List and net abuses [was: Re: Trolling levels]

[François Pinard]

[Michael Hudson]

> Without wanting to sound overly pissy, can I just point out that I don't
> want to read threads about "Ruby vs Python" and the trolls therein (which
> I already don't, thanks to a nicely sharpened score file) but I also don't
> want to read people *talking about* silly threads and the trolls therein,
> which due to rampant subject changing keep reappearing in my news reader.
> Enough already!

Exactly the same feelings here.  Despite not much, it takes a bit more time
every week for tuning up score files so un-interesting messages get filtered
out.  The noise ratio on `python-list' is progressively climbing, there is
danger that we loose some of the pleasure of reading it in the long run.

> And now if we can just shoot those responsible for sending out viruses
> with "From python-list at python.org", maybe I wont be killing 70% of the
> posts in the group...

This might not be easy.

One of my (mostly unpublished) domain name and my own addresses are being
abused from far away sites for widely broadcasted UCE, either with `From' or
some fake initial `Received:'.  Seeing my own name abused has been rampant
for years (and it happened to many maintainer-friends as well, probably
because we were known as good guys), but for relatively recently, such abuse
is becoming extremely aggressive and pretty difficult to counter-fight.

My filters have to cope with hundreds of rejects every hour for the mere
abuse of my own name.  And for the abuse of my domain (forgeries seemingly
emanating from random non-existing users from that domain), the generated
rejects have been the source, on the domain MX, of several hundreds of SMTP
connection attempts, sustained at all times, night and day, for many months.
(Other people take care of our network bills, I should evaluate the impact.)
Yet, as this is all originated elsewhere, this is a bit outside our control.

And I'm nobody.  I barely imagine what `python-list' might be living, for
those having to administer lists and servers.  It might be frightening!
Happily some Python project, for any counter-measure system that might
demonstrate some efficiency against this!  But it might be difficult...

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard