginal post.  In addtion it
> would violate the usenet requirement to avoid modifing the post.

In my opinion, the hnorable way to deal with multi-posts is to detect them
automatically and to ignore them. A NoCeM 'bot like the one run by the
Venerable CancelMoose is a good thing.

A compression scheme where many copies of the same text would be transmitted
only once even if they're posted once would be an excellent thing (given that
such traffic is a very substantial
portion of a full uncensored feed), but it's not crucial.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:

[...]

> A compression scheme where many copies of the same text would be transmitted
> only once even if they're posted once would be an excellent thing

I beleave that uucp feeds can do things like this.

- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett

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In <199707311120.MAA00669@server.test.net>, on 07/31/97 
   at 12:20 PM, Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> said:

>Another longer term way to improve the situation is to charge some small
>token amount per article, just to encourage people to use it with some
>intelligence (use cross posts rather than separately reposting to each
>group).

>It is also entirely possible for people to have 'bots which auto-post in
>response to articles matching keywords, or matching authors. (We've seen
>a few of these on cypherpunks).

>If people want to make a nuisance for others by spewing random garbage
>via bots to newsgroups, they could post mega bytes of stuff per day and
>swamp the content.  What can you do about this?  Charging a small amount
>per post, or per megabyte would provide a small disincentive for this
>type of behaviour.  However it would never reflect the true cost to
>USENET bandwidth as a whole.

>One interesting idea which has been floated on this list in the past is
>for authors to have their free posting rate moderated by other peoples
>ratings of their posts.

>One way to implement this is for other people to pay the author for their
>articles a penny if they like the article.  That way people who write
>things which others find interesting to read get subsidized posting.  Is
>it still free speech if you have to pay for your posts if you're arguing
>for an unpopular minority?

This will not work!!!

Charging for e-mail/news posts will no nothing to prevent spam and more
than likely increase the noise on such lists. It is the spamers who have
the money to post volumns of their crap. Allso I think you will find that
it will be the fanatics who will think it worth the $$$ to get their
message out.

While I find the various mailling lists & newsgroups of intrest the
majority of them are not thet intresting that I would be willing to pay
$$$ every time I post a reply to someones questions (most of my posts
outside of CP are answering questions on programming,crypto, & OS/2). I
think that the overall quality of the newsgroups would decline if you
started paying on a per-post basis.

It should be noted that the Bandwith issue is a red-herring. It is an
antiquated concept from the Fidonet days and does not apply. The bandwith
of the USENET has been *PAID IN FULL* by every subscriber to an ISP. The
ISP customers pay for their connections to their ISP who in turn pay for
their connections to the Access providers who inturn pay for the Backbone.
The PIPE has been paid for what goes over it not an issue. If all I want
to do with my T1 connection is ship *.jpg files via ftp 24/7 that is no
ones busines but my own. If I chooses to use my bandwith to transmit a
variety of file formats using various protocols
(HTTP,FTP,GOFFER,ARCHIE,...ect) who are you to say that some formats are
good and some are not!! (this is not even getting into the content of the
data being shiped).

>Also, this might be an interesting information market model because
>technical experts might even find themselves with a well paid job of
>answering technical questions in newsgroups.

There is a web site that is doing exactly this. They provide forums for
users to post technical questions in which "experts" will answer them.
Upon receiving the answer the person who posted the question is requested
to rate the answer. I haven't been on the site in awhile but the last time
I was there they were working on a mechinism to compensate their "experts"
for answering questions. They had a point system based on the difaculty of
the questions. After registering with them and obtaining a certain number
of points for correctly answering questions you would be classified as an
"expert" for that forum which then would make you eligable for
compensation. I believe all funds were to be generated through web page
advertisement.


I'll see if I can find the URL for the site and post it to the list.

- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html                        
- ---------------------------------------------------------------

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William Geiger MLCVXII <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:
> In <199707311120.MAA00669@server.test.net>, on 07/31/97 
> >  at 12:20 PM, Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> said:
> >
> >One way to implement this is for other people to pay the author for their
> >articles a penny if they like the article.  That way people who write
> >things which others find interesting to read get subsidized posting.  Is
> >it still free speech if you have to pay for your posts if you're arguing
> >for an unpopular minority?
> 
> This will not work!!!
> 
> Charging for e-mail/news posts will do nothing to prevent spam and
> more than likely increase the noise on such lists. It is the spamers
> who have the money to post volumns of their crap.

