From tor.general Wed Jul 8 08:43:47 1992 Xref: utcsri tor.general:4110 news.admin:22929 Newsgroups: tor.general,news.admin Path: utcsri!torn!utzoo!telly!evan From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) Subject: Re: Internet on City TV news... Organization: Somewhere just far enough out of Toronto Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1992 03:12:44 GMT Message-ID: <2A5A5D2D.32D7@telly.on.ca> References: <710490325.17473@zooid.guild.org> In article <710490325.17473@zooid.guild.org> vid@zooid.guild.org (David Mason) writes: >Isn't anyone going to comment on City TV's treatment of pornography/censorship >at U of T of Usenet groups and Internet resources? [ For those of you joining the discussion late, CITY is a Toronto TV station ] >Yes, for those who were lucky enough to miss it, they had a nice five minute >summary of the issue. They were nice enough to comment that alt.sex and >related items were only a small part of the system, but in typical >journalistic style they had screen shots of cryptic looking symbols (well, I >suppose to the uninitiated message headers scrolling by at 9600 baud can look >cryptic) as well as semi-pornographic language on the screen. >This was covered in regards to the censoring of alt.sex groups at the >University of Manitoba. Apparently at U of M it was treated as a pornography >issue while at U of T it is being treated as a censorship - freedom of speech >issue. The media is treating Usenet the way it treats most other parts of everyday life. The stuff that doesn't bother anyone, or is productive, or boringly efficient, is ignored. That which irritates someone, or offends, or provokes outrage, is instantly fair game. I wouldn't expect much of CITY, as I consider it one of the more tabloid-type TV news programs. Their "analyst" Colin Vaughan has all the political savvy of a box of Polyfilla. It isn't over, though. A week or so ago, I was on the phone for the better part of two hours with a guy from the Globe and Mail (newspaper), who intends to do something a little more in-depth than the reports we've seen so far. So he says. As the moderator of the erotica group and a Canadian, I guess I was a reasonable (and probably inevitable) target. What the reporter didn't expect was that I have been on both sides of this fence, having completed a graduate Journalism programme along with many of this reporter's co-workers. So I could be honest in the interview, giving his intentions the benefit of the doubt whilst keeping my guard up. Even if he is either sympathetic or merely impartial, that's not to say that his editors will be. The impression I got during the interview while getting a feel for some of the other people this guy has spoken to, is that some people are scared shitless about Usenet. Scared? You bet. Unlike a newspaper with its heavily selective letters to the editor or a broadcaster who has complete editing control over what makes the 6:00 news, Usenet has no such bounds over one's ability to respond to what one reads. Those who wish to be offensive or think offensive things, be they fans of sex with animals, homophobes, holocaust revisionists or John Palmer, cannot be silenced per se; Partially because the mechanics of the system don't make it easy to censor, but also partly because there's no central authorites to do the censoring. This lack of control is something that, in my mind, would be very difficult for those in conventional media to grasp. It is so easy to keep out the views of the offensive and pretend they don't exist, or it is possible to bring them into the open and expose them for the shams that they are. The point that kept going through my mind during the interview, that I hope I conveyed well enough to the reporter, is that the individual news reader/poster has much more influence over the content of the net than in any other media. As a result, we see some commentaries and discussions in many subjects that are of better quality and relevance than the other media are capable of providing. We also see an awful lot of absolute garbage, but the net is no better and no worse than the people who contribute to is. Indeed, each site is in total control of the level of participation they desire, even to the point of ignoring certain subject groups totally. "Where does it end?" asked the reporter. "It doesn't," I answered, pointing out applications like Clarinet which make use of conventional net mechanisms to *replace* conventional media. The proportion of Usenet devoted to sex is a much smaller part than, I would suggest, the amount of sex on DOS BBS systems like Canada Remote Systems. But that's not news anymore. What is news is that some people from the outside are starting to see what the net is and what it is capable of being. Some of us are fascinated by it; others, who