Subject: Important info regarding complaints (Re: FREE 1 YR. MAGAZINE SUB...)

From: [email-masked] (Doug Yanega)
Date: 2 Nov 1995 17:00:14 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, Christopher Majka wrote:

> >   From: [email-masked],[email-masked],[email-masked].
> >          jp,[email-masked],[email-masked],[email-masked]
> >          ,[email-masked],[email-masked],[email-masked],gar@un
> >          ee.edu,[email-masked],[email-masked],[email-masked],[email-masked]
> >          (Yoshio Koseki)
> 
> All forgeries:
> 
> Send your complaints to:  <[email-masked]>
> 
> This is what I wrote:
>  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> I draw your attention to the following post made by your user 
> <[email-masked]>.
> 
> This post is blantantly commercial and was made to a
> non-commercial newsgroup, sci.bio.entomology.lepidoptera. It is completely
> off-topic since sci.bio.entomology.lepidoptera concerns itself solely with
> Lepidoptera and not with magazine subscriptions.
> 
> You will also note that it was prolificaly cross-posted to many other
> newsgroups for which it is also off-topic.
> 
> I trust you will take appropriate disciplinary action and that you will
> inform me as to the results of this.

For those of us - ANY of us who are disturbed by mass commercial
advertisements, the FIRST step is to look for messages in the newsgroup
news.admin.net-abuse.misc
to see what is being done, if anything, about the message in question
(since, as a rule, THOUSANDS of copies are sent out, and as such are fair
game for automatic cancellation - I'll bet most of you were unaware that
the Net had an "immune system" keeping the newsgroups relatively
Spam-free). In the present case, there is NOWHERE to complain, because
KrazyKev *IS* the postmaster at KJL.com (his name is Kevin Jay Lipsitz, in
Staten Island, New York, and he has forged some 100+ false identities and
false accounts in the months he's been running his e-mail scams). This
particular person is one of the most remorseless and devious entities on
the Internet, and has even taken to scanning the Net for articles written
about his activities, and illegally forging cancellations of those
incriminating messages to cover his tracks. About the only useful
complaint one might make in this case is to one's own Usenet service
provider, asking that they "alias out" messages originating at kjl.com
(not all of his messages bear that address, but it would help). These
folks make a *living* parasitizing the Net, though, so it's very hard to
track them down or stop them completely.
   One thing I *should* point out for reference, is that complaining
because of *content* is viewed as the weakest possible argument for
disciplinary action on the Net; either the message must represent an
illegal activity (the most common are pyramid schemes), or it must be part
of a mass-mailing (most easily spotted when there is a LONG list of
cross-posted newsgroups in the header) to generate any genuine
intervention by administrators. Complaints based on content are, perhaps
correctly, viewed as censorship. There is a war being fought over this,
much of it behind the scenes (again, just like an immune system), but a
war nonetheless which will determine the future of the Internet. On that
ominous note, let's get back to leps... ;-)
-- 
Doug Yanega                    Illinois Natural History Survey,
607 E. Peabody Dr. Champaign, IL 61820  USA    (217) 244-6817
affiliate, University of Illinois Dept. of Entomology
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is
    the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick