From: lcs Mixmaster Remailer <mix@anon.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 12:40:30 -0800 (PST)
To: mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Why posts are not appearing in NG.
In-Reply-To: <199711240215.DAA29717@basement.replay.com>
Message-ID: <19971124204002.8181.qmail@nym.alias.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) wrote:

> Anonimity has already been lost due to the fact that if some
> ass who is a control freak keeps posting crap to the
> news.lists.filters newsgroup. Go ahead an see for yourselves
> how many groups have been eliminated from receiving posts from
> anonymous remailers. All that need be done is post some spam
> through the anonymous remailer to a legitimate group, make a
> request to cancel all postings to the newsgroup from that remailer
> and guess what, your posts will no longer appear in the newsgroup.
> 
> No investigation, no nothing! Just like that all posts from an
> anonymous remailer stop appearing in a group.
> So if your posts are not appearing on a particular newsgroup,
> chances are that it has been prevented from accepting posts due
> to idiots that just do as they are requested. By the way, who has
> authority to just terminate (restrict the acceptance of posts)
> to a newsgroup?
> Do not believe it? Go to Deja News, go to power search and type in
> the following (anonymous and news.lists.filters) and see what
> the results are. Shocking. Someone or group of individuals is
> abusing this privalage and must be exposed/dealt with accordingly.

That's becoming old hat with the censorious control freaks.  If they don't 
like what's being posted anonymously, the post a whole bunch of anonymous 
"abuse" themselves, then turn around and demand that "something to be done 
to stop this abuse".  It's gotten remailers banned from posting through 
certain mail2news gateways, and even gotten remailers (like Mailmasher,
Huge Cajones, and Lucifer) shut down entirely.

In many cases, it's not hard to figure out who's doing it.  Just look for
posts where anonymous posters are called "anonymous assholes", accused of
"hiding behind the skirts of a remailer", etc.  For info on the attack on
Jeff Burchell's remailers, visit:

 http://calvo.teleco.ulpgc.es/listas/cypherpunks-unedited@toad.com/HTML-1997-11/msg00536.html

-or-

 http://infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks/dir.archive-97.11.13-97.11.19/0432.html

> One of the biggest abusers of this practice is at
> Unknown News Administrator <news@news.msfc.nasa.gov>
> 8862 news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins
> This individual posts requests through legitimate servers and is
> slowly eroding the anonymous posts purpose.
> Go ahead and check to see if the newsgroup you post to is on the
> list and report back to the group.
   
If you'll visit the "control" NG, you'll find see that <news@news.msfc.nasa.gov>
is forging a lot of cancel messages to kill anonymous posts.  Perhaps a
complaint to NASA is in order to protest government computers being used
for forgery. And if someone is also forging a NASA address to make them look
bad at the same time, then they need to know about that, too.

--