Re: news.admin.policy: A Report From the Front

[jordan@imsi.com (Jordan Hayes)]

	>>> Who here has been in such a news war ...

I was involved in a slightly different news war a few years ago.  I was
being harrassed by a particularly prolific news poster (at one point he
represented nearly 9% of the total USENET weekly volume), and it turned
out that I was running a site that had an NNTP feed to his site.  I
talked with the admin there, found out their fan-out plan, and made
sure that anything I got from them got fanned out as soon as possible.

Except I would modify the message in subtle ways, like change the
attribution line from something like

	From: john@somesite.net (John Q. Public)

to

	From: john@somesite.net (Wimpy Math Grad Student)

Anyway, I was able to make my version of his postings "the" version by
hitting all the other sites his site fanned out to first.  It was fun
for a while until he found out and tried to mail bomb me.  Fortunately,
I was around when it started, and put a reflector in to send his bombs
back automatically piece by piece.  His machine was a lowly VAX 750
running some backwater rev of 4.3 alpha-alpha, and sendmail promptly
sent the load to 40 and crashed the machine.

His PhD advisor was not amused.

/jordan