see a potential erosion in the media status quo, or the reduction of the media as a one-way tool for influencing thought, in my eyes indeed have much to fear. I don't believe it's far fetched to say that I've learned more about the gut problems behind that Canadian constitution from can.politics that from any parade of taking heads on the Journal. Imminent death of Usenet predicted? NOT. In Usenet, I see methods of frustrating those who would censor, of knocking professional journalists and "experts" down a notch and making them more responsible for what they say and do. Indeed, Usenet is not for the overly sensitive or easily offended. It's more like the floor of the Stock Exchange than an audience watching a stage play. It's not for everyone, but I don't think it's reached a fraction of its potential. The more the conventional media attacks it out of ignorance or fear, the more I believe this to be true. -- Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd., located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!utzoo!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504 Said Captain Jean-Luc Picard to the tailor at his machine: "Make it sew!" From tor.general Sat Mar 18 18:00:13 1995 Xref: utcsri alt.censorship:42828 alt.current-events.net-abuse:24132 can.infohighway:5570 comp.org.eff.talk:48757 news.admin.misc:35129 tor.general:21821 Newsgroups: alt.current-events.net-abuse,alt.censorship,news.admin.misc,comp.org.eff.talk,tor.general,can.infohighway Path: utcsri!cannon.ecf!info.physics.utoronto.ca!utzoo!telly!evan From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) Subject: Re: Scientology's illegal cancellations, War With The Cult Message-ID: Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 02:32:48 GMT References: <3j22sj$1n1@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> <3k9dct$pl1@nyx10.cs.du.edu> Organization: Sound Software Ltd., Brampton, Ontario In article <3k9dct$pl1@nyx10.cs.du.edu>, henry wrote: >In article , Evan Leibovitch wrote: >>The only action that needs >>to be taken is by those who want to turn it off. >>Do you not see what's wrong with this? >no. your inability to change your defaults >is no reason to toss out the cyberspam convention, >which works just fine. There may be a "convention" agreed to by a small number of admins. It is not in the form of an RFC. It is not in the official docs of any Usenet software. Its only documentation is in an FAQ of an *alt* group. This is hardly a universal declaration. >>Bad example. I don't know when Cancelmoose postings arrive here to do >>their good deeds. >well then you're stupid. >[...] >you're even more of an idiot than i thought. >[...] >so once again you stand revealed as a raving baboon. >[...] >get a fuckin' copy of INN! Truly a posting that added to the s/n ratio of this newsgroup -- in which direction? My how people are so quick to resort to personal insults. If even Chris Lewis can't respond to a legitimate beef without ad homina and/or sewaring, it's reasonable to assume this is an emotional issue without much reason to back it up. Certainly the lack of hard rebuttal outside of personal attacks has borne this out. >if something is posted >to enough newsgroups, and wastes enough diskspace, cancelmoose >zaps it according to rules which were established during >months of deliberations, during which there was considerable >thought paid to these issues that you raise now. Um hmm. In an *alt* group. Yup, that's universal -- NOT. >next you're gonna say that since YOU weren't personally >consulted about The Great Renaming, it is bogus and we >ought to rmgroup every new newsgroup for the last seven >years or so. At least there was a formally held vote on it. >>Chris didn't read what I wrote. I don't disagree at all with the rights >>and intentions of admins to act on spams in any way they see fit; but let >>them do it *on their own machines*! Make available software that allows >>admins to do their own local spam-seek-and-destroy routines as they wish; >why? do you have any comprehension of the amount of cpu time >this would cost? Yes, and I'm willing to bear it -- just like I bear the cpu time of expiry, map unpacking, alt.sex.pictures.