February 19–26, 1998

hit and run

Netcom Defcon

For the nearly 10,000 local subscribers to Netcom, Cyberspace may get a little smaller starting at 8 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 20.

Last Saturday—in response to Netcom's inability to stop the massive amounts of advertisements (or spam) generated by its customers—an advance notice calling for a Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) against the California-based Internet Service Provider was issued on the Internet.

What this means is that any electronic post, originating from Netcom's more than half a million customers nationwide, to the 30,000 Internet discussion groups (or newsgroups) that comprise Usenet, will be canceled.

The UDP announcement issued by the Internet's Cabal Network Security read, in part: "This action shall remain in effect until such time as Netcom US dramatically reduces the amount of Usenet spam originating from its servers, and publicly declares a solid anti-spam policy which includes giving its abuse department the authority to suspend or terminate accounts that have been determined to be the source of abuse."

The UDP will not affect Netcom customers' e-mail at all," explained Rick Buchanan, one of the dozen or so cancellers worldwide who will enforce the edict. "It will not affect their access to the Web. They will still be able to read Usenet newsgroups, but their posts will be subject to immediate cancellation."

The UDP is a last-resort measure used to combat spam, which threatens to drown out the legitimate messages posted to discussion groups. Participation in the UDP is voluntary, but most major Internet news servers honor such cancellations.

"The UDP is a weapon we don't like to use," Buchanan, a New Jersey-based computer consultant, stressed. "Innocent parties will be affected and that bothers me. But Netcom has consistently ignored our complaints."

Although the UDP is based on volume, not content, Buchanan claims that the vast majority of spam originating at Netcom are advertising pornographic Web sites.

On Tuesday evening, Pamela Goncalves, public relations manager for Netcom, said that she didn't "anticipate the death penalty to be a problem." She assured City Paper that Netcom's operations department was in communication with the Cabal and that "the problem was being resolved."

-Deborah Scoblionkov