Following last week’s victory by a group of site administrators, forcing Worldcom Inc’s UUNet Technologies Inc to implement much stronger anti-spam technology, the group says that it as yet has not received any notice of the promised legal action against it. The group called off its action on August 6 after receiving an explanation from UUNet about its plans to reduce the level of spam on its Usenet newsgroup service, and after noticing a general reduction in the level coming through anyway. But if UUNet did decide to bring legal proceedings against the ad-hoc group, other site administrators would be willing to support them by erasing UUNet’s presence on the internet, says group spokesperson Dennis McClain-Furmanski, a student at Radford University in Virginia. This could be done, he says, if enough administrators put a filter on the Domain Name Server (DNS) tables at their site, rejecting incoming traffic based on certain criteria. The group is developing such a piece of software which it plans to give away. It will be based on filtering software called NoCem which is available over the net. The group also plans to make a list of all the sites that produce spam over a certain threshold, based on something called the Briedbart Index. The group says it is still writing the software at this stage.
