Author Profiles at Deja News
Bill McClatchie
doesn't archive alt.*, soc.*, talk.*, or any of the binaries
groups.
I would say it does, considering that I found many posts made solely to
groups like alt.bigfoot, talk.abortion, and alt.flame - along with
several cross-posted from these groups to the groups like soc.women
At first I thought this was odd, perhaps just a strategy to
eliminate junk from the database. It also provides a way for
eliminating most of the controversial groups from the database and
from an author's profile.
They also carry a great deal of local groups which are supposedly not
world readable. Which releases a great deal of strange, silly, and
nasty messages that the original poster had no reason to think would be
shown outside of a "small community".
When I post, I am well aware that my posts are going to be around for a
long time - and this is the reason I have an account at Netcom with my
real ID hidden from world view.
And a search of small local only groups will turn up quite a few. One
such group being netcom.shell.test - a non-world readable group where
people post some really bizzarre things at times, nasty remarks and
flame the IX.netcom.com posters there for a wide variety of reasons
with no holds barred.
Not something i would expect to ever be in the public eye - yet it is
now with no warning that it could or would be. And I found several
other local groups listed (no cross-posts) with similar types of
material.
Talk about blindsiding.
Chip Rosenthal
DejaNews service and CLID (often called Caller ID).
In both cases, an expectation of privacy evolved, and many people came
to depend upon it. The privacy existed because the technical tools
didn't. Once the phone company figured out a way to deliver the
calling party's number, or another company figured out a way to store
and search large numbers of news articles, the privacy no longer was
there. That's troubling because we've grown to expect it to be.
I'm highly ambivalent about both of these developments. It concerns me
that the privacy that I've always known is gone. But the new services
they provide can be useful.
What's clear is all of these sorts of developments will force me to
change my behavior. For instance, with a service such as DejaNews, I
would never consider "de-lurking" in a sensitive newsgroup. I would
use an anon remailer instead.
Here is a suggestion for people who want to keep a posting out of their
DejaNews profile: change your From: address. Recently, I wanted to
make a posting to rec.music.misc, a newsgroup I do not carry. To do
so, I telnetted to my ISP and posted from there. I added a Reply-To:
with my normal address, but the From: pointed to an address at the
ISP. DejaNews recorded the message according to the From:, thus it
does not appear in my profile. Many news clients allow you to modify
the From: address, so you could do this without having accounts on
other machines (as I did). PLEASE, however, if you futz with the
From:, put a usable Reply-To: in the message so that people don't waste
time composing responses that bounce. (Or just use an anon remailer.)
--
Chip Rosenthal I won't represent the US in the Summer Olympics.
Unicom Systems Development - http://www.unicom.com/john-hiatt/
PGP key: http://www.unicom.com/personal/chip.html
Todd W Burgess
a site but when would there be such a site. I have always been
suspicious that anything I posted might be archived and resurface in
the future. So its always been my policy never to post anything I
wouldn't want my mother to read.
I don't think compiling statistics on Usenet is anything new. I imagine
various organizations have been doing it for years. I think DejaNews
big thing is its the first Usenet database available to the general
public. No longer is Usenet statistics and storage limited to big
organizations with big budgets and a security policy which ensures
their private databases remain private.
I think the whole Dejanews issue isn't about the storage of Usenet
articles its about the possibilty that what you post publicly may be
used against you. I know the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) have
been quoted as saying that they do "monitor" certain newsgroups. Which
I don't think is a bad thing.
If somebody was to state on national television that they molest
children I think the general public would want the police to
investigate the individual. Just because the person posts it in
alt.sex.pedophillia doesn't mean they should be immune to criminal
prosecution.
Usenet is a lot like television. If you wouldn't want to say it on
television then you shouldn't say it on Usenet either. Both are public
forums and both could be used against you.
EMAIL : tbur...@uoguelph.ca
URL : http://eddie.cis.uoguelph.ca/people/tburgess/tburgess.html
LOCATION : Universty of Guelph
MAJOR : Computer Science
C. Titus Brown
could show someone as posting to groups like the alt.pedophilia.*
groups, and quite possibly they won't have the article you followed
up to which had a "unusual" follow-up line. Something like that
ought to look good on a quick check of what you do online.
Which highlights an interesting question: are there any restrictions on
the sources of information that a company can use in "checking out" a
potential/current employee?
I'm not sure if it's practical or even feasible to try to legally limit
a background check by big companies, but I wonder if any companies have
a hiring policy about this sort of thing.
Cheers,
P.S. Being a first-time poster, I went and looked at the FAQs
available from this newsgroup in one of the archive services. I was
kind of surprised not to see something on my question..?
--
Titus Brown, br...@krl.caltech.edu.
Alan Miller
not. This lets me do on a larger scale things that I've in the past
been limited in, such as searching for information on doing X in VB,
etc.
I did fire off a quick letter to them mentioning the privacy concerns
that many people have, along with a couple of suggestions to reduce
those concerns, but I think the most effective way to do that is to
start using anonymous remailers or semi-anonymous/pseudonymous
accounts.
