Tim Skirvin <tskirvin@math.uiuc.edu> writes:

Ryan Anderson <randerso@ece.eng.wayne.edu> writes:

...

"Make Money Fast" are killed because they're illegal scams in the US and I think in most of the world.

Make.Money.Fast is killed because it's spam a few thousand times over. The legality of it doesn't come into question.

Look in your "control" newsgroup, and you'll see that most of the cancels forged for the MMFs state in the body that they're being cancelled because they're "illegal". To save bandwidth, here's one counterexample to Tim's claim: ]Path: ...!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.msfc.nasa.gov!cyberspam!not-for-mail ]From: news@news.msfc.nasa.gov ]Newsgroups: sci.physics ]Subject: cmsg cancel <32684BAE.68B3@computer.mic> no reply ignore ]Message-ID: <cancel.32684BAE.68B3@computer.mic> ]Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 15:07:31 GMT ]Control: cancel <32684BAE.68B3@computer.mic> ]Sender: listentome <determin@computer.mic> ]Reply-To: bitbucket@news.msfc.nasa.gov ]Organization: Semi-Automatic Chain Letter Remover ]Lines: 3 ]Approved: news@news.msfc.nasa.gov ]X-No-Archive: Yes ]X-Canceled-by: news@news.msfc.nasa.gov ] ]ignore ] ]Illegal MMF canceled by news@news.msfc.nasa.gov You will notice that the anonymous cancel came from a .gov site. :-) --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

David, Check out netlynews.com and search for Assassination. That'll get you my story on Bell from early April. -Declan On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, David Yaffe wrote:

Hi, I'm fairly new to the list and to crypto/political issues..

question one: What did Jim Bell do that go him into trouble? question two: If all non-key-escrow crypto systems become banned, won't that make e-commerce illegal? Thanks David "You can take my PGP when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers"

Ryan Anderson <randerso@ece.eng.wayne.edu> writes:

At 02:03 AM 7/31/97 +0100, Adam Back wrote:

...

It's censorship. If you didn't write it, you have no business cancelling it.

Have you considered the actions of the news-admins that are auto-canceling anything with more than a certain number of cross-posts, or posts with "Make Money Fast" in the subject? ...

I posted an MMF parody (PGP as MLM) to the cypherpunks mailing list last January and was threatened by more than one person too stupid to recognize a parody. The Net.Scum who forge cancels for Usenet articles that are cross-posted into "too many" newsgroups a) are not usually sysadmins - just control freak users, who often get spanked from their ISPs for forging cancels, harrassing posters, and other net-abuse, 2) have no clue how Usenet works - they claim that cross-posting wastes bandwidth, 3) suppress not only MMF but any content they don't like (like Guy Macon, the retromoderator of the formerly unmoderated soc.religion.quaker, has been forging cancels for the leprosy thread which he thinks is "off-topic") The solution is to disable all cancels now.

"Make Money Fast" are killed because they're illegal scams in the US and I think in most of the world.

Who are you to decide that a particular content is illegal, or that a Usenet article soliciting an activity that's illegal in some jurisdictions should be suppressed? Unlike you, I am a news admin. Many years ago I used to forge cancels for MMF articles on Usenet. Then I realized that I was very wrong to do that. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

Tim Skirvin <tskirvin@math.uiuc.edu> writes:

Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes:

...

Newsadmins who auto-cancel cross-posts are acting counter-productively and censorously.

Once again, the net.Scum who forges cancels are generally NOT news admins. Please examine Net.Scum web pages for the self-appointed censors like Tim Brown (http://www.netscum.net/brownt0.html) or Bob Curtis (../curtisb0.html) when the site is up again. Indeed, Bob Curtis's example is very telling - he tried to "take over" an unmoderated newsgroup, claiming to represent some "Usenet administration", and forging cancels for articles that exposed his lies.

I'm not aware of anybody that does that. The only crossposts that are killed are those that reach a BI of 20, and for a single post to do that would require the message to be crossposted to 400 newsgroups. Which doesn't happen.

