HOST - dreamhost.com / Liberality (Hosting, Basic Requirement)

[Tim X]

Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> writes:

> Ilias Lazaridis schrieb:
>> crossposted to 5 groups, which are affected by this case.
>> followup not applicable.
>
> Actually, in this case, yes.
>
>> It _seems_ that Mr. Xah Les's account was terminated by dreamhost.com
>> because of
>> a) the inability of several people to detect the interconnections
>> within writings which lead to perfectly valid cross-posts within the
>> usenet.
>
> Actually, his posts are mostly off-topic.
>
>> b) the non-liberal and essentially non-professional way of how
>> dreamhost.com deals with abuse complaints.
>
> Unless you give some concrete facts, this is simply slander.
> URLs don't count.
>
>> To dreamhost.com:
>> You should install an autoresponder to your abuse email, which
>> reminds
>> people that it is
>> * nearly inpossible to rate the content posted to usenet
>> * neally inpossible to detect validity of cross-posts
>>   especially within complex analytical/philosophical writings
>> * other important facts
>
> Why are you wasting our mental bandwidth with that?
> Besides, it's utter nonsense. There's an infinity of invalid reasons,
> so you can't rule them out with an autoresponder.
>
>> People can then decide if they still wish to send the abuse complain
>> (e.g. can follow a link within the autoresponder).
>
> Nope. Finding out the provider is enough of a barrier. Additional
> barriers are not really necessary.
> Xah Lee has been irritating people for months.
>
> I do share your concerns. Complaint handling often is unprofessional.
> However, in Xah Lee's case, he's indeed been irritating too many
> people for a too long time that *some* sanction is in fact
> appropriate.
> I routinely kill his threads, but I'm reading a specific newsgroup for
> a purpose, and Xah Lee requires me to kill his. He's essentially doing
> semantic spam - analytical and philosophical writings may be well and
> fine, but they aren't appropriate on the newsgroups that I frequent
> (or only in very specific ways that Xah Lee doesn't address).
>
>> To anyone:
>> Any form of censorship and "suppression of freedom of expression"
>> should be kept out of from open-source projects and from usenet.
>> It is the within the responsibility of every entity (including
>> commercial companies) to act against it.
>> http://dev.lazaridis.com/base/wiki/LiberalProjectDefinition
>
> There are many important goals. Free speech is indeed very high on the
> list. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that Xah Lee will find
> another provider.

I think the other point here is that everyone *assumes* Xah's account
was cancelled simply because of a campaign to report him for spamming
multiple newsgroups. I suspect there were other factors involved. for
all anyone knows, the provider might have been getting complaints from
people about Xah's account, website, e-mail and newsgorup posting for
ages and just decided it was more trouble than it was worth to keep
him as a customer. 

Personally, I didn't report Xah to his provider, but I do believe he
was a troll (which he himself admits) and which is confirmed by the
fact he never hangs around to defend or debate his posts which seem
more often than not deliberately designed to start a flamewar. 

Bottom line is everyone seems to have just accepted Xah's claims and
now we have lots of outraged netters screaming about free speech.
Given Xah's desire to provoke emotion etc, its even possible Xah
created this whole thing just for entertainment!

On usernet, I think the secret is "believe nothing, question
everything" and remember, on the net, nobody knows your a dog!


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au