$500 REWARD FOR IDENTITY OF TROLL

Big Bill wrote:
|Just accepting posts from a proxy elevates the scrutiny that it ought
|to be subject to, a kind of scrutiny that ought to be extremely
|intense any way you look at it.
|
|]IMO, you're asking for something you really don't want, unless you're
|a big fan of censorship.
|Once you ask someone like Google to start reading posts to judge the
|quality thereof, you're asking them to make judgement calls;

Yet Google appears to employ a 'relevance' formula for ranking its
data prior to publication, so how can Google say its archives are not
subject to any internal review? When it comes to coin collecting,
this whole tort might well have been avoided if the 'relevance'
formula had buried the allegations of incompetence or fraud at the
bottom of a 10,000 hit search. Of course, Google wouldn't be making
as much money if it did that sort of thing, inflammatory innuendo
and libel being so much more profitable.

|this is almost never a good thing. To counter that 'not a good thing',
|you'll need governmental intervention, which is universally a "bad
|thing".

If you don't want the government to do it, how about just having
Google's own insurance company evaluate the posts prior to publication?
After all, this whole thing appears to come off sounding in tort,
which is a civil matter (unless it turns out that government employees,
somewhere, are the ones that are libeling people, in conjunction with
Google's own employees).

|Not to mention trying to determine which government you'd like to have
|doing the intervention.

Or, I guess, which insurance company...

Big Bill wrote:
|Just accepting posts from a proxy elevates the scrutiny that it ought
|to be subject to, a kind of scrutiny that ought to be extremely
|intense any way you look at it.
|
|]IMO, you're asking for something you really don't want, unless you're
|a big fan of censorship.
|Once you ask someone like Google to start reading posts to judge the
|quality thereof, you're asking them to make judgement calls;

Yet Google appears to employ a 'relevance' formula for ranking its
data prior to publication, so how can Google say its archives are not
subject to any internal review? When it comes to coin collecting,
this whole tort might well have been avoided if the 'relevance'
formula had buried the allegations of incompetence or fraud at the
bottom of a 10,000 hit search. Of course, Google wouldn't be making
as much money if it did that sort of thing, inflammatory innuendo
and libel being so much more profitable.

|this is almost never a good thing. To counter that 'not a good thing',
|you'll need governmental intervention, which is universally a "bad
|thing".

If you don't want the government to do it, how about just having
Google's own insurance company evaluate the posts prior to publication?
After all, this whole thing appears to come off sounding in tort,
which is a civil matter (unless it turns out that government employees,
somewhere, are the ones that are libeling people, in conjunction with
Google's own employees).

|Not to mention trying to determine which government you'd like to have
|doing the intervention.

Or, I guess, which insurance company...

Kibo informs me that Big Bill stated that:

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 11:08:45 +1100, Lionel wrote:
Actually, it /is/ Googles problem, because the troll is posting from
Google itself, not from some random news service, & Google is preventing
victims of the troll's defamatory posts from taking legal action against
the troll.

[I should also have added here that Google refuse to enforce their
TOS/AUP against their problem-users. If they did, this situation
wouldn't have gotten as bad as it has.]

If the trail ends at an ISp that doesn't control who uses it as an
open relay, then Google, if subpoenaed, would run into that same dead
end, wouldn't it?
So how is Google preventing victims from finding the perp?

Other than anonymous news gateways, (which don't permit their users to
impersonate others), Google is the only news provider I know of that
permits totally anonymous, non-authenticated posting privileges via open
proxies, with a unenforced AUP/TOS, & as many free accounts (&
identities) as a person can find time to create. This combination of
'features' makes Google a nirvana for spammers & psychos.

--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------

Kibo informs me that Big Bill stated that:

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 11:08:45 +1100, Lionel wrote:
Actually, it /is/ Googles problem, because the troll is posting from
Google itself, not from some random news service, & Google is preventing
victims of the troll's defamatory posts from taking legal action against
the troll.

[I should also have added here that Google refuse to enforce their
TOS/AUP against their problem-users. If they did, this situation
wouldn't have gotten as bad as it has.]

If the trail ends at an ISp that doesn't control who uses it as an
open relay, then Google, if subpoenaed, would run into that same dead
end, wouldn't it?
So how is Google preventing victims from finding the perp?

Other than anonymous news gateways, (which don't permit their users to
impersonate others), Google is the only news provider I know of that
permits totally anonymous, non-authenticated posting privileges via open
proxies, with a unenforced AUP/TOS, & as many free accounts (&
identities) as a person can find time to create. This combination of
'features' makes Google a nirvana for spammers & psychos.

--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------

Kibo informs me that Big Bill stated that:

On Tue, 01 Mar 2005 19:45:39 +0000 (GMT), (Brian
{Hamilton Kelly}) wrote:

On Sun, 27 Feb 2005 21:57:15 -0700, in article

"Big Bill" wrote:

So how is Google preventing victims from finding the perp?