* filtering, etc. You don't send cancel messages around in order to accomplish sites' expiry for them, even though that would save cpu cycles too... >take the cost of doing it from one site, or >having the moose do it. multiply that by tens of thousands >of sites, all running identical filtering systems. Just like there are tens of thousands of sites doing expiries, and map unpacking, and archiving of *.answers and sources, and newsgroup threading, etc. Each site does these redundant activities locally in order to maintain local control over policy. That is exactly the pattern I am advocating wrt anti-spam policy. It should be run locally, not broadcast. >these goddamn machines are being used for BUSINESS, dammit. >they're being used for EDUCATION, dammit. Oooh, swear a little more, it makes you sound so much more convincing. >Usenet is one of >dozens of things they're supporting. so why WASTE limited >resources duplicating IDENTICAL filtering operations TENS >OF THOUSANDS OF TIMES? certainly even you can see why this >is infeasible and just plain dumb. Well, hell, why have all these machines even repeating news to each other, let's just do it Compuserve's way and have every thing sitting on one big machine. Then we don't have all these redundant exipires and overview databases and other unnecessary stuff. Face it, Usenet, by its very nature, involved tens of thousands of machines doing essentially the same task, differing only by policy implementations and resources. This would be but one new policy implementation to be done at each site. Nobody blinked when the overview database was installed by default in Cnews, even though it silently gobbles up 10% of your spool. Yet another redundant Usenet policy implementation being done on tens of thousands of systems. Why should anti-spam policy be the only exception to this tradition? >>I always understood that there were only two proper uses of the cancel >>control message -- to kill one's own postings, and to kill postings >>which were clearly forgeries (like a moderator killing a posting that >>forged his approval). To change the allowable use of the cancel message >>to kill "unacceptable" posts, even if I agree with the nature of the >>unacceptability, is a leap in philosophy I believe is being made foolishly. >it is not the POSTS per se. it is the NUMBER of them, and the >WASTE OF RESOURCES. if you disagree with me, i suppose you won't >mind if i call you collect a hundred times a day, force you to pay >for it, and EVERY message is identical--you can't IGNORE them >without either FILTERING them personally by, say, buying a >machine or software to do that--OR by accepting a trusted >individual, phone moose, to stop the calls. My site accepts thousands of messages each day that I don't read, likely many hundreds I would find disgusting if I did read them, and a number of newsgroups whose articles never see the light of day here. That's because I choose my own policy. If I choose to allow spams to sit on my site and/or deal with them locally in any way I see fit, why should it bother anyone else? If I was a leaf node then it wouldn't even be an issue if my upstream was implementing an anti-spam activity. >after several months, you are expected at least to have a tiny >clue. you lack it. this shows some sort of ingrained cluelessness >which can only be removed by a judicious application of fire. Oh certainly, half-assed attempts at flamage have neber been the way to prove a point, unless it's the feeble attempt by the flamer to sound clever. >>but I guess some of us just tire of all that hand-wringing and choose >>to read the newsgroups in which we actually find value-for-time-spent. >>The larger issue at hand, is the very basic change of a Usenet control >>function, in order to offer a band-aid fix to a politically-incorrect >>bahavior. >that's what cancelmoose IS. he saves US the trouble >of doing what we'd HAVE to do otherwise, Ges, do you let someone else program the expiry times at your site by remote control? Gee, if nobody did that for you maybe nothing would expire and your disk drive would fill up. Pity. >and lets us get back to the business of Usenet. discussions, fun, >flaming dead-ass ignorant clowns like you. Um hmm. Well, maybe that's the business for people posting from duh.edu. >>So let's RTFM -- where are these "conventions" so faithfully documented? > >they're mostly at rtfm. duh. rtfm.mit.edu--they moved it, >but the nameserver at mit still finds it. And how are UUCP-only sites to get it? Not all are high-and-mighty parts of the Internet. >>I archive every FAQ that makes it to *.answers. Not a one contains the term >>cyberspam. Furthermore, there is no reference to "spam" in the most current >>C News documentation. >so what? it has nothing to do with the functioning of c news. When someone installs news, the main docs they have to use are the Usenet FAQs and the documentation for whatever news transport software they have to install. At this time none of the above makes mention of cancel forgeries, or even pointers to the net-abuse FAQ. >>Cancellation policy, like policies to deal with newgroup, rmgroup and >>sendsys messages, should be implemented locally using available tools. > >why? why duplicate the processing time tens of thousands of times. >this is stupid, counterproductive, and a waste of processor time >almost as bad as the waste of disk space the spam caused in the >first