Newsgroup spam ➡ a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

[⊙＿⊙]

Newsgroup spam ➡ a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

*****

Newsgroup spam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

Spamming of Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates e-mail spam. The first widely recognized Usenet spam (though not the most famous) was posted on 18 January 1994 by Clarence L. Thomas IV, a sysadmin at Andrews University.[1][2] Entitled "Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon",[3] it was a fundamentalist religious tract claiming that "this world's history is coming to a climax." The newsgroup posting bot Serdar Argic also appeared in early 1994, posting tens of thousands of messages to various newsgroups, consisting of identical copies of a political screed relating to the Armenian Genocide.

The first "commercial" Usenet spam,[2][4] and the one which is often (mistakenly) claimed to be the first Usenet spam of any sort, was an advertisement for legal services entitled "Green Card Lottery - Final One?".[5] It was posted on April 12, 1994, by Arizona lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, and hawked legal representation for United States immigrants seeking papers ("green cards").

Usenet convention defines spamming as "excessive multiple posting", that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). During the early 1990s there was substantial controversy among Usenet system administrators (news admins) over the use of cancel messages to control spam. A "cancel message" is a directive to news servers to delete a posting, causing it to be inaccessible. Some regarded this as a bad precedent, leaning towards censorship, while others considered it a proper use of the available tools to control the growing spam problem.

A culture of neutrality towards content precluded defining spam on the basis of advertisement or commercial solicitations. The word "spam" was usually taken to mean "excessive multiple posting (EMP)", and other neologisms were coined for other abuses – such as "velveeta" (from the processed cheese product of that name) for "excessive cross-posting".[6] A subset of spam was deemed "cancellable spam", for which it is considered justified to issue third-party cancel messages.[7]

In the late 1990s, spam became used as a means of vandalising newsgroups, with malicious users committing acts of sporgery to make targeted newsgroups all but unreadable without heavily filtering. A prominent example occurred in alt.religion.scientology.

Prevalent in recent times is the MI-5 Persecution spam, which is well known across many newsgroups. These rambling postings often appear as clusters of twenty or more messages with varying subjects and content, but all related to Mike Corley's perceived surveillance of himself by MI5, the British intelligence agency. These rambling messages used to state the originator as ***@mi5.gov.uk. Lately (December 2007) the spammer has taken to altering the "from" address and subject line in an attempt to get past newsgroup "kill" filters. This UK-based spammer readily admits that he has mental illness in several of his postings. See also The Corley Conspiracy.

The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "spamminess". The use of the BI and spam-detection software has led to Usenet being policed by anti-spam volunteers, who purge newsgroups of spam by sending cancels and filtering it out on the way into servers. This very active form of policing has meant that Usenet is a far less attractive target to spammers than it used to be, and most of the industrial-scale spammers have now moved into e-mail spam instead.

Google Usenet News Archive

Unfortunately, the advent of the large Usenet archive kept as part of the Google Groups website, has made Usenet more attractive to spammers than ever. The goal in this case is not just to reach the members of a newsgroup, but to also take advantage of the fact that Google gives a higher pagerank to websites that are referred to by these messages, which are catalogued and mirrored in multiple languages at Google's top-level domain. Critics have suggested that Google has ulterior motives for "turning a blind eye" to the problem since the websites being pointed to use Google ads, which potentially generate revenue for both the spammer AND Google. The spam is extremely unfair to the companies paying Google and the spammer for an ad-click, as the most prevalent current spam (2010) is trying to trick readers into clicking on web ads by referring to them as images and saying that a link is hidden in them "due to high sex content" or that a link hidden in the image (Google ad) will take them to a "PayPal form" that will give them money.[8][9]

While most newsreaders filter the spam at either the server or user level, Google does not filter spam out of its Usenet News archive. Google does, however, offer spam filtering for groups that decide to abandon Usenet and form a moderated Google Group, which gives another reason why Google would turn a blind eye to spam in its archive of Usenet News.