For email spam I disagree.  I currently get 10 spams a day or so.  All
as a result of one unprotected post to a USENET group a few weeks
back.  Before that I hadn't posted to USENET for a while and the spams
had nearly died down.

If the spammer had to pay 1c for each spam, he'd be out of business
with his current scatter gun approach.  He'd have to get a lot more
selective, because it would be in his commercial interests to do so.

> Also I think you will find that it will be the fanatics who
> will think it worth the $$$ to get their message out.

Fine by me, so long as they're paying their way, the NoCems from a
reliable rating service will take care of them.

You have more of a point in newsgroups, or mailing lists as the
spammer only has to make one post.

Charging for posts in that scenario only makes sense to stop people
who spew multiple mega-bytes of robo-spam just to be annoying, and for
no commercial gain at all.

NoCems are the real answer to public forums.  Spammers will feel less
incentive to spam when it becomes clear most people have them filtered
out anyway.

> While I find the various mailling lists & newsgroups of intrest the
> majority of them are not thet intresting that I would be willing to pay
> $$$ every time I post a reply to someones questions (most of my posts
> outside of CP are answering questions on programming,crypto, & OS/2). I
> think that the overall quality of the newsgroups would decline if you
> started paying on a per-post basis.

Surely you aren't that prolific a writer that 1c a post would
be a burden on you?

I make what 20 posts a day at peak?  Often 1 or none some days.

> It should be noted that the Bandwith issue is a red-herring. It is an
> antiquated concept from the Fidonet days and does not apply. The bandwith
> of the USENET has been *PAID IN FULL* by every subscriber to an ISP. The
> ISP customers pay for their connections to their ISP who in turn pay for
> their connections to the Access providers who inturn pay for the Backbone.
> The PIPE has been paid for what goes over it not an issue. If all I want
> to do with my T1 connection is ship *.jpg files via ftp 24/7 that is no
> ones busines but my own. If I chooses to use my bandwith to transmit a
> variety of file formats using various protocols
> (HTTP,FTP,GOFFER,ARCHIE,...ect) who are you to say that some formats are
> good and some are not!! (this is not even getting into the content of the
> data being shiped).

That's interesting, and probably true, but still bandwidth is limited,
see.  It is entirely possible for some idiots to consume vastly more
than their share of the shared pipe.

Probably what you're saying is that you like a lot of other "power
users" myself included use more bandwidth than the average neophyte.
So you're in favor of flat charges because it represents a good deal
for you.

Get me on a T1 and I use it, man.  Hmm, I'll just upgrade to gcc 2.7.x
(10 megs later) and then I'll upgrade the OS (another 50 megs later),
and so the day gos on.  Bandwidth hog.

Sitting on the end of this pay per second 28.8k PPP line really cramps
my style :-) I've started buying linux CD sets, and upgrading OS less
frequently.  I'm still on X32a (for linux people) even though it's
expired and tried to disable it's self, I've hacked around the
disablement (set the clock back 2 months for a couple of seconds while
it's starting, and then forward again part way through seems to fix
it) because I don't fancy the cost of 10 megs at 28.8k, nor the
hassle.

Now I would be pretty happy to spend $500 - $1500 a year for a 64k
leased line, or at least for a flat rate phone bill.  But nooo you
can't get that in the UK.  You're looking at more like $10k once
you've factored in leased line + bandwidth leasing.

To compensate I bought a load of BT (phone co) shares, so that at
least in theory I get some of the money they are making.  But the
OFTEL setup (government regulatory body) is killing them with
regulations, which is reducing their profitability.  I'm hanging on to
the shares, as it's supposed to end soonish.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

I'm back from the weekend to a large quantity of unanswered e-mail
which I'll get to eventually. if you said something of interest in
the last week or so, I'll comment on it this week - I hope.

But first I'll rant and rave some more on the subject of payment for
physical transportation and the snail mail, with the payment for the
Internet in mind.

Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes:

> 
> William Geiger MLCVXII <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:
> > In <199707311120.MAA00669@server.test.net>, on 07/31/97 
> > >  at 12:20 PM, Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> said:
> > >
> > >One way to implement this is for other people to pay the author for their
> > >articles a penny if they like the article.  That way people who write
> > >things which others find interesting to read get subsidized posting.  Is
> > >it still free speech if you have to pay for your posts if you're arguing
> > >for an unpopular minority?
> > 
> > This will not work!!!
> > 
> > Charging for e-mail/news posts will do nothing to prevent spam and
> > more than likely increase the noise on such lists. It is the spamers
> > who have the money to post volumns of their crap.
> 

As I think I pointed out before, the "spammers" would be more willing to
spend money to post than the folks who just talk and answer questions.
I wouldn't answer questions on comp.unix.questions if I had to pay to
do that. Any scheme that requires the poster to pay will dampen signal
more than it will damped the noise and thus worsed the signal to noise ratio.

