Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!cartan!brahms!gsmith From: gsmith@brahms.UUCP Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,news.misc,news.sysadmin Subject: Foothead, Foothead, on the net/Who's the biggest liar yet? Message-ID: <1128@cartan.Berkeley.EDU> Date: Sat, 18-Apr-87 05:09:12 EST Article-I.D.: cartan.1128 Posted: Sat Apr 18 05:09:12 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 19-Apr-87 01:11:57 EST Sender: daemon@cartan.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: gsmith@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Gene Ward Smith) Followup-To: news.misc,news.sysadmin Organization: Brahms Gang Posting Central Lines: 129 Xref: utgpu talk.religion.misc:2591 news.misc:261 news.sysadmin:100 Summary: fer shur Oh dear! There I was, snidely implying that Foothead might not understand the net and UNIX(*) that well, and in particular might not understand the implications of the phony arndt@prometheus appearing from daemon@ucbvax. Wrong, wrong, wrongo--and my sincere apologies. Obviously Foothead knew about all this. He must have. Because Foothead IS the phony Ken Arndt. This would explain why he was so annoyed at my original pointing out of this, above and beyond the standard Foothead irritabilities. Now, I posted an article yesterday "speculating" that this was true, as a counter to Foothead's duplicitous "speculations". As stated, this was based on mere stylistic analyses. But in fact, we had done some more checking, and already knew that Foothead was indulging in a "pseudoposition" of his own. To use George Greene's more accurate and assertive formulation, Foothead is a damn liar. Either that, or he is indeed the biggest master baiter on talk.religion.misc. First: where are the arndt@prometheus articles really coming from? Would you believe, Rich Rosen? No, not exactly. Specifically they come from the account rlr@borax.lcs.mit.edu. We have the following from the ucbvax news log: Apr 16 06:49:20 ucbvax sendmail[7351]: AA07351: message-id=<666@prometheus.UUCP> Apr 16 06:49:20 ucbvax sendmail[7351]: AA07351: from=, size=5888, class=0 Apr 16 06:49:38 ucbvax sendmail[7371]: AA07351: to=XXXX, delay=00:00:53, stat=Sent And for confirmation, over at borax: Apr 16 10:45:53 borax.lcs.mit.edu: 27885 sendmail: AA27885: message-id=<666@prometheus.UUCP> Apr 16 10:45:54 borax.lcs.mit.edu: 27885 sendmail: AA27885: from=rlr, size=5772, class=0 Apr 16 10:46:47 borax.lcs.mit.edu: 27887 sendmail: AA27885: to=XXXX, delay=00:00:57, stat=Sent (The XXXX is put there at Erik Fair's request. It is the standard method that the bitnetters and certain non-usenet arpanetters use for posting.) In other words, the phony <666@prometheus.UUCP> "Ken Arndt" article actually came from a "Rich Rosen" account at MIT. Did Rich do it? Well, Rich is in New Jersey, whereas Foothead is at MIT, which even a Californian like me knows is in a different state. So far, this is just Foothead-style kneejerk "reasoning". (Either that, or just Foothead-style pseudopositioning.) But what does Rich have to say about it? I sent him a letter asking about the rlr@borax account. According to him, this got set up during the Brahms-Rosen "we are all Rich Rosen" wars. He now has a password on it, and uses it to forward mail from Massachusetts. We might wonder, does Foothead know about it? Well, lo and behold, we find the following from the mail log at borax (and eddie concurred): Apr 15 18:46:44 borax.lcs.mit.edu: 20516 sendmail: AA20516: message-id=<8704152247.AA14732@EDDIE.MIT.EDU> Apr 15 18:46:45 borax.lcs.mit.edu: 20516 sendmail: AA20516: from=, size=1925, class=0 Apr 15 18:46:56 borax.lcs.mit.edu: 20519 sendmail: AA20516: to=, delay=00:00:32, stat=Sent This was the night before the <666@prometheus.UUCP> posting! In other words, we get mail traffic from Foothead to rlr@borax, and then mail traffic from rlr@borax to ucbvax here in Berkeley. Does Rich