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Cancelbot
A cancelbot is an automated or semi-automated process for sending out third-party cancel messages over Usenet, commonly as a stopgap measure to combat spam. History One of the earliest uses of a cancelbot was by microbiology professor Richard DePew, to remove anonymous postings in science newsgroups. Perhaps the most well known early cancelbot was used in June 1994 by Arnt Gulbrandsen within minutes of the first post of Canter & Siegel's second spam wave, as it was created in response to their "Green Card spam" in April 1994. Usenet spammers have alleged that cancelbots are a tool of the mythical Usenet cabal. Rationale Cancelbots must follow community consensus to be able to serve a useful purpose, and historically, technical criteria have been the only acceptable criteria for determining if messages are cancelable, and only a few active cancellers ever obtain the broad community support needed to be effective. Pseudosites are referenced in cancel headers by legitimate c ...
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Cancel Message
Control messages are a special kind of Usenet post that are used to control news servers. They differ from ordinary posts by a header field named Control. The body of the field contains control name and arguments. There are two historical alternatives to header field Control. They are not supported by contemporary software and forbidden according to RFC 5537. However, the traditional format of the subject line is widely used in addition to the Control header: the subject line consists of the word "cmsg" followed by control name and arguments. Types cancel A cancel message requests the deletion of a specific article. The body of the Control field contains one argument, the Message-ID of the article to delete. According to RFC 1036 only the author of the target message or the local news administrator is allowed to send a cancel (cancels not meeting this condition are called "rogue cancels"). To verify authorization the line (or line, if it exists) of the cancel message must mat ...
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Canter & Siegel
Laurence A. Canter (born June 24, 1953) and Martha S. Siegel (April 9, 1948 – September 24, 2000) were partners in a husband-and-wife firm of lawyers who posted the first massive commercial Usenet spam on April 12, 1994. This event came shortly after the National Science Foundation lifted its unofficial ban on commercial speech on the Internet, and it marks the end of the Net's early period in some views, when the original netiquette could still be enforced. Canter and Siegel were not the first Usenet spammers. The "Green Card" spam, however, was the first ''commercial'' Usenet spam, and its unapologetic authors are seen as having set the precedent for the modern global practice of spamming. Green card spam In early 1994, Canter and Siegel contracted with Leigh Benson to write a program to advertise on Usenet, but Benson was unable to write their software. In April 1994 they used a Perl script written by a programmer known only as "Jason", to generate advertisements for their ...
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Usenet Death Penalty
On Usenet, the Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) is a final penalty that may be issued against Internet service providers or single users who produce too much spam or fail to adhere to Usenet standards. It is named after the death penalty (the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for a crime), as it causes the banned user or provider to be unable to use Usenet, essentially "killing" their service. Messages that fall under the jurisdiction of a Usenet Death Penalty will be cancelled. Cancelled messages are deleted from Usenet servers and not allowed to propagate. This causes users on the affected ISP to be unable to post to Usenet, and it puts pressure on the ISP to change their policies. Notable cases include actions taken against UUNET, CompuServe, and Excite@Home. Types There are three types of Usenet Death Penalty: #''Active'': with an active UDP, messages that fall under the UDP will be automatically cancelled by third parties or their agents, such as by using can ...
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Usenet
Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980.''From Usenet to CoWebs: interacting with social information spaces'', Christopher Lueg, Danyel Fisher, Springer (2003), , Users read and post messages (called ''articles'' or ''posts'', and collectively termed ''news'') to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.The jargon file v4.4.7
, Jargon File Archive.

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Spam (electronic)
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose (especially the fraudulent purpose of phishing), or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly. Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no ...
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Usenet Cabal
The backbone cabal was an informal organization of large-site news server administrators of the worldwide distributed newsgroup-based discussion system Usenet. It existed from about 1983 at least into the 2000s. The cabal was created in an effort to facilitate reliable propagation of new Usenet posts. While in the 1970s and 1980s many news servers only operated during night time to save on the cost of long-distance communication, servers of the backbone cabal were available 24 hours a day. The administrators of these servers gained sufficient influence in the otherwise anarchic Usenet community to be able to push through controversial changes, for instance the Great Renaming of Usenet newsgroups during 1987. History As Usenet has few technologically or legally enforced hierarchies, those that formed were largely social. People acquired power through persuasion (both publicly and privately), public debate, force of will (often via aggressive flames), garnering authority and respec ...
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Breidbart Index
The Breidbart Index, developed by Seth Breidbart, is the most significant ''cancel index'' in Usenet. A cancel index measures the dissemination intensity of substantively identical articles. If the index exceeds a threshold the articles are called newsgroup spam. They can then be removed using third party cancel controls. Cancel Index *Crossposting is the act of posting the same message to multiple newsgroups *Multiposting is the act of posting the same contents multiple times The principal idea of the ''Breidbart-Index'' is to give these methods different weight. With a crossposted message less data needs to be transferred and stored. And excessive crossposts (ECP) are also a likely beginner's error, while excessive multiposts (EMP) suggest deliberate usage of special software. The crucial issue is categorizing multiple articles as ''substantively identical''. This includes *byte-for-byte identical messages *otherwise identical postings minimally customized for each group it ...
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Rich Salz
InterNetNews (INN) is a Usenet news server package, originally released by Rich Salz in 1991, and presented at the Summer 1992 USENIX conference in San Antonio, Texas. It was the first news server with integrated NNTP functionality. While previous servers processed articles individually or in batches, ''innd'' is a single continuously running process that receives articles from the network, files them, and records what remote hosts should receive them. Readers can access articles directly from the disk in the same manner as B News and C News, but an included program, called ''nnrpd'', also serves newsreaders that employ NNTP. A later improvement was the Cyclical News Filesystem (CNFS), which sequentially stores articles in large on-disk buffers. This method, implemented by Scott Fritchie, greatly increased performance by eliminating the operating system overhead needed to deal with thousands of individual article files. James Brister's ''innfeed'' program was also added to ...
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Dave The Resurrector
Dave the Resurrector was a so-called "resurrector bot" that responded to any attempts at canceling a message on the usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse by re-posting the message. Ohm, Paul K Skirvin, Tim It was written by Chris Lewis. The bot is notable as one of the first escalations in the spam arms race. See also *Cancelbot A cancelbot is an automated or semi-automated process for sending out third-party cancel messages over Usenet, commonly as a stopgap measure to combat spam. History One of the earliest uses of a cancelbot was by microbiology professor Richard ..., a process that sends out cancel messages Notes References * * Anti-spam Newsgroups {{Compu-network-stub ...
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