Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: Resolution of the "fagcancel" flap
From: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 18:22:42 -0400
From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com> An unknown culprit yesterday launched a massive attack on Jewish, Muslim, Asian, feminist, and sexual minority discussions on the Net, removing thousands of messages from newsgroups including soc.culture.jewish, soc.culture.indian, and soc.feminism. The attacker's technique, similar to what the Scientologists used against alt.religion.scientology, was to spread forged "cancel" messages ostensibly from the original authors instructing that their posts be deleted. The "kikecancel" messages seem to come from UUNET; the "fagcancel" messages came from Cottage Software Inc., a tiny Internet provider in Tulsa, Oklahoma. William Brunton, the president of Cottage Software, was a bit harried when I spoke with him this evening. "I can say it did originate from my site. A user originated it and we've stopped it. It's been turned over to the appropriate authorites. As far as I'm concerned, the matter is closed," he said. Brunton said the slew of "cancel" messages started Sunday morning. He learned about the attack that evening. "As soon as I found out about it, they were vaporware." He declined to elaborate, but from what I was able to gather the attacker simply sucked through all the messages in the offending newsgroups and attempted to delete each one. The text of the forged "fagcancel" and "kikecancel" messages says: These cancels are issued as a service to the Internet providers not wishing to carry articles from sexual perverts and deviants. Sites that do not wish to take advantage of this free service can easily can opt out of these cancels by "aliasing out" the fagcancel pseudosite. These cancels are issued as a service to thInternet providers not wishing to carry articles from persons of Jewish persuasion. Sites that do not wish to take advantage of this free service can easily can opt out of these cancels by "aliasing out" the kikecancel pseudosite. (Of course, unless the operator of a news server takes special steps to "alias out" and therefore ignore the forged cancel messages, the offending messages will be deleted.) Other cancels include: twatcancel ("females of the species"), geekcancel ("computer geeks and eggheads"), towelheadcancel ("persons of Muslem [sic] persuasion"), and slanteyecancel ("persons of Oriental extraction"). Though the attacks centered on a handful of newsgroups, they affected scads of others. One cancel message (<cancel.51ug0p$jnn () solaris cc vt edu>) was designed to remove messages from dozens of newsgroups: Newsgroups: wash.politics,us.politics.bob-dole,us.politics.abortion, tx.politics,triangle.politics,talk.politics.theory,talk.politics.misc, talk.politics.libertarian,talk.politics.guns,talk.politics.crypto, talk.politics,seattle.politics,scruz.politics,ri.politics,or.politics, ny.politics,nj.politics,ne.politics,mn.politics,dfw.politics,dc.politics, co.politics,ca.politics,ba.politics,az.politics,alt.politics.white-power, alt.politics.usa.republican,alt.politics.usa.newt-gingrich, alt.politics.usa.misc,alt.politics.usa.constitution, alt.politics.usa.congress,alt.politics.usa,alt.politics.reform, alt.politics.radical-left,alt.politics.perot,alt.politics.nationalism.white, alt.politics.media,alt.politics.libertarian,alt.politics.immigration, alt.politics.homosexuality... Now that Brunton from Cottage Software has kicked off the offending user, he's more philosophical than he was at this time yesterday: "There's really nothing you can do. You don't know you have a bad apple until a worm crawls out of it." -By Declan McCullagh (declan () well com), 9/23/96 ### Some of the cancel messages are stored in: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/wo/wotan/cancel.gz ------------------------------------------------------------------------- fight-censorship is at http://www.eff.org/~declan/fight-censorship/ -- Stanton McCandlish mech () eff org Electronic Frontier Foundation Online Activist
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- IP: Resolution of the "fagcancel" flap Dave Farber (Sep 25)