See also

Sporgery
Cancelbot
References

Templeton, Brad. "Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse". Retrieved 11 July 2006.
"20 Year Archive on Google Groups". Google. 2003. Retrieved 11 July 2006.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9401191510.AA18576%40jse.stat.ncsu.edu
"History of Spam". Mailmsg.com. Archived from the original on 26 March 2006. Retrieved 11 July 2006.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2odj9q%2425q%40herald.indirect.com
"velveeta" from The Jargon File 4.4.7
FAQ: Current Usenet spam thresholds and guidelines at faqs.org
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/eb8005557ad288f2/aa7523840180dafa?lnk=gst&q=high+sex+content#aa7523840180dafa
http://groups.google.com/group/cakewalk.coffeehouse/browse_thread/thread/336167892f7ac19e/b5581be337345d54?q=paypal+form
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newsgroup_spam&oldid=735587772"
Categories: SpammingUsenet
This page was last modified on 21 August 2016, at 19:38.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

[⊙＿⊙]

Dark side of trolling

*****

'It just makes me happy when I can make someone angry' - A special investigation into the dark world of trolling
5 YEARS AGO FEBRUARY 28, 2012 12:20PM


A Cave Troll from a scene from film "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring". Source: AdelaideNow

Dark side of trolling
Three trolls, three different reasons for trolling: Ben, Sarah and James. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied
BEN spends up to 70 hours a week on the internet getting high on other people's anger and despair.
The unemployed 19-year-old from Victoria - who spoke to news.com.au on the condition of anonymity - doesn't go out much and doesn't have many real friends, but he doesn't feel alone. He believes he's part of a community of similar-minded people who scour the web looking for pages to vandalise and lives to upset.
Ben (not his real name) first started trolling in 2008 on the online forum 4Chan.
His first act was innocuous enough: he weighed in on a discussion about religion and claimed to have disproved everything people had written.
Since then his trolling has become more vicious and destructive.
"It just makes me happy when I can make someone angry. It sounds weird but I kind of feed off their anger. The angrier I can get them, the better I feel," he told news.com.au.
Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
He usually only trolls a post or website once before moving, not out of any sense of decency, but because he is scared of being arrested.
He said the worst thing he ever did was vandalise the Facebook memorial page of a young girl who had committed suicide. "I wrote, 'How's it hanging guys'."
He doesn't feel any remorse, and strangely doesn't consider his actions bullying despite claiming he probably wouldn't have started trolling if he had not been bullied at school.
IT'S HOT IN HELL
"I'd feel responsible but I wouldn't care. I've pretty much lost all hope for humanity anyway, I don't believe that anything can save people," he said.
Ben and the hundreds of thousands like him reflect the dark side of the internet. They believe themselves to be cultural critics, indulging in harmless fun, but RIP trolling is one of the most destructive and harmful forms of trolling. It mocks and exploits the pain of those grieving the loss of loved ones. It ranges from the sort of distasteful comment Ben posted to plastering pages with photo-shopped pictures of babies in meat grinders or hardcore pornography.
Last year Bradley Paul Hampson became the first Australian to be jailed for it. He plastered the Facebook tribute pages of two slain schoolchildren with child pornography, an act the judge described as depraved.
In the UK, one of the most infamous RIP trolls, Sean Duffy, was sentenced several months later for persecuting on Facebook four families of dead children. On one girl's memorial page he wrote: "Help me mummy, It's hot in Hell."
But trollers like Ben and Hampson may not be just hurting their victims.
Psychologist Karyn Krawford claims that extreme trolling may be a sign of mental ill-health.
Ms Krawford said she had done studies which showed the empathy of mental health sufferers decreased for every hour they spent online.
Term Life Insurance
Via: Term Life Insurance
LACKING EMPATHY
"This lack of empathy caused people to become emotionally immune and desensitised to images they're not seeing in real life," she said.
In one study, subjects displayed a complete lack of empathy when shown images of people dying. "They couldn't see how much that person was hurting; they couldn't see the cut off arm or the pain and distress and terror.
"As a consequence they were able to make these remarks and express these bullying type behaviours."
Twenty-three-year-old stay-at-home mother Sarah, from South Australia, is one such bully. For years she limited her trolling to snarky posts on the parenting website BabyMama.org, reserving her vitriol for discussions about breastfeeding and vaccinations.
But last month her actions spiralled out of control and she started actively bullying other users. Sarah set up a Facebook page belittling another mother that had posted near naked pictures of herself on the website.
"She started getting negative replies and deleted the pictures but I saved the pictures and uploaded them to a Facebook group where she was humiliated," she said.
Sarah quickly apologised and deleted the photos after other users criticised her actions and the site threatened her with expulsion.
"I randomly targeted a lady for no reason, humiliated her for no reason - just to be a bitch. Looking back now it was petty. I'm one of those remorseful trolls, I suppose."
Sarah, like Ben, attributed her trolling to years of bullying she suffered at school. "I dropped out of school in year nine," she said. "I suppose I'm an asshole to people because I’m carrying all this spitefulness around with me. I hurt people."
Sydney student James admits he has problems switching from the "vicious but joking troll" persona on gaming sites to "James the nice guy" elsewhere.
"On gaming sites, if you don’t troll you’re pretty much seen as someone who is sucking up to the site moderators," he said.
And he has no shame when it comes to trolling. "If the person I was trolling was from a poorer area, maybe I'd say something like 'How does it feel having no future knowing you're from that area'," he said.
"It's just my mentality to make it personal and a lot of people take things way too seriously – especially on social networking sites."
POWER OF THE WEAKLING
Psychologists have long attributed bad behaviour online to "deindividuation" - the feeling people get when they think they are anonymous.
"Social distance can cause a 55-year-old climate change sceptic with a job and a mortgage to behave like a spastic donkey with strange malicious behaviour," said Professor James Heathers, of the University of Sydney.
He said the quality of online conversations in general seemed to be worsening by the day, and had now turned into a competition to see who can yell "urrgggh lame" the loudest.
"There's no turn-taking, or reacting like there is in face-to-face communication," he said. "The conversational structure is completely broken and there’s no thoughtful consideration of issues."
Psychiatrist Dr Tanveer Ahmed said people who troll may well feel a sense of regret, guilt or shame afterwards but mostly they rationalise their behaviour.
“It's a bit like the day after a big party - a part of you could be filled with regret but most of you is like, 'I was off my face, I'm giving myself a pass'."
He said that people don't feel the need to moderate their behaviour when they were online.
"The ability to say 'hi how's it going' to people we dislike helps us function in society, but that facade isn’t required online and often the first thoughts that come to mind – thoughts that would be unacceptable in other forums – are the first ones we bang up into a comment section on the web."
He said a sense of power was important to how people behaved online. "You're far more likely to be a troll if you’re a relative weakling elsewhere," he said.
"The internet is kind of a Wizard of Oz type setting, where people can feel big, whereas in another social setting they can be, well, pissheads frankly."
MEET THE TROLLS
BEN
- "It just makes me happy when I can make someone angry. It sounds weird but I kind of feed off their anger. The angrier I can get them, the better I feel. I'd feel responsible but I wouldn't care. I've pretty much lost all hope for humanity anyway, I don't believe that anything can save people."
SARAH
- "I randomly targeted a lady for no reason, humiliated her for no reason - just to be a bitch. Looking back now it was petty.. I’m one of those remorseful trolls."
JAMES
- "On gaming sites, if you don’t troll you’re pretty much seen as someone who is sucking up to the site moderators. It's just my mentality to make it personal and a lot of people take things way too seriously – especially on social networking sites."



