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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.group
Subject: Re: Removing net.flame
Message-ID: <697@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 27-Jun-85 03:33:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: vortex.697
Posted: Thu Jun 27 03:33:06 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Jun-85 00:23:08 EDT
References: <1818@amdcad.UUCP>
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 35
Xref: watmath net.news:3509 net.news.group:3192

Exactly HOW do you go about "removing a site" from the net?
(I intend this as a rhetorical question, not as a trigger
for endless replies on this topic!)

A site simply changes its name and/or finds sites that are
willing to feed it.  It isn't practical for everyone to
install software to try find and filter certain articles--and
people would rapidly learn how to bypass these in various
ways anyway.  

The phone-based Usenet is by DEFINITION an uncontrollable
free-for-all.  As the number of sites and users increases, we
can expect to see more "offensive" articles that attract
much more attention and waste much more of everyone's time
than other articles.  That's the name of the game.  Wait
until there are, oh, 200 thousand people or so on the net.
Then you'll REALLY see the silly putty start to fly.
It might be sooner than one might think.

---

By the way, the UCLA student convicted a couple of days
ago of playing games with various ARPA and other computers 
(in other words, he mucked around with typical non-classified
R&D computers) wasn't even a legit user of the UCLA-LOCUS system.
In fact, UCLA computers were among the ones he attacked, and the UCLA
CS dept. was involved in helping to track him down.  This guy
was apparently doing things like changing people's passwords
and altering/deleting files, and left a trail of muck the
size of tank tracks.  He was convicted for "malicious" activities,
and indeed what he was doing sure seems to have been malicious
in nature.  Anyway, don't blame the UCLA machines on the net
for him.  He wasn't one of their own.

--Lauren--