30 What is Net Abuse and where can I learn more about it? (Alt.Tv.Xena)
Description
This article is from the Xena: Warrior Princess FAQ, by Paul Hilling p.hilling@bigfoot.com with numerous contributions by others.
30 What is Net Abuse and where can I learn more about it? (Alt.Tv.Xena)
Net Abuse refers to any of several generally disapproved
practices. The practices include the use of fake addresses (not
screen names -- as long as email can reach you, screen names are
okay), posting the same article to multiple news groups (this is
called "spam"), cross-posting off-topic articles to multiple news
groups, posting crude and malicious articles (such as defaming
Jesus in a Christian news group, or telling C programmers that
BASIC rules -- these are called "trolls"), or posting the same
article dozens of times, etc.
It is common to see "fake" addresses on articles. As long as the
people posting the articles mind their manners otherwise, no one
really cares what they call themselves. But using a fake address
may be a violation of your ISP's guidelines and service
agreement. And if you try to hide behind a faked address in
order to flame someone, there are usually people who can track
you down from the information contained in the headers of your
articles, so you aren't likely to get away with anything.
The worst offenders are the trolls, the illegal pyramid schemes,
and heavily cross-posted off-topic articles. In some cases you
can complain to an offender's ISP and that service provider will
send out a cancellation message that kills the thread on all the
machines where it's propagated (well, most of them).
There is also a group of volunteer system administrators who
regularly browse news groups on a random basis and send out
cancellation advisories, usually just to remove binary files, but
also to get rid of "spam" articles. These folks will post an
advisory article telling the appropriate news groups what they
are doing and why. Their activities are accepted Usenet practice
and they come as close as anyone to being monitors for Usenet
traffic.
There is a FAQ on net abuse that discusses many aspects of good
and bad Usenet behavior. It also outlines accepted responses
used in handling abusive articles, and explains why other
practices (such as posting follow-up articles) are discouraged.
The Net Abuse FAQ is posted regularly to
news.admin.net-abuse.misc and to news.answers. The Net Abuse FAQ
explains where and how to report net abuse or suspected abuse.
The net abuse newsgroup maintains several FAQs. The ATX FAQ is
not guaranteed to reflect the current views and information
provided in the net abuse FAQs. The reader is therefore advised
to retrieve the current Net Abuse FAQs for more current and
detailed information about net abuse.
A master HTML version of the net abuse FAQ may be useful
(http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html).
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