^On 11 Jan 99 at 14:39, Edward Reid wrote:
^> This -- I can't call it a spammer, it's worse -- did this
^> to probably hundreds of thousands of Usenet postings. All
^> kinds, every newsgroup I've seen, not just FAQs. I tried to
^> get some info from news.admin.net-abuse.usenet a week or
^> two ago, but most of the postings there were the BARRY
^> BOUWSMA gibberish. What I did find indicated that nobody
^> knows the motivation of the perpetrator.
Those would be the supersedes done by the hipcrime cartel.
Hipcrime himself is a sociopath. He distributes, and sometimes
runs, a program he wrote called "NewsAgent", which allows you
to supersede huge numbers of articles, replacing them with
garbage such as you are observing. His motivation is fairly
simple - he wants to disrupt and destroy, and he wants attention.
If he's ignored too long in public, he'll start writing to those
he perceives as somehow central to the "opposition".
Unfortunately, a couple of handfuls of other people have also
downloaded Hipcrime's proggy. Some of these are well-known as
net kooks, some aren't, but the point is that a number of people
who enjoy creating chaos are in possession of something that
will do so with relatively little difficulty.
Unfortunately, open tactics of negative attention don't work
against these people. For them, and especially for Hipcrime,
*any* attention is the goal.
In fact, if you can spread the word, privately, not in public
postings, that "hipcrime" is not to be mentioned, and that the
disruption is to be ignored as much as possible (damage control
done by email where it can be) and followups discussing it Not
Done, it would help a lot.
BTW, it's completely possible to Truly Ignore the situation.
I have two newsfeeds on which the supersedes have no effect
because of filtering. On one of my feeds (the Onramp ISP) the
news admin not only filters out supersede nonsense but also
Dave the Resurrector reposts that are for the supersedes that
were dropped.
If I want to see the mess and damage, I can dial up to bellatlantic,
because they haven't figured out how to run usenet servers yet.
^It's even hitting groups in local hierarchys such as uk.*.
^The UKs largest two ISPs(With the exception of AOL) have
^stopped accepting cancel message.
^
^Imran
Anyone seeing this stuff ought to insist that their ISP install
adequate filters. If they're already spam filtering, it only
requires a few tweaks. I'll be glad to direct anyone who needs
help toward the experts on filter-fiddling.
-- Remain Calm
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