Subject: Re: Usenet Global Killfile

From: [email-masked] (Nathan J. Mehl)
Date: 31 Oct 1995 18:56:04 -0500

[Posted in mail and news - please follow up in news.]

In article <[email-masked]>,
	[email-masked] (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 -- [email-masked]
<A HREF="http://web.near.net/~nmehl">homepagesque</A>