stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP FORGED MESSAGE-----
On Sun, 30 Nov 1997, Lance Cottrell wrote:
[Spam baiting, forged mailing list subscriptions]
The hard problem is
Forged postings with deplorable content will bring down retribution on the forgery victim.
I shut down my remailer a few years ago because of this one; the forger posted hate mail to the gay newsgroups with the victim's name at the bottom (didn't even use From: pasting, just message body.) Supporting From: pasting just encourages this.
So what's the problem? Has everyone forgotten how to use their delete key? Does nobody have anything better to do with their time and resources than to waste them being offended by people who are trying to offend them? It never fails to amaze me that complainers point out that an 'abusive' letter started out, "I hate niggersfaggotsjewsyou!" and then proceed to list the other fifty 'abusive' things that the writer had to say. Do these people correct the spelling as they are reading the 'abusive' messages?
Besides Usenet, other popular tactics for retribution are sending death threats to politicians, sending child pornography to mailing lists, forging messages _from_ politicians, etc. Disclaimer/warning headers help, but can't stop it all.
Laissez-faire... I have never been very enamored of becoming a babysitter to the whole fucking world in the enterprises I enter into. I set up an anonymous remailer system for a mental health group and the first time they claimed that someone was 'abusing' it, I told them, "You're all fucking crazy! What the fuck do you expect? That's why you have the list in the first place." I can't believe the lame fucks who complain about politically incorrect anarchists on the CypherPunks list, or who suggest that list members who may or may not hate niggersfaggotsjewsyou somehow reflect well or badly on the CypherPunk Nation/Flag/Cause. Got a problem with my politics? I wear a grey blazer. You can a different colored blazer, so my posts don't reflect badly on you. Identity/source forgery is not usually a major problem in itself, but becomes one because of the people who buy into the game being played because they can't fuck up their boss without getting fired, so they're waiting for someone to 'give them a reason...' I followed an anti-spam list full of dweebs who had no idea how to tell a good header from a badly forged header, and they would spam god-and-everybody, en mass, like a blind lynch mob. It was hilarious to watch. I can make my own Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com> signature and inundate the InterNet with "I like to kill babies after I molest them (signed) posts." Although it would undoubtedly be a pain in the ass for you, it would also result in the education of a lot of complainers as to the principles of identity and digital signitures, albeit at the expense of your time and resources. I can also do the same with the perceived net identities of other people, including politicians and random strangers. And so can anyone else. So what? It's part of life. We can route around the damage, or we can make it a felony punishible by death, or we can give up our job, family and hobbies in order to spend the rest of our life crusading against the 'wrong' that has been done to us. There seem to be an increasing number of people who are crying out for elephant-gun solutions to fly-swatter problems. During the censorship experiment, my nephew and his friends were reading some of the grand schemes proposed for dealing with the spam/flames/etc on the list. (Everyone must wear an aluminum foil hat and generate hash-cash e-postage to be sent to a Mars base station for conversion to an exchange medium based on their hair color and weight...) He looked at me, mystified, and said, "Don't these guys have <Delete> keys?" There are always going to be people who read the disclaimers and warnings on anonymously sent email and still harass our good pal, <president@whitehouse.gov> because 'he' sent them a message saying, "I dare you to spam me, asshole!" One of the little known secrets of the universe is that a great many problems can be 'solved' by simply ignoring them, or by using common sense. "Doctor, it hurts when I do _this_." "Don't _do_ that." GrayMonger