Here's one counterexample. Yes, it's in the regional relcom.* hierarchy. Yes, there are lots of folks who forge cancels for "inappropriate cross-posts" in the "big 8". I won't bother looking for them because Tim Skirvin knows about it and is simply lying. ]Path: ...!www.nntp.primenet.com!globalcenter1!news.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!europa.clark.net!newsfeed.sovam.com!sovam!Gamma.RU!srcc!news1.relcom.ru!news1.relcom.ru!dmart ]From: dmart@news1.relcom.ru (Dmitri Martynoff) ]Newsgroups: relcom.commerce.computers,relcom.commerce.communications,relcom.demos.commerce,relcom.netnews,relcom.tcpip,relcom.www.users,relcom.www.support,relcom.hot-news,relcom.commerce.talk ]Subject: cmsg cancel <33c3c4a0.2317359@news2.worldweb.net> ]Control: cancel <33c3c4a0.2317359@news2.worldweb.net> ]Date: 9 Jul 1997 01:11:51 GMT ]Organization: Relcom/Eunet InterNetNews site ]Lines: 3 ]Sender: vad@worldweb.net (Vadim Daskovsky) ]Approved: dmart@relcom.ru ]Message-ID: <5puogn$9f0$1@news1.relcom.ru> ]NNTP-Posting-Host: news1.relcom.ru ] ]Excessive crossposting a.k.a. SPAM canceled. See Usenet newsgroup ]news.admin.net-abuse.misc for details. ]Coordinator of relcom.* newsgroups Dmitri Martynoff <dmart@relcom.ru>. And now some friends of Tim are forging cancels for any traffic originating from UUNet, irrespective of contents, and Tim Skirvin approves of it. Tell your news admin to stop processing cancels immediately.

It might interest you to know that a cancel will kill all the crossposts in a single message, BTW. Your "cancelling 99 of the 100 articles thing" does save lots of reader time.

(If you're going to talk about cancels authoritatively, please read my Cancel FAQ - it's got huge piles of information on this stuff.)

Please be advised that all of Tim Skirvin's FAQs are full of lies (except for the parts plagiarized from David Stodolsky :-). --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

Ryan Anderson <randerso@ece.eng.wayne.edu> writes:

At 02:03 AM 7/31/97 +0100, Adam Back wrote:

...

It's censorship. If you didn't write it, you have no business cancelling it.

Have you considered the actions of the news-admins that are auto-canceling anything with more than a certain number of cross-posts, or posts with "Make Money Fast" in the subject?

Here's the problem: once you start censoring anything, you've started on the slippery slope. Everyone has their pet things which annoy them. Newsadmins who auto-cancel cross-posts are acting counter-productively and censorously. Cross-posts result in only one copy in the news-spool. Most newsreaders will only display the article once to each reader -- it doesn't save the readers time to cancel 99 of the 100 articles leaving 1 in a random group. Probably these admins are cancelling all 100 on the assumption that anything cross posted that widely is garbage anyway. That is a value judgement and something I'd prefer not done to a newsfeed I read. Dumb spammers who individually post to each of 100 groups are the ones who really consume bandwidth. What they should be doing is compressing their news spools and down-stream feeds by converting the same article individually posted to many groups to articles cross-posted to the same set of groups. If they take issue with the number of posts an individual is making total (eg a bot perhaps auto posting in response to articles containing certain keywords), they should be thinking of working towards a (low) postage requirement for each post. Hashcash might be an interesting interim payment method. That'll slow down the bots and people who repost large posts too frequently. Other than that I think getting involved in cancelling posts is getting dubious. A better way to do register your negative opinion of some posts is to issue NoCems.

"Make Money Fast" are killed because they're illegal scams in the US and I think in most of the world.

Foo on illegal. Cryptography is illegal in some parts of the world. Showing pictures of females revealing leg above the ankle, or showing their faces is illegal in other parts. If suckers want to fall for the pyramid scams let them. Why should we have dumb laws protecting dumb people. There are scant enough evolutionary pressures as it is. Think of dumb pyramid scams, and lotteries with sub 50% pay-outs as evolution in action. There is no place for dumb laws on USENET. This is the Internet man, we don't need politicians or governments messing with it's content thanks kindly. Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Adam Back wrote:

Some people have been arguing that cancelling other peoples posts based on their own subjective views is a good thing.

Nno one is arugeing that. Both sides in this debait aggry that that is a REAL BAD thing. Spam cancelers use an objective rules. The world would be a better place if this didn't happen and everybody was on NoCeM. But yet this is not true. [...]

It's censorship. If you didn't write it, you have no business cancelling it.

Not even forgeries in my name? Not even out of the control spews from fidonet?

NoCems are a good solution to mailing list and USENET groups spams.

NoCeMs don't work on email.

For email spams (not talking about cancels here), I'd suggest attaching electronic payment to emails as a condition of delivery.

