From: Michael Handler <grendel@netaxs.com>
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 95 19:25:24 PST
To: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Subject: Re: San Francisco Editorial
In-Reply-To: <199501032244.OAA15281@jobe.shell.portal.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950103221256.28053B-100000@unix3.netaxs.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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 <grendel@netaxs.com>                        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