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[newsgroups deBoursified]

Masataka Noda <masa@radiotelephone.net.PAS_DE_SPAM> wrote:
>>
>>BI is Briedbart Index, the standard method of measuring excessively
>>crossposted ('spam') or excessively multiposted ('velveeta') Usenet
>>posts. It's the sum of the square roots of the number of groups that
>>similar articles are posted to. A BI of 20 is considered open for
>>cancelling by a 3rd party.
>
>then if you don't exceed BI of 20, you can post a spam upto a maximum
>of 399 newsgroups in one single article.    sqrt(399) = 19.97... ??

That's correct. That one article crossposted to 399 groups takes up
exactly as much space being transmitted between servers, and being
stored on a given server, as one article posted to one group. Crossposted
articles are only stored in one newsgroup on a news server; the other
newsgroups to which it is crossposted only contain pointers to the
original article (symlinks, IIRC, in INN).

Also, decent newsreaders, on marking a crossposted article read in
one group, mark it read in all groups. This isn't possible with
multiposted articles.

>I don't think this index is useful.  

Most spammers don't. 

>One can avoid getting BI of 20
>by crossposting the articles (more the crossposting, less the BI).

This is correct. Crossposting is considerably better than multiposting.
It's *hard* to get a BI of 20 unintentionally, which is the entire 
point. Mind you, you're only two more "McGill Myth" posts away from
a BI of 20 yourself, so it appears to work. That said, there's still
lots of spammers who manage to get a BI in the high hundreds or even
thousands.

This has all been hashed out over the last eon or so, and has been
accepted as the standard by the people that actually *do* the spam
cancelling. I'd suggest a DejaNews search in news.admin.net-abuse.usenet
or even a Web search for the Net Abuse FAQ to get an idea of the
background on it. Current discussion on it also belongs in that 
group, and Followups: are set appropriately.

  -Rich

-- 
Rich Lafferty ---------------------------------------------------------
IITS/Computing Services     | "Oderint dum metuant."
Concordia University        |            -- Lucius Accius (170-90 BC).     
rich@vax2.concordia.ca -----------------------------------------[McQ]--