Cancelbot
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A cancelbot is an automated or semi-automated process for sending out third-party cancel messages over Usenet, commonly as a stopgap measure to combat spam.[1]
History
One of the earliest uses of a cancelbot was by microbiology professor Richard DePew, to remove anonymous postings in science newsgroups.[2] Perhaps the most well known early cancelbot was used in June 1994 by Arnt Gulbrandsen within minutes of the first post of Canter & Siegel's second spam wave,[3][4] as it was created in response to their "Green Card spam" in April 1994.[5] Usenet spammers have alleged that cancelbots are a tool of the mythical Usenet cabal.
Rationale
Cancelbots must follow community consensus to be able to serve a useful purpose, and historically, technical criteria have been the only acceptable criteria for determining if messages are cancelable, and only a few active cancellers ever obtain the broad community support needed to be effective.
Pseudosites are referenced in cancel headers by legitimate cancelbots to identify the criteria on which a message is being canceled, allowing administrators of Usenet sites to determine via standard "aliasing" mechanisms which criteria that they will accept third-party cancels for.
Currently, the generally accepted criteria (and associated pseudosites) are:[6]
| Pseudosite | Criterion |
|---|---|
| Breidbart Index above the cancel threshold for the group or hierarchy | cyberspam!usenet |
| "Make money fast" schemes | mmfcancel!cyberspam!usenet |
| "Spew" (large number of nonsense or repeated postings) | spewcancel!cyberspam!usenet |
| Binary files posted to a group that doesn't allow them | bincancel!cyberspam!usenet |
| Retromoderation (only applies to groups that have a retromoderation policy in place) | retromod!cyberspam!usenet |
| Ad cancels within the biz.* hierarchy | adcancel!cyberspam!usenet |
| Messages originating from sites or networks under active Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) sanction by the community; the UDP is exceedingly rare, requiring a broad consensus that a Usenet site is acting in a manner generally harmful to the community, and active cancellation under a UDP is even rarer still | sitenameudp!udpcancel!cyberspam!usenet |
By general convention, special values are given in X-Canceled-By, Message-Id and Path headers when performing third-party cancels. This allows administrators to decide which reasons for third-party cancellation are acceptable for their site:
- The $alz convention states that the Message-Id: header used for a third-party cancel should always be the original Message-Id: with "cancel." prepended.
- The X-Canceled-By: convention states that the operator of a cancelbot should provide a consistent, valid, and actively monitored contact email address for their cancelbot in the X-Canceled-By: header, both to identify the canceler, and to provide a point of contact in case something goes wrong or questions arise regarding the cancelbot's operations.
- The !cyberspam convention states that specific pseudosites should be given within the cancel message's Path to identify them as complying with certain cancel criteria, see above.
See also
References
- ^ Scott Southwick; J.D. Falk. "The Net Abuse FAQ". Archived from the original on November 1, 1996. Retrieved 2006-09-02.
- ^ Lueg, Christopher; Fisher, Danyel (2012-12-06). From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9781447100577.
- ^ Canter, Laurence. "Green Card Lottery- Final One?". Retrieved 2006-09-02.
- ^ Gulbrandsen, Arnt. "Now comes the C&S crunch... let's see". Retrieved 2006-09-02.
- ^ Gulbrandsen, Arnt. "Canter and Siegel: What really happened".
- ^ "Cancel Messages FAQ". wiki.killfile.org. Retrieved 2018-05-09.
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