You've come to this page because either you've asked a question similar to
What's the gen on Alan Connor ?
or you've demonstrated, by re-covering ground that many people have covered before, that (usually because you don't know about him) you mistakenly believe that you are covering new ground with him.
This is the Frequently Given Answer to that question.
Alan Connor appears to be deliberately setting out to attain, one by one, the several distinct qualifications for kookhood. For months, we have resisted his persistent efforts to attain the 3 points that having a frequently given answer (such as this) written about him accrues. But such restraint has proven to be no longer feasible.
There is rational discussion on to be had in the various newsgroups that Alan Connor posts to. But you won't find it with Alan. Please move along.
You may have heard of Alan Connor from his postings about survivalism, about flower-power dentistry, about knowing Bigfoot, about taking a holiday with Xena the warrior princess, and baiting Christians with (to them) heresy and apocrypha. In which case, you may be surprised to learn that, for someone who lives in the mountains in camouflage without using metal or power or telecommunications utilities, he appears to spend an impossibly large amount of time in front of a personal computer with an Earthlink connection posting to comp.mail.misc and the various news.admin.net-abuse.* newsgroups. (Presumably the charcoal shielding around the computer monitor is extra thick to mask all of those nasty cathode rays from the surveillance satellites, and the rangers haven't yet spotted the giveaway lines of utility company poles leading across the mountains to his secret hideout.)
You may also have met Alan by the other names that he has gone by:
Since he's only ever gone by "Alan Connor" (2003-05-26 - present) in the comp.mail.misc and news.admin.net-abuse.* newsgroups, that's the name that is used here.
Every kook has to have a specialist subject that they post all sorts of rubbish and "informational articles" about. Archimedes Plutonium's specialist subject was (of course) plutonium. Alan Connor's specialist subject (at least as far as the comp.mail.misc and the various news.admin.net-abuse.* newsgroups are concerned) is Challenge-Response mail systems, purportedly for combatting unsolicited bulk mail.
(Of course, Alan didn't invent this idea. Alan is the disciple that Timo Salmi probably fervently wishes, on the quiet, wasn't on his side.)
In true kook fashion, Alan refuses to admit that Challenge-Response systems are inherently flawed and will not engage in sensible discussion about the subject. Instead, he has created and maintains a boilerplate message, which he posts in response to any discussions of Challenge-Response systems, making minor modifications to it from time to time.
At least twice now, he has posted a particular version of his boilerplate message so often that it became cancellable Usenet spam itself.
Alan's boilerplate message advertises his Earthlink web pages, where he purveys a program that he has written to issue challenges to the senders of all received mail messages.
The name of Alan's program has changed every so often, and at various times has been called
Don't bother making genuine enquiries about MSP/PPM/ELRAV1/YouveNoMail/WhateverNameItIsThisMonth. Alan won't answer them, and will only respond by repeating his Usenet spam boilerplate advertisements for his web site and his software, followed by the usual tirade of insults, threats, and false accusations if that fails.
Alan managed to put off at least one potential user of his system by simply repeating the boilerplate when that person, who was interested in his system, replied to the boilerplate asking for more information.
Alan put off a second potential user of his system, who downloaded it but couldn't get it to work, with the insults, threats, and false accusations.
The reality is that Alan's program doesn't work. It suffers from the well-known problems that Challenge-Response systems have and simply reflects his incoming unsolicited bulk mail, offloading the burden of dealing with it from himself onto other people and postmasters.
In essence, it is itself a tool for sending unsolicited bulk mail.
The mechanism by which this happens was demonstrated in action against Alan's own system in 2003. The "dear paid administrator" letter accompanying his program, addressed to the postmasters of the third party systems that his program reflects the UBM with forged sender mailbox names to, even explicitly acknowledges that the program sends unsolicited bulk mail.
Worse still, temporarily setting aside the flaws of the Challenge-Response idea itself, Alan's program isn't even a good implementation of that idea in its own right. For examples:
Because Alan's program automatically blacklists senders who don't answer two challenges, it's trivially easy for a malicious third party to execute a denial-of-service attack against a target of their choosing, preventing them forevermore from communicating with someone who is using Alan's program. The third party adds whomever they choose to the blacklist of the person who is using Alan's program by simply sending three mail messages to that person (for which, of course, the targets of the attack won't confirm the challenges sent back) forging the target's name as the sender.
Because Alan's program hasn't been thought through anywhere near as thoroughly as TMDA, it is missing the auto-whitelisting features that try to prevent the chicken-and-egg problems that occur when two people using Challenge-Response systems attempt to communicate with each other. This is the reason that Alan Connor and Timo Salmi, who both use this system, are unable to receive each other's mail.
It is ironic that the only two known users of this system cannot communicate with each other because of it. But this does demonstrate that the scheme doesn't even scale to two users, let alone to tens of millions of them across Internet.
Of course, both Alan and Timo blame each other for the problem, and not the system that they use. But Timo hasn't responded to the challenge message that Alan's system has sent to him because Alan hasn't responded to the challenge messages that Timo's system has sent to him, challenging that challenge.
