News.admin.net-abuse.email

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news.admin.net-abuse.email (sometimes abbreviated nanae [1] or n.a.n-a.e, and often incorrectly spelled with a hyphen in "email") is a Usenet newsgroup devoted to discussion of the abuse of email systems, specifically through email spam and similar attacks. According to a timeline compiled by Keith Lynch, [2] news.admin.net-abuse.email was the first widely available electronic forum for discussing spam.

Contents

Steve Linford, the founder of The Spamhaus Project, sometimes posts in the newsgroup.

Topics covered

In its original charter the following examples of "on-topic" areas were listed:

Eventually, by mutual consent, it was also determined that the following were also "on-topic":

History

The group was officially proposed (i.e. its RFD posted) by Tim Skirvin (tskirvin) on July 9, 1996 alongside a number of other groups in order to reduce the load on the two net abuse groups at that time, news.admin.net-abuse.announce and news.admin.net-abuse.misc. [3]

Later that month it went to vote and passed 451 to 28. [4]

In September 2002 it was proposed that a subgroup, news.admin.net-abuse.email.blocklists, be created.

NANAEisms

Over time, some (more or less) NANAE-specific terms were coined: [5] [6] [7]

404-compliant
A website that has been terminated by its hosting provider for terms of service violation is said to be "404-compliant", a reference to the 404 "not found" status code in HTTP and a parody of spammers claiming their spam is 301 compliant, referring to a bill that never made it into a law.
Auto-ignore
The automated response from an ISP's abuse desk, when it is believed that sending out the automated response is the only action the ISP will take.
Black hat
An ISP that enables spamming, for example a hosting provider that does not act upon spam complaints. Named after old westerns where the bad guys often wore black hats. Compare white hat and gray hat.
Bulletproof
Said when it's difficult to get an ISP to take action against spamming customers.
Cartooney
A derisive portmanteau of the words cartoon and attorney, used to refer to a hollow lawsuit threat with which a spammer tries to intimidate an anti-spammer. This term may also refer to the spammer's lawyer (who is usually assumed not to exist). The majority of such hollow legal threats arise in the context of a listed entity threatening a blacklist maintainer with legal action.
Cats and Coffee warning
A Cats and Coffee warning [8] [9] or C&C warning is a satirical warning that a usenet posting or other writing may contain humorous material. [10] The C&C warning originated with the usenet group news.admin.net-abuse.email, but has spread to other groups. [11] The warning is an admonition to the reader to secure liquid beverages (particularly hot ones) and cats in case uncontrollable laughter breaks out upon reading the article.
Chew toy
From time to time, a spammer surfaces in the group, typically ranting about how spam control activities, such as blacklisting, amount to censorship and violate that spammer's right to free speech. [12] These visiting spammers are referred to as chew toys (because of the slight entertainment value their tirades provide). The same chew toy may frequent the group for several years. There may not always be a chew toy active, and very seldom have there been more than one concurrently.
Chickenboner
A derisive term used to refer to minor or amateur spammer. Named after a colorful and humorous description one newsgroup participant made of spammers living in trailers and eating at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Cut it out, Ron
A standard response to a posting that is suspected to be a troll. Named after a regular poster who often wrote humorous troll posts.
Frea speach
Spammers claim the right to distribute unsolicited bulk mail as part of their right to free speech under the United States Constitution. After one such person repeatedly misspelled it as "frea speach", newsgroup participants who argued that the right to free speech refers to the right to not be censored by the U.S. government and nothing to do with the right to employ the services of private individuals and organizations to distribute bulk mail, took to referring to this claimed right as "frea speach", deliberately mis-spelling it partly as a parody and partly to distinguish it from actual free speech rights. [13]
Gray hat
An ISP whose stance in spam matters is somewhat ambiguous. It may terminate some spamming customers but not all of them. Compare black hat and white hat.
Hat check
A request to determine the reputation of a given ISP in spam matters. See also black-, gray- and white hat.
Joe job
The act of sending out spam made to look like it came from a person or organization which the spammer dislikes. Spamhaus, SpamCop and other anti-spam organizations are often the victims of these, as are some individual anti-spammers. Being Joe-jobbed is usually taken as a sign that the victim must have really hurt some spammer.
LART
A meme which jokingly refers to a fictitious hypothetical blunt instrument (i.e. a " Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool") whose primary and/or singular use and purpose is the metaphorically application or introduction of understanding (typically of Internet norms and conventions, but of any concept whatsoever) to a person currently lacking such understanding. Large mallets and anvils are popularly referred to as examples of items or tools which would be useful as LARTs. [14]
Listwashing
The act of responding to complaints by removing the complainer's email address from the spammer's list, without taking any further actions against the spammer.
Lumber Cartel
A tongue-in-cheeck conspiracy theory that claimed anti-spammers were secretly paid agents of lumber companies.
Mainsleaze
Spam coming from a notable or well-known ("mainstream") company.
Netscum
A list of anti-spam activists published by Sanford Wallace (also known as Spamford Wallace).
Pink contract
A contract for internet services or hosting that makes it difficult to impossible to terminate the contract for spamming.
Quirk Objection
'Objection! Assumes X not found in evidence!' A humorous objection, raised when the previous poster assumes the presence of something that has not yet been proven to exist. Not used to refer to things that have definitely been proven not to exist. Named after the regular poster 'Captain Gym Z. Quirk' who first raised this. Often shortened to ObQuirk!
Sock
A poster who is suspected to be someone else (usually a spammer) using a new name. Shortened from Sock Puppet.
Spamhaus
Originally, this term was used as a derogatory epithet to refer to any individual ISP that had mostly or only spammers for customers. Nowadays, it more often refers to the anti-spam organization of the same name.

Spamware
Software that was written explicitly for the purpose of spamming, or has features that are mostly or only useful to spammers and other abusers. Also called 'ratware'.
TINLC
There is no Lumber Cartel
TINW
There is no We. The poster recognizes that NANAE does not have a collective opinion.
Whack-a-Mole
The act of repeatedly causing spammers' throwaway accounts and drop boxes to be terminated. Named after the Whack-A-Mole arcade game. [5]
White hat
An ISP which takes spam complaints seriously and terminates offenders swiftly and with extreme prejudice. Named after old westerns where the good guys usually wore white hats. Compare black hat and gray hat.

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, non-commercial proselytizing, or 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 Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) was an anonymous service that maintained a list of IP address ranges belonging to internet service providers (ISPs) that host spammers and show little action to prevent their abuse of other networks' resources. It could be used by Internet sites as an additional source of information about the senders of unsolicited bulk email, better known as spam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sporgery</span> Posting a flood of articles to a Usenet group, with falsified headers.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UUNET</span> Early U.S. Internet service provider

UUNET Technologies, Inc., formerly UUNET Communications Services, was an American commercial Internet service provider. Founded in 1987, it was one of the first and largest commercial ISPs and one of the early Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia. Today, UUNET is an internal brand of Verizon Business.

Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting, i.e. repeated posting of a message or very similar messages to newsgroups. The spam may be commercial advertisements, opinionated messages, malicious files, or nonsensical posts designed to disrupt the newsgroups. A type of newsgroup spam is sporgery which is intended to make the targeted newsgroups unreadable. The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "spamminess", and attempts to purge newsgroups of spam.

On Usenet, the Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) is a final penalty that may be issued against Internet service providers or single users who produce too much spam or fail to adhere to Usenet standards. It is named after the death penalty, as it causes the banned user or provider to be unable to use Usenet, essentially "killing" their service. Messages that fall under the jurisdiction of a Usenet Death Penalty will be cancelled. Cancelled messages are deleted from Usenet servers and not allowed to propagate. This causes users on the affected ISP to be unable to post to Usenet, and it puts pressure on the ISP to change their policies. Notable cases include actions taken against UUNET, CompuServe, Excite@Home, and Google Groups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Linford</span> CEO of The Spamhaus Project

Stephen John "Steve" Linford is a British entrepreneur and anti-spam campaigner best known for founding The Spamhaus Project.

Nanae may refer to:

<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 take action against what they allege to be spammers. The correctness of this assessment by Spamhaus is regularly disputed. If the assessment is based on objective characteristics or on standards set by Spamhaus itself is disputed. 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. Spamhaus has been criticized to purposely hide all direct methods of contact from its webpages to avoid transparency, while asking transparency from others.

The Lumber Cartel was a facetious conspiracy theory popularized on USENET that claimed anti-spammers were secretly paid agents of lumber companies.

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.

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

The Abusive Hosts Blocking List (AHBL) was an internet abuse tracking and filtering system developed by The Summit Open Source Development Group, and based on the original Summit Blocking List (2000–2002). Its DNSBLs were shut down on Jan 1, 2015 and now appear to be blacklisting the entire Internet.

Christopher Lewis is a Canadian computer security consultant from Ottawa, 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.

A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.

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

Usenet, USENET, or, "in full", User's Network, 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 BBSes, 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.

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. McWilliams, Brian S (9 Sep 2014). Spam Kings: The Real Story Behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 11. ISBN   9781491913710.
  2. Lynch, Keith. "Keith Lynch's timeline of spam related terms and concepts".
  3. Skirvin, Tim (1996-07-09). "RFD: news.admin.net-abuse reorganization". Newsgroup:  news.announce.newgroups. Usenet:   836945105.13229@uunet.uu.net . Retrieved 2009-06-03Also posted to news.groups,news.admin.net-abuse.announce,news.admin.net-abuse.misc,news.admin.misc,news.admin.censorship,news.admin.hierarchies{{cite newsgroup}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  4. Patokallio, Jani (1996-11-09). "RESULT: news.admin.net-abuse reorganization all groups pass". Newsgroup:  news.announce.newgroups. Usenet:   847550753.7941@uunet.uu.net . Retrieved 2009-06-03Also posted to news.groups,news.admin.censorship,news.admin.hierarchies,news.admin.net-abuse.announce,news.admin.net-abuse.misc{{cite newsgroup}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  5. 1 2 Andrew Nellis (1998-09-14). "The Net Abuse Jargon File". Archived from the original on 2006-08-06.
  6. Brian S. McWilliams (2004). Spam Kings: the real story behind the high-rolling hucksters pushing porn, pills and @*#?%. O'Reilly. pp.  11–14. ISBN   0-596-00732-9.
  7. Brian S. cWilliams (2004). Spam Kings: the real story behind the high-rolling hucksters pushing porn, pills and @*#?%. O'Reilly. pp.  13. ISBN   0-596-00732-9.
  8. SPAM FAQ Archived 2004-02-12 at the Wayback Machine
  9. The Jargon File
  10. Brian S. cWilliams (2004). Spam Kings: the real story behind the high-rolling hucksters pushing porn, pills and @*#?%. O'Reilly. pp.  13. ISBN   0-596-00732-9.
  11. Catsandcoffee.org
  12. "The Deja Vu Sequence".
  13. "Frea Speach Store". The unofficial NANAE Kook Kollektion.{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
  14. Brian S. cWilliams (2004). Spam Kings: the real story behind the high-rolling hucksters pushing porn, pills and @*#?%. O'Reilly. pp.  13. ISBN   0-596-00732-9.