Re: Sick of trolls!

From: Michael Heiming (michael+USENET_at_www.heiming.de)
Date: 05/29/05 

Date: Sun, 29 May 2005 09:08:35 +0200

In comp.os.linux.misc Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld>:
> In article <cfclm2-0av.ln1@news.heiming.de>, Michael Heiming wrote:
>>In comp.os.linux.misc Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld>:

>>> 2/04 3176 920 29.97% 5/05 2612 814 31.16%
>>
>>Proves my point exactly, those 31.16% are significant and the
>>sole reason for this thread. Close to every third post has been
>>kill-filed by your filters, that's much!

> Yes, but because they are killed, I don't see them, so I don't know
> what specific reason might have killed this or that post. Not that it
> bothers me. Also, this doesn't show all of the kills, because I also
> use short term kills in the news reader, to kill threads for 14 days,
> which usually suffices.

Sure, but troll contributions were obviously escalating this
month as your logs show nicely. Presuming there wasn't any
significant change in your filter rules.

Can't tell for sure if there is any relation at all, but short
after posting "6npmm2-hdd.ln1@news.heiming.de" things have been
fixed on the hijacked system ("0summ2-c7f.ln1@news.heiming.de").

>>Hopefully we have closed one open proxy, thx to this thread, but
>>there are just to many people without the slightest clue
>>connecting systems to the internet 24/7.

> That's been known for years. It's also why I no longer publish an
> e-mail address. When I opened this account, the salesdroid was
> perplexed where I got the username I was requesting. He understood the
> concept of piping /dev/random through uuencode to get a password, but
> thought it unusual to do that to get the username.

You are lucky, I'm using this mail address since nearly 10 years,
when spam was more or less unknown, for obvious reasons I won't
toss it. Probably it's on any spammer starting kit DVD anyway, so
why care. Using a well configures SA keeps the crap out, my
(1Mbit) connection has a flat fee, bandwidth used for spam
doesn't really matter.

>>Once had a problem with *** loads of spam on a domain of a pretty
>>well known company I was responsible for mail/www these days. The
>>jerks used an open relay (doze) in China.

> The advantage of being a multinational company. From what I've seen,
> all mail from China to our company is 551'd with a redirect to the
> local Chinese address. We never see web stuff, as it's intercepted
> by the DNS and also directed to the Chinese address.

That was a couple of ages ago at a pretty small shop, with just a
single admin (me). ;-)

[..]

> Few people using the Internet even have a faint concept of what a
> computer is, never mind how to use it. It used to be that the
> installation program for your newsreader auto-subscribed you to
> 'news.announce.newusers' and perhaps 'news.announce.important' in
> the vain hope that the new user would gain minor clue. I doubt that
> the current rash of application writers are even aware of the groups.

Yep, this is one of the reasons to come up with the idea of our
frequently posted newreader FAQ, which has IMHO involved to a
pretty good document, thx to others contributing to it.

Sure, remains unknown how many new reader read it, but it seems
as it does a good job to anyone who cares to actually read it.

Would be nice if apps auto-magically detect something like this as
soon as you subscribe to a new group and bring it to your
attention.

> The service providers used to ship out a 20+ page document that did
> a lot of explaining, as well as laying down terms and conditions. The
> past five ISPs I've had accounts with not only failed to snail-mail
> anything - they didn't even bother sending an email of any sort. The
> _only_ mail I ever get from them are the monthly billing reminders.
> There might be something on the ISP's web page... just checked two,
> and they are pure advertisements of why you should use this ISP, and
> don't contain ANY useful information other than a 'subscribe me' form.
> They don't even have telephone numbers!!!

Strange service? Perhaps they have already off-shored most
technical stuff?

No problems with my ISP, even if there are odd things like
officially not supporting Linux, but on the other hand you can
download a Linux tool (GUI) from them to check your bandwidth.

Makes you curious, but they have no qualms if you call them in
case of problems (2/3 outages for about 30-50 minutes in the last
five years) and tell you'd run Linux.

No wonder, Linux support and standing behind it seems to be a
problem not uncommon. Quite often, during looking for some new
piece of hardware you'll find not a single word about Linux
support on the international (English) www presence of some
company, but on the German pages of the same vendor you find
Linux 100% supported. 

-- 
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)
mail: echo zvpunry@urvzvat.qr | perl -pe 'y/a-z/n-za-m/'
#bofh excuse 83: Support staff hung over, send aspirin and
come back LATER.