(Or, rather, Alan has responded. In stark contrast to his claimed expertise with challenge-response systems, he didn't even recognise one of Timo's challenge messages when he received it, and published it on Usenet claiming that it was UBM. Alan's response to Timo's challenge messages is thus, strictly speaking, "Get a life, jerk.".)
In addition to the acknowledgement, in the documentation itself, of the failings of his program, Alan's own actions acknowledge that his program doesn't work. Alan does not use his actual mailbox name in his Usenet postings.
People have frequently asked Alan why he does this.
Alan also denies the existence of unsolicited challenge messages being sent in bulk to innocent third parties, as the result of forged envelope sender mailbox names being used in UBM sent to users of challenge-response systems, despite people even explicitly collecting and showing to him such messages that they have received (and again and again).
Alan also denies that he has been sent any complaints about this.
Alan also uses circular definitions. He doesn't want to receive "undesirable mail". But his definition of "undesirable mail" is mail that is sent by people who don't answer his challenges. By his circular definition, therefore, Alan's system stops 100% of undesirable mail.
Unfortunately for Alan, because of his own actions as a spammer (both of Usenet and of mail), the sword of Damocles now hangs over his head. Anyone, should they so decide, is now able both to have Alan's advertisements that he is multi-posting to Usenet removed (by following the procedure in the Net Abuse FAQ document) and to have his hosting provider cease publishing his web site.
(Because they are advertised in the Usenet EMP messages that Alan posts and because they are where Alan's program for sending UBM can be downloaded from, Alan's Earthlink web pages qualify as "spam support services" and thus violate section 2(g) of Earthlink's Web Page Usage Policy.)
These are some of the things that people have noticed about Alan Connor's postings.
One of the Five Unmistakable Marks, projection, is very much in evidence in Alan's postings. If you take everything that Alan writes about other people, and then interchange the rôles of Alan and everyone else, you usually won't go far wrong.
For examples:
Alan will usually meet any discussion of his posts with "You're an idiot and don't know what you are talking about." responses. Practically everyone, including some rather well-known experts (one an author of a mail protocol RFC), has been told that they don't know a thing about electronic mail, at some point.
When people don't take the bait of being called stupid, Alan attempts to escalate things by telling them that they are criminals. Of course, Alan refuses to be specific about what, exactly, the crime is supposed to be.
In addition to calling people idiots, morons, liars, and criminals, Alan Connor will almost certainly call them "spammers". By Alan's idiosyncratic definition, anyone who disagrees with him is a "spammer".
Indeed, according to Alan Connor, even Seth Breidbart is
Alan accuses practically everyone of being sock puppets. Apparently, Alan is the only real person in the newsgroups in which he posts. (Even Roosta and his towel aren't real.) Recently, Alan has told everyone that we are all Morely Dotes' sock puppets. In earlier cycles, we were all apparently sock puppets of Ben Finney. The choice appears to be arbitrary.
Of course, the irony is that, once again, interchanging the rôles of Alan and everyone else yields the truth. In addition to running his several long-standing aliases, listed earlier, Alan will also occasionally create one-time sock puppets. These appear once, post a message in support of Alan (usually accompanied by a feeble "I'm here now from the other newsgroup. What fun!" salutation of some kind, addressed to Alan, in an effort to give them credence), and then disappear entirely again. In previous years, these throwaway sock puppets were easily identified as Alan, since they all bore the IP address of his Earthlink Internet connection. However, in recent months Alan has discovered an NNTP server in Germany that doesn't affix IP address trace information to postings, and has taken to using that for his sock puppets (and also for his latest long-standing alias).
This hasn't made it that much harder to identify one of Alan's sock puppets, however. The one-off sock puppet posts are usually identical in style, tone, vocabulary, typographical and grammatical errors, paragraphing, punctuation, and content (including attacks on whomever the current bête du jour is) to the posts of his long standing aliases that they are supposedly supporting. In fact, the only differences are generally merely the name in the From: field and the signature.
Alan's nemesis is, according to Alan, "Sam". "Sam" covers a multitude of sins, according to Alan. Indeed, to Alan the onset of the W32/Swen.A@mm Microsoft Worm, harvesting his mailbox from his Usenet posts in the same way that it did for all other newsgroup contributors, was in fact "Sam" persecuting him personally. Alan duly told the U.S. FBI this. (It's worth noting that this was unwise of Alan, since the U.S. FBI also investigates racketeering and the people who commit it. Other agencies investigate fraud and unlicensed broadcasting, of course.)
Alan has a bad habit of linking people who post to Usenet with entirely unrelated UBM that he happens to receive at about the same time, accusing them of sending it. But, given his premise that he and "Sam" are the only two real people in existence, this is, of course, entirely logical. It would be illogical for Alan to suppose that there were perhaps other people in existence, continually sending UBM to him (and to everyone else) at the same time that he happened to be conversing with someone on Usenet.
Alan is very prone to vanity killfile announcements, which, bizarrely, he believes to be some kind of punishment (albeit that many people in fact see it as blessed relief). But in fact he doesn't actually killfile people. "Killfiled for 90 days" appears to actually mean "killfiled for 90 seconds", because very soon (certainly not 90 days) after several of his vanity killfile announcements, Alan has been back responding once more to the person that he claimed to have killfiled as more than one person has noticed.
