Weird historical detail. Sprint was covered by common carrier regulations which our legal team basically interpreted as we couldn’t block anything based on content (simplified). We had a lot of emergency meetings to be able to shut down C&S. We had to establish they were causing reliability problems. A bit of a stretch to be honest, but… we did pull the plug.
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Just as Canter & Siegel contributed mightily* to the collapse of UseNet with the first real case of mass spam, and exploited a system of trust, that's what this is doing. Spray painting their vulgar spittle across the public square with hopes of garnering a few extra dimes.
* I was at Sprint at the time and remember the hammer that got dropped being "nuclear" by the standards of the time. Now it's quaint. In retrospect, we should have done so much more, but I don't think anyone imagined it would ever get THIS bad. And for as bad as you think it is, it's 1,000,000x worse than that.
Weird historical detail. Sprint was covered by common carrier regulations which our legal team basically interpreted as we couldn’t block anything based on content (simplified). We had a lot of emergency meetings to be able to shut down C&S. We had to establish they were causing reliability problems. A bit of a stretch to be honest, but… we did pull the plug.
But for example it meant we carried all of alt.binaries #iykyk in spite of some dubious content, but we could at least limit storage to a shorter time period than we kept for text groups.
Which now reminds me of being woken up by my SkyTel pager falling in my head from the headboard at 2a. The NOC calling. Usenet servers were acting up. Fine fine. Let me check. Ah disc cleanup scripts failed for some reason so things filled up. Fixed. Huh I wonder how they knew because they aren’t actually monitored that much (we didn’t provide SLA). Ah… they were reading alt.binaries.$porn.
I called the NOC back and let them know it was fixed and that “perhaps you should be more careful what groups you’re looking at while at work”.
And then there was the weird things we rigged the pagers to be able to do. This was in the days before any reasonable mobile data options. But we could use the 2 way pagers as a janky system. So we could actually reboot routers through it. There was a tiny bit of security.
Was it secure? I mean kinda? Sorta. The resources available to adversaries we cared about were wildly more limited back then. No SDR, for example.
You’re talking about a period RIGHT AFTER the first firewalls even existed. I think the DEC SEAL (hi Marcus!) had just been installed at the White House, and was pretty much the first of its kind.
It was different times.
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