PAT: Please leave my address munged as 'b l bergman at earth link dot
net' to confuse the bots. And I DO care about Usenet.
On Thu, 1 Sep 2005 11:14:51 -0400, mc <mc_no_spam@uga.edu> wrote:
> I thought this (comp.dcom.telecom) was a moderated newsgroup.
It IS a moderated newsgroup and only messages that have gone past
Pat an are approved by him (or Lisa) are supposed to be propagated,
but if you check the headers -- I'll attach the original message below,
PAT feel free to snip it off or edit it for length -- the sender forged
himself an Approved: header.
Almost all news servers do not check if the approval is valid, it just
sees that the header is there and sends the message through. And Pat,
forget about sending a cancel message -- forged cancel messages are so
prevalent that very few servers will act on them.
(There are programs that will try to mass-cancel all the messages in a
newsgroup so a radical can silence his opposition. Even if it doesn't
work, then you have to wade through all the cancel message clutter to
read the messages with real content.)
The original message below has appeared unchanged in many of the
groups I read. The guy is trying to accuse President Bush of being an
international terrorist by sending our armed forces out to invade and
capture countries, murder, torture, rape, etc. But there ARE loons
out there that will believe practically anything, facts be damned ...
I will complain to his hosting company and to Google (his GMail return
address) but it is much more effective if lots of people do it.
One complaint to an ISP and you might as well not bother, they will
ignore it. (With a few exceptions like Erols.) But when they have to
dedicate one or two employee's time for several days emptying out
thousands of messages from the Abuse@ mailbox and dealing with the
backlash, THEN they will do something about the original poster.
Oh, and it might be a "Joe Job" smear attempt instead, considering the
post has the (alleged) full name and address at the bottom.
--<< Bruce >>--
> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I kept the 'Re:' on the subject line of
> this message because even though _I_ did not see this message at all
> (it may have fallen in the spam trash basket here and gone
> unobserved), apparently _some people_ got the original comment. If
> anyone wants to tell me what the _original message_ was all about, I
> will be most appreciative. My presumption (we know what 'they' say
> about 'assume' and 'assumption'; what do 'they' say about 'presume'
> and 'presumption'?) is that it was some flavor of spam, or scam, or
> other get-rich-quick scheme. And yes, mc, c.d.t. is in theory a
> moderated newsgroup. Years and years ago, I would have seen your
> message (of course, I probably would have seen my copy of it also) and
> dropped everything to rush around and find out which news site had a
> leak which was allowing the spam/scam to propogate around the net. It
> was important to keep _my_ newsgroup looking impeccable. I would have
> sat here and put out control:cancel messages until I was blue in the
> face, to keep the newsgroup clean. That's when I was known as the
> moderator who did not give a shit, or even an iota of a shit.
> For quite some time now, Usenet has been an area that I simply cannot
> be concerned about. Yes, I still feed it daily, but no, I do not worry
> about the sewage which flows in from everywhere on an almost daily
> basis. Like the former crown jewel of the south, New Orleans, the
> internet is sinking deeper and deeper into the mire every day. Like we
> are going to see in the instance of New Orleans where most people who
> _matter_ and most institutions which _matter_ are going to desert it
> totally over the next couple of years, giving it over to the Red Ants
> which are feasting on the carcasses -- human and animal -- floating
> along Canal Street, we'll begin to see (already have begun to see)
> less and less of what _matters_ on the net, which in the 1980-90's
> used to be our own crown jewel. If someone who has a copy of the
> message in question will send it to me, I'll do a cancel on it if
> it is still possible. PAT]
And here is the original message, with all headers.
> Path: newsspool2.news.pas.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!elnk-pas-nf1!newsfeed.earthlink.net!pd7cy1no!shaw.ca!newscon02.news.prodigy.com!newscon06.news.prodigy.com!prodigy.net!news-feed01.roc.ny.frontiernet.net!nntp.frontiernet.net!news02.roc.ny.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail
> From: tomstdenis@gmail.com
> Message-ID: <19c6d3be.35050c49.tomstdenis@gmail.com>
> Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom,mn.test
> Subject: dear comp.dcom.telecom readers
> Approved: tomstdenis@gmail.com
> User-Agent: Xnews/M3
> Sender: ottawa-hs-209-217-122-41.s-ip.magma.ca [209.217.122.41]
> Lines: 90
> X-Complaints-To: abuse-news@frontiernet.net
> X-Trace: 52616e646f6d4956902cec576439a1fbc7e2ca3ff44e0eae17e4e285f8a55b7b2ba61b710b42fc794ee846752154951ed4faee4e122dad8fc0d9393aaca7c6b51a03346f34f0a0934466a5ccca759f67dfb75d52d3e4c30490a3466f0b8bd1a9
> X-Abuse-Info: Please be sure to forward ALL headers so that we may process your complaint properly.
> NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 09:38:24 UTC
>Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 09:38:24 GMT
> Xref: news.earthlink.net comp.dcom.telecom:59751 mn.test:8345
> X-Received-Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 02:38:24 PDT (newsspool2.news.pas.earthlink.net)
Bruce L. Bergman (blbergman@notchur@biz)