Of course, given that Alan professes difficulty in dealing with the rapid alias changes of Morely Dotes, who at the time had used the same From: line for the previous 15 months, it could just be that Alan is simply incapable of actually using a killfile properly.
Alan Connor is also a volunteer Usenet Policeman.
In 2003, Alan's remit as Usenet Policeman included "punishing" people (with his killfile) for "having illegal signatures", i.e. either having more than 4 lines after a "sigdash" or not having a "sigdash" at all despite Alan's royal decree that they must have one. (Ironically, Alan himself doesn't use a "sigdash" above the signature in his own posts, only above the advertising footer.)
In early 2004, Alan's remit as Usenet Policeman included warning people when they didn't talk about what was described by the Subject: field. (Don't miss the irony of his doing so in the instance used here as an example, given what the Subject: field actually is.) Of course, Alan doesn't understand that Google Groups searches article bodies as well as subjects.
In late 2004, Alan's remit as Usenet Policement included punishing all people named "Mike".
Alan needs the U.S. FBI to track down the pesky the W32/Swen.A@mm Microsoft Worm for him, of course, because his own powers of detection appear to be limited to reading Usenet article headers, badly. His rank in the Usenet Police Force is certainly not Detective.
He doesn't even seem to be able to conceive of reasons why someone would not be listed in a telephone directory, despite being a self-proclaimed expert in "living 'off the grid'". One can only assume that none of those episodes of Murder, She Wrote that he watches on daytime television have sunk in. Of course, it is highly doubtful that he actually performed the telephone directory search that he claimed to have performed. It is rather a lot of countries. (This is in a way, a shame, as the result that he claimed would, if only it were in any way credible, be rather a cheering one. It's a fair bet that all of the other Alan Connors in the world would be equally cheered to learn that their names were unique to them, too.)
Alan is very prone to proudly announcing that he hasn't read any parts of messages, and then responding to their contents anyway.
Alan used to claim to read posts "a line at a time, using ed", deleting all remaining lines with the d command when he wants to stop reading. (This is, of course, a completely daft way of going about doing this. For one thing: Editing a message, which is what the d command of course does, that one is reading is a pretty pointless exercise. A simpler way of going about things would be to use ed's Q command, to simply quit.) Apparently because no-one actually believed him when he claimed this, let alone was impressed by it, Alan has not recently repeated this claim.
Here is a list of some of the questions that people frequently ask Alan Connor, which he either ignores or evades:
If spammers avoid forging real E-mail addresses on spam, then where do all these bounces everyone reports getting (for spam with their return address was forged onto) come from?
If your software deals with UBM as well as you claim it to do, why do you still munge your mailbox name when you post to Usenet? After all, if it does what you say, you wouldn't have to worry about UBM senders harvesting you mailbox name from you Usenet posts.
Alan has been asked many times (D Stussy probably tried the hardest to pin him down on an answer.) why he does this. He's never answered the question. About the closest that he has ever come to an answer to it was to point out that searching Google Groups will turn up his real mailbox name.
Do you still believe that rsh is the best solution for remote access?
What is your evidence that everyone who disagrees with you is a spammer?
How many different individuals do you believe really post to comp.mail.misc? What is the evidence for your belief that everyone, except you, who posts there is some unknown arch-nemesis of yours?
How many times, or how often, do you believe is necessary to announce that you do not read someone's posts? What is your reason for making these regularly-scheduled proclamations? Who do you believe is so interested in keeping track of your Usenet-reading habits?
When was the last time that you saw Bigfoot?
If your system employs a UBM filter so that it won't challenge UBM, then why does any of the mail that passes the filter, and is thus presumed not to be UBM, need to be challenged at all?
You claim that the software you use to read Usenet magically identifies any post that makes fun of you. You explain that "What I get in my newsreader is a mock post with fake headers and no body, except for the first parts of the Subject and From headers.". Since your headers indicate that you use slrn and, as far as anyone knows, the stock slrn doesn't work that way, is this interesting patch to slrn available for download anywhere?
For the curious, here are the Breidbart Index tallies for when Alan Connor's postings have exceeded the threshold for cancellable Usenet excessive multiple postings.
The period for this tally commences on 2004-02-25, the date of the earliest article in the list, and ends on 2004-04-08 when it was announced that he had exceeded the threshold.
This yields a Breidbart Index of 23.266.
This list includes only those articles seen in the comp.mail.misc newsgroup. A Google Groups search reveals two further articles posted during the period but not posted to that newsgroup or to any other newsgroups that the author of this answer carries and thus not included in the calculation:
| Groups | Value | Article |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 1.732 | mv03c.27804%24aT1.10616@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net |
| 3 | 1.732 | YtM2c.26847%24aT1.9641@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net |
The period for this tally commences on 2004-04-16, the date of the earliest article in the list, and ends on 2004-04-19. (Yes, that's right. This took a mere 4 days.)
This yields a Breidbart Index of 34.319.
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2004-2004
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard.
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"Moral" rights asserted.
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