Why?

Like I have said before - I don't normally see an unusual amount of spam at all. In fact, all I really see is the blogspot spam and the occasional religious entry.

I don't know where the spam is getting filtered. It may be at the ISP, or alternatively it may be in my new reader which is Outlook Express.

When I click on comp.arch.embedded I occasionally fleetingly see the number of unread messages as being very high, but then immediately drop down to a sensible number. This would seem to indicate the filtering was being done by the news reader.

On the other hand, the one time I did get caught by a flood of spam, when I turned my computer on the next morning clicking on one of the spam messages brought up an error message saying the message was no longer present on the server. This would see to indicate that the filtering was being done on the server and I was unlucky enough to download the messages between them arriving on the server and the servers binning them.

In any case, there must a solution for you I just don't know if its changing client or server.

I am not sure what you are currently seeing since I am getting a clean feed at the moment; earlier this week there was a little 'sporge' leaking through for me but now it is gone. My provider is 'supernews.com'; perhaps suggesting a change in providers to your ISP may be in order?

Regards,

Michael

As far as I know, yes. The motivation seems to be something along "you don't play with me, so I destroy your toy".

It's done at the news server. Your news server assigns a serial number to each posting it receives (and puts that into the 'X-Ref' header), and your newsreader displays the difference between the last known and the newest serial number as "number of unread messages". Just when you actually download the messages, it'll see that thousands of these messages have been cancelled in the meantime.

Changing servers should help. I use news.individual.net, who provide a well-maintained server for 10 EUR a year. In addition, I've plugged a Hamster between my newsreader and the server, which can pull several newsservers, do some filtering, and, because it assigns its own serial numbers, avoids the serial number problem completely :-)

Stefan

Ouch. Poor critter.

-- Ray

Yes, it seems like there is a correlation between the messages from some known kooks and the crap flooding.

The other reason could be an interest group trying to make c.a.e. unusable so the discussion will be forced to their private forums.

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

The ISP could do something about it. Each message has an ID of its source and path of travel. I know I've reported him several times. Still keeps coming.

Unfortunately, crap floods are not limited to c.a.e. A usual target seems to be the admin.net-abuse groups, though (often but not always mentioned as Followup-To address for crap posts, to make inexperienced users double the impact by replying "hey, stop posting this").

Stefan

Unfortunately yes.

Like an earlier poster, I now use news.individual.net at 10 Euro per annum, and never have to sight it again.

Another advantage for me, as I travel a little, this news feed can be picked on by my EEE-PC baby note book from anywhere, as long as I have a net connection.

Cheers Don...

The OP is using Google Groups which seems to be far worse for spam, sporge etc than just about any other news server out there. Google doesn't seem to respect the bulk third party cancels that get rid of a good proportion of the spam. Instead, in the quest to archive everything, they end up archiving mostly crap.

I suspect it may be a way of testing ways of overcoming spam-blocking mechanisms. Rocky

My assumption - probably known to some groupmembers from my previous postings - is that the purpose of the flood is to make most people sigh with relief when new restrictions on the net are built into law - which will of course be designed to eliminate spam.

So far the only plausible hypothesis I can think of.

Dimiter

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Rocky ha scritto: > I suspect it may be a way of testing ways of overcoming spam-blocking

or to pollute blacklist ?

In some cases, it's about mental illness.

In some cases, it's completely senseless--no different than children who break things because they're bored.

There is the related paradigm of children who spray-paint their names on walls. Carried to its extremes in Cyberspace, you get scripted techniques

Not really--not for Google Groupers. You have to be able to parse the NNTP-Posting-Host in the headers to do anything yourself. Webb pointed at a tool for those who use real newsreaders and non-web-based providers.

This is all that exists for Google Groupers: (Greasemonkey scripts for Gecko-based browsers)

As Webb said, lesser-tier providers don't do any real filtering. You have to get a provider who is a true Usenet specialist

--or put up with the sporge.

If you access the newsgroup regularly, one technique is simply to mark the entire content as read (without reading) when one of the monster uploads occurs. That way you won't miss much.

So, *that's* who benefits from all this spam. Newsservers that charge you. This particular one is already mentioned twice.

In message , Didi writes

How can these "laws" work? The Internet is international and no one can pass laws for it.

It only needs one country to ignore them and it falls over. We have that situation new where many countries us the "opt in system" for emial lists etc but the US (one of the main sources of spam) uses the "opt out" system.... Most people don't want to "unsubscribe" because if it is the wrong sort of spam it simply validates the address.

... snip ...

We have found another point of agreement. :-) Except extend the locale to the USA and Canada.

Please stop doing that... It will ruin our credibility :-))))

US is doomed to paranoia from what I have seen. One incident and they invade two countries (one of which had nothing to do with the terrorism)

It's understandable, today, to look back and see just the one incident, especially given the "9/11 9/11 9/11" drumbeat but recall that there were really *two* incidents in close succession: the al Q attacks on

An argument can be made (see

for a review and some additional links) that it was the "bio-terror" attack on Washington DC that really freaked the administration.

Which isn't to say that the prevailing attitude was not that any excuse to "get Saddam" was good enough, even if they had to fabricate one.