http://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/it-just-makes-me-happy-when-i-can-make-someone-angry-a-special-investigation-into-the-dark-world-of-trolling/story-fndo4dzn-1226283852843

[⊙＿⊙]

Newsgroup spam ➡ a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

*****

Newsgroup spam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

Spamming of Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates e-mail spam. The first widely recognized Usenet spam (though not the most famous) was posted on 18 January 1994 by Clarence L. Thomas IV, a sysadmin at Andrews University.[1][2] Entitled "Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon",[3] it was a fundamentalist religious tract claiming that "this world's history is coming to a climax." The newsgroup posting bot Serdar Argic also appeared in early 1994, posting tens of thousands of messages to various newsgroups, consisting of identical copies of a political screed relating to the Armenian Genocide.

The first "commercial" Usenet spam,[2][4] and the one which is often (mistakenly) claimed to be the first Usenet spam of any sort, was an advertisement for legal services entitled "Green Card Lottery - Final One?".[5] It was posted on April 12, 1994, by Arizona lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, and hawked legal representation for United States immigrants seeking papers ("green cards").

Usenet convention defines spamming as "excessive multiple posting", that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). During the early 1990s there was substantial controversy among Usenet system administrators (news admins) over the use of cancel messages to control spam. A "cancel message" is a directive to news servers to delete a posting, causing it to be inaccessible. Some regarded this as a bad precedent, leaning towards censorship, while others considered it a proper use of the available tools to control the growing spam problem.

