After escaping the wrath of an anti-spam email boycott last month, Netcom On-Line Communication Services is now in hot water with Usenet news activists who say the company allows spammers to use its networks to pollute public news groups.
Unless a truce is called today, a loose cabal of hundreds of news administrators, hackers, nerds, geeks, dorks, and lurkers intend to sentence Netcom US - the domestic division of the international ISP - to a Usenet death penalty (UDP), effective Friday at 5 p.m. EST.
One of the most dreaded tactics the Net community has at its disposal, a UDP means that all posts to Usenet originating from Netcom will be automatically canceled and deleted. The tactic is a last resort against ISPs who refuse to take responsibility for Usenet spam that originates on their networks.
"Despite repeated complaints about Usenet spam originating from Netcom's news servers, Netcom US has not only not acted to solve the problem but has ignored the growing public outcry against this problem," read a UDP declaration, first posted to Net-abuse newsgroups on 14 February.
If carried out, the action will not affect customers of Netcom Canada or Netcom UK, nor those news posts made to Netcom-specific newsgroups.
Netcom has been in contact with the activists, and claims that the UDP has been postponed until Monday.
"Our initial reaction from them on [our plan to stop Netcom-originated spam] is very favorable," said Mike Kallet, Netcom's senior vice president for product services and business development. "I hope that they look at what we're doing, and they're reasonable about it," he said. "I don't see any reason why they would continue with the threat."
Kallet said Netcom's plans include implementing new software that will deny spammers the ability to make mass postings. The company will also be detailing its actions online, including possibly posting the user IDs of offending spammers. Finally, Kallet said that legal action will be taken against habitual spammers who keep using Netcom as a source of their spams.
For their part, the activists pushing the UDP have remained unavailable for comment and, as of midday Thursday, their Web site did not reveal any intention to reverse their plans.
"Knowing them, I'd doubt they're planning on actually stopping anything until Netcom has actually started playing nice," said Tim Skirvin, moderator of news.admin.net-abuse.policy, one of the groups where the UDP was posted.
"Because we're one of the largest ISPs, we either get a lot of [spam] or generate a lot of it," Kallet said. "So the quantity is a lot, but we do have a no-tolerance policy on spam, and we kick people off our network all the time."
Earlier this year, Netcom was given a similar treatment by Net vigilantes. The company spent a month on the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), a boycott tool used against ISPs whose owners allow their systems to be used by spammers. The RBL effectively severed many email ties with Netcom until it was lifted at the end of January.
"We have an agreement with Netcom which they are so far complying with," said Paul Vixie, the consultant and engineer who runs the RBL in his spare time.
While Vixie does not directly participate in UDPs by canceling messages, he does honor the UDP "cancel messages" that are generated elsewhere. Cancel messages - the technical tool of a UDP - are administrative commands that travel between news servers, canceling out offending messages.
Should the Netcom UDP occur, most of the world's news administrators will be honoring the cancels - whether they realize it or not. "Most news admins don't know what a cancel message is," Vixie said.
It looks like a classic battle between the clueless suits and the Dilberts who are running the network, said one anti-spam expert.
"Both on Usenet and with junk email, Netcom seems to be the scene of the most recent war between pointy-haired suits and clueful technical staff," asserted John C. Mozena, co-founder of CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.
"Netcom's sysadmins know that they need to gain control over their servers and keep them from being used to abuse the rest of the Net," Mozena said. "They've got good people there who are trying their hardest to be good Net citizens."
Still, if the UDP is carried out as threatened, there is little Netcom can do to stop it, short of satisfying the demands of the cabal.
"Hopefully," said Mozena, "both the UDP and the continuing possibility of reinstatement to the RBL will help convince the non-clueful folks at Netcom who make the decisions that the Net isn't going to stand for the flood of Net abuse that comes from or passes through their systems."
"Spam is actually a very expensive venture, [and] not only for people whose productivity is disrupted because of it," Kallet said. "But it definitely eats up a lot of our operations staff and a lot of our network and a lot of our service and a lot of our customer service folks with regards to the attention that they have to spend on it. "Spam costs Netcom literally millions of dollars a year, so we take spam very seriously, and we try to do everything we can to try to diminish it," he said.
"It's a game of just staying one step ahead of these [spammers]," said Kallet. "It's a very expensive venture, but it's very expensive if we don't do it, so we have to do it."
And it seems that the real expense of spam has been proven to almost every corporation in the business. Telecom giant UUnet was issued a UDP last August for being the largest aimed-for-Usenet spam factory at the time. That UDP lasted for six days.
