-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Another point re Cantor and Siegel is that there is now a service calling itself CancelMoose which goes through Julf's anon server in Finland (anon.penet.fi) to cancel spams. (Spams are off-topic, nearly-identical posts to large numbers of groups.) This is what Siegel is really upset about. She and her husband are publishing a book telling businesses how they can use spam posts on usenet as free advertising. But now CancelMoose is a relatively accepted counter to these increasingly-frequent spams (pyramid schemes, etc.). This makes their book obsolete and really hits them where it hurts. But they can't sue CancelMoose because its identity is hidden. Personally, I don't like the idea of cancelling other people's posts, spam or not. I would rather see news readers enhanced to detect copies of posts I have already seen and delete them. The awful thing about Cantor and Siegel's Green Card spam was that they didn't cross-post, they used a bot to individually post to all groups. I was shown their message headers for days. Ordinary off-topic posts don't bother me much because I can ignore them easily. With a better newsreader the Green Card spam would have been equally trivial to ignore. The scary thing about cancels is that some proposals have actually been directed at anonymous posts themselves. Someone anonymously posted what purported to be a grisly transcript of the last seconds of the doomed Challenger crew as they fell to the ocean. This caused a great hue and cry and some calls for banning anonymous posts and/or retroactively cancelling them. This led to some very amusing events which Detweiler has chronicled in his FAQ on anonymity, the net result of which was that the idea was discredited. But the emergence of CancelMoose is not an altogether positive event in my view. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQBVAwUBLwnTGRnMLJtOy9MBAQGjFAH/WEzWgAEG4mX9c6yR1iyR2nWq3V1AvUBL lC1rTlUWUf8YWZDmVAuOkg8AH8nPo3L1e67l66wMrgGedaCD39/3Aw== =psrV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----