None Gary Burnore, Paul Pomes, and the DataBasix Gang (was: Re: Remailer hating Nazis)
nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) wrote:
I'm familiar with the role of Gary Burnore <gburnore@netcom.com> and that of his DataBasix associates Belinda Bryan <eridani@ix.netcom.com> and Billy McClatchie (aka "Wotan") <wmcclatc@primenet.com> in getting the Mailmasher and Huge Cajones remailers shut down. Jeff Burchell posted a public expose' of their harassment to Usenet back in June, apparently catching the DataBasix folks off-guard. But what's the story with Paul Pomes? What has he done?
Paul Pomes was complaining about Jeff Burchell's huge cajones remailer to Jeff Burchell's upstream and employers about the same time the rest of the Databasix gang was doing it. Paul Pomes appears to be a part of the Databasix gang.
It's sort of ironic that these anti-privacy, anti-anonymity Nazi wannabes complain about remailers which give their users privacy, then somehow expect that their own complaints will be kept hidden. I rather syspect that Gary Burnore, Belinda Bryan, and Paul Pomes were rather shocked when Jeff Burchell decided to tell the whole story (unfortunately AFTER shutting down the Huge Cajones remailer). Maybe the next time Gary, Linda, or Paul send a remailer operator a complaint, the operator will know what to expect next. I'm wondering if that's at least part of what's behind the faux spam-baiting that's underway, with messages to varios MMF, MLM, and alt.sex.* NGs whose title and body consist of randomly- chosen words, followed by a list of bogus e-mail addresses in the body. The thing that's not so random is the high percentage of words that are related to DataBasix, such as "DataBasix", "Burnore", and "Wotan". I'm almost waiting for Gary Burnore to give the remailer and mail2news operators a "helpful" suggestion that they could curb most of this "abuse" by simply blocking any anonymous posts containing any of those three keywords. <g> Or perhaps he's done so and politely been turned down. Perhaps the next wave of attacks on remailers will not consist of attempts to shut them down altogether but to progressively cripple them by getting certain features disabled, one by one. This seems to have already started. The strategy seems to be to fabricate a form of "abuse", anonymously through remailers, for which the seemingly "logical" solution is to disable a certain feature. This has already proven successful with header pasting, for example. Now you can't post to Usenet and set the From: address to that of your own 'nym. I'm not even certain that you can set a Reply-To: address any more. If the "camel" can get his nose under the tent and convince operators to start filtering on the *CONTENT* of the Subject: line or body of usenet posts, the anti-privacy nuts will have scored a major victory. In fact, from reading Jeff Burchell's posts, it looks like Gary and his DataBasux-ers had initially convinced Jeff to do exactly that. But, in a symbolic victory for freedom of speech, he removed those filters for a week before he finally shut down Huge Cajones altogether.
Perhaps the best thing that can be done with people like Burnore is to put together an FAQ about their tactics, similar to what his "fans" have done for the "Rev." Steve Winter. Then when Burnore tries to stir up trouble by first fabricating anonymous "abuse" and then demanding that it either be stopped and the culprit(s) identified (knowing in advance that's impossible), or else that the remailer be shut down, someone can forward that FAQ to the remailer's upstream provider, or whoever is being pressured to pull the plug. And if Paul Pomes engages in the same dishonest tactics, that needs to be done with him as well.
Gary Burnore had a mongo page at http://www.netscum.net/burnorg0.html. So did Paul Pomes, Belinda Bryan, and the rest of the Databasix gang. Too bad it's down for now, but it'll be back.
It's already back, for the time being. The new URL is: http://www.spambusters.dyn.ml.org/www.netscum.net/burnorg0.htm I'll go look for Paul Pomes' page at that site. Thanks for the tip! Let's see how long that site stays in operation before the self-styled "Thought Police" attempt to shut it down. -- Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. -- General William Westmoreland
Note that these comments apply primarily to the cracker remailer. On Tue, 11 Nov 1997, Anonymous wrote:
Maybe the next time Gary, Linda, or Paul send a remailer operator a complaint, the operator will know what to expect next.
I did get one complaint from Gary Burnore about stuff being sent directly to him. He wasn't a jerk about it, and I haven't heard a peep out of him since.
thing that's not so random is the high percentage of words that are related to DataBasix, such as "DataBasix", "Burnore", and "Wotan". I'm almost waiting for Gary Burnore to give the remailer and mail2news operators a "helpful" suggestion that they could curb most of this "abuse" by simply blocking any anonymous posts containing any of those three keywords. <g> Or perhaps he's done so and politely been turned down.
He's never asked us, at least. Although, when spam-baiting started hot and heavy this summer, another Databasix employee did suggest that his address should not appear in posts. I made it quite clear we don't check for specific names, words, or addresses, and that he was a legitimate topic of discussion. Never heard back after that, and this was several months ago.
Perhaps the next wave of attacks on remailers will not consist of attempts to shut them down altogether but to progressively cripple them by getting certain features disabled, one by one. This seems to have already started. The strategy seems to be to fabricate a form of "abuse", anonymously through remailers, for which the seemingly "logical" solution is to disable a certain feature. This has already proven successful with header pasting, for example. Now you can't post to Usenet and set the From: address to that of your own 'nym.
If you really want the post to have the From: address of your nym, send the post with your nym and not with the remailer as the last hop. The point of anonymous remailers is to be anonymous. If you want to use a psuedonym, use a nymserver.
I'm not even certain that you can set a Reply-To: address any more.
You can at cracker. However, you can't post in From:, Sender:, Received:, and a couple other "identifying" headers.
If the "camel" can get his nose under the tent and convince operators to start filtering on the *CONTENT* of the Subject: line or body of usenet posts, the anti-privacy nuts will have scored a major victory. In fact, from reading Jeff Burchell's posts, it looks like Gary and his DataBasux-ers had initially convinced Jeff to do exactly that. But, in a symbolic victory for freedom of speech, he removed those filters for a week before he finally shut down Huge Cajones altogether.
Cracker does have a spam-bait mangler which is somewhat simpler than the scheme Jeff used. In a nutshell, if there are an inordinately large number of addresses (compared to other text), the addresses are mangled, i.e., president@whitehouse.gov becomes president <AT> whitehouse <DOT> gov. Still human-readable but useless for address harvesters. No posts get dropped or filtered out under this scheme, and no keywords or particular addresses are looked for. Andy Dustman / Computational Center for Molecular Structure and Design For a great anti-spam procmail recipe, send me mail with subject "spam". Append "+spamsucks" to my username to ensure delivery. KeyID=0xC72F3F1D Encryption is too important to leave to the government. -- Bruce Schneier http://www.athens.net/~dustman mailto:andy@neptune.chem.uga.edu <}+++<
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