And thus killing mailing lists like freedom knights and cyperpunks? Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep. ex-net.scum and proud You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For Themselves? --Terry Pratchett -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM9+0k6QK0ynCmdStAQFWYwQA0NmbRaL14Fp0XHik+pgJ7sAxx5MQJd+m tjO023S8SUncdaUdB5VtrXK0quZvrS9GU087s6xAXNMGbv2UAxVPY5raBhJ1V1yf C0KBkPgxHcKHBEs53oMRtHJTkMMx3XhCL24fUPI8j1Coy/rvraFqNF6S1WppZSwa UawusK+H1ZY= =mDBU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:

? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:

...

Nno one is arugeing that. Both sides in this debait aggry that that is a REAL BAD thing. Spam cancelers use an objective rules.

[...]

Let me clarify two things:

1. "Spam cancellers" are not generally news admins.

I think you will have to justerfy this, the top spam cancellers are all news adimns.

2. Once a cancel-forger builds a "reputation" as a "spam canceller", s/he often diversifies into "retromodetration"

There is little proof that this is the case. Even the netscum case could have been considered spam. [...]

...

Not even forgeries in my name? Not even out of the control spews from fidonet?

Correct.

Ok so if a mailing list gateway @bwalk.dm.com pumps thousands of broken posts into usenet you don't wish them to be removed from usenet? Nor if I post a message with your name and email, saying "Chris Lewis the best thing that happened to usenet and I wish to have his baby." If this is so sould I change the RB to reflect this. Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep. ex-net.scum and proud You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For Themselves? --Terry Pratchett -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM+GTWKQK0ynCmdStAQERNQP+OlKyKfBQl0YOb3hBRipLXHfvnLSdhnWY HF91PySz5wikYaF046efV+SeIN7+cMPj8+LPdYMvft8Wy/gQMU6Sjp8hVFz4l5kN 4ygAihiDmHXWsDbvpksiSuJBodvvE/EnSqrulpEYfJ2KNb33dCDfuoo8ARk5DZhD +5l3c9SPDek= =50wo -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Paul Bradley wrote: [...]

...

Ok so if a mailing list gateway @bwalk.dm.com pumps thousands of broken posts into usenet you don't wish them to be removed from usenet?

That would be for Dimitri to decide for himself, and not for some cocksucker to take a unilateral decision on.

I have made no such unilateral decision, I have simply asked a question of the good Doctor.

Of course disabling cancels on all news-servers would mean such a freak article couldn`t be cancelled, even by it`s author,

Wouldn't authentercated cancel models be better so an artical could be cancelled by its author and no other. - -- Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep. ex-net.scum and proud You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For Themselves? --Terry Pratchett -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM+SpXaQK0ynCmdStAQGiGwP+Pe67+xKUZetX1ORoW1V5M5macasopNtu FiPeEB7e+crbb+Gut+jfjAHEPh2wHUsviRkApt1wbnjohtT0hYgXWY34lX64VjBz OB1q9Nm0y0ATclw9fsv3bgDH5wRVFtogJe6Lmb0e1kI4rp4hNUGTf/AFclUcK+nP UVIIa67yRCM= =1197 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

"Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM" <dlv@bwalk.dm.com> writes:

1. "Spam cancellers" are not generally news admins. They are plain old users who get kicked off of their ISPs for forging cancels. For examples, see Net.Scum pages of Rick Buchanan, David Ritz, et al.

Many spam cancellers are news admins. Most of the major ones are admins, in fact - Chris Lewis, JEM, etc.

2. Once a cancel-forger builds a "reputation" as a "spam canceller", s/he often diversifies into "retromodetration" - forgng cancels for singly-postd articles whose contents they don't like and claiming that they were "spam". For examples, see the Net.Scum pages for Guy Macon (the retromoderator on soc.religion.quaker), Chris Lewis, et al.

This rarely happens, actually, and such situations are quickly slapped down as soon as they're spotted. The two examples Dimitri gives, of course, are major misrepresentations. - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin@uiuc.edu) -- Skirv's Homepage<*> The Killfile Dungeon

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:

Tim Skirvin <tskirvin@math.uiuc.edu> writes:

[...]

...

Many spam cancellers are news admins. Most of the major ones are admins, in fact - Chris Lewis, JEM, etc.

You're splitting hairs. One very unpleasant cancel-forger, Jan Isley, was the admin of a site where he was also the sole user.

[...]

