🚀 go-pugleaf

sjsobol@devel.nacs.net (Steve Sobol) writes:
>Chris Caputo said:
>>Users have lost posting ability for continued violations of this policy. 
>>If you see a customer of Altopia using someone else's email address, feel
>>free to let us know.
>
>Chris, a question: Forgery is abuse. We apparently both agree on that.

The thing that some people, not necessarily you, do not agree with us on
is the definition of forgery.  The dictionary has a few definitions.  The
kind of forgery we take issue with is that of using an email address or
domain name without the permission of the email address or domain name
owner. 

We do not mind of someone makes up an email address using a non-existent
domain, nor do we mind if someone takes someone's email address and
modifies it in some way, as long as it is not the same and does not use a
domain without permission. 

We do mind if someone uses the exact email address of a real person
without that person's permission.  We do mind if someone uses a domain in
their email address without the permission of the domain owner. 

Using ccaputo@alt.net without my permission would not be okay. 

Using ccaputo@altnetstinks.net would be okay, assuming altnetstinks.net
does not exist as a registered domain.  If it does exist as a registered
domain, the user needs permission from the domain owner to use it. 

Note, we do not have a problem with Path: pre-loading, using other sites
domain names because there is a legitimate use for this. 

>So how is newsgroup flooding, with intention to disrupt, not abuse?

Intent is not something we can or will try to judge and so it is not
relevant to us.

The problem here is that different people apparently have different
definitions of flooding.

For example, we believe:

   - posting a 1 meg binary in 5000 different parts is a flood.

   - posting each line or sentence or paragraph of the bible or koran or
     torah or whatever long text, one post at a time is a flood. 

   - posting random, computer generated gibberish at a rate of 1 article
     per second is a flood.

   - posting off-topic messages with human thought put into each one, is
     not a flood.  This is unlikely to happen at a high rate, since a
     human is generating each message by hand, and thus it is not a flood. 

If we believe a flood is happening, we will make every attempt to stop it
quickly.  We stop a flood by disabling the users posting ability and
killing their current session(s).  Once the flood is stopped the user is
dealt with as we feel appropriate (sometimes it really is an accident). 

Chris Caputo
President, Altopia Corporation