Chris Lewis (Usenet)

Last updated

Chris Lewis
NationalityCanadian
OccupationSecurity consultant
Organization SpamhausTechnology
Known forVolunteer "despamming"
Operating cancelbots
on Usenet

Chris Lewis is a Canadian security consultant [1] from Ottawa, [2] who fought spam on Usenet and the early Internet. Active in volunteer anti-spam efforts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lewis was described in Net.wars (1997) as "the best known active canceler of spam and other mass postings" at the time. In April 1998, he organized an unsuccessful moratorium with forty other anti-spam volunteers in an attempt to boycott internet service providers into doing their share against spam. He worked as a systems architect for Nortel and, as of 2017, is Chief Scientist at SpamhausTechnology.

Contents

Career

Lewis worked as a senior security architect at Bell Northern Research, then as a systems architect for Nortel from 1991 to 2012. [3] [4] In 2002, Lewis led a five-man spam-filtering team at a major telecommunications company [lower-alpha 1] with over 45,000 employees. His unofficial title was "spam issues architect", and he was conservative with the messages he filters so as not to accidentally hide potential business offers. He said at the time that, while Usenet spammers had become unsuccessful, email spammers were still prevalent. [5] In late 2012, Nortel downsized and laid off Lewis. As of 2017, Lewis works as Chief Scientist at SpamhausTechnology, an organization targeting email spammers. [3]

Volunteer anti-spam efforts

Lewis was involved in volunteer anti-spam efforts on Usenet [6] and operated many bots, [7] including cancelbots, as part of these efforts. [8] Journalists Wendy M. Grossman and Andrew Leonard describe him as "the best known active canceler of spam and other mass postings" and "one of Usenet's foremost" spam-cancelers at the time. [9] [7] Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory's website called him a "[m]ajor Canadian despammer who has probably canceled more usenet abuse than anybody else." [10]

Lewis wrote and ran Dave the Resurrector, a "resurrector bot" that reported and reposted unauthorized cancel messages in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.misc, after a "particularly obnoxious run of cancels" sent by Kevin Lipsitz. The "resurrector bot" was named after Dave Hayes. [11] In 1995, Lewis stirred controversy after he canceled messages from Austin Bastable, a voluntary euthanasia activist suffering from multiple sclerosis, because they were mass e-mails and therefore met the definition of spam. He defended his actions by saying that while he sympathized with Bastable's position, "spam is spam". [12] In September 1996, Lewis was able to restore over 25,000 canceled posts with Dave the Resurrector after a cancelbot attacked several newsgroups on Asian and Jewish topics. [9] [7]

In April 1998, Lewis coordinated a strike with forty other anti-spam volunteers due to the failure of some internet service providers and websites to help implement anti-spam filters—spam and spam-canceling messages were estimated by Lewis to make up 80% of Usenet traffic at the time. [2] [13] [14] However, predictions that Usenet would suffer a meltdown from spam traffic occurred only on a smaller scale, as some servers and small ISPs failing to use filters crashed. There was also a lack of "solidarity" between all volunteers, and "Cosmo Roadkill", one of their most active, continued to cancel spam regardless. The boycott was declared on March 31 by Lewis, [1] and ended after two weeks. Lewis said that the boycott helped raise awareness towards spam and pressured smaller ISPs and newsgroup administrators into implementing filters. Some alt. newsgroups may have been lost. [15]

Lewis co-founded CAUCE Canada, the first organization of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), alongside John Levine and Neil Schwartzman on November 30, 1998, and was later its treasurer. [3] [16] He was a member of the despamming group Cabal Network Security/SPUTUM. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spamming</span> Unsolicited electronic messages, especially advertisements

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, 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.

The Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology started in 1991 to discuss the controversial beliefs of Scientology, as well as the activities of the Church of Scientology, which claims exclusive intellectual property rights thereto and is viewed by many as a dangerous cult. The newsgroup has become the focal point of an aggressive battle known as Scientology versus the Internet, which has taken place both online and in the courts.

news.admin.net-abuse.email is a Usenet newsgroup devoted to discussion of the abuse of email systems, specifically through spam and similar attacks. According to a timeline compiled by Keith Lynch, news.admin.net-abuse.email was the first widely available electronic forum for discussing spam.

Serdar Argic was the alias used in one of the first automated newsgroup spam incidents on Usenet, with the objective of denying the Armenian genocide.

A Domain Name System blocklist, Domain Name System-based blackhole list, Domain Name System blacklist (DNSBL) or real-time blackhole list (RBL) is a service for operation of mail servers to perform a check via a Domain Name System (DNS) query whether a sending host's IP address is blacklisted for email spam. Most mail server software can be configured to check such lists, typically rejecting or flagging messages from such sites.

