At 1:32 AM +0000 12/31/97, wayne clerke wrote:

On Tuesday, December 30, 1997 7:56 AM, Mark Hedges [SMTP:hedges@rigel.cyberpass.net] wrote:

...

We found IRC users to be so involved in petty information wars -- ping floods, malicious prank hacking, and the like -- that we directed policy against use of IRC from the anonymous shell accounts at CyberPass.

If IRC users weren't so easily lulled by the tempation to crash a server or run malicious bots or just plain irritate other people for fun, and if they would gang up and kick out people who did that, then perhaps we'd switch that back on.

They were just too much overhead. Everyone else seems pretty nice, really, as far as the system goes. They're all self-interested in keeping the anonymous publishing and so on going, so the peace keeps itself.

What's the reason behind the policy direction against the use of personal web proxies running in a (paid for) shell account? Seems like less risk than you already accept anyway. Something I've missed?

System load is the issue in this case. If a proxy becomes publicly known the load it imposes on the system could quickly become gigantic. In addition we found that people were setting up proxies on any old port, sometimes causing all kinds of conflicts. Our accounts are priced assuming light personal usage. Running servers on our systems is negotiable. -Lance ---------------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell loki@infonex.com PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server. http://www.infonex.com/~loki/ "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche ----------------------------------------------------------