Michael C Taylor wrote:

On Thu, 17 Jul 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:

...

They hate Toto's ISP:

So does Toto.

Funny thing is that Sympatico.ca is NOT some fly-by-night ISP, but one of the larger ISPs and has the deepest pockets. Each province buys the basic 'francise' from MediaLink (??) in Upper Canada, and resells it and packages it how they want.

The problem is with spam is not they do more of it, they are most likely underqualified to fix the problem of non-Sympatico users using the various Sympatico SMTP servers as a relay.

Sympatico is a hacker's dream. Not only are you able to access their systems all across Canada once you get an inside track into one of them but most of the provincial admins seem to have little idea of what the concept of security entails. As long as you remain low-key you can set up your own little cyberkingdom across the country. {If you hack Toto's website you will find a file in the home directory which explains how to hack Sympatico's mail system. In return Toto asks that you use unlimited accounts instead of those like his, which cost the user on a time-of-use basis.} Passive-aggressive hacker fans of "The True Story of the InterNet" sometimes use Toto's account in ways that are meant to cause trouble for him but he has not received even a whisper from Sympatico admin despite loud and voriciferous protests from the victims of the hackers' shenanigans. There was an annual MC hacker's contest going on for the last month on the Sympatico system and none of the Webmasters seemed to notice even though all the provincial systems were compromised from top to bottom. When the Evil-1 set up shop on the Sympatico system he had to go through it and _improve_ the security in order to keep the neophyte hackers out of his hair. The Saskatchewan Sympatico system is the easiest to use for general purpose mischief. The British Columbia system is best for hiding large volumes of use and CPU time. The Ontario system is the most fun to lurk in because all of the Sympatico employees are perverts of one kind or another and their private email puts the sex sites to shame. {It's best not to mess with the government accounts until you've figured out where the Mountie and CIS spooks are lurking but their monitoring methods are real blatant and easy to route around by using blind telnet, deleted mail mirroring, etc.} Sympatico's motto is "Internet Service For Everyone." I doubt that they realize how true it is. Toto #6UALDV8