Re: What to do about off-topic spam?

On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:30:19 +1000, Peter Moylan posted:

On 06/09/07 15:14, Oleg Lego wrote:
On Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:13:24 -0700, Shannon Jacobs posted:

(By the way, the newsgroups are already strongly censored in the
sense in which you [Mr. Moylan] applied the term. There is a whole
lot of spam that never makes it as far as the OP of this thread.)

Are they? How is that accomplished,pray tell? I think you are again
confusing Google Groups (the archive) with Google Groups (the groups
hosted by Google), and with Google Groups (the web interface to
usenet).

No, he is right on that point. There are spambots that issue "cancel"
messages for spam whenever they detect it. Of course the spam does reach
some servers before the cancel does, and some others don't honour the
cancel, but apparently this does substantially reduce the number of news
servers that receive the spam.

Oh, sure, and if that's what you meant in the sense Shannon specified,
I agree. I just took it that Shannon wanted her "news server" to do
the protection for her, and that he or she didn't understand that
there is a whole 'nother world outside Google Groups.

I once saw an estimate that about 1/3 of
Usenet traffic was spam, and that another 1/3 was spambot "cancel"
messages. This might have changed now that spammers have turned to
e-mail as their preferred delivery method.

The thing that makes the spambot activity uncontroversial is that the
spambots define spam purely in terms of excessive cross-posting. If an
article is cross-posted to five different newsgroups, then it's
generally agreed that the article is pestiferous regardless of its
content. The fact that one of those newsgroups is something like
alt.j.ha-ha.mirage is not taken into account, because that would require
a subjective judgement saying that some newsgroups are more worthy than
others.

Exactly, and anyone reading newsgroups has the option of finding a
server that does not honour the cancels. Do you suppose Google's
usenet interface falls into this category?

With any other definition of spam, you run into the classic problem of
all censorship: where do you draw the line? As it happens, I disapprove
of the "I am a radical Muslim" postings just as much as I disapprove of
prayers in Parliament, but when you come right down to it that's a
personal opinion. If we were to ban certain classes of newsgroup
postings based on some subjective judgement, then sooner or later we'd
end up banning some group that includes me. The dangers of censorship
run wild are, in my opinion, far worse than the dangers posed by
messages that I personally disapprove of.

Letting people filter postings with the aid of their own killfiles is
unexceptionable, because we all have the right to choose what we will or
will not read. Where censorship becomes unacceptable is where someone is
making other people's decisions for them. In the case that started this
thread, the argument against the posting was that it was off-topic. How
do you define "off-topic" in a wide-ranging newsgroup such as this one?

I fully agree with you.

In the case of Google, arguments for censorship are even weaker because
Google is not primarily a news server. (Technically, it's not a news
server at all. I have never succeeded in connecting to port 119.) If
Google had a policy of deleting all postings from radical Muslims, or
from fundamentalist Christians, or whatever, then it would lose its
claim to being an unbiased archive.

Exactly.

.

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