> At 1:24 AM -0500 7/11/00, Ben Byer wrote: > > > It isn't "spam." It's a matter of one or more lists being subscribed > >> to one or more other lists. > >> > >> Suppose someone signs up the Foobar List to one of the Cypherpunks > >> lists. (Hint: this has happened.) > >> > >> > >> Are the CDR operators responsible for this "spamming" of other lists? > >> In Marshall's logic, are they guilty of "Federal Crimes"? > >> > >> Get real. [I know Ben Byer didn't write this. I didn't get the original, so I don't know who did.] I phrased that the way I did because the Sparklist.com administrators seem to be pretty stupid. I called it a "denial of service" attack and phrased some of the other things the way I did on the assumption that it might get more of a response. In particular, to a system admin, mail to an abuse address which states that a denial of service attack is currently coming from a site they feed tends to get their attention. Do I think that they actually violated Federal law? Not unless the government has outlawed stupidity. Do I think that they should have their feed yanked until such a time as they fix their system? Yeah. (An alternative would be to RBL them.) What they did was similar to someone getting on a T1 and letting loose with a flood ping aimed at somebody. The fact that somebody other than the owner telnets into the system and executes the 'ping -f' isn't relevant, except for determining what should be done after the DoS attack has been interrupted. > >It's spam, in that it's unwanted, bulk email. No, I'm not stupid -- I > >understand WHY it came. Still-- sparklist.com *makes money* off those > >mailing lists, and should therefore put some effort into maintaining them. > >One listserv was able to detect the fraudulent subscriptions -- why not them? Because they, like most of the other admins of such sites, don't care. Writing a couple lines of code to keep these kinds of DoS attacks from happening is too much work for them, just like it's too much work for various other sites to block the various Cypherpunks list addresses from their services despite being asked to countless times.
