Subject: Re: Scientology's illegal cancellations, War With The Cult

From: [email-masked] (Evan Leibovitch)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 02:32:48 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
	henry <[email-masked]> wrote:

>In article <[email-masked]>, Evan Leibovitch <[email-masked]> 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 / [email-masked] / (905) 452-0504
       Those to my right are extremists; those to my left are heretics

---

From: [email-masked] (Evan Leibovitch)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 1995 05:23:55 GMT

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<animal> 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 <[email-masked]>,  <[email-masked]> 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 <cancel> 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 :-).