Cpunks List: Remove The Spammer From The List
Greg, it is time for you to remove this spammer from the list. The Internet has, since its inception, mutually and universally, for good reasons, and with full conviction, wisely decided that such spammers shall be banned. This spammer has spammed over 70,000+ spams upon the list and its subscribers. All of them filled with nonsense gibberish, generated noise, and personal psychobabble crap, none of it having any relation or point to topic. This spammer has posted and admitted multiple times that they are doing it with full knowledge and intent to destroy the list and harm its subscribers. This spammer has been told to stop by everyone many times, and they have still refused to stop abusing the list with spam. This spammer has also refused the listop's directive to stop abusing the list with spam. This spammer has caused valuable contributors who are otherwise unable to filter out the abusers spam to leave the list. This includes a number of original members. This spammer is abusing members network and storage space. This spammer is causing damage to the list. This spammer is causing mail delivery problems. This spammer has destroyed usability of the web archives. This spammer is using tens of sockpuppet accounts to spam the list. This spammer has been banned for abusing other forums as well. The Internet has decreed that it is not the job of subscribers to deal with these egregiously abusive spammers. The Internet has provided three options for list operators... 1) You must kick this spammer's accounts off the list. 2) You must set the moderation flag on this spammer's accounts and deal with and filter them out yourself. 3) You must move this spammer's accounts off to a separate new list that you create for them alone. Take your pick and make it happen. The list thanks you.
These spammers are continuing to spam the list. These accounts are both doing nothing but robotic spamming, flooding users mailboxes, blowing out the archives, spamming identical copies many tens of times, spewing gibberish, making no point or commentary, running bots, spamming other non subscribers into the list, etc. THOUSANDS of SPAM, MONTH after MONTH they SPAM... And they have admitted willful intent to destroy the list. One spampsychobot itself "Gunnar". Another spampsychobot calls itself "Karl". All have condemned their spam. As before, the internet has long since decided that such spammers have no right to inflict such abuse on lists. And rate limiting spammers does not solve the problem. So, this time, do your job Greg... The Internet has provided three options for list operators... 1) You must kick these spammers accounts off the list. 2) You must set the moderation flag on these spammers accounts and deal with and filter them out yourself. 3) You must move these spammers accounts off to a separate new list that you create for them alone. So take your pick of the above options and do your job Greg.
Hi grarpamp. I appreciate your passion for the cypherpunks list, and your contributions so it. For your request below: In short, it is my belief that subscribers who don't want to see content from other subscribers are expected to have the capability to block those subscribers from their personal mailboxes. Every email system I know of can do this quite easily. In the long-ago times, people like Tim May called these a kill list. "Welcome to my kill list" was often heard. It was part of my welcome to the cypherpunks, back around the year 2000. At this point in time, the stresses on mail delivery I first reported here in September is still creating delivery delays for gmail users. However, I have observed that even on days with just a few cypherpunks messages (and none from Karl, for example), Google's mail servers complain & delay delivery. Many gmail users have been automatically unsubscribed as a result. This is unfortunate, but it would not be fixed by banning or censoring the people mentioned below. Instead, the solution is for those subscribers to not use their @gmail.com addresses to receive the list. There are plenty of other free email providers. I hear that protonmail.ch works reasonably well. I did make one configuration change last fall, and reported it here: the list now has a cap of 24 posts in any 24 hours. Karl, in particular, has adjusted his output accordingly. Further discussion on any of these topics is welcome. Best regards to you and all cypherpunks subscribers. ~ Greg On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 01:07:27AM -0500, grarpamp wrote:
These spammers are continuing to spam the list. These accounts are both doing nothing but robotic spamming, flooding users mailboxes, blowing out the archives, spamming identical copies many tens of times, spewing gibberish, making no point or commentary, running bots, spamming other non subscribers into the list, etc. THOUSANDS of SPAM, MONTH after MONTH they SPAM... And they have admitted willful intent to destroy the list. One spampsychobot itself "Gunnar". Another spampsychobot calls itself "Karl". All have condemned their spam. As before, the internet has long since decided that such spammers have no right to inflict such abuse on lists. And rate limiting spammers does not solve the problem.
So, this time, do your job Greg...
The Internet has provided three options for list operators...
1) You must kick these spammers accounts off the list. 2) You must set the moderation flag on these spammers accounts and deal with and filter them out yourself. 3) You must move these spammers accounts off to a separate new list that you create for them alone.
So take your pick of the above options and do your job Greg.