They are aiding and abetting the perpetrator(s) by failing to reject
posts made through well-known open proxies, thus facilitating continued
libellous postings.

I have a problem with shutting out legitimate users

Legitimate users don't routinely access their news provider via hijacked
SOCKS/HTTP proxies, in order to circumvent the providers Terms of
Service & security policies.

Blocking open proxies wouldn't impact Googles legitimate users in the
slightest, unless they were one of the idiots who owned one of the
poorly secured proxies, in which case lack of Usenet posting access via
Google would be the least of their problems.

--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------

Kibo informs me that Big Bill stated that:

On Tue, 01 Mar 2005 19:45:39 +0000 (GMT), (Brian
{Hamilton Kelly}) wrote:

On Sun, 27 Feb 2005 21:57:15 -0700, in article

"Big Bill" wrote:

So how is Google preventing victims from finding the perp?

They are aiding and abetting the perpetrator(s) by failing to reject
posts made through well-known open proxies, thus facilitating continued
libellous postings.

I have a problem with shutting out legitimate users

Legitimate users don't routinely access their news provider via hijacked
SOCKS/HTTP proxies, in order to circumvent the providers Terms of
Service & security policies.

Blocking open proxies wouldn't impact Googles legitimate users in the
slightest, unless they were one of the idiots who owned one of the
poorly secured proxies, in which case lack of Usenet posting access via
Google would be the least of their problems.

--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------

"Lionel" wrote in message
...
Kibo informs me that Mxsmanic stated that:

Lionel writes:

Yes - simple, & remarkably stupid too:
(1) Unless a Australian judge decides to flout 150+ years of Australian
& British legal precedent, the posts will most definitely be judged
highly defamatory.

When they are, then Google can be required or requested to remove them.
Until that time, removing posts just because someone objects to them
raises serious First Amendment questions, at least in the U.S.

The USA doesn't /quite/ run the entire world yet.

Accusations of defamation are legion on USENET, and they are usually
baseless.

Nothing personal, but I give greater credence to legal advice from
lawyers, rather than that from random Usenet posters.

--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------




I'm sure that I'm not the only person who wishes that you would stop whining
like an aggrieved schoolboy, and actually *do* something about your imagined
slight.

Personally, I hope that the court takes the view that you are a censorious
tosser with an grotesquely inflated sense of your own importance, but that's
just my opinion.

Try not to sue me, thanks.

"Lionel" wrote in message
...
Kibo informs me that Mxsmanic stated that:

Lionel writes:

Yes - simple, & remarkably stupid too:
(1) Unless a Australian judge decides to flout 150+ years of Australian
& British legal precedent, the posts will most definitely be judged
highly defamatory.

When they are, then Google can be required or requested to remove them.
Until that time, removing posts just because someone objects to them
raises serious First Amendment questions, at least in the U.S.

The USA doesn't /quite/ run the entire world yet.

Accusations of defamation are legion on USENET, and they are usually
baseless.

Nothing personal, but I give greater credence to legal advice from
lawyers, rather than that from random Usenet posters.

--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------




I'm sure that I'm not the only person who wishes that you would stop whining
like an aggrieved schoolboy, and actually *do* something about your imagined
slight.

Personally, I hope that the court takes the view that you are a censorious
tosser with an grotesquely inflated sense of your own importance, but that's
just my opinion.

Try not to sue me, thanks.

In news.groups, cjp writes:

I'm sure that I'm not the only person who wishes that you would stop
whining like an aggrieved schoolboy, and actually *do* something about
your imagined slight.

This is a particularly pointless thing to say about a pending lawsuit,
given that lawsuits of this sort routinely take several years to play out.
He may very well be doing things right now; we don't have any way of
knowing.

I'll also point out that it's not like Lionel is the one who's continuing
this thread. He actually stopped posting to it for quite a while. If you
want the thread to go away, I think you're preaching to the choir.

You could just killfile the whole thing pretty easily, you know. There
are several great general killfile criteria that would work: anything
crossposted to news.admin.net-abuse.*, any thread whose subject is in all
caps, and any thread whose subject contains the word "troll" are all
excellent criteria to use to make a lot of groups look cleaner.

--
Russ Allbery ) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/

In news.groups, cjp writes:

I'm sure that I'm not the only person who wishes that you would stop
whining like an aggrieved schoolboy, and actually *do* something about
your imagined slight.

This is a particularly pointless thing to say about a pending lawsuit,
given that lawsuits of this sort routinely take several years to play out.
He may very well be doing things right now; we don't have any way of
knowing.

I'll also point out that it's not like Lionel is the one who's continuing
this thread. He actually stopped posting to it for quite a while. If you
want the thread to go away, I think you're preaching to the choir.

You could just killfile the whole thing pretty easily, you know. There
are several great general killfile criteria that would work: anything
crossposted to news.admin.net-abuse.*, any thread whose subject is in all
caps, and any thread whose subject contains the word "troll" are all
excellent criteria to use to make a lot of groups look cleaner.

--
Russ Allbery ) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/