"Mike said:
Who is moderating this group?
If you are referring to the constant stream of virus
postings and 1-900 phone scams, not everyone who uses
USENET can see them. Some people use news servers fed
by CleanFeed, which removes a good deal of it. My provider
doesn't subscribe to that service, so I'm stuck with
the "Britney Spears naked" etc.
In an article I read recently, several people were caught
and charged, for using on the order of 20000 internet
connected computers, for a DDOS (distributed denial of
service) attack. Basically, what they do, is they flood
the target internet site with traffic. To do this, the
participants use the virus posting you see, where either
the virus is a .scr file attached to the post, or they
exhort you to visit some $7 a month web site they run,
where the virus is hosted on the web site. Once the
virus has control of your comnputer, it joins the other
19,999 machines, to be used for DDOS, spamming etc.
That is the way the world works I guess - find a clear
pool of water, and there is always another human to
crap in it.
Paul
