Filtering the Anonymous USENET Trolls? 32
BoneFlower asks: "Anonymous remailers are all well and good, but sometimes people use them to abuse people through email or through trolling newsgroups. I've had limited results filtering "anonymous" on a USENET group I frequent but many anonymous remailer trolls get through. The group was nearly unuseable for over a week due to the volume of anonymous remailer trolls. Does anyone have tips on filtering them out? I personally use Forte Agent 1.9.1, many others use Netscape/Mozilla, OE, and various others. If you could help us out, we'd appreciate it."
Re:Avoiding trolls (Score:2)
I just have a hot-key mapped to "kill", and then I can kill posts (and articles) based on a regular expression executed against the thread, the subject, or the poster of a message. It's really cool! We never had anything like it back in the 80's, when we were stuck with crappy USENET news readers.
No, wait, I'm all fucked up. The newsreaders we were using before some of the SlashDot posters were born make the SlashDot interface just look sad.
Re:Avoiding trolls (Score:1)
Ahhh...the simple goodness of trn.
please post the name of the group (Score:1)
Re:please post the name of the group (Score:2)
Method of filtering (Score:2)
Re:Method of filtering (Score:2, Informative)
How ironic... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How ironic... (Score:1, Funny)
Yeah, and your point is?
Re:How ironic... (Score:4, Informative)
Your statement has some element of truth to it. Probably 99% of the usenet data is devoted to these time honored traditions. However, these are generally not the areas that are inflicted with trolls. The binary newsgroups typically are pretty well organized, and most of the commentary is devoted to requests or to flaming those who haven't learned how to post properly yet. Pron newsgroups get a lot of spam and heated discussions as to image quality... or content quality. *Ahem*... or so I've heard.
The trolls prey upon the general discussion groups. That is because they can actually get a voice there. If you're in a binary group, you're there to download binaries, and thus, you're going to download the multipart messages that are visibly 10-15 megs in size. The individual messages you can scroll by in a heartbeat without ever paying attention to anything more than the message size. Even the title won't stand out. Trolls get no audience this way. Now, if the trolls took to posting large binaries for kicks, that would be something different. And while I'm not saying that they don't, I've never encountered this on usenet, although I have seen it done on the various P2P networks. It would appear, that if someone's going to spend 3 days uploading something, they're not going to waste their upstream on something just so one person can download it then post a warning message to the rest of the group to ignore it.
-Restil
Do they actually make money? (Score:2)
Re:Do they actually make money? (Score:2)
Re:Do they actually make money? (Score:2)
Not only that but the lowest number of susceptiable readers. Nowadays very few stupid people know about USENET or how to use it.
Re:Do they actually make money? (Score:2)
Really? I just tried to read through a few groups, and it appears the "stupid" people are out in full effect.
That said, I know what you mean - Very few people that have only been online in the last 3-4 years even know what a newsgroup is.
Re:Do they actually make money? (Score:2)
Set up a local spool (Score:3, Informative)
If you decide to do this, you can usually perform the tests during the ingest process (if it's always running), or as a daemon that periodically runs and checks the most recent messages.
The results can be staggering. I was doing this on a couple alt.* groups as a test, and a few simple rules could reduce the SNR from about 1-in-20 messages to about 2-in-3 messages. More importantly, this approach tends to eliminate the stuff that's mindlessly repeated hundreds of times. Most people don't mind getting a spam message once, but seeing the 247th identical message to make your breasts and penis larger (*who* needs this stuff?!) can make anyone lose it.
Re:Set up a local spool (Score:1)
Serdar Argic (Score:1)
Re:Serdar Argic (Score:2)
Re:Serdar Argic (Score:2)
Re:Serdar Argic (Score:1)
Nonetheless, let us return to the fact of the matter:
Source: "/usr/dict/words" by Ritchie, Dennis
From "words"
Aaron
Ababa
aback
abaft
abandon
abandoned
abandoning
abandonment
abandons
abase
abased
abasement
abasements
(err....)
Source: "The Linux Genocide" by Bill Gates
From "The Death of IP"
Pages 42-45
"In 1812, Richard Stallman assembled an army of criminals, hackers and luddites, armed them with evil circumvention devices and proceeded to steal all the software in the kingdom of Uruguay. Not content to merely steal intellectual property, the thugs slaked their lust by massacaring hundreds of millions of innocent women and children. Witnesses at the time described the excessive zeal with which the marauding Stallmanists destroyed whole villages, and every technological innovation their ignorant hands could grasp. The horrors of the Linux Genocide are well known to historians everywhere and are documented in even more detail in:"
R.A. :D uga
Re:Serdar Argic (Score:1)