place. I guess you don't expire anything on your system because that only duplicates processing tens of thousands of times. I suppose to you this is stupid, counterproductive, and a waste of processor time almost as bad as the waste of disk space that unexpired articles caused in the first place. >>If >>the moose can be automated to broadcast cancellations, it can be automated >>at individual sites to implement *local* anti-spam policy -- just as >>archiving, map unpacking, expiry, censorship and other policies are done >>locally now. It should be tunable on a site-per-site level -- >IT ALREADY IS YOU BUMBLING AIRHEAD! Really? What software has been posted in comp.sources to allow admins to implement their own spam-killing actions? What tools exist to allow someone to receive Cancelmoose messages as e-mail, as an advisory only? >haven't you listened to a single word anyone else has said? Sure, the same thing has been repeated ad nauseum. The end justifies the means. The danger of spams justified forged cancellations. And then everyone whines when the same activity is done in a politically incorrect manner. >SOME of them even said >it politely, but it's early morning, i have a train to catch >halfway across the country, i've been up all night, and i'm >frankly in no mood even to tolerate such flat-out stupidity >as you repeatedly exhibit. So, of course, your answer is to post a flame and add a content-free posting to the Usenet traffic whose volume you say needs to be minimized. That makes as much sense as anything else you've said. >>what one >>considers acceptable may not be the threshold for everyone. This is the >>way policy has been done since day one, and it sort-of saddens me that >>people are so quick to let arbitrary policy implementations float around >>the net like so many viri. >because they damn well work. if cancelmoose didn't work, he'd >be axed. plain and simple. if tale started sending out newgroups >for comp.fuck.the.skull.of.jesus, soc.devilbunnies and >talk.bellering.idiots, he'd be gone before you could say 'spafford.' tale send out stuff that's been voted on. He doesn't decide what goes out, the voters do. If there was a legitimate CFV for soc.devilbunnies and it passed, tale would most *certainly* not be gone for issuing the newgroup message for it. What makes you think otherwise? >>At very least, Cancelmoose should be a subscription service like a >>mailing list -- you should have to explicitly ask for it to get it. >why? like you pointed out, there are clueless jerks out there. Then let them suffer the consequences of their cluelessness. If the Moose is so useful, the subscription request will be in the thousands, and those who don't subscribe may have their spools blow up. At very least, how about getting the information out of alt.whatever and into the news.announce hierarchy where it's more likely to get a widespread audience? >why should the default be crashing news servers, disks filling >up in hours, loss of service, and disgruntled users? Imminent death of Usenet predicted, blah blah blah... >what you're saying is like saying that cars shouldn't have >regulators on the engine, so that you can overrev it and blow >up the engine if you like, because HEY it's freedom and anything >else would be we-know-what's-good-for-you paternalism. Well, there are those in govrenment who would put a limited on cars which would not allow them to exceed 65mph. I guess you're in favour of that measure? >and hey. so far, cancelmoose DOES know what's good for us, >and he's DOING it. Maybe this should be everyone's motto. >>As for the point about everyone liking the Cancelmoose except the spammers, >>Allisat and me, I never had much faith in the lemming style of debate. > >do you consider that maybe the reason everyone who actually >knows anything about being a newsadmin agrees with the moose-- >do you consider that that might _indicate_ anything. it's >not like it's 100 per cent of random joe slobs, it's not like >it's 100 per cent of church of scientology members, it's not >like it's 100 per cent of flat earthers. it's 100 per cent, >give or take a .01 per cent here or there, and it's 100 per >cent of the people who have been doing this, some for a living, >some for DECADES! And usually I look for familiar names, of people I trust, to lend credence to any given proposal. I haven't seen any yet. Get tale or Mark Moraes or Henry Spencer involved and call back. Present it at a Usenix or turn it into an RFC and call back. Until then it may be a bunch of flat earthers for all I know. >>In the meantime, the ethical rationale >>behind the Cancelmoose still eludes; I have a hard time believing it >>exists at all. >what ethical rationale? if i want his cancels, i take 'em. >if i don't, i filter them out, or go to a site that does. Exactly. I