Internet Advertiser's Blacklist

Axel Boldt (boldt@math.ucsb.edu)
Tue, 13 Dec 1994 22:40:35 -0800

[Moderator's note: I have some trepidation about this information. However,
I believe it is critical for the members of this list to be fully informed
about such an endeavor, whether the endeavor is reasonable, enforceable,
legal, or practical. Therefore, in the spirit of free information, I have
forwarded most of this post to the list, with the poster taking full
responsibility for its contents. The poster asks for discussion to follow
in alt.internet.services, where this topic is being heatedly discussed as
we speak. I will post some responses within reason to this list--GF]

THE INTERNET ADVERTISER'S BLACKLIST

* 1. What is this?
* 2. Who gets included?
* 3. What is the philosophy behind it?
* 4. What can I do with it?
* 5. What if I wanted to punish YOU?
* 6. What other blacklists are out there?
* 7. How can I help?
* 8. The Blacklist in itself.

1. What is this?

This is the Internet Advertiser's Blacklist. It is intended to curb
inappropriate advertising on usenet newsgroups and via junk e-mail. It
works by describing offenders and their offensive behavior, expecting
that people who read it will punish the offenders in one way or
another.

The list is posted regularly to several newsgroups and the most recent
version is always available over the WWW as
http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/blacklist.html.

2. Who gets included?

Everyone who is pointed out to me for sending out unsolicited
commercial e-mail or posting inappropriate commercials to usenet
newsgroups. I also monitor alt.recent-events.net-abuse.

With "inappropriate commercials in usenet" I basically mean ads posted
to unrelated newsgroups or to newsgroups which traditionlally don't
tolerate commercial messages. The number of complaints I receive is
also a factor.

3. What is the philosophy behind it?

In a nutshell: the Internet is probably as close to an anarchy as we
can get. This is good. Therefore, punishing of unwelcome behavior
should be done by private individuals and hence follow the same grass
roots philosophy that governs the rest of the net. Read more about it
in http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/blacklist_philosophy.html.

4. What can I do with it?

If you judge that one of the described behaviors is worthy of
punishment, you could for example do one of the following. (Note that
some of these might be illegal in some jurisdictions. Check the books
first and don't blame me.)
* Boycott the advertising business.
* Send them or their sysadmins a message informing them that you
disapprove of their behavior.
* Put them in you kill file. (Read all about rn and trn kill files
in
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/killfile-faq/
faq.html.)
* Filter them out of your mailbox. (If you read mail on a unix host,
you might want to use the program procmail for that, which can be
gotten via anonymous ftp from syd.dit.csiro.au as
/pub/ken/procmail-3.03.tar.gz. Another possibility is filter,
which comes with the mail reader elm.)
* Use procmail and an AI engine like emacs doctor to engage them in
a fake mail dialog.
* If you are a system admin, you could stop forwarding mail or news
originating from them. Or, if the culprit owns their own domain,
you can deny them access to your ftp, gopher, telnet and servers.
* If you operate a cancelbot, you could automatically cancel all
postings originating from them.
* Say individuals A and B are on the list. You can send an e-mail
message to B with fake From-header A saying "I'm interested in
your product/service." In this fashion, the advertisers will start
to bug each other, end up on each others mailing lists and waste
time and money.

5. What if I wanted to punish YOU?

Well, in principle you could use the measures from question 4 (except
the first and last one) or you could even start a blacklist of
blacklist maintainers. But why would you want to do such an evil thing
to me, your humble servant?

6. What other blacklists are out there?

I'm aware of one blacklist operated by Pierre Beyssac
<pb@fasterix.frmug.fr.net> which tries to keep the french usenet
hierarchy fr clean of commercials and is posted regularly to the
groups fr.news.reponses, fr.news.divers and fr.biz.d.

7. How can I help?

* If you encounter an instance of offensive advertising on the
internet, send me a copy, or, even better, post it to
alt.recent-events.net-abuse. If you send it directly to me,
please make sure to check the latest version of the list first so
that I won't get multiple complaints about incidents already
covered. The newest version is always available over the WWW as
http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/blacklist.html.
* Feel free to contact me if you find that any information in this
document is inaccurate.
* Please start your own blacklist and tell me about it. I will
include a pointer to it here.
* Let me know about any creative suggestions for the answer to
question 4.
* Distribute this list widely.

8. THE BLACKLIST IN ITSELF

I have formatted it in such a way to make automatic processing easy.
Every entry can contain some or all off the fields ID, Name, Address,
Phone, Email, WWW, Entered, Changed, Behavior, Remarks in this order.
A line starting with whitespace is a continuation of the preceding
line. Several Names, e-mail or WWW addresses etc. are separated by
commas and optional whitespace. Blank lines separate the entries.
Every entry has a unique ID so that your program can decide if it has
processed that entry before when a new list arrives. Furthermore, the
original offensive article is accessible as
http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL/<ID>.txt where the true ID
is to be substituted for <ID>.

[Moderator's note: blacklist omitted for reasons of comfort. I'm not sure
if I support this whole idea, and want to direct people interested in the
actual contents of the list to the sites mentioned above.--GF]

_________________________________________________________________

Date: 1994/12/13 16:25:32 PST
(C) 1994 by Axel Boldt <boldt@math.ucsb.edu>.
Do with it what you want.