At 12:00 PM 5/18/96 EDT, dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis) wrote:
2. there is no good way to deal with spams or other so-called "abuse" Nor should there be. What's one person's abuse is another person's free speech. Internet traffic should not be censored based on contents.
I disagree - when I was running a remailer, I found several varieties of abuse, and some of them were worth blocking. Usenet, in particular, is divided into newsgroups so material can be directed to the groups where the readers want to find it, which is filtering, not censorship. * The most common was spammers sending lots of mail to a specific person who didn't want it; that's easy to block, and keeping up with that was a major part of traffic on the remailer-operators news groups. * Another was spammers who were sending out large volumes of spam; my remailer would shut down if it got too much volume (operator-settable), but usually I blocked senders like this based on remailer-operators notices from other remailers that were being spammed through. * Another was inappropriate news postings; most of the complaints I got were from phone sex ads in the pictures newsgroups, where they're unwanted (as opposed to misc.forsale or other group where they're in scope). They're a minor annoyance, and I didn't censor them; there'd probably be less of them from 2-way remailers, since people who objected could spam back. In general, these were posted to many newsgroups, and reducing the number of newsgroups that a message could be crossposted to would probably have helped, though it might have just resulted in multiple postings. * The nastiest spam, which I wasn't able to block, was to sign someone else's name on flamebait hate postings. Blocking by content (e.g. blocking postings with the address of someone who had complained) would cut down on repeat postings, but it only takes one or two postings to get thousands of flames sent to the victim. The damage could be reduced by putting disclaimer notices at the beginning and end of the text, reminding the reader that it may be a forgery, etc.; simple mail headers don't seem to get the attention of enough readers, even those whose newsreader software doesn't discard them. Similar spams can be done to mailing lists... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 # goodtimes signature virus innoculation