For your request
Not mine, but on behalf of the list, on behalf of all who have complained about these spammers and personal abusers over the years. Users obviously don't have ability or desire to filter such spam and abuse, so your ideals don't reflect the reality of what global users expect of lists. And your inaction to remove such spammers and abusive posters has, along with them, destroyed this list over the years, evidence in point: everyone and all convo has left, with many filing written complaint. Society does not succeed when left to savages. So now you're left with a grand freepost list that no one but spammers post to. The cumulative complaints from people were not so much about freespeech topic, which lists tend to self steer and correct on a social basis, but about the spammers and abusers intentionally and egregiously spamming and abusing people and refusing all requests to quit their wanton malbehaviour. In the end, you yielded exactly what you supported and refused to fix. And you also blocked access to the archives so that no one can read or download or link them without first swearing allegiance to Cloudflare over the clearnet. Ye who fails to heed the wisdom of the Internet's long held rules on spam and abuse, ends up with an abandoned service. Amazing that no one has forked and rebooted the list, yet again.
gmail delivery
Which was apparently due in the first place to, you guessed it... these spammers spamming. Thus that's an invalid argument...
Many gmail users have been automatically unsubscribed
And let us just admit that the vast majority of such non-posting accounts are, shall we say, not in support of the cypherpunk movement.
adjusted output
Invalid, the spammers still continue to spam and abuse, at effectively zero cost to them, all win, no downside. Spam and abuse are still spam and abuse. The Internet decided that issue 35+ years ago, and provided real options to deal with it. Pick one.
I'm sorry about this. I hope this is a fake internet and in the real internet the grassroots hackers defeat the spammers, instead of the other way around.
On 1/5/24 00:38, Greg Newby wrote:
Hi grarpamp. I appreciate your passion for the cypherpunks list, and your contributions so it.
For your request below:
In short, it is my belief that subscribers who don't want to see content from other subscribers are expected to have the capability to block those subscribers from their personal mailboxes.
Those spams will still count against any bandwidth quotas. This response isn't all that far from "shut up and eat your spam".
Many gmail users have been automatically unsubscribed as a result. This is unfortunate, but it would not be fixed by banning or censoring the people mentioned below. Instead, the solution is for those subscribers to not use their @gmail.com addresses to receive the list.
I do not have a soft spot for Google or Gmail, but I find the proposed solution to Gmail's spam filtering (which apparently has tagged the entire Cypherpunks list as a spam source) to be quite tedious, if not odious. I personally pay for this email address at Fastmail. I have the spam filtering turned down to its lowest setting to avoid losing any legitimate email (some of which is work-/income-related).
There are plenty of other free email providers. I hear that protonmail.ch works reasonably well.
I'm sure there are many other free email providers out there but sooner or later, Cypherpunks list email will trip their spam filters as well if the root cause is not dealt with. Allowing the entire Cypherpunks list to be tagged as a spam source is close to the worst possible outcome; were that to happen, it basically means a few bad actors have the power of censoring *everyone* who would otherwise like to post to the list, a true tragedy of the commons. Look at what happened to Canter & Siegel. Look at what happened to Sanford Wallace. Many, many other spamming operations have come and (thankfully) gone, as the internet community at large deems that conduct unacceptable. I remember writing untold numbers of messages to abuse contacts hosting Sanford Wallace, who apparently negotiated a contract with AGIS (a backbone provider of the era) where he couldn't get kicked off even for the most blatant, egregious, and vile conduct in violation of the former's AUP/TOS. It took months for AGIS to find a way to boot him. I've been fighting the anti-spam fight for years. graramp later writes:
Not mine, but on behalf of the list, on behalf of all who have complained about these spammers and personal abusers over the years.
That would include me as well. -- Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn@rushpost.com>
Thanks for these thoughts, Shawn. A few responses below. On Sat, Jan 06, 2024 at 07:42:07AM -0600, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:
On 1/5/24 00:38, Greg Newby wrote:
Hi grarpamp. I appreciate your passion for the cypherpunks list, and your contributions so it.
For your request below:
In short, it is my belief that subscribers who don't want to see content from other subscribers are expected to have the capability to block those subscribers from their personal mailboxes.
Those spams will still count against any bandwidth quotas. This response isn't all that far from "shut up and eat your spam".
The term "spam" as I've understood it is synonymous to "unsolicited commercial email" (UCE). I think it's being used here instead as shorthand for "email messages I don't want to see." Or, "list subscribers who send too many messages." If we had people who were sending UCE, I absolutely would ban them. Instead, what we seem to have is a few prolific posters that some other list members would rather not hear from. That's why I think it's reasonable to push those editorial choices to subscribers.
Many gmail users have been automatically unsubscribed as a result. This is unfortunate, but it would not be fixed by banning or censoring the people mentioned below. Instead, the solution is for those subscribers to not use their @gmail.com addresses to receive the list.
