 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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As of this issue, the nonmember edition of PC Update will be distributed to the 400-strong Adelaide PC Users Group. In our early years this magazine was also shared with the Sydney and Perth groups.
Awards update
As mentioned last month, at the Eighth Intergalactic User Group Conference in New York, PC Update won four awards. It was the outright winner in the Best Features & Reviews and Best Columnists categories. I said that we won "at least" three awards, the third being runner up in the Best Publication category. The final results have come in and you will see the plaques and certificates hanging proudly at our office. The fourth was also a runner up award in the Best Presentation and Layout category. Thanks to all our well-wishers and to the people here who made it possible.
That other survey
Most of you didn't vote for the Readers' Choice Awards last month. Would you believe, four (4, vier, quatre, quattro) people submitted the form printed in the magazine? About a dozen voted on the BBS, and about five hundred voted on the Web. While that shows that our voters are mostly Net users, what does it say about the 7000 members who are not? Come on, Dave Mitchell and Stan Johnstone are putting in a lot of effort to make the awards a success, so find that back issue and rush in your entry.
Usenet tip
A user commented, "Pyramid selling Get-Rich-Quick scams seem to litter newsgroups" and asked, "Does Melb PC User Group have a policy on this trash?"
Apart from the effect on the bandwidth, they are illegal in Victoria and possibly in other states. Yes, the policy is in the form you signed. If a user broke the law, we'd cooperate fully with the police. We have already suspended one user for a month for something less widespread.
You and I should ignore them. If you glance at the news.admin.* newsgroups you will see the "CancelMooses" and other automated means of removing them. Our site does not honour control messages from unknown people, so the cancel messages have no effect here and you get to see the spams (excessively cross-posted messages).
Some messages are posted to draw flames, so resist the temptation to bite.
A spam is usually from a fake address, so your complaint will just bounce back to you. The recent Hong Kong based message used a different (but real) return address, possibly to reduce the load on his own site (and to send more spams I suppose) whereas the innocent site was hit by complaints and mail bombs.
At present there are two people ostensibly in Brazil and Vietnam sending out a spam about magazine discounts.
The message-ID field is harder to fake and suggests a posting from the Dorsai Embassy, a New York City based ISP. Only the operator of dorsai can see what account caused the posting by checking the logs (not necessarily which individual used the account at that time). The one from "Vietnam" (netnam.org.vn) used amazingly (not improbably) the same version of Pine mailer!
Why is the organisation the "University of California, Berkeley" in both posts? It would seem that a particular loophole was being exploited there. A casual reader would be tempted to post a complaint to root@netnam.org.vn, but you might find that such a site does not exist. If it did, then the spam is doubly cruel.
Some mothers do 'ave 'em
Some of these spammers are young people out to have fun; just one more reason we have this policy of not sharing accounts with anyone including close relatives.
We continue to see subscribers changing their organisation line, omitting their full name from headers, exceeding the four-line limit for signatures and the like.
We have temporarily banned the use of OS/2 and UNIX sendmail on the users' computers for security concerns, which effectively means using only DOS or Windows SLIP/PPP programs for them. We hope this will be a temporary measure.
Some of you might think that what the administrators don't know won't hurt them. If only life were that simple. We see the bounces caused by your failed posts, sometimes a few dozen at a time. We simply don't want to lose our link to the Net for the sake of the group's reputation, not to mention other users' "net.enjoyment." While irresponsible users can just walk away from a disaster here and find a new provider, the ones that put our system together and other users have much more to lose.
Learning from others
Another user group I know has just under half our membership, no staff, and recently had just enough money in the bank to print one issue of their magazine. They cannot hope to get out of this situation unless they can raise some capital quickly.
At the other end of the spectrum, we look towards groups such as the giant Boston Computer Society with its 23,000 members as possible role models. It has 15 paid staff, while we have just reverted to two full-timers here.
We are seeing signs that we need to increase our staff, and this will start with a technical person to oversee our online services. On a happier note I am pleased to note that advertising has doubled this month. Please continue to support our advertisers!
Reprinted from the September 1995 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
