Policy Committee Report
Chebucto Community Net Society
Annual General Meeting 2006
The role of the Policy Committee is two-fold:
- to address policy development and implementation issues; and
- to address complaints or abuses about and by CCN members.
Over the past year there have been a couple of complaints against Chebucto
users for sending unsolicited email messages and Chebucto Plus service for
a couple of users was temporarily suspended when their infected computers
became part of a botnet designed to send out spam.
Unjustified complaints against Chebucto Community Net users were more
common, mostly coming from users of other mail systems reporting mail from
Chebucto Community Net as spam when for the most part it came from mailing
lists to which the complainers themselves had subscribed. In one case the
group running the mailing list left Chebucto completely due to the large
number of unjustified spam complaints made against their list, which was
apparently deliberately targetted.
Tighter control of organizational website scripts is proving to be
necessary as groups have several times over the past year been careless
about security configuration and script security updates.
Spammers are constantly probing for software and configuration
vulnerabilities so they can take over a machine and use it to send out
even more spam email.
They also have pretty much spoiled web forums for public use with constant
automated scripts signing up to post spam messages and flooding forums
with junk, rendering them useless. On one no longer used Chebucto web
forum spammers had posted more than 55,000 spam messages.
This year, as last year, I am appealing for volunteers for the Policy
Committee. If you are a mature informed adult with a good sense of right
and wrong tempered with compassion, discretion and a sense of fair play
then please consider stepping forward.
Andrew D. Wright
Chair
Policy Committee
Chebucto Community Net