Re: The Crisis with Remailers

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 12:00 PM 5/18/96 EDT, dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis) wrote:
>> 2. there is no good way to deal with spams or other so-called "abuse"
>Nor should there be.  What's one person's abuse is another person's
>free speech.  Internet traffic should not be censored based on contents.

I disagree - when I was running a remailer, I found several varieties of
abuse, and some of them were worth blocking.  Usenet, in particular,
is divided into newsgroups so material can be directed to the groups
where the readers want to find it, which is filtering, not censorship.

* The most common was spammers sending lots of mail to a specific person
who didn't want it; that's easy to block, and keeping up with that was
a major part of traffic on the remailer-operators news groups.  

* Another was spammers who were sending out large volumes of spam; 
my remailer would shut down if it got too much volume (operator-settable), 
but usually I blocked senders like this based on remailer-operators notices
from other remailers that were being spammed through.

* Another was inappropriate news postings; most of the complaints I got
were from phone sex ads in the pictures newsgroups, where they're unwanted
(as opposed to misc.forsale or other group where they're in scope).
They're a minor annoyance, and I didn't censor them; there'd probably
be less of them from 2-way remailers, since people who objected could
spam back.  In general, these were posted to many newsgroups, and reducing
the number of newsgroups that a message could be crossposted to would probably
have helped, though it might have just resulted in multiple postings.

* The nastiest spam, which I wasn't able to block, was to sign someone
else's name on flamebait hate postings.  Blocking by content (e.g. blocking
postings with the address of someone who had complained) would cut down
on repeat postings, but it only takes one or two postings to get thousands
of flames sent to the victim.  The damage could be reduced by putting
disclaimer notices at the beginning and end of the text, reminding the
reader that it may be a forgery, etc.; simple mail headers don't seem
to get the attention of enough readers, even those whose newsreader
software doesn't discard them.  Similar spams can be done to mailing lists...

#					Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215
# goodtimes signature virus innoculation