Re: forged cancels (Re: Entrust Technologies's Solo - free

[dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)]

Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com> writes:

> At 10:36 PM 7/30/97 -0400, Ryan Anderson wrote:
> >"Make Money Fast" are killed because they're illegal scams in the US and I 
> >think in most of the world.

This doesn't give the various net.scum any right to forge cancels for them.
(I used to forge cancels for MMFs years ago - I was very wrong.)

But this is not the only kind of content censorship going on under the guise
of 'spam cancels".  Check out the Net.Scum Web site.  One guy decided to cancel
an entire thread discussing the requirements for setting up a MUD server
claiming it was "spam".  Another forged a cancel for a national Science
Foundation announcement in sci.fractals figuring it was off-topic, therefore
"spam".  It takes a special kind of asshole to take up "spam-cancelling"
and most of them don't stop at cancelling just the "multi-posted" articles -
they quickly diversify into foring purely content-based cancels.

> 
> They're illegal in the US primarily because the Post Office is confused
> about whether its job is to deliver the mail or to censor it,
> and delivery of MMFs by mail is policed by Postal Inspectors just as
> delivery of obscenity by mail is.  It's a side effect of having services
> provided by a government monopoly rather than the free market,
> though I'm sure that to some extent it's because people started 
> complaining to the Post Office that they were receiving junk mail,
> and complaining to their legislators that they lost money on these scams.
> 
> On the Internet, on the other hand, not only is the stuff spam and a scam,
> but it's abusing flat-rate prices for service, and service providers
> don't like it.  Julf's remailer used to block MMFs.

MMFs are one example of a "memetic" article which encourages the readers to
reproduce it and post it elsewhere.  Does anyone remember the Craig Shergold
meme?  When I worked at GS, I came across a paper copy of it - a bunch of
p.r. and salespople were faxing it to one another and asking for business
cards to be sent to it.  The idiot sysadmins at a school I taight at put
the craig Shergold appeal in the message-od-the-day on the school computer.
> 
> Pyramid scams like the MMF, and the government's inability to deal with it,
> brought down the Albanian government recently.  Here in the US that would
> _never_ happen (:-), assuming of course you don't consider Social Security
> to be a Ponzi scheme....

This reminds me of the old farts who lost lots of money in the mini-crash in
Oct 87.  Basically, they sold insurance to other investors against the maret
suddenly going down a lot (which is a low-probability event, but can happpen and
I think will happen again any day now :-)  They were collecting their equivalent
of insurance premiums. When the market did hucckup and they had to pay what
they promised they would, they started screaming that they weren't warned
adequately that their income wasn't "risk-free" and they might actually have
to perform their part of the contract they entered!

Why should the gubmint protect people from pyramid schemes and other such scams?
("make money at home stuffing envelopes" seems to be a related scam that's
very popular and not "illegal".)  Any time a sucker tries to beat the market,a
xtto get more than the normal return without incurring extra risk, he
deserves to be fucked.  Gubmint's attempts to "protect" the sucker limit
the freedom not of the crooks who'd fleece him (they'll find a way), but
the regular people who are neither crooks not suckers.

---

<a href="mailto:dlv@bwalk.dm.com">Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM</a>
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps