Umm.. OK? But.. what do *ISP*, geography or skin color
got to do with any of this?
People were discussing blanket-killfiling people based on news
provider, remember?
The following sentence is a blanket response to Kaldrenon and others
also, to rebut them:
Regardless of any statistics regarding spam sources, it is still wrong
for someone to be ignored not because of anything they did, but
because of something someone else did that just happens to use the
same service provider, and it is more so if the provider is one for
which many people have no alternative, say because they hold an
effective monopoly.
Please confirm to me that you understand that even
people with no 'personal ISP', have alternatives to GG,
for posting to the *Java* related groups. (I almost bet
there are other ways to contribute to most of the major
hierarchy of usenet newsrgoups, but would have to go
.Googling* to prove it)
These are no good to someone whose interests are broad enough that the
only single news source that covers it and that they have reasonably
ready access to is Google Groups. I expect this is a substantial
fraction of Usenet users, partly based on the fraction (rapidly
growing) of regular posters in the groups I read that have a GG path
(ending with "...googlegroups.com!not-for-mail" or similarly) in their
postings and other GG-indicative headers (unrelated to the fact that
I'm *reading* the post at GG).
Some site providing comp.lang.java.* gatewaying is of no use to me
because I use non-Java newsgroups too. Of course, in theory I could
sign up at a sextillion different sites each to post to one or a few
different newsgroups, but that's a **** of a lot of work, a buttload
of userids and passwords to remember, a metric shitload of exposure to
potential misuse of my personal information, and more frequently
having to do something as a workaround because one of the sites
decides to do something evil or stop working either temporarily or
permanently. Whereas I can use GG and access all of these groups from
just one place, with only one signin, only one exposure of personal
information to one organization, and a specific site has to go down to
inconvenience me instead of any of several dozen being able to do so
and it therefore happening dozens of times as often. Also, GG is a
large site with proven staying power, if questionable management and
reliability at times.
In short, my objection is the same as to any push towards Web forums
(and this includes non-Usenet "google groups" that require separate
signup rather than letting any existing GG member post) -- too many
logins, too many passwords, too many parties with access to my
personal information, too many failure points any one of which will
inconvenience me, too many separate bookmarks to have to visit to
check and catch up on everything, and just plain too many goddamn
annoying hoops to jump through. All not to satisfy *me*, but
apparently to satisfy *JohnT* and others like him. Why should I have
to multiply by a factor of umpteen the work involved in a) getting and
b) using my usenet access on *their* account? I haven't done anything
to them. I certainly haven't spammed them or any newsgroup they read,
or anyone or any newsgroup at all for that matter. And it's not just
me of course; JohnT and his ilk are implicitly asking this of *all* GG
users -- stop using GG and sign up for a million separate more
narrowly-scoped gateways each. It's not even so much that they choose
to KF the whole site themselves, which is I suppose their prerogative.
It's their promoting the practise and pushing everyone else towards
doing so that is especially morally objectionable, because a
significant positive response to such suggestions will make GG defacto
unusable for people as using it will get them ignored, and *force*
large numbers of people of limited financial means to either shell out
extra for usenet access or get it at much greater cost in time and
effort and risk-of-spam from a fragmented bunch of separate web
gateway providers. It's simply not fair to the vast majority of GG
users, who are legitimate, to do this because of a few rotten apples
in their midst. Rotten apples you can find at any other large news
provider, I might add, including whatever large ISPs still provide
usenet for their customers. Rotten apples for which there are existing
abuse-handling mechanisms I might add:
* Individual spammers can be reported and will tend to lose their
accounts at any responsible provider.
* Irresponsible providers can be subjected to a UDP, though this is
rare; most news providers now terminate spammer accounts quickly when
given good evidence of abuse rather than risk a UDP. Including GG.
* There are still automated cancels for spams are there not?
* A lot of news providers scrub inbound spam from their feeds with
e.g. Cleanfeed. News providers downstream of them don't receive the
spams via propagation; users don't see the spams at either the
provider that scrubs it or the providers it thereby fails to propagate
to.
The proper use of your local killfile is to block non-spamming posters
whose posts, while not in violation of their provider's TOS, are
objectionable to you. Blocking a whole site is stupid. Recommending
that others do so is evil *and* stupid.