Rosen know that Foothead is sending mail to rlr@borax? rlr@pyuxe, the original genuine Rich Rosen, says not. He wonders how it is that Foothead is sending mail to rlr@borax but it isn't reaching him--after all, he "knows" it's used to forward mail to him. I will take a chance, and leap to the con- clusion that perhaps Foothead knows how to edit .forward files. I also notice that Foothead's mail to rlr@borax is 1925 bytes long. The article that <666@prometheus.UUCP> was responding to was <9322@decwrl.DEC.COM>, which was 1663 bytes long on our system. That does leave room for mail headers. And what a coincidence, were Foothead the perpetrator, he would read and save the original on eddie, and somehow get it over to borax. (A suggestion for next time: use something other than e-mail. Magnetic tape perhaps? :-) What about the Paul Koloc connection? According to Koloc, his prometheus was broken into and a phony arndt@prometheus account was set up. This happened just before April 1, and an April Fools' "joke" seems likely. Paul then had to remove the account and send out cancel messages on the bogus articles. He says a number of attempted entries were then rebuffed, the log showing the following: BAD LOGIN ATTEMPT arndt tty02 Tue Mar 31 12:45:56 1987 BAD LOGIN ATTEMPT ogin: tty02 Wed Apr 1 13:34:36 1987 BAD LOGIN ATTEMPT arndt tty02 Fri Apr 3 11:52:47 1987 BAD LOGIN ATTEMPT arndt tty02 Fri Apr 3 11:53:01 1987 BAD LOGIN ATTEMPT hey,_pau tty02 Fri Apr 3 11:53:59 1987 BAD LOGIN ATTEMPT arndt tty02 Fri Apr 3 11:54:18 1987 BAD LOGIN ATTEMPT arndt tty02 Mon Apr 6 16:44:44 1987 BAD LOGIN ATTEMPT arndt tty02 Mon Apr 6 16:44:56 1987 BAD LOGIN ATTEMPT arndt tty02 Tue Apr 7 11:25:03 1987 BAD LOGIN ATTEMPT arndt tty02 Tue Apr 7 11:25:13 1987 Curioser and curioser! Bogus arndt@prometheus articles, and a bogus arndt@prometheus login. And simultaneously, valspeak gets run on pmk@prometheus articles. Since Foothead is strongly implicated in the first--his insistent attempts to point the finger before anyone even suggested he was involved are truly laughable--we wonder. And we do recall, another, just amazing coincidence, Foothead indeed has been on an anti-Koloc and anti-Arndt rampage from the very beginning of his known net.existence. Far be it from us to ask Foothead to explain anything, or exhibit minimal honesty. For someone who goes around exclaiming how certain other posters are notorious liars, seeing him go into detail here would be like getting sex and marriage tips from Tammy Bakker. The rest of you can draw your own conclusions; those on the ARPANET can even go telneting around for themselves if they wish to check the above. We have a question for the system administrators: now what? Do note that genuine prometheus.UUCP articles are effectively cancelled by the pre-existence of the phonies at prometheus's feeds. Prometheus itself did not see them, since the netnews transfer algorithm checks paths first to avoid "obvious" redundancies. Let us guess at the answer: nothing. Just sit while the net degenerates as more and more Feethead join in on the fun. Sounds reasonable. But in conclusion, we would like to thank Foothead for exposing the kneejerk inability of many netters to distinguishing the real Ken Arndt's stated beliefs from an obvious forgery. Oh no, they just had to flame automatically. WE could tell they were phony from the beginning. And we think a lot (as in many) of his beliefs are screwy too. Pat Robertson for President? Like, fer shur, gag us with a pitchfork! ucbvax!brahms!weemba Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720 ucbvax!brahms!gsmith Gene Ward Smith /Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720 Some billion years ago, an anonymous speck of protoplasm protruded the first primitive pseudopodium into the primeval slime, and perhaps the first state of uncertainty occurred. --I J Good (*) UNIX is a registered Trademark of AT&T.