A culture of neutrality towards content precluded defining spam on the basis of advertisement or commercial solicitations. The word "spam" was usually taken to mean "excessive multiple posting (EMP)", and other neologisms were coined for other abuses – such as "velveeta" (from the processed cheese product of that name) for "excessive cross-posting".[6] A subset of spam was deemed "cancellable spam", for which it is considered justified to issue third-party cancel messages.[7]

In the late 1990s, spam became used as a means of vandalising newsgroups, with malicious users committing acts of sporgery to make targeted newsgroups all but unreadable without heavily filtering. A prominent example occurred in alt.religion.scientology.

Prevalent in recent times is the MI-5 Persecution spam, which is well known across many newsgroups. These rambling postings often appear as clusters of twenty or more messages with varying subjects and content, but all related to Mike Corley's perceived surveillance of himself by MI5, the British intelligence agency. These rambling messages used to state the originator as ***@mi5.gov.uk. Lately (December 2007) the spammer has taken to altering the "from" address and subject line in an attempt to get past newsgroup "kill" filters. This UK-based spammer readily admits that he has mental illness in several of his postings. See also The Corley Conspiracy.

The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "spamminess". The use of the BI and spam-detection software has led to Usenet being policed by anti-spam volunteers, who purge newsgroups of spam by sending cancels and filtering it out on the way into servers. This very active form of policing has meant that Usenet is a far less attractive target to spammers than it used to be, and most of the industrial-scale spammers have now moved into e-mail spam instead.

Google Usenet News Archive

Unfortunately, the advent of the large Usenet archive kept as part of the Google Groups website, has made Usenet more attractive to spammers than ever. The goal in this case is not just to reach the members of a newsgroup, but to also take advantage of the fact that Google gives a higher pagerank to websites that are referred to by these messages, which are catalogued and mirrored in multiple languages at Google's top-level domain. Critics have suggested that Google has ulterior motives for "turning a blind eye" to the problem since the websites being pointed to use Google ads, which potentially generate revenue for both the spammer AND Google. The spam is extremely unfair to the companies paying Google and the spammer for an ad-click, as the most prevalent current spam (2010) is trying to trick readers into clicking on web ads by referring to them as images and saying that a link is hidden in them "due to high sex content" or that a link hidden in the image (Google ad) will take them to a "PayPal form" that will give them money.[8][9]

While most newsreaders filter the spam at either the server or user level, Google does not filter spam out of its Usenet News archive. Google does, however, offer spam filtering for groups that decide to abandon Usenet and form a moderated Google Group, which gives another reason why Google would turn a blind eye to spam in its archive of Usenet News.

See also

Sporgery
Cancelbot
References

Templeton, Brad. "Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse". Retrieved 11 July 2006.
"20 Year Archive on Google Groups". Google. 2003. Retrieved 11 July 2006.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9401191510.AA18576%40jse.stat.ncsu.edu
"History of Spam". Mailmsg.com. Archived from the original on 26 March 2006. Retrieved 11 July 2006.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2odj9q%2425q%40herald.indirect.com
"velveeta" from The Jargon File 4.4.7
FAQ: Current Usenet spam thresholds and guidelines at faqs.org
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/eb8005557ad288f2/aa7523840180dafa?lnk=gst&q=high+sex+content#aa7523840180dafa
http://groups.google.com/group/cakewalk.coffeehouse/browse_thread/thread/336167892f7ac19e/b5581be337345d54?q=paypal+form
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newsgroup_spam&oldid=735587772"
Categories: SpammingUsenet
This page was last modified on 21 August 2016, at 19:38.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

[⊙＿⊙]

Newsgroup spam - a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

*****

Newsgroup spam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

Spamming of Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates e-mail spam. The first widely recognized Usenet spam (though not the most famous) was posted on 18 January 1994 by Clarence L. Thomas IV, a sysadmin at Andrews University.[1][2] Entitled "Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon",[3] it was a fundamentalist religious tract claiming that "this world's history is coming to a climax." The newsgroup posting bot Serdar Argic also appeared in early 1994, posting tens of thousands of messages to various newsgroups, consisting of identical copies of a political screed relating to the Armenian Genocide.

The first "commercial" Usenet spam,[2][4] and the one which is often (mistakenly) claimed to be the first Usenet spam of any sort, was an advertisement for legal services entitled "Green Card Lottery - Final One?".[5] It was posted on April 12, 1994, by Arizona lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, and hawked legal representation for United States immigrants seeking papers ("green cards").

