Re: Idiot spam attack on sci.lang

On Jan 28, 1:06 pm, António Marques <m...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

There is/was no MI5Vic 'account'. There is a person writing messages
(from wherever) under that name. As far as anyone can tell, no one has
ever used that name to write 'normal' messages - so quite a few server
administrators, and possibly Google as well, chose to ignore messages
signed by MI5Vic. It's as simple as that. There are no 'accounts' or
'banning' involved - not any more than Google giving you results when
you search for 'hamburger' means that there is a google account for
hamburgers. That's all google's 'profiles' are - aggregated views of
searching their archives for a given e-mail address.

Thank you for the three replies. I answer only here,
for the sake of simplicity. You may know that we entered
the era of structured products (for exampl the structured
financial products, which, in combination with rating
agencies, caused the present financial crisis). Another
example is the firm Swisscom, a phone company with
a web section called bluewin, and bluewin has web mail
called bluemail. Bluemail was free for a long time. I got
two bluemail addresses myself, one of which I use for
posting here. Bluemail is very good, so when they
announced that it won't be free any longer, some two years
ago, I decided to keep my bluemail accounts and pay the
modest fee for their good service, including spam filters
and a lot of comfort, and fifty kilobytes storing capacity
per e-mail address. I could get more e-mail addresses
for the same price, but the two I have are sufficient for
me, as I don't run a business. Now Google has a similar
structured product: Google took over Deja News, then
simply deja, Google maintain the archive of the Usenet,
and they added Google groups, where everyone who
got something to say can create his or her own forum,
within a couple of minutes. Google stores the terabytes
of Usenet messages, and provides access to the Usenet
for computer morons of my caliber (I can't handle other
Usenet portals, or how they are called). I subscribed to
sci.archaeology, then also to sci.lang, and so I got an
account, I can post to these two groups, and to any
other group, either in the Usenet, or in the Google groups.
Google runs a profile, which lists up my messages, and
the groups I wrote to, by year and month, a very useful
instrument (apart from the sum total of ratings - you
know my opinion about rating in the sciences). Using
my profile, I can easily find again a message of mine
I wrote years ago. Now Google runs a profile on every
poster to the Usenet, not only subscribers to Google.
This function is a free service, such as bluemail was
a free service in the structured product offered by
Swisscom. The profile of another poster allows me
to find again messages others wrote a long time ago
(I remember he said this or that, in the spring of 2004,
if memory serves, I would like to retrieve that specific
part of information, now I could use it for my work ...).
From the viewpoint of a firm, the free part of a structured
product must work especially well, for it is the interface
to the gobal consumer and potential customer. Now if
Google allows criminals to fill my profile with krap, sent
by people who abuse my name and Google identity,
they have a problem. Imagine that a criminal could flood
a bank with counterfeit money, and do so in the name
and using the accounts of the regular customers - that
bank would have a real problem. Google must solve their
problem, the steps they took until now are not sufficient.
One step they took was closing the account - note well:
the free account that runs under the name of profile -
of the MI5Vic... spammer. You can't retrieve his profile
anymore. Yet if you go back and find an old message
by him, and klick on the function "Find messages by this
author," you'll find that he sent 144'000 messages that
were sent by him, via a robot, of course, and you can
retrieve the first 1,000 spam messages, or, by varying
your query, many more. Now the spammer goes on
with other e-mails, one for example big foot (or so),
and Google runs profiles for these identities. I could
cope with a temporary flooding of the groups with
spam, but I don't accept the flooding of my profile as
part of my Google account with krap I did not write
and did not send. As I said before: the free part of
a structured product must work especially well.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Idiot spam attack on sci.lang
    ... That's exactly the situation Google is in. ... One step they took was closing the account - note ... possibility to look up MI5Vic's 'profile'. ... all that matters is 'connect to their news server ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Idiot spam attack on sci.lang
    ... That's exactly the situation Google is in. ... One step they took was closing the account - note ... possibility to look up MI5Vic's 'profile'. ... It means I once paid $3.95 so that teranews would give me a username and password with which I can connect to their news server to read and send messages. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: google groups "rating"?
    ... I have already had some 'Google Groupers' learn about me more than I ... by looking at some profile Google had bound to metname. ... Is it not enough that they infiltrate UseNet and very lately ... Google Group for something, thinking in advance. ...
    (alt.internet.search-engines)
  • Re: Anti-spam on usenet (Google Groups?)
    ... > originally to google to be able to post at all). ... Get an account at one of the free services (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. - we call ... > also need ISP's that will specifically provide newsgroup access. ... Teranews, etc. Do a Google search on "newsgroups", "Usenet", etc. and ...
    (alt.computer.security)
  • Re: Report this spam to: groups-abuse@google.com
    ... The usenet is still routinely spammed. ... since GOOGLE IS NOT USENET. ... "Goggle Groups" user account for spamming. ... They could cancel his posts, ...
    (sci.electronics.misc)