From elastic!exorcist!lethe!geac!herboid!whome!woffi!infoshare!news1.toronto.fonorola.net!news.interlog.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news.mathworks.com!uunet!not-for-mail Thu Nov 2 00:44:32 1995 Xref: elastic news.admin.technical:191 Path: elastic!exorcist!lethe!geac!herboid!whome!woffi!infoshare!news1.toronto.fonorola.net!news.interlog.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news.mathworks.com!uunet!not-for-mail From: nmehl@bbnplanet.com (Nathan J. Mehl) Newsgroups: news.admin.technical Subject: Re: Usenet Global Killfile Date: 31 Oct 1995 18:56:04 -0500 Organization: BBN Planet Corporation, Cambridge, MA Lines: 98 Sender: zorch@ftp.UU.NET Approved: zorch@uunet.UU.NET Distribution: world Message-ID: <475ufi$16d@mercury.near.net> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net [Posted in mail and news - please follow up in news.] In article , pkh@adp.wisc.edu (Kent Hooker) writes: >In reading recent postings on news.admin.censorship, I see mention of >something called the Usenet Global Killfile, used, apparently, to filter >spammers and other abusive posters out in some manner. > >Can someone (anyone) direct me to information on what this Usenet Global >Killfile is, how it is used and administered, and how to implement it with >INN 1.4? Oh lord. Sometimes a troll can be a bit too successful. I was the person who most recently invoked the name of the "Usenet Global Killfile" on news.admin.censorship. As such, I suppose that it falls to me to answer this question. The "Usenet Global Killfile" is, in the common parlance, a troll. (As in "trolling for suckers.") It first cropped up on news.admin.policy about a year ago, when a somewhat hysterical character by the name of Steve Boursy became convinced that a secretive global cabal of Usenet sysadmins were conspiring to silence him. Joel Furr decided to play on Boursy's martyr complex, and issued an official-sounding post stating that due to his antisocial behavior, Boursy had been put into the "Usenet Global Killfile", which was "subscribed to by 83% of all Usenet sites." Boursy, being a credible fool who was convinced that it was his divine destiny to save the "Information Superhighway" from the Evil Cabal, but who had no actual knowledge of (and indeed a marked aversion to learning about) the technical underpinnings of Usenet, fell for it spectacularly, and attempted to have Furr investigated by the FBI. (Presumably there is, somewhere in Boston or Cambridge, an FBI agent who still shudders upon hearing the name of "Stephen Boursy." Might be interesting to track him/her down one day.) Once it became obvious to Boursy that his posts were, in fact, propagating every bit as well as usual, he decided that he had won a decisive victory over the Cabal. After a few hundred people explained slowly and patiently to him that the "Usenet Global Killfile" was a patently fraudulant concept, Boursy changed his tune a bit and decided that Joel was actually guilty of intimidation (which in a certain sense is true, but only if you discount the fact that it was Boursy's carefully maintained ignorance and egotism that made it possible). Since then, the Usenet Global Killfile has taken on a small life of its own, much like the GOOD TIMES virus. Since there is a never-ending supply of people who *know* in their heart of hearts that there is no such thing as a decentralized system, and that there *must* be a shadowy Cabal secretly controlling Usnet, there is a never-ending supply of people who are only too happy to believe that a 'Usenet Global Killfile' exists, and that it is directed at them. Sometimes the word of it is spread from one fool to another, and sometimes a new fool is freshly trolled with it. Such was the case with John Grubor (aka DrMacho, aka DrG, aka Manus aka a dipshit disbarred lawyer from Pittsburgh working out his midlife crisis in front of several thousand witnesses), who has been the subject of much recent verbiage on news.admin.censorship and alt.usenet.kooks. I won't spoil it for you by detailing it here (it's just too much fun - go to the newsgroups and see for yourself), but suffice it to say that Grubor is Boursy's hyperactive cousin, and a more perfect subject for the UGK troll could not have been dreamed of by myself. The heart of the matter here is: there is _no_ _such_ _thing_ as a "Usenet Global Killfile." Really, this should be close to intuitively obvious for anyone with a passing familiarity with the INN software. One person could, of course, set up a script that automatically cancels every post that a given set of people make, but to make it 'Global' in scope, that set would have to be shared (and reliably updated on a minute-to-minute basis) between hundreds of sites, and INN simply has no facility built into it for maintaining such a list (nevermind keeping it in sync with a thousand other servers). But people will likely always continue to believe in it, because everybody wants to be a hero, and there's no better enemy for a hero to face than a secret, unknown, faceless mass that is at once all- powerful and entirely powerless. [Unless, of course, there *is* a shadowy Cabal, and they've developed a set of patches to do just that, and they distribute the list via pgp-encoded articles in Control, and have managed to discreetly roll the patches into several releases of INN so that many admins don't even know they're running the Killfile...woo, scary. It could happen, you know. And you would never even know it. Muah hah hah hah hah...] All hail the Cabal. There is no Cabal. *OM* -- "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." If you think I speak for my employer, they'll be happy to correct you. Nathan J. Mehl -- BBN Planet System Operations -- nathan@bbnplanet.com homepagesque