For a couple of weeks now, every time I fire up Gravity it shows
hundreds or thousands of unread messages in comp.editors. The subject
lines are mostly question marks, which I assume means non-ISO-8859-1
characters.

Does anyone know: Is this some sort of weird DDOS attack, or what?

--
Stan Brown, Tehachapi, California, USA https://BrownMath.com/
Shikata ga nai...

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown@fastmail.fm> wrote:

>For a couple of weeks now, every time I fire up Gravity it shows
>hundreds or thousands of unread messages in comp.editors. The subject
>lines are mostly question marks, which I assume means non-ISO-8859-1
>characters.

Yes. "?" can be used to substitute for a character that's not in the
character set being used.

>Does anyone know: Is this some sort of weird DDOS attack, or what?

Absolutely. You may consider it a denial of service attack. They are in
a variety of Asian languages, although some are in English, and many of
the spam articles trigger Google's BASE64 encoding. A few are encoded in
Quoted-Printable. Yes, they do tend to use encoded-word on Subject.

For several months, there have been massive spam attacks through Google
Groups into various newsgroups. Ray and several others have been issuing
NoCeMs as a spam countermeasure. I thought individual.net was processing
them. If not, you could request it.

Note that volunteers are analyzing the spam and adapting as the spammers
are adapting to the countermeasures. Therefore, even with NoCeMs being
processed, you'll still see spam that hasn't yet been countered.

Am 23.11.2023 um 10:08:06 Uhr schrieb Stan Brown:

> Does anyone know: Is this some sort of weird DDOS attack, or what?

Most likely spam from Google Groups.

Can you implement a filter ruleset on your client?

On Thu, 23 Nov 2023 19:48:35 +0100, Marco Moock wrote:

> Am 23.11.2023 um 10:08:06 Uhr schrieb Stan Brown:
>
>> Does anyone know: Is this some sort of weird DDOS attack, or what?
>
> Most likely spam from Google Groups.
>
> Can you implement a filter ruleset on your client?

The Usenet Improvement Project website has information on filtering
Google Groups posts in the OP's client, Gravity.
<http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/filters_ex3.html>

--
Kind regards
Ralph Fox

Betere byþ oft feðre þonne oferfeðre.

On Thu, 23 Nov 2023 18:28:50 -0000 (UTC), Adam H. Kerman wrote:
>
> Stan Brown <the_stan_brown@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
> >For a couple of weeks now, every time I fire up Gravity it shows
> >hundreds or thousands of unread messages in comp.editors. The subject
> >lines are mostly question marks, which I assume means non-ISO-8859-1
> >characters.
>
> Yes. "?" can be used to substitute for a character that's not in the
> character set being used.
>
> >Does anyone know: Is this some sort of weird DDOS attack, or what?
>
> Absolutely. You may consider it a denial of service attack. They are in
> a variety of Asian languages, although some are in English, and many of
> the spam articles trigger Google's BASE64 encoding. A few are encoded in
> Quoted-Printable. Yes, they do tend to use encoded-word on Subject.
>
> For several months, there have been massive spam attacks through Google
> Groups into various newsgroups. Ray and several others have been issuing
> NoCeMs as a spam countermeasure. I thought individual.net was processing
> them. If not, you could request it.
>
> Note that volunteers are analyzing the spam and adapting as the spammers
> are adapting to the countermeasures. Therefore, even with NoCeMs being
> processed, you'll still see spam that hasn't yet been countered.

Thanks for the info, Adam. That would explain why today Gravity said
there were several thousand new ones on the server, but only a dozen
or so appeared when I opened the newsgroup. I don't have a rule to
kill Google Groups postings, because some worthwhile posters use GG;
but I do have a rule to kill posts with garbage characters in the
subject. That would be why the dozen or so had already been marked as
read.

--
Stan Brown, Tehachapi, California, USA https://BrownMath.com/
Shikata ga nai...