Well, the third parties got complaints anyway and pulled jan's plug in no time. :-)

It is clear from this example that he was not a mainstream spam canceler.

For the archetypal "spam canceller", please examine Tim Brown's

Tim Brown is not a spam canceller. - -- Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep. ex-net.scum and proud You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For Themselves? --Terry Pratchett -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM+Pn8aQK0ynCmdStAQFRKwP8D/F+uHpqIJ6up9SD1UAJ3ZL3Zlp4JzPj eKmJec09D6Z1TuDCjtgwhH5fBswmG1JBImdJ3SUmiRqbGI7pWJJFsM+wWhq7qb2f NFmW9LjAAjID/OkCmPK+IjDYPL86LUdvxt/wGKJxaJYqXHCiItDyCC37NsQGzIS9 wHj/0rKsfF4= =p0nZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Bill Stewart wrote: [...MMF...]

though I'm sure that to some extent it's because people started complaining to the Post Office that they were receiving junk mail,

The MMF ban came about when its volume rose to a point where it crashed californaia's snail mail system. Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep. ex-net.scum and proud You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For Themselves? --Terry Pratchett -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM+FkeKQK0ynCmdStAQHCzwQAmr60ZmnFX0e+bsd/TIyeEFfBdVwJoIwC TMaiup70Qq0Lj5gFsCV6TsX8OlA6oIjxSzUQSrYqOM9agXf2vw8uG4KTeBft8Lsf 16Yfs40C3Py96KWaYoKLzhDRpxvq//6QUxkLUwra306ol1EcCnhF/YEu4JTrhXm4 +9lXf8TMLlY= =Tl5N -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com> writes:

At 10:36 PM 7/30/97 -0400, Ryan Anderson wrote:

...

"Make Money Fast" are killed because they're illegal scams in the US and I think in most of the world.

This doesn't give the various net.scum any right to forge cancels for them. (I used to forge cancels for MMFs years ago - I was very wrong.) But this is not the only kind of content censorship going on under the guise of 'spam cancels". Check out the Net.Scum Web site. One guy decided to cancel an entire thread discussing the requirements for setting up a MUD server claiming it was "spam". Another forged a cancel for a national Science Foundation announcement in sci.fractals figuring it was off-topic, therefore "spam". It takes a special kind of asshole to take up "spam-cancelling" and most of them don't stop at cancelling just the "multi-posted" articles - they quickly diversify into foring purely content-based cancels.

They're illegal in the US primarily because the Post Office is confused about whether its job is to deliver the mail or to censor it, and delivery of MMFs by mail is policed by Postal Inspectors just as delivery of obscenity by mail is. It's a side effect of having services provided by a government monopoly rather than the free market, though I'm sure that to some extent it's because people started complaining to the Post Office that they were receiving junk mail, and complaining to their legislators that they lost money on these scams.

On the Internet, on the other hand, not only is the stuff spam and a scam, but it's abusing flat-rate prices for service, and service providers don't like it. Julf's remailer used to block MMFs.

MMFs are one example of a "memetic" article which encourages the readers to reproduce it and post it elsewhere. Does anyone remember the Craig Shergold meme? When I worked at GS, I came across a paper copy of it - a bunch of p.r. and salespople were faxing it to one another and asking for business cards to be sent to it. The idiot sysadmins at a school I taight at put the craig Shergold appeal in the message-od-the-day on the school computer.

Pyramid scams like the MMF, and the government's inability to deal with it, brought down the Albanian government recently. Here in the US that would _never_ happen (:-), assuming of course you don't consider Social Security to be a Ponzi scheme....

This reminds me of the old farts who lost lots of money in the mini-crash in Oct 87. Basically, they sold insurance to other investors against the maret suddenly going down a lot (which is a low-probability event, but can happpen and I think will happen again any day now :-) They were collecting their equivalent of insurance premiums. When the market did hucckup and they had to pay what they promised they would, they started screaming that they weren't warned adequately that their income wasn't "risk-free" and they might actually have to perform their part of the contract they entered! Why should the gubmint protect people from pyramid schemes and other such scams? ("make money at home stuffing envelopes" seems to be a related scam that's very popular and not "illegal".) Any time a sucker tries to beat the market,a xtto get more than the normal return without incurring extra risk, he deserves to be fucked. Gubmint's attempts to "protect" the sucker limit the freedom not of the crooks who'd fleece him (they'll find a way), but the regular people who are neither crooks not suckers. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps