taylor@intuitive.com (Dave Taylor) (01/31/91)
While we've all known the value of electronic mail and communications for a while, it's remained a somewhat new technology, with the down side limited to the occasional unprovoked hostile message. Clearly, though, that can't remain, and here's a note that crossed my mailbox (with information changed as needed) indicating the kind of problem that we should expect in the future: > From: Someone at a University in the United States > To: Usenet Newsgroup Moderators > Date: Wed Jan 30 09:58:50 PST 1991 > > I have lately been the victim of electronic harassment. A person at > <organization> has been busily subscribing my account to _hundreds_ > of mailing lists. I have been getting yours as a result of that. Filling a persons mailbox is a "classic" problem in harassment cases out of the computer context, and it seems like as our technology grows in popularity, it picks up the negative as well as the positive of the society and culture it exists within. Most unfortunate. Dave Taylor
mrl08033@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Michael R Linksvayer) (01/31/91)
Would not this problem be virtually eliminated if the maintainers of mailing lists would only subscribe an account if the request for subscription came from that account? It would seem that this is a vast improvement over regular mail which cannot be traced to a sender. Mike Linksvayer
jwtlai@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Jim W Lai) (02/01/91)
Michael Linksvayer writes: > Would not this problem be virtually eliminated if the maintainers of > mailing lists would only subscribe an account if the request for > subscription came from that account? Naive systems would be fooled by forged email, however. If the mail is coming from the same site/machine on a Unix system, the userid can be forged rather trivially. Callback (i.e. sending a verification message and query) would reduce the problem however. Jim
reggie@paradyne.com (George W. Leach) (02/01/91)
Several years ago, a coworker became annoyed at his being included on a list of people to whom certain project-related information was mailed. This person probably did request that I not include him on the mailing list, however I forgot to remove him immediately. He took offense to it and decided to use a loop to continuously send me a copy of the most recent mail message that I had sent to him. The end result was that we ran out of disk space and could not delete the messages fast enough (rather reminds of the internet worm problem). The actions of this individual dissabled our primary development machine for a while causing approximately 60 people some grief. He did not realize the extent to which his actions would cause problems. George W. Leach