in support of Garth Bruen and KnuJon

[Glenn Becker <burningc@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings,

I would like to add my admittedly small voice to those who have been 
following and appreciating Garth Bruen's tireless work.
Over the past couple of years my efforts at fighting a mephitic 
tidal wave of spam have probably increased four-fold: once I started 
seeing invitations for what was apparently (given the URLs) child 
pornography sites, I decided I had had enough -- so instead of simply 
submitting my spam reports to SpamCop and moving on, I started to use 
tools like whois, dig and host to try to track down the owners of the 
IPs or at least IP ranges from whence the spam was coming.
Unfortunately, whois more often than not provided information that was 
bogus, incomplete (no contact email at all) or -- more innocently I 
suppose -- out of date. My emails to the NOCs and admins of the IPs 
or hosts in question most often bounced straight back to me. In the 
case of the output apparently hosting the child pornography sites, I 
wound up contacting law enforcement in the Netherlands. Whether 
anything was done, I do not know.
This is simply unacceptable. If there are rules, *someone* is not 
doing the job of enforcing them. If there are rules but they are only 
for people who aren't wealthy, then we have a bigger problem, I'd say.
Garth has correctly pointed out that the Ombudsman's response to our 
collective claim was not actually a response at all, and was, to put 
it bluntly, a hopelessly lame and high-handed brush-off.
I cannot imagine how the companies that regularly turn a blind eye to 
this kind of activity are still in business. Well, actually, I CAN 
imagine ... and it isn't pretty.
Please clean up.

Regards,

Glenn Becker

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Glenn Becker - burningc@xxxxxxx
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.org
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