> For email spam I disagree.  I currently get 10 spams a day or so.  All
> as a result of one unprotected post to a USENET group a few weeks
> back.  Before that I hadn't posted to USENET for a while and the spams
> had nearly died down.
> 
> If the spammer had to pay 1c for each spam, he'd be out of business
> with his current scatter gun approach.  He'd have to get a lot more
> selective, because it would be in his commercial interests to do so.

I've been getting dramatically less junk e-mail sent to the addresses which
I placed on the various "removal" lists. (Maybe 1 or 2 / day, vs 10-20 on
the 'control" ones.)
> 
> > Also I think you will find that it will be the fanatics who
> > will think it worth the $$$ to get their message out.
> 
> Fine by me, so long as they're paying their way, the NoCems from a
> reliable rating service will take care of them.
> 
> You have more of a point in newsgroups, or mailing lists as the
> spammer only has to make one post.
> 
> Charging for posts in that scenario only makes sense to stop people
> who spew multiple mega-bytes of robo-spam just to be annoying, and for
> no commercial gain at all.
> 
> NoCems are the real answer to public forums.  Spammers will feel less
> incentive to spam when it becomes clear most people have them filtered
> out anyway.
> 
> > While I find the various mailling lists & newsgroups of intrest the
> > majority of them are not thet intresting that I would be willing to pay
> > $$$ every time I post a reply to someones questions (most of my posts
> > outside of CP are answering questions on programming,crypto, & OS/2). I
> > think that the overall quality of the newsgroups would decline if you
> > started paying on a per-post basis.
> 
> Surely you aren't that prolific a writer that 1c a post would
> be a burden on you?
> 
> I make what 20 posts a day at peak?  Often 1 or none some days.
> 
> > It should be noted that the Bandwith issue is a red-herring. It is an
> > antiquated concept from the Fidonet days and does not apply. The bandwith
> > of the USENET has been *PAID IN FULL* by every subscriber to an ISP. The
> > ISP customers pay for their connections to their ISP who in turn pay for
> > their connections to the Access providers who inturn pay for the Backbone.
> > The PIPE has been paid for what goes over it not an issue. If all I want
> > to do with my T1 connection is ship *.jpg files via ftp 24/7 that is no
> > ones busines but my own. If I chooses to use my bandwith to transmit a
> > variety of file formats using various protocols
> > (HTTP,FTP,GOFFER,ARCHIE,...ect) who are you to say that some formats are
> > good and some are not!! (this is not even getting into the content of the
> > data being shiped).
> 
> That's interesting, and probably true, but still bandwidth is limited,
> see.  It is entirely possible for some idiots to consume vastly more
> than their share of the shared pipe.
> 
> Probably what you're saying is that you like a lot of other "power
> users" myself included use more bandwidth than the average neophyte.
> So you're in favor of flat charges because it represents a good deal
> for you.
> 
> Get me on a T1 and I use it, man.  Hmm, I'll just upgrade to gcc 2.7.x
> (10 megs later) and then I'll upgrade the OS (another 50 megs later),
> and so the day gos on.  Bandwidth hog.
> 
> Sitting on the end of this pay per second 28.8k PPP line really cramps
> my style :-) I've started buying linux CD sets, and upgrading OS less
> frequently.  I'm still on X32a (for linux people) even though it's
> expired and tried to disable it's self, I've hacked around the
> disablement (set the clock back 2 months for a couple of seconds while
> it's starting, and then forward again part way through seems to fix
> it) because I don't fancy the cost of 10 megs at 28.8k, nor the
> hassle.
> 
> Now I would be pretty happy to spend $500 - $1500 a year for a 64k
> leased line, or at least for a flat rate phone bill.  But nooo you
> can't get that in the UK.  You're looking at more like $10k once
> you've factored in leased line + bandwidth leasing.