Usenet convention defines spamming as "excessive multiple posting", that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). During the early 1990s there was substantial controversy among Usenet system administrators (news admins) over the use of cancel messages to control spam. A "cancel message" is a directive to news servers to delete a posting, causing it to be inaccessible. Some regarded this as a bad precedent, leaning towards censorship, while others considered it a proper use of the available tools to control the growing spam problem.

A culture of neutrality towards content precluded defining spam on the basis of advertisement or commercial solicitations. The word "spam" was usually taken to mean "excessive multiple posting (EMP)", and other neologisms were coined for other abuses – such as "velveeta" (from the processed cheese product of that name) for "excessive cross-posting".[6] A subset of spam was deemed "cancellable spam", for which it is considered justified to issue third-party cancel messages.[7]

In the late 1990s, spam became used as a means of vandalising newsgroups, with malicious users committing acts of sporgery to make targeted newsgroups all but unreadable without heavily filtering. A prominent example occurred in alt.religion.scientology.

Prevalent in recent times is the MI-5 Persecution spam, which is well known across many newsgroups. These rambling postings often appear as clusters of twenty or more messages with varying subjects and content, but all related to Mike Corley's perceived surveillance of himself by MI5, the British intelligence agency. These rambling messages used to state the originator as ***@mi5.gov.uk. Lately (December 2007) the spammer has taken to altering the "from" address and subject line in an attempt to get past newsgroup "kill" filters. This UK-based spammer readily admits that he has mental illness in several of his postings. See also The Corley Conspiracy.

The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "spamminess". The use of the BI and spam-detection software has led to Usenet being policed by anti-spam volunteers, who purge newsgroups of spam by sending cancels and filtering it out on the way into servers. This very active form of policing has meant that Usenet is a far less attractive target to spammers than it used to be, and most of the industrial-scale spammers have now moved into e-mail spam instead.

Google Usenet News Archive

Unfortunately, the advent of the large Usenet archive kept as part of the Google Groups website, has made Usenet more attractive to spammers than ever. The goal in this case is not just to reach the members of a newsgroup, but to also take advantage of the fact that Google gives a higher pagerank to websites that are referred to by these messages, which are catalogued and mirrored in multiple languages at Google's top-level domain. Critics have suggested that Google has ulterior motives for "turning a blind eye" to the problem since the websites being pointed to use Google ads, which potentially generate revenue for both the spammer AND Google. The spam is extremely unfair to the companies paying Google and the spammer for an ad-click, as the most prevalent current spam (2010) is trying to trick readers into clicking on web ads by referring to them as images and saying that a link is hidden in them "due to high sex content" or that a link hidden in the image (Google ad) will take them to a "PayPal form" that will give them money.[8][9]

While most newsreaders filter the spam at either the server or user level, Google does not filter spam out of its Usenet News archive. Google does, however, offer spam filtering for groups that decide to abandon Usenet and form a moderated Google Group, which gives another reason why Google would turn a blind eye to spam in its archive of Usenet News.

See also

Sporgery
Cancelbot
References

Templeton, Brad. "Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse". Retrieved 11 July 2006.
"20 Year Archive on Google Groups". Google. 2003. Retrieved 11 July 2006.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9401191510.AA18576%40jse.stat.ncsu.edu
"History of Spam". Mailmsg.com. Archived from the original on 26 March 2006. Retrieved 11 July 2006.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2odj9q%2425q%40herald.indirect.com
"velveeta" from The Jargon File 4.4.7
FAQ: Current Usenet spam thresholds and guidelines at faqs.org
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/eb8005557ad288f2/aa7523840180dafa?lnk=gst&q=high+sex+content#aa7523840180dafa
http://groups.google.com/group/cakewalk.coffeehouse/browse_thread/thread/336167892f7ac19e/b5581be337345d54?q=paypal+form
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newsgroup_spam&oldid=735587772"
Categories: SpammingUsenet
This page was last modified on 21 August 2016, at 19:38.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

[Stephen Wolstenholme]

Post by ⊙＿⊙
Newsgroup spam - a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

That has been happening for decades. It got worse when Google groups
copied the newgraoups. Good newsreader applications like Agent can
easily be set to classify most spam as junk or kill filter spammers.

Steve