I do not have a soft spot for Google or Gmail, but I find the proposed solution to Gmail's spam filtering (which apparently has tagged the entire Cypherpunks list as a spam source) to be quite tedious, if not odious.
What's your evidence that Google has tagged the entire list as spam? That is not what I've seen, or how I've characterized Gmail's failings to receive messages. I have access to another similar server from another organization with completely different lists, and it suffers the same thing. I've seen similar reports on the Internet from other mail administrators. The basic problem is not the content or the volume of messages sent or the name or subject matter of the list, or the domain it's coming from. It's the volume of recipients. At any time there are around 80 cypherpunks list subscribers with @gmail.com addresses. Google throttles receipt of those messages with complaints about too many duplicate message IDs or "an unusually high rate of sending." As far as I've been able to determine, our configuration is conformant with Google's requirements. Only Google is throttling these messages - other servers with lots of cypherpunks subscribers like yahoo.com and protonmail.ch don't throttle. This has all started fairly recently, as reported here and as my research has indicated... circa September 2023.
I personally pay for this email address at Fastmail. I have the spam filtering turned down to its lowest setting to avoid losing any legitimate email (some of which is work-/income-related).
I presume Fastmail can filter particular incoming list sender's email addresses. Sorry that I'm not seeing the problem with a subscriber technical solution.
There are plenty of other free email providers. I hear that protonmail.ch works reasonably well.
I'm sure there are many other free email providers out there but sooner or later, Cypherpunks list email will trip their spam filters as well if the root cause is not dealt with.
As mentioned above, this has not been observed. And, the automated complaints from Google are not about the individual senders or the content: they are about the number of subscribers using their service. Here's a message from the top of the mail queue right now: 0D80811C1F4B* 11647 Wed Jan 3 11:52:47 cypherpunks-bounces@lists.cpunks.org (host alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[209.85.202.27] said: 421-4.7.28 Gmail has detected this message exceeded its quota for sending 421-4.7.28 messages with the same Message-ID. To best protect our users, the 421-4.7.28 message has been temporarily rejected. For more information, go to 421 4.7.28 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/188131 cs3-20020a056000088300b003374a2fa940si600246wrb.186 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command)) I am hopeful that a forthcoming (circa April 2024) Ubuntu upgrade will facilitate moving the list to Mailman3. That has somewhat better controls, which might help. In particular, I'm wondering whether each recipient of a list message could get their own Message-ID. (That's a technical topic that might belong in a different discussion thread.) Meanwhile, this discussion has inspired me to look for additional technical tweaks, and I am trying a few on our Postfix server.
Allowing the entire Cypherpunks list to be tagged as a spam source is close to the worst possible outcome; were that to happen, it basically means a few bad actors have the power of censoring *everyone* who would otherwise like to post to the list, a true tragedy of the commons.
Again, that's not what's happening. If it were, I would rapidly change my stance on how to mitigate the situation.
Look at what happened to Canter & Siegel. Look at what happened to Sanford Wallace. Many, many other spamming operations have come and (thankfully) gone, as the internet community at large deems that conduct unacceptable. I remember writing untold numbers of messages to abuse contacts hosting Sanford Wallace, who apparently negotiated a contract with AGIS (a backbone provider of the era) where he couldn't get kicked off even for the most blatant, egregious, and vile conduct in violation of the former's AUP/TOS. It took months for AGIS to find a way to boot him. I've been fighting the anti-spam fight for years.
We all have. Fighting UCE is, to me, quite different than keeping particular senders or topics out of my inbox. Fighting UCE is largely in the hands of the mail server administrators, and I would say that the quantity of UCE on the cypherpunks list has been close to zero since I've been running it. If you look in the cypherpunks-archives (https://lists.cpunks.org) you'll find many thousands of UCE messages from those days. A modern Mailman+Postfix configuration, like we have, makes it harder for UCE to go to mailing list subscribers. Filtering topics and senders is largely in the hands of subscribers. Modern mail clients have excellent tools for filtering.
graramp later writes:
Not mine, but on behalf of the list, on behalf of all who have complained about these spammers and personal abusers over the years.
That would include me as well.
Best regards, Greg
Greg, to remind you, the list experienced a flood of requests at once that triggered google’s limit. Shawn, I was an early (2010s not too early) victim of politicodigital targeting and mind control partly performed by mass influence of communication channels (control the information, control the thoughts and emotions, control the behavior; it also seems to focus on power and disruption).
participants (4)
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grarpamp -
Greg Newby -
Karl Semich -
Shawn K. Quinn