Bill G wrote that the payment for (non-toll) roads is flat. This
isn't quite true. You see, the more you use a road, the more gasoline
you use up. When you buy gasoline, a very substantial portion of its
price are the taxes imposed by varous gubmint entities. A "toll-free"
road still brings revenues when it's used - the more traffic, the more
gas is burned, the more gas is bought, the more tax is paid. The funds
raised from gasoline taxes are supposed to be earmarked for highway
repairs and new construction.  Thus, the gubmint taxes you for every
mile you drive. Owners with less "fuel-efficient" cars are taxed more
heavily. All miles are equal, whether you drive on an interstate or
around your own backyard.  Tolls come in when the gubmint wants to
make a certain mile "more equal" than the other miles. E.g. in New
York City it costs $7 to cross the Verazzano bridge from Brooklyn
to Staten Island, but if you live on Staten Island, you can get a
discount. (By the way, this toll is used to subsidize the subway, 
which doesn't even go to Staten Island.)

Of course the U.S. highway infrastructure isn't getting adequate
maintenance anyway and is failing at an increasing rate.

The New York City subways/buses are an example of a true flat rate. 
Last months the system changed so that if you use a little plastic
card to pay your fare instead of the traditional token, you can
change for free between buses and subways.  Thus, someone who lives
and works in Manhattan and takes a subway for 1 or 2 stops pays the
same $1.50 as someone who takes the subway from Manhattan to the
outskirts of Queens and then changes to a bus. The argument is that
once the infrastructure is in place, the incremental cost of carrying
one more passenger doesn't depend much on how far he's going. The
real reason is that the users who benefit from this fare structure
are much more likely to vote Republican than the users who
subsidize them. :-) And NYC subways are still in a much worse shape
than the public transportation in cities where the fare depends on
the length of the trip (like Washington, DC, or London) or is
artificially low and can't cover the costs (like Moscow).

I might as well remind those still reading this rant that the reason
why NYC subways fell into such disrepair was political. When 3 private
companies built competing underground railroad systems in NYC in late
19th/early 20th century, they each charged a flat 5c for a ride and
had sufficient revenue for maintenance, new construction, and dividends
to the investors. Unfortunately, USD like any other currency is
subject to inflation. When the 3 companies tried to raise their fares
to match their rising costs, the New York City and State politicians
didn't let them. To keep the subway fare at 5c was the standard
promise of every politician running for NYC mayor in the first half
of the century. The subway companies were forced to operate at a loss
and were happy to turn over their trains to the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority - a piece of gubmint controlled by New York
State. Now that the gubmint owns the subways, the fares have been
rising much faster than the inflation. (I remember when the subway
cost 50c on a weekday, 25c on a weekend.) However the years of
neglect (blamed on the lack of capital) have left the subways in
a much worse shape, and the repairs are likely to cost more than
regular maintenance would have. (Just like the U.S. highway
infrastructure.)

And the cost of collecting the fares is a substantial one. (This is
also the case with long distance telephone calls - I believe that
flat-rate service, not wasting any resources on keeping track how
long a particular user has used a circuit, will prevail eventually.)
E.g. the MTA just spent close to $1B on installing new turnstiles
with card readers. Most users of New York City subways already pay
a special city income tax (not that I like it). Wouldn't it be more
"efficient" to make the subways "free", and to collect the funds
for running the subways from the "general" city and state taxes?
(Using taxes is the socialist solution; letting a private company
charge a flat fee for unlimited usage, if it so chooses, is the
efficient free market solution.)

Now on the subject of snail mail: someone asked why USPS is in the
business of censoring content (e.g. pyramid schemes). USPS has been
in this business for a long time. It refuses to deliver "obscene"
content, and in the past refused to deliver "birth control"
information (to a consenting recipient) judging it to be obscene.
Not too long ago USPS used to raid "competing" services, such
as FedEx, examine the contents of the letters, judge that they
weren't sufficiently "urgent" and should have sent via 1st class
mail (USPS's gubmint-granted monopoly), and harrass the sender
and the recipient. Not too long ago USPS seriously proposed
charging 1st class postage any time a fax machine was used.

Is USPS's postage "flat"? Obviously, they charge per piece of mail.
However is costs the same 32c to smail a first-class envelope under
a certain weight from Queens to Brooklyn or to Hawaii. Obviously, it
takes much more effort to deliver such a letter to HI than to Brooklyn.
The European tradition was to charge according to the distance the
letter was supposed to travel. I recall reading that in late 19th
century USPS simply did not deliver to rural areas - the farmer was
supposed to travel to his nearest post office to collect the mail.
There was a political battle in U.S. Congress, with "free rural
delivery" being the slogan of the politicians representing the
states with a lot of farmers, while the ones from the more urban
states did not want their contituents to subsidize the obviously
expensive rural delivery. Eventually the farmers won, resulting
in the birth of "mail order" industry - companies mass-mailing
catalogs and delivering good by mail (such as Sears), who were
in fact subsidized by the city dwellers who had to pay the same
postage to deliver a package across town than Sears paid to
deliver its catalog across the Great Plains.

