[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: San Francisco Editorial
On Tue, 3 Jan 1995, Hal wrote:
> Another point re Cantor and Siegel is that there is now a service
> calling itself CancelMoose which goes through Julf's anon server in
> Finland (anon.penet.fi) to cancel spams.
This is a common misconception. Cancelmoose[tm] doesn't use
anon.penet.fi for cancelling spams -- she telnets directly into the NNTP
server of a university in Norway. Strangely enough, this is the same
university where Arnt Gulbrantsen works. Arnt, if you don't already know,
is the Norwegian hacker who wrote the cancelbots that are being used
against spams (Canter & Siegel's included). Cancelmoose[tm] is reachable
through anon.penet.fi for comments, and she always lists the <naXXXXXX>
form of the address (non-double-blinded)
> The scary thing about cancels is that some proposals have actually been
> directed at anonymous posts themselves. Someone anonymously posted
> what purported to be a grisly transcript of the last seconds of the
> doomed Challenger crew as they fell to the ocean. This caused a great
> hue and cry and some calls for banning anonymous posts and/or
> retroactively cancelling them. This led to some very amusing events
> which Detweiler has chronicled in his FAQ on anonymity, the net result
> of which was that the idea was discredited. But the emergence of
> CancelMoose is not an altogether positive event in my view.
Dick Depew and AARM (Auto-Active Retro Moderation). He wanted to
cancelbot any posting from anon.penet.fi in the Big Seven Usenet hierarchies.
He was promptly beaten down by the net. Feh.
-mbh-
ObCrypto: I've been working on a draft paper that puts forward a proposal
to make Usenet articles uncancellable except by [1] the original author
of the article or [2] the system admin who runs the NNTP server the
article issued from. The problem with this is that it eliminates
Cancelmoose[tm] and the other spam cancellers, who, IMHO, are Good Things.
--
Michael Handler <[email protected]> Philadelphia, PA
Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics s.s.y.g-l-b co-moderator
PGP Key ID FC031321 Print: 9B DB 9A B0 1B 0D 56 DA 61 6A 57 AD B2 4C 7B AF
"They like to watch everything you do / Transmitters hidden in the wall"--JD