Re: The Accuracy of mtDNA vs. Y chromosomal DNA

on 7 Nov 2006 15:21:08 -0800, Universal1300 <universal1300@xxxxxxxxxxx> sez:
Will you please at least remove the post/address from this site?

This isn't a "site". This is Usenet. It predates the web by about
15 years. It uses its own protocol. We have no idea what "site"
you are looking at, but you have at least as much likely ability
to remove something from such a site as any of us, which is to
say, extremely little.

You may be accessing this newsgroup via a website portal, but the
portal can't affect the newsgroup content, which is contained
in newsspools on servers all over the net. The news protocol is
NNTP, as distinct from HTTP, and the way it works is, if an NNTP
server compares its own content with a peer, and finds that it
is defficient of posts present on the other server, it immediately
fetches the missing posts. This continues until the posts are
past their expiry date, which is set by the individual server
administrator, and may be anywhere from a day to a month, or,
in the case of archiving sites, never. The bottom line is, once
an email address is present on usenet, it is pretty much there
forever. There are many things you can do ahead of time to
prevent this, but once it's happened, you're baked.

To do
so, find the link to the right of the "Date" on your original message
named "show options." The expanded options should have a "Delete"
link.

Ah. Yes. NNTP does have a feature called "cancel article", which
is supposed to send out a "delete post" command which will
remove (only your own) posts. Unfortunately, the protocol was
composed very early in the history of the net, as I noted, and
back then, the only users were decent responsible academics.
The composers did not see the need for including strong security
measures (in fact, they probably didn't expect NNTP to last more
than a few years, certainy not more than 25). Thus, the "cancel post"
command was vulnerable to abuse, and as soon as usenet became
widely accessible, flurries of forged "cancel attacks", made
by less than well balanced individuals, and/or in response to
less than well balanced individuals, appeared. Soon, these
escalated into "cancelbot wars", and the traffic so dragged down
the performance of the NNTP universe that most server admins
disabled response to the cancel command. And that is, as far as
I know, the way the situation remains. You can cetainly send
out a cancel on your own post, but it is not likely to have
any effect.

Note that if you are using a webform to post, you are probably
not seeing all the NNTP headers on your posts, which are visible
to anyone using a proper newsreader. One of these headers contains
your email address, which is how those following up your post
cause it to show up in the quote string. Securing your address
against distribution is generally done as I do it, by munging
your address so that it can be decoded by humans but not by
bots. Unfortunately, that doesn't really help me, as UBC insists
on adding a header revealing my true email address (or it did
the last time I looked), so munging only masks my address in
quoted followups. Depending on your posting host/web portal,
you may be able to replace your address with a munged version.
Not that address harvesters (used to) usually go directly to the
newsspool (haven't kept up on this stuff), so what you can
actually see on a web page has little influence on how
widely your address is being harvested.

The other popular method to avoid these problems is to open
all your exposed interactions using a sacrificial free email
account, which you use just for entering in registration
forms, receiving login confirmations etc, and just ignore it
otherwise unless you know you should be receiving something.

I recognize that by now the e-mail address is already on multiple
websites, but I would feel better if it weren't showing on this one.
I'll just hold my breath and hope that, as you observed, the spam isn't
too bad (right now, I am at zero spam messages in my account-- not
bad).

My address is in archives going back 15 years or more, but it
seems most spam uses addresses harvested in the preceding year
or so. You can expect to get anywhere from 1-8 spams per day
as a result of unshielded usenet posting these days, with about
a two month lag time before your address is harvested and sold
to a spammer. If you subsequently hide your address, the spam will
trail off to perhaps 5% of the peak rate after about 2 1/2 years.

This is very much a function of the strength of legislation
in various jurisdictions, funding for policing efforts, and
fads in unscrupulous marketing. Improved enforcement of
anti-spam laws in the US brought a substantial drop in
spam a few years ago, and subsequent SEC fines knocked
down the plague of penny stock spams a couple of years
ago, but for some reason (a recent court ruling? benign
neglect by a pro-sleaze administration?) the latter have
picked up again rather severely in the last month.


--
==========================================================================
vincent@triumf[munge].ca Pete Vincent
Disclaimer: all I know I learned from reading Usenet.
.

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