@Home heeft een Usenet Death Penalty gekregen nadat bleek dat 39% van de traffic uit het @Home netwerk uit spam mailings bestond. @Home bleek geen gehoor te geven aan verzoeken om actie te ondernemen tegen het misbruik van hun netwerk. Hier de aankondiging uit news.admin.announce:
Over the past year, @Home Network has been the source of vast quantities of Usenet spam. Despite countless complaints, reports, and phone calls, @Home Network shows no inclination towards stopping this ongoing abuse. By December, 1999, the situation reached unconscionable levels of abuse.Currently there is still a huge volume of EMP spam originating both directly from @Home's @Home grown spammers and through the countless open proxies to their news servers. These open proxies present a very clear threat to the entire Usenet community at large. The data included in the following article shows a trend of persistent and increasing abuse.
This Request For Discussion comes after much consideration and not insignificant effort on my part and the part of others to avoid this action. Unfortunately, I feel the options have been exhausted. As always, it is my hope that the reasons for remedial action may be adequately addressed, in order to prevent any UDP action.
@Home Network is having an increasingly difficult time keeping their spam numbers at anything approaching reasonable levels. In my estimation, there are two primary reasons for this; open proxies to their news servers and a hesitancy to act against their @Home grown spammers.
Since 01 December 1999, a daily average of 11,174 cyberspam cancels were issued against posts coming through NEWS.HOME.COM. Between 1999.12.01 and 2000.01.08, 435,799 cancels have been issued against @Home originated spam. I can provide the breakdown by individual posting server, if its felt there's a need for these additional stats.
The "typical" @Home posting server which makes it into the Spam Hippo report, has an average output which is 39% spam, on average accounting for approximately 1738 articles or 166 MBytes of spam being dropped daily, per listed server. Since 01 Dec 1999, Hippo has dropped over 49 GBytes of spam originated through the @Home posting machines.
Since WebBinaries.com stopped spamming, the vast majority of spam coming from @Home is coming through hijacked open proxies, with the Saylor operation leading the pack of parasites using the @Home news servers.
A policy of not port scanning their own network, in an attempt to secure open proxies, means that the only people actively trying to locate exploitable security holes in the @Home network are the net-abusers. So far as I can tell, there is no proactive role being undertaken by @Home, to prevent the rape of Usenet through their hijacked news servers. Unless someone on the outside makes a point of hammering on @Home about an open port, they remain blissfully unaware of the damage being inflicted on the network, through their neglect.
This is not the only problem, however. When it is pointed out that professional spammers are operating from the @Home network, @Home appears unwilling to act against them. Posting may be suspended for a few hours, but the spammers seem to manage to sweet talk their way back into good standing, far too frequently and far too often.
In most instances, it appears that no action is taken against @Home's @Home grown spammers. Some low volume spammers are able to contine their abuse of the net for months at a time. [break] Zeurpiet stuurde dit artikel van Webwereld, handig als je geen zin hebt om het bovenstaande door te lezen:[/break] Spam in nieuwsgroepen met een @Home.com adres als afzender hangt beheerders van nieuwsgroepen de keel uit.
De moderators hebben daarom een Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) afgeroepen over het @Home Network. Alle berichten die klanten van de kabelinternetaanbieder plaatsen in nieuwsgroepen worden automatisch gewist. @Home heeft in de VS één miljoen gebruikers, in Nederland heeft het bedrijf ongeveer 7500 abonnees.
"Gedurende het afgelopen jaar is @Home bron geweest van grote hoeveelheden spam", schrijft David Ritz, een vechter tegen commerciële niet ter zake doende berichten in nieuwsgroepen (spam) en organisator van de UDP. "Ondanks ontelbare klachten, rapporten en telefoontjes aan @Home toont het bedrijf geen enkel initiatief om het misbruik tegen te gaan".
