Al said:
They are not from what I'm told. He might have a small case if he'd
have posted a copyright notice with his postings, but he didn't.
Al
I'll simply offer this post from Bass's past:
From:
[email protected] (Yin Lung Shih)
Subject: Can we un-hijack this newsgroup?
Message-ID: <
[email protected]>
Organization: Caltech Alumni Association
Newsgroups: rec.aviation.student
I'm sorry to bring this up, but one Robert L. Bass with the
original e-mail address of '
[email protected]' has recently
taken actions out of spite with the apparent intent to destroy
this newsgroup or blackmail it into submission. These include:
- Deliberately changing his e-mail address to get through
newsgroup participants' kill filters. Aliases noted so far
include:
[email protected], Harry Haffer, Wally Waller, RLB,
and others. He has used about a half dozen aliases in about
48 hours
- Pirating information compiled, edited, and mostly written by
Gene Whitt and claiming it as first belonging to no one and now
claiming that he has created a version which is owned by him
- Retracting a promise to withdraw that pirated material and
renewing his distribution attempts
- Offering "peace" with one hand and a thrusting knife with the
other to his detractors
- Bombing the newsgroup with posts of this information, hundreds
of KB at a time, despite prior warnings as to the consequences
to news-servers
- A threat to repeat this bombing periodically, and in fact an
explicit statement by him that he is doing so to push the
off-topic "flames" against him out of news-server buffers (so
he knows what he is doing)
- A threat to scan the AIM and FAR and post those in the future
He claims to be doing these things in response to flames against
him and because it is his "right". Further he would stop if people
stopped flaming him. However, as a recent participant in these
"flamewars", I perused past transactions and concluded that the
forced departure of all the people he complains of, Ahrens,
Laffer, and even myself (if 5 days, 3 in defense of Gene's rights,
constitutes sufficient transgression against group sensibilities)
would only lead to a new flurry of flames in short order with
new participants. He is some kind of wierd neurotic "moth" that
both attracts flames and is attracted to flames.
Since this is an unmoderated newsgroup there are a limited
number of options:
- Readers can object to his actions by copying his posts to
their ISP and his ISP and hope that some action is taken by
his ISP to kick him off or your ISP to reject posts from his
ISP. This means keeping up with e-mail address changes and
ISP changes as he hops around at first, as he is likely to do.
- Readers can ignore his actions, treat him as a pariah, and
hope he goes away. Note that his bombing the newsgroup and
changing his e-mail address means that it will be impossible
to ignore the consequences of his actions even if you ignore
him. And you won't be able to ignore him easily by kill-filing
him anymore. The newsgroup will function in a degraded fashion
so long as he keeps this up. (He knows this, which is why he
is doing it.) But perhaps enough patience will see him get
tired of this spite tantrum and the newsgroup can return to its
semi-debilitated state of waiting for another blow-up from him.
- Apply pressure to his detractors to shut up and leave him
alone. I think this is a forlorn hope as it will only
encourage him to be more outrageous and new detractors will
arise with a repetition of these events at a later time.
- This group can change to a moderated newsgroup. This has
limited success outlook as moderated groups tend to be sterile
and activity rates are low. It can also take several months
to get the change implemented.
- Those members of this group who are fed up can move to an
e-mail reflector list. This requires someone to set up and
maintain a list, which is not very hard to do - I run one
for a club and know how. It is less efficient than a newsgroup
since every post is replicated in a mailbox rather than on a
new-server, also archiving is not so straightforward as through
Dejanews. On the other hand, I know of a ham-radio reflector
which probably has over 1000 satisfied subscribers with no
interest in "upgrading" to a newsgroup and the Mooney reflector
probably has 100-150 subscribers. A reflector is probably
better than a moderated group as it doesn't require post by
post approval, which is what slows moderated groups down, and
can operate at e-mail speeds. Of course, the only point of
the list is to exclude RLB or anyone else who behaves in a
continuously outrageous manner. The list maintainer would
have that power, and only he or his designees could do so.
If the list maintainers abused that power then the list would
eventually become sterile or worthless. I don't see why that
should be, but it is important to be up front about the
trade-offs.
- Quit the newsgroup, as many others have already done, in
disgust.
I can think of no other choices.
Yin Shih, N9YS/6, PP-ASEL-IA, M20K
[email protected]