Sporgery is the disruptive act of posting a flood of articles to a Usenet newsgroup, with the article headers falsified so that they appear to have been posted by others. The word is a portmanteau of spam and forgery, coined by German software developer, and critic of Scientology, Tilman Hausherr.

Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email spam</span> Unsolicited electronic advertising by e-mail

Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Spamhaus Project</span> Organization targetting email spammers

The Spamhaus Project is an international organisation based in the Principality of Andorra, founded in 1998 by Steve Linford to track email spammers and spam-related activity. The name spamhaus, a pseudo-German expression, was coined by Linford to refer to an internet service provider, or other firm, which spams or knowingly provides service to spammers.

HipCrime was both to the screenname of a Usenet user and a software application distributed by, and presumably written by, this individual or group. The name derives from a neologism in the John Brunner science fiction novel Stand on Zanzibar.

Usenet II was a proposed alternative to the classic Usenet hierarchy, started in 1998. Unlike the original Usenet, it was peered only between "sound sites" and employed a system of rules to keep out spam.

SpamCop is an email spam reporting service, allowing recipients of unsolicited bulk or commercial email to report IP addresses found by SpamCop's analysis to be senders of the spam to the abuse reporting addresses of those IP addresses. SpamCop uses these reports to compile a list of computers sending spam called the "SpamCop Blocking List" or "SpamCop Blacklist" (SCBL).

SORBS is a list of e-mail servers suspected of sending or relaying spam. It has been augmented with complementary lists that include various other classes of hosts, allowing for customized email rejection by its users.

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.

CAUCE, or the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, is a non-profit advocacy group that works to reduce the amount of unsolicited commercial email, or spam, via legislation. CAUCE was founded in 1997 by participants in the USENET newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email and the SPAM-L mailing list.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Usenet</span> Worldwide computer-based distributed discussion system

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. Users read and post messages 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 history of email spam reaches back to the mid-1990s when commercial use of the internet first became possible - and marketers and publicists began to test what was possible.

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. It was written by Chris Lewis.

The Meow Wars were an early example of a flame war sent over Usenet which began in 1996 and ended circa 1998. Its participants were known as "Meowers". The war was characterized by posters from one newsgroup "crapflooding", or posting a large volume of nonsense messages, to swamp on-topic communication in other groups. Ultimately, the flame war affected many boards, with Roisin Kiberd writing in Motherboard, a division of Vice, that esoteric Internet vocabulary was created as a result of the Meow Wars.

References

  1. ↑ Unnamed in the article; presumably Nortel.
  1. 1 2 3 Glave, James (April 10, 1998). "Anti-Spam Boycott Faces Fragmented Ranks" . Wired . Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  2. 1 2 Ward, Mark (April 18, 1998). "Throwing a spammer in the works" . New Scientist . Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  3. 1 2 3 Lewis 2017.
  4. ↑ "Chris Lewis". Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network . Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  5. ↑ Olsen, Stefanie (March 21, 2002). "Spam flood forces companies to take desperate measures". cnet News . Archived from the original on June 16, 2011.
  6. ↑ Leonard 1997, p. 167.
  7. 1 2 3 Leonard 1997, p. 153.
  8. ↑ Leonard 1997, p. 176.
  9. 1 2 Grossman, Wendy M. (1997). Net.wars. NYU Press. p. 147. ISBN   0-8147-3103-1.
  10. ↑ "8.12: NoCeM". w3.pppl.gov. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Archived from the original on November 1, 2004. Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  11. ↑ Skirvin, Tim (September 15, 1999). "Cancel Messages: Frequently Asked Questions, Part 4/4 (v1.7)". Internet FAQ Archive . Archived from the original on October 6, 1999.
  12. ↑ "'Spam' Is Not Always Glorious". Newsweek . Vol. 126, no. 16. October 15, 1995. p. 82. ISSN   0028-9604.
  13. ↑ Bransten, Lisa (April 6, 1998). "Spam-Cancellers Threaten A Strike in Cyberspace". The Wall Street Journal . Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  14. ↑ McNamara, Paul (April 13, 1998). "Spam-busters to Usenet community: 'Don't call us'". NetworkWorld. Vol. 15, no. 15. p. 10. ISSN   0887-7661 – via Google Books.
  15. ↑ "Usenet spam strike ends". CNET . April 17, 1998. Retrieved November 17, 2022.
  16. ↑ Schwartzman, Neil (July 1, 2014). "CASL Comes into Force". CAUCE . Retrieved November 16, 2022.

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