From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 00:58:47 +0800
To: freedom-knights@jetcafe.org
Subject: Re: forged cancels (Re: Entrust Technologies's Solo - free download)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.93.970808133524.450A-100000@shirley>
Message-ID: <V5B7ae92w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} <dformosa@st.nepean.uws.edu.au> writes:

> On Wed, 6 Aug 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
>
> > Tim Skirvin <tskirvin@math.uiuc.edu> writes:
> > > 	Not accepted ones.  They're treated as rogues, and asked to stop
> > > it, and you know it.
> >
> > Net.Scum like [...] Tim Brown,
>
> Tim Brown is not an accepted canceler.

As challenged, I've listed 3 dozen "spam cancellers" caught slipping cancels
forged for "non-spam" among their "spam cancels". There are at least twice
as many more listed in the Net.Scum database. For some reason you chose to
snip all of them and to pick on Tim Brown, perhaps because he's a self-
described schizophrenic.

What difference does it make whether Tim Skirvin considers someone an
"accepted" or "rogue" canceller?  Tim Brown forged hundreds of cancels
between october 96 and July 97. Most of these cancels were for "spam"
(stuff posted lots of times; usually ads).  A substantial minority of
Tim's cancels were for singly-posted articles whose contents he didn't
like, posted by his flame war opponents. Many examples can be found at
his Net.Scum page: http://www.netscum.net/brownt0.html .  Tim Brown
apparently stopped forging cancels soon after I stepped lightly on his
dick. I don't know whether there was a connection.

Tim Brown's cancels lacked the "Sender:" header. For this reason they were
not processed at sites running INN with the paranoid settings, but were
accepted at a lot of sites still. The whining by the Cabal that Tim Brown
is not an "accepted" cancel-forger, as opposed to "accepted" cancel-forgers
like Pedophile Chris Lewis and John E. Milburn is irrelevant, and your
Cabal itself is irrelevant, isolated, impotent, and ignored.

Guy Macon is another fine example of a "spam canceller": Steve Boursy and
Dr. Fomin caught him forging cancels for artciles on soc.religion.quaker
that were not "spam" by any definition, but which Guy considered to be
"off-topic", like the thread about leprosy.  Macon recently posted an
announcement on soc.religion.quaker calling himself "the official spam
canceller" of s.c.r and claiming to have forged two more cancels.

The way to stop these forgers is to ignore their cancels. Your distinction
of who's "accepted" and who's not "accepted" by you is irrelevant to their
ability to censor others.  You haven't succeeded in stopiing Guy Macon,
Ehud Gavron, David Richards, and a host of others for months, demonstrating
the utter irrelevance of your "accepted cancel-forger" label.

> > Examples of lies in Tim Skirvin's Magnum Opus, the "Cancel FAQ" (what else)
> >
[How to get a cancelbot]
> > ]Sounds cool.  Where do I get one?
> > ]
> > ]	If you have to ask, you don't get one.
>
> [...]
>
> > My cancelbot has been freely available for over 18 months.
>
> And if thay can't find it thay have to ask therefore thay don't get one.
> There are freely advalable alt.* newsgroup creation scripts, and still
> peaple don't know how to post cancels.

"How do I get a cancelbot" is indeed a frequently asked question, and whenever
I see it posted, I e-mail the poster a copy of cbcb's source code.

Tim Skirvin is under no obligation to disseminate the information that he
feels shouldn't be publicly available ("security through obscurity").
However since he chooses to present himself as the author of the "official"
FAQ on usenet Cancels (actually, substantually plagiarized from the Cancel
FAQ that David Stodolsky used to post), a more honest way to deal with the
questions he doesn't want to answer would be to either omit the question
altogether, or to state that he doesn't want to answer the question.

I e-mailed Skirvin repeatedly pointing out that his answer is factually
incorrect, yet he presists in presenting his view of what things should
be rather than what they are.

I was asked to provide examples of lies of Tim Skirvin's FAQs. This was
just one of several such examples.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps