OT - Windows 7 newsgroup issues
Paul wrote:
Bill in Co wrote:
Paul wrote:
Bill in Co wrote:
Just FYI. I just contacted Giganews, and they basically said they
have - and want - NO control over it. Here is a the "chat"
conversation I had with them just now:
Live Chat with Support
My chat note to them:
Binaries are now being posted on a text based newsgroup:
alt.windows7.general, which is a violation of your policy (aka
spamming). Specifically, some idiot is now posting binaries on the
alt.windows7.general newsgroup now, and it just started this week. Can
you take care of this, please? TNX
William
Hello, my name is Jared. Thank you for contacting Giganews Support! One
moment while I take a look at your request, please.
I apologize for the trouble, but we do not monitor or regulate any of
the content on our servers and thus can not remove any content
Please let me know if you have any other questions for me
Jared
Even if it violates your policy?
William
Yes even if it does. We can not be responsible for any content put on
our servers. This is in part so that we can take no responsibility to
any content that may exist.
Jared
I just thought there were rules that had to apply, but I guess not. So
there is nothing I can do, and I can't report it as spam, either, I
guess? William
No, Im afraid not. I apologize for the inconvenience
Jared
Is there anything that I could report that would constitute abuse, or
is this just a free for all? That's disappointing to hear.
William
No there is not. I am sorry. We can not regulate anything or then we
have to regulate everything which would prevent us from offering access
to multiple types of content.
Jared
OK then, sorry to hear that. Thanks.
William
If you have any further questions or concerns, please let us know.
Please remember that Giganews Support is available 24/7 including
holidays. Bye for now
Jared
Thank you for contacting us.
Chat session disconnected.
Unbelievable! They offer the "service" of providing a server, and
*that's it*. Period. But alas, I guess it's just yet another sign of
the times, with respect to "Customer Service".
At least L. L. Bean still offers good quality customer service (and
perhaps a few others), but I guess that's about it, these days.
https://www.giganews.com/legal/aup.html
https://www.giganews.com/legal/tos_personal.html
It's not worded like normal ones.
Normal ones say "we will respond to legal actions",
meaning a subpoena for addresses will be honored, up
to the event horizon of the server. In some countries,
even with anonymized headers, there's a requirement to keep
addresses for around a month or so. The giganews makes no
mention of what happens if they're served by law enforcement.
Maybe the employees hide in the lunchroom and sing kumbaya.
Since your reseller is Earthlink, maybe you can ask them
about whether they have a front end to the service. If you've
been given a sort of "news.giganews.net" style address, then at
a guess, their reseller relationship is really a "hands-off" one.
And I cannot imagine a corporation using the reseller method,
to give a rats ass about what happens. The sole reason for using
the reseller option, is so maintenance is "Earthlink-staff-free".
My previous ISP used to run their own news servers. And they had
admins who rode shotgun. (I almost got TOSsed for forwarding
a spammy advert for running shoes, with my joke at the end of it.)
And their excuse when they canceled the service entirely, was
that paying admins was too much trouble. And they also didn't
give a price reduction because of the loss of that service.
Moves like this by facilities like Giganews, is primarily about
DMCA. For example, at least one of the servers changed how it
handled headers, making it harder for their "opponent" to file
automated DMCA takedowns with a robot. So they really have
gone "underground" in a sense, buggering the service so it can
serve binary content (which pays the bills), with the least
possible DMCA kickback (from robots).
*******
Would giganews care if the rest of USENET issued a UDP ?
They might.
And flooding a group, no matter how insignificant, is how
you get that UDP on the radar. That's the nuclear option.
That's when the CABAL gets its act together, which is
less and less likely as time passes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_Death_Penalty
It's up to the abuse address on the originating source, to
respond to complaints. The admins on the free servers, may
choose to not respond at all, at least initially. You'll
get a "not my problem". However, if a few million longish
message increase the bandwidth bill for them, the CABAL
email system will spring to life. Money talks.
Paul
I think this is what it's going to come down to. It's not my problem,
and I don't care, which is basically what the chat guy was saying. But
I did send an email to anyway.
Earthlink basically doesn't want anything to do with this, and so much
so, that any new subscribers to Earthlink can't even get any access to
Usenet newsgroups anymore. And that happened a long time ago! I was just
grandfathered in, since I've been with them for so long (almost an
eternity, it seems now).
At any rate, the only annoyance (which I guess is a minor one) is the
appearance of that "xxxxx messages not downloaded" in the taskbar, even
though those messages are not really there as far as my access of such
junk is concerned. So I just have to say "Catch Up" to reset the message
counter. That said, it's still a slight annoyance, since I can no
longer rely on the new message counter to give me an accurate reading.
So you're either using a filter in your own newsreader,
which causes that symptom. Or, the server is using
its own cancelbot to cancel those messages. The MID
exists in the server, but the message itself is canceled
by the bot. Maybe that would give the symptoms of "thousands
of things", but none of them being delivered to you.
There's more than one way to solve the problem. The
cancelbot concept is probably a better usage of
computing resources. Putting a PERL filter against
every upload, would cost quite a few CPU cycles.
And no matter how "big" the newsserver is, the admins
uniformly pride themselves on "automation". They don't
want to sit around 24/7 with mouse clicks and play
"whack-a-mole". If they're going to fix something,
a computer will be implementing the method. They will be
off playing golf or going to the movies.
Paul
I don't have a filter for that, so it must be at their end. If their server
is using a cancelbot to cancel those messages, I don't know why I don't get
an accurate count, and have to use Catch Up to reset it. Just today it said
something like 10,000 messages. The only thing I do know is I tried to see
if I could get any of that crap by simply using a wide open find search on
the messages, but only the valid (text) messages show up in that count (like
searching the alt.windows7.general newsgroup for all messages with a space,
or letter a, or a period, or what have you :-)
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