It costs USPS much more to deliver an envelope with a handwritten
address than one with an OCR-readable address. That's why the senders
of "junk mail" (pre-sorted, with OCR-ready labels) are said to
subsidize the senders who scribble something on an envelope - even
though the "bulk" postage is less than "first class". USPS has
been talking about various schemes so people who mail a single
envelope with an OCR-ready address would get a smaller postage
hike than the "scribblers".

I'm not sure what all this means in terms of flat vs. metered
Internet fees, so in closing I'll rant about the pyramid schemes,
"airplane games", "earn money stuffing envelopes" scams, et al.
No gubmint should be in the business of declaring them to be
"illegal" any more than they should be declaring pornography, 
bomb-making  recipes, religious propaganda, or crypto programs
to be "illegal". 

You may recall that the first wide-known pyramid scheme was run
buy a chap named Ponzi in Boston. He collected money from 
"investors", and said he expected to pay back a handsome return
based on some "postal orders" business. He did in fact pay the
promised returns to the early invesors using the funds collected
from the later investors, until the rate at which he had to
pay out the old investors exceeded the rate at which he was
getting new investors. Ponzi was arrested, convicted of "fraud"
(because he was claiming that the returns came from "postal
orders" when in fact they didn't), spend a brief time in jail,
then moved to Florida where he made lots of money on the real
easte boom.

A similar scheme in Russia by an organizaton called "MMM", run 
by the Mavrodi bothers, left a large number of "investors"
holding the bag. Interestingly, one of the Mavrodi brothers
is now in Russian jail (awaiting trial), and the other one is
still running a pyramid scheme: he accepts "voluntary donations"
from an investor, in return for a "voluntary donation" at a later
date whose amount and time are not guaranteed and depend on
the "donations" collected from others. The Russian government
does not shut down Mavrodi's latest operation so far, claiming
it's not "fraud" since he doesn't misrepresent the source of
his returns nor the risks involved. Reportedly so far he's
getting oodles of investors and pretty good returns. Eventually
of course his scheme will collapse, but the "investors" who
got in and out early enough will have made good money.

A similar scheme recently brought down the government of Albania.
Reportedly the investors who got in late in the game and didn't
get the returns they expected (or actually lost their investments)
demanded that the gubmint reimburse them for their losses (by
taxing the money from the more intelligent Albanians). When
the idiots want the gubmint to protect them from their own
idiocy, the gubmint happily uses this excuse to screw not only
those who would fleece the idiots, but everyone.

The obvious moral of this extra-long rant is that gubmint of any
kind is a root of all evil and Kent Crispin sounds like a pedophile.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

"William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:

> In <199707311120.MAA00669@server.test.net>, on 07/31/97
>    at 12:20 PM, Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> said:
>
> >Another longer term way to improve the situation is to charge some small
> >token amount per article, just to encourage people to use it with some
> >intelligence (use cross posts rather than separately reposting to each
> >group).
>
> This will not work!!!
>
> Charging for e-mail/news posts will no nothing to prevent spam and more
> than likely increase the noise on such lists. It is the spamers who have
> the money to post volumns of their crap. Allso I think you will find that
> it will be the fanatics who will think it worth the $$$ to get their
> message out.

In all fairness, it would decrease the "spam" because some spammers are
certain to be unwilling to pay for braodcasting the kind of crap they
now broadcast for a flat fee. However it would not eliminate the "spam"
and it would damped the "signal" more than it would damped the "noise".

In my opinion, the recipient of the "spam" should not have to pay
anything. Now, some service charge per packets transmitted or the
time spent online. Their users are therefore pushed into trying to
censor "spam", flames, or anything else they find off-topic. Even
when there's no monetary cost, some people use crappy software to
read usenet or mailing lists, and it takes them time to ignore what
they don't like, and they value their time and become angry.

> >Also, this might be an interesting information market model because
> >technical experts might even find themselves with a well paid job of
> >answering technical questions in newsgroups.
>
> There is a web site that is doing exactly this. They provide forums for
> users to post technical questions in which "experts" will answer them.
> Upon receiving the answer the person who posted the question is requested
> to rate the answer. I haven't been on the site in awhile but the last time
> I was there they were working on a mechinism to compensate their "experts"
> for answering questions. They had a point system based on the difaculty of
> the questions. After registering with them and obtaining a certain number
> of points for correctly answering questions you would be classified as an
> "expert" for that forum which then would make you eligable for
> compensation. I believe all funds were to be generated through web page
> advertisement.
>
>
> I'll see if I can find the URL for the site and post it to the list.