don't argue that the Moose works for many people. I do question the ethics of this ends-justifies-the-means rationale behind forging cancellation postings. And I note that there's not a huge moral leap between the Cancelmoose and the Scietology cancellations. -- Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd., located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario Novell Unix Master Reseller / evan@telly.org / (905) 452-0504 Those to my right are extremists; those to my left are heretics From tor.general Mon Mar 20 13:49:17 1995 Xref: utcsri alt.censorship:43117 alt.current-events.net-abuse:24665 can.infohighway:5679 comp.org.eff.talk:48971 news.admin.misc:35474 tor.general:22068 Newsgroups: alt.current-events.net-abuse,alt.censorship,news.admin.misc,comp.org.eff.talk,tor.general,can.infohighway Path: utcsri!newsflash.concordia.ca!news.mcgill.ca!hookup!news.kei.com!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!newsjunkie.ans.net!fonorola!infoshare!whome!telly!evan From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) Subject: Re: Scientology's illegal cancellations, War With The Cult Message-ID: Date: Mon, 20 Mar 1995 05:23:55 GMT References: <3j22sj$1n1@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> <3k8ssc$9ss_019@slc23.xmission.com> <3kbfjt$m54_001@slc3.xmission.com> Organization: Sound Software Ltd., Brampton, Ontario Lines: 156 I thank those of you who have answered me in e-mail and publicly with well-reasoned and thoughtful replies. You more than balanced-out those who believed that they could make their points by flamage, name-calling, and condescention; topped off by Chris Lewis' Al Pacino impression ("do you have that little faith in MY ethics? Think very hard before answering"). (No, Chris, I don't have that little faith. I recognize the value in what's being done. I just don't buy into the tactics, and the cavalier attitude that everyone of sound mind must support every aspect of The Cancelmoose Cause.) I don't think my opinion of the Cancelmoose has changed much, but at least it's evolved in my mind from merely an Evil to a Necessary Evil. For now. I still very much believe in the "Evil" part of it because, no matter what anyone says, the spam-cancellers are still perverting the purpose of the cancel control message. Most replies have gone out of their way to point out the "necessary" part; I won't argue for a second that the spam-killers have done a great service to the net, and preserved many units of Net resources, be it storage, CPU or communications. But I can't avoid the fact that this is an "end justifies the means" argument, that still leaves a bad taste. I have come to the impression that the Cancelmoose is a transitional tool, a hastily-contrived reaction to a problem that caught the design of the net with its electronic pants down. It works -- for now -- but it will have to be supplanted by a more-general-purpose tool that will accomplish the same goal (and compensate for even other net-abuses in the future), in a more-reasonable manner that puts policy back in the hands of local sites. I have pointed out that many admins, especially those of smaller sites, are probably not aware of the whole spam/cancel issue, and that there should be better information in the basic news-admin FAQs to deal with this. I hope that the news.admin.net-abuse.* groups pass, so that this information can go more mainstream: Having the announce group will certainly make it easier for admins with very little time on their hands to keep up on the issue(s). But there continue to be a number of issues that bother me about the spam-killers, even after hearing from all the rebuttals to my first post: In article <3kbfjt$m54_001@slc3.xmission.com>, wrote: >Things weren't planned, they just kind of evolved. Understood. Spamming is nothing more, or less, than net.vandalism. It wastes resources so that a few can have a greater audience for their message(s) than societal norms would allow. Given the technology of the Net, the amount of time it takes for a single vandal to work their electronic spray-cans around the world has been ever-decreasing and the extent of the damage ever-increasing. As I can see it, the effectiveness of the Cancelmoose *depends* on the vandals' lack of sophistication. Is it not possible that the spammers may soon get really good at what they do, and foul up the whole process? Could we not eventually see: - Cancelmoose forgeries that are good enough that, while they will eventually be tracked down, they can destroy the credibility of the service in the process? After all, the current message has no provision for any real form of verification. - Spam-hunter-hunters that attempt to cancel the cancellations? - Scientology (or other "bad") mass-cancellations using the anti-spam "conventions"? After all, these guys aren't going to care one bit if their announcements are not approved on the n.a.n-a.a group, are they? Then we have the ever-blurring concept of "what is spam"? What we have now, for the most part, is fairly clear-cut. But apparently there have already been instances where each posting of a spam is very-slightly altered to suit the newsgroup it's in -- these have been cancelled just as if they were pure spam. But what happens as the "vandals" get more sophisticated and make, say, 50% of each of 200 postings different? Is this technically spam? How about %60? 