🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Dec28.185055.18248@muddcs.claremont.edu> irilyth@fenris.claremont.edu (Josh Smith) writes:

>Ken Bibb (kbibb@maui.qualfomm.com) writes:

>> But can [Uunet] refuse service because a *human* isn't behind the posts?

>Tim Pierce (twpierce@unix.amherst.edu) replies:

>> Who can prove that?  I don't believe it's true.  I'd lay money that
>> Argic's choice of messages to follow up is motivated by a similar kind
>> of pattern-scanning mechanism to Kibo's (i.e. find /usr/spool/news
>> -exec grep -i turk) but I think that someone actually attempts to
>> write at least some of the prose.

>While the text was certainly written by a human at some point, it appears
>that posts are being made without any human interaction. That is, the poster
>is not only pattern-scanning, but is also auto-posting replies based on the
>results of the scan. I've sent a couple of messages to this group and
>soc.culture.turkish in an attempt to gather evidence for this hypothesis,
>and it's pretty convincing. This morning's effort should be fairly
>conclusive if Argic is in fact just a machine.

Don't forget the postings to articles on Thanksgiving turkey.  And I had
a completely unrelated followup to the aforementioned article.

>> But besides that, why should it?  UUNET's job is to funnel news to and
>> from paying customers.  Why should it decline that service from
>> anatolia just because someone's put an automaton behind it?

>I don't know enough about UUNET or the legality/morality of flooding the net
>with posts, and Argic is "flooding" a small enough segment that this
>probably isn't a problem. What if someone set up a daemon to follow up to
>every post made to every group by quoting the entire post, and adding the
>single line "Good points, John" or "I disagree, John" (chosen randomly) at
>the bottom? Given the equipment to do this quickly, this could effectively
>double the size of Usenet overnight. What if it posted five or ten followups
>to every message? What if it started following up to its own followups?
>Imminent death of the net predicted! (grin)

Small enough segment?  Take a look in news.lists:  he's made the top 10
for number of posts!  (Or was it volume?)

-- 
Ken Bibb                "he heard the snow falling faintly through the
kbibb@qualcomm.com	 universe and faintly falling, like the descent of
jester@crash.cts.com     their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
				--"The Dead", James Joyce