2. Are you familiar with the concept of "EMAK" (Excessive Morphing to Avoid Killfiles)? If so, what limits do you impose?

The only actual hit in my search engine that i get for the search term "Excessive Morphing" is the very message (on google groups). Anyone knows what this is ?

cheers

trw

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Posted on def4

so this is something from way back (the 90s, for gods sake...).
yawn...i think the usenet today is not the place of flamewars any longer (at least not that I can see, some groups have a shitposting and spam problem, ok, but really small scale).
I think most of the people who like that kind of thing are today on imageboards....the wild west has moved on...

cheers

trw

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Posted on def2

floods of forged control messages (special posts used to create newsgroups, cancel individual usenet posts, and so on) caused the creation of hundreds of oddly-named newsgroups to appear at many locations. About this time, other Meower incidents included Fluffy the Cat—a parody[4] of a Harvard student's[5] pet[6] and self-proclaimed owner of Usenet—announced the creation of news.admin.cascade.[7][8] The control flood prompted some Usenet users to adopt digital signatures to verify the authenticity of such messages.

That is from the same wiki article. So control messages were not verified in this day ? lmao....that is like leaving your ssh server open and allow anonymous logins with root privileges....

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Posted on def2

Anonymous wrote:

floods of forged control messages (special posts used to create newsgroups, cancel individual usenet posts, and so on) caused the creation of hundreds of oddly-named newsgroups to appear at many locations. About this time, other Meower incidents included Fluffy the Cat—a parody[4] of a Harvard student's[5] pet[6] and self-proclaimed owner of Usenet—announced the creation of news.admin.cascade.[7][8] The control flood prompted some Usenet users to adopt digital signatures to verify the authenticity of such messages.

That is from the same wiki article. So control messages were not verified in this day ? lmao....that is like leaving your ssh server open and allow anonymous logins with root privileges....

That's true. There was much less, sometimes if any, security in things. Mostly because the people using the networks weren't there to trash it, unlike many people today.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
www.novabbs.com

well, apparently the will to trash things, like you put it, came latest during the mid 90s.
but hackers surely have been around before, it was just a much smaller, more nerdy thing with a lot less people involved (let alone big money and surveillance).
well, no way to go back, ever. best make the most of today, with our highly aggressive environment (especially true for the darknets).

cheers

trw

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Posted on def2

Anonymous <poster@anon.com> wrote:

so this is something from way back (the 90s, for gods sake...).

The term is from 90s, but practice of  morphing itself is still in use.

yawn...i think the usenet today is not the place of flamewars any longer
(at least not that I can see, some groups have a shitposting and spam
problem, ok, but really small scale).

It kind of is, just not on that scale. I’m running Usenet server, and most
articles posted are in Italian groups. Apparently Usenet is still popular
in Italy, and they have some flame war going on in it.politica newsgroup.
Not sure exactly what’s the reason, and how many people are involved, but I
was receiving many complaints about morphing, since some participants were
changing their From header quite often. Actually, I think messages from
Neodome posted to it.politica are being filtered out on Aioe server because
of this flame war. It’s still most popular newsgroup on my server though,
and probably one of the most active newsgroups on Usenet.

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Neodome

although i run a news server myself (a very small one), i am not actually very familiar with the usenet. i started running it only when we started rocksolid, and mostly only for this purpose.

in Italy, and they have some flame war going on in >it.politica newsgroup.

I think politics in Italy are a little more lively than in other places, also the spectrum is broader.

was receiving many complaints about morphing, since >some participants were changing their From header >quite often.

Yeah, I can imagine that if you are used to use plonk, morphing can be pretty annoying.
Of course, running three nodes that allow anonymous posting (in one case forced anonymous), I have kind of a different take to this.
Although I have to say that this only works because the rocksolid groups have not been invaded yet (probably not well known enough to be a good target). In case we would have a huge influx of spam and trolls, I guess we would enforce user accounts.
Or have a really well working spam filter, I think Retro Guy is advanced in this. For now I am just happy that it is not necessary.

cheers

trw

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Posted on def2