75%? I don't think we're that far away, given the ability to automate thesaurus functions. What then? If someone posts 200 messages which have similar subject matter but are lexographically different, then we cross the lines from the current issue of pure spams, to one of appropriateness of content. After all, you can't tell someone who's posted 200 messages of which the majority of the content of each message is distinct, that they could have just cross-posted... Does anyone *not* see the inevitability of this question coming up in the foreseeable future? It's cut-and-dry for now, will it be in the years to come? Will we continue to have such widespread consensus then of what constitutes spam? Will one auto-canceller's choice of where to draw the line continue to be acceptable to everyone? So admins have the (poorly-documented) choice of all or nothing -- yes, Chris, I know about system aliasing, and have implemented it myself. I just don't feel it deals with the whole issue. My complaint is that the only local policy options an admin has is to allow all spam-killing messages (the default action, which I'm still not crazy about but can live with) or to disarm them all. No middle ground (eg, I trust the Moose's cancels and Chris', but nobody else's), no facility to send mail to the admin and allow him/her the choice of whether or not to implement any particular spam-kill. This is what was at the heart of my original post, that local admins have no say in the matter -- either enable external control of spam-kills, or don't. I was quickly corrected in my statement that admins can do nothing, but I don't consider the current choice of everything-or-nothing to be much more acceptable. I can flexibly configure my system to deal with newgroup messages. I can automatically allow them to be honoured if sent by tale; if not, the requests get sent to me and I get to choose whether or not I wish to honour the request on my site. Is this not far superior to the current binary approach wrt spam-hunters? An e-mailed reply to me from Harry Johnston, suggests that a process is underway to develop an "advisory" control message. If adapted, it would deal with almost all of my concerns, since it would hand control back to the admin to implement policy locally -- to, let's say, automatically honour one spam-hunter's advisory cancels but to ignore another which has a definition of spam which is too narrow for me. It could be in the form of the shell-scripts now used to implement so many other local policies -- it would not force a one-size-fits-all approach to spam-killing, and it could be reasonably flexible to deal with other foreseeable uses of an "advisory" message. Most of all, it allows the raw "cancel" control message to go back to its original purpose, for use by the originator only. Maybe the cancel message can be adapted to allow verification, preventing systems from doing forced (as opposed to advisory) cancellations unless the identity (that is, the issuer of the cancel is the same as the issue of the original posting) is verified. And if, at that point, Scientologists (or anyone else) want to cancel messages that aren't theirs, they too will have to use advisory cancels, and convince admins to implement their advisories. If they can succeed at that, far be it for me to stop them, but at least it'll be above board... I can see the day when there may be "cancel-advisors" who will be on the lookout for copyright violations, ads in non-ad newsgroups and so on. Admins will pick and choose which "advisors" they listen to, I can live with that scheme quite easily. I've been told in many replies to put up or shut up, that is, be part of the process to help if I'm not just trolling. Fine. In the time I've been reading n.a.m, I have yet to see anything regarding the creation of an RFC for an advisory control message. If such an effort has been taken off-line, I'd be more than happy to contribute to its work -- that is, if they'll have me :-). -- Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd., located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario Novell Unix Master Reseller / evan@telly.org / (905) 452-0504 Those to my right are extremists; those to my left are heretics