Subject: CCL: Disruption in CCL operation (fwd)

From: Jan Labanowski <jkl{at}ccl.net>
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:10:32 -0400 (EDT)

Dear CCL members...

Your sleepy coordinator speaks in a faint voice... I also smell bad {:-(}.

I thought it will be a short job, but things always take more than you wish.
With the spammers attacking CCL like mad dogs, I had to take some measures.
For this reason, the CCL server has been moved to another machine running RH9.0
with most security updates installed. I started about 11pm  yesterday,
and I need to go to bed soon, since I do not see much. But I still have many
things to do, and need to process the backlog of mail.

Now, before you post to CCL, you need to put CCL: on the Subject line.
This way your script will only go through routine/automatic checks before
it is posted. If the checks do not find anything even slightly suspicious,
they will let the message through. If they find something, the message will
be manually reviewed by a human. If you forget about CCL: on the Subject line,
your message will need to wait for human to review it.

Also... From now on, the e-mail addresses appearing in the message
will be intentionally messed up before being SAVED in the CCL archives.
I will also do a global replace on the e-mail addresses currently in
the archives, but I probably will not be able to get to it today.
The @ sign which appears in each e-mail address (oh well, they do not
use bangs anymore...) will be replaced by a randomly chosen "look alike"
> from the set of twenty, or so of them (e.g., with *at*, (at), -.at.-, etc).
We probably should do a competition for good at-look-alikes.
The humans will figure out what the e-mail address is, but the automatic
harvesting robots will have problems. They are oriented on volume
harvest, and hopefully collect only the regular addresses with correct
syntax. I could do GIF imges with addresses, but then it would be a problem
with plain text files.

The footnote to each CCL message became longer, I will hopefully condense it
some day. I also need to update the instructions on the Web and info for
new subscribers. I will be discontinuing e-mail based services like
MAILSERVER (serving files from CCL archives via e-mail) and e-mail based
CCL archive search. Since currently THERE IS NO WAY to establish identity
of the party originating the e-mail, the stupid spammers try to use these
services to include junk mail into the request with phony From: address
hoping for it to bounce. While it does not really work, they still manage
to produce error codes which are sent to unsuspecting people.

On top of this, due to formidable economic boom, I do not have 
really any help in doing the chores. So, please be considerate, or
send me donations to CCL fund (just go to CCL Home page, read how you
can give me money or buy something from CCL, and roll the green my way {:-(}..
Will be much obliged...).

Thank you for your patience...

Jan
[email-masked]	

Jan K. Labanowski         |  phone: 614-292-9279,  FAX: 614-292-7168
Ohio Supercomputer Center |  E-mail: jkl{at}ccl.net 
1224 Kinnear Rd,          |  http://www.ccl.net/~jkl
Columbus, OH 43212-1163   |  http://www.ccl.net/    http://asdn.net/