Most of my posts on newsgroups like nyc.food or comp.unix.questions are
answers to other people's questions.  I'd love to see this concept
extended to Usenet - sort of like "shareware".

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

> Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 06:46:53 -1000
> From: "Dr. Jai Maharaj" <jai@mantra.com>

> > What this scum is actually upset about is Chris Lewis cancelling
> > spam. He calls that "forgery" because the spammer's name goes
> > in the sender field of the cancel message. Nonsense. . . .
> >  -  Sandy Harris
> 
> Forgery is a crime and such acts are not justified.

Spamming is a crime (theft of computer resources) and sometimes such
acts may be justifiable self-defense.

-- 
Martin Pool <m.pool@pharos.com.au>
Pharos Business Solutions

"Sandy Harris" <sandy@storm.ca> writes:

> 
> Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM <dlv@bwalk.dm.com> writes:
> 
> 
> 
> >> Entrust Technologies (www.entrust.com) has made Solo available for
> >> download, free . . .
> 
> >I ask everyone on these two forums
> 
> Cypherpunks & Freedom Knights. Both should be very happy to
> see strong encryption becoming more widely available.

As opposed to snake oil peddled by the forgers who employ Chris Lewis.

> 
> >to inform Northern Telecom Forgers / Bell North Forgery Research
> >/ Entrust that we will boycott their "security" products
> 
> Snarky quotes not required. This isn't snake oil. There is plenty of
> solid analysis behind these products. Check references on Entrust
> web site.
> 
> >as long they continue to employ the child-molesting
> >pedophile Chris R. Lewis - the biggest forger on Usenet.
> 
> What this scum is actually upset about is Chris Lewis cancelling
> spam. He calls that "forgery" because the spammer's name goes
> in the sender field of the cancel message. Nonsense.

"Scum" applies to Chris lewis and Sandy Harris, both of whom have Web
pages dedicated to them at http://www.netscum.net/lewisc0.html and
../harriss0.html.  (While at it, check out gary Burnore's net.Scum
page at ../burnorg0.html.)

Chris Lewis forges cancels for Usenet articles posted by other people when
he doesn't like their contents.  'Forges' refers to Chris Lewis putting the
e-mail address of his victim in the Sender: field.  You can find numerous
examples of Chris Lewis forging cancels for articles that are not "spam"
by any definition on his Net.Scum page.

> Dimitri, the "forgeries" are going to continue until someone comes
> up with a better way of dealing with spam. If you have suggestions,
> post them to some of the news,admin.net-abuse.* groups or to
> the Freedom Knights list.
> 
> The crap about pedophilia is also, of course, nonsense. It seems
> to be a favorite slur lately with several grossly misguided people
> who think calling people they dislike pedophiles is a way to
> "defend freedom of speech".
> 

Sandy Harris sounds like a typical Usenet pedophile.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

> Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM <dlv@bwalk.dm.com> writes:
> 
> > I ask everyone on these two forums to inform Northern Telecom Forgers /
> > Bell North Forgery Research / Entrust that we will boycott their
> > "security" products as long they continue to employ the child-molesting
> > pedophile Chris R. Lewis - the biggest forger on Usenet.

  Chris Lewis' sexual predilictions are of no concern in the issue of
an individual's right to use any means necessary to force their own
censorous values on the rest of the world.
  Despite what Chris Lewis did to my six year-old niece, I support
his right to destroy the creations of those with whom he disagrees.

  Northern Telecom, Bell Northern and Entrust take the position that
employing persons who openly admit to forgery and censorship should
in no way reflect badly on their production of a product in the
security market.
  Entrust is confident that Chris Lewis' forgery, fraud and deceit
in no way affects the level of trust and confidence that people should
have in Entrust security products. After all, people lie, cheat and
steal all of the time. Why should those who work on security products
be held to a higher standard?

  What this anti-forgery scum, Dimitri, is actually upset about is 
Chris Lewis cancelling spam. He calls that "forgery" because the 
spammer's name goes in the sender field of the cancel message. Nonsense.
  If someone were to put my name in the sender field of email, I would
certainly not call that "forgery," even if they used email sent in my
name to suggest that I participated in the sexual acts Chris Lewis
committed with my niece. (BTW, the charges against me were dropped
after her unexpected death.)