The suggestions were: 1) don't plan on adding mailing lists other than
those going to bit.listserv groups to the database (see response below)
and 2) consider supporting a field in the article header such as
"X-NoArchive: ", where the only relevant factor is the presence of the
field, and it prevents archiving of the posting. This doesn't stop
followups, but that would be a _much_ more difficult undertaking. No
response on this one.
The response on mailing lists was: (extracted from email) >If and when
we end up archiving mailing list posts, we'll certainly make >sure the
recipients of such gated lists know explicitly that their posts >will
find their way to our database. We believe that mailing list
>correspondents have reason to be informed that their lists are being
>archived in a searchable index, unlike with UseNet where it's pretty
well >known that posting is world-wide publishing.
--
Alan Miller \\ a...@mcs.com
<a href="http://www.mcs.net/~ajm/home.html">AJM's WWW page</a>
Adam Barclay
could show someone as posting to groups like the alt.pedophilia.*
groups
And for a variation on a theme, it might be interesting to see the
reaction of Deja News staff should anyone forge posts to questionable
newsgroups in their names.
At the very least it might let Deja News users know how worthless and
inaccurate the service can be.
--
Adam Barclay |
ad...@troll.elec.uow.edu.au | Twice the Caffiene
George Demosthenes Nickas
Since you quoted me, I thought it best to clarify and expand on a few things.
Upon learning from this discussion group of the Author Profiles
available to anyone with a web client at Deja News
(http://www.dejanews.com), I investigated. Sure enough, they had
their database engine compile a summary of all the newsgroups I had
posted to. At that point, I used their mailto: form to politely but
firmly request that they remove me from their database, as I felt
it was an invasion of my privacy. I received a response from
George Demosthenes Nickas, Customer Liaison (de...@dejanews.com)
that basically said "OK, we'll remove you, but didn't you realize
that by posting to UseNet you opened yourself up to something just
like this. We have no sympathy."
Untrue and misquoted. There is a difference between not having
sympathy for someone and not believing in the logic or validity of
their arguments. Our position is certainly the latter, but that
doesn't mean we don't care about your argument specifically, or
privacy/anonymity arguments in general. We *do* care (which is why, as
a courtesy, we removed the text of your posts), we just don't agree.
I received another response this morning from Steve Madere,
mad...@home.dejanews.com (I deleted his original, so I don't know
his title) that was even more to the point, and he quoted numerous
net.guide documents and the banner from the tin newsreader, where
they all remind you that you should be aware of the implications
of posting to possibly controversial newsgroups.
Steve Madere is president and owner of DejaNews. As he mentioned, it
does seem that the various extant documents on what posting to UseNet
entails support our viewpoint. The documents overtly assume, from
various perspectives (network resources, propriety, etc.), the
amazingly wide distribution of articles posted to UseNet.
I'd like to include my full response to your quoted email as I think it
contained a few salient points about our privacy stand (first level of
quotation is your email):
------------------------
You are not providing a responsible service. The potential for
discrimination and harassment, as well as targetted direct
marketing is now infinitely easier with your service.
By virtue of its entirely unmanageable size, UseNet was essentially
a "private" place. Just as you can move to New York City and do
*lots* of things that absolutely no one will notice, you could post
to weird and potentially sensitive areas on UseNet and no one would
be the wiser.
But if someone notices a person on a street or in a dark alleyway in
New York City and tells everybody about the weird things she's done
(which is not even *close* to what we do), can she reasonably get mad
at them and call them irresponsible?
I think that's really the key issue here. Because someone has had the
semblance of privacy in a public place, it doesn't mean that privacy is
their right or even to be expected. I believe that, given the evidence
of what UseNet is (DejaNews or not), it is not logical to posit any
expectation of privacy there.
Private, communicative venues on the Net exist elsewhere. I really
believe that the kind of communication you describe would be best
accomplished via private email, (non-gated) mailing lists and IRC which
is not, as far as I know, logged anywhere. My sense of UseNet is that
people like it *because* it's public, and restrictions on that public
nature would only hurt UseNet.
I don't even have that much of a problem with being able to get
lists of posts a user makes. The scary part is the Author Profile
that provides the Executive Summary of where a particular user
frequents in UseNet.
To clarify, the profile doesn't summarize what they *read*, only where
they say what they say in the "crowded room" of newsgroups (this
analogy is from one of the UseNet FAQs).
---------------------
Obscurity is only privacy de facto and shouldn't be taken as any kind
of guarantee. As I mentioned above, our contention is that all of
UseNet is, by reasonable standards of observation, a public discussion
forum. Just because you were able to post relatively unnoticed does
not mean that this is your right.
We do care that you are concerned, it's just that it seems like you are
"shooting the messenger" here. I encourage you to check out "A Primer
on Working with the UseNet Community" at:
http://www.smartpages.com/faqs/usenet/primer/part1/faq.html
Since the existence of DejaNews will affect UseNet, I would really like
to see some more discussion on this topic, and toward the end, we'll be
creating an alt.* newsgroup for the debate, as well as adding a
discussion of our view on this issue to our pages.
George D. Nickas
--
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
& George Demosthenes Nickas | D E J A N E W S &
& Customer Support Representative | &
& de...@dejanews.com | *The* Tool for &
& | Searching USENET! &
& Reply to ---> he...@dejanews.com | &
& ---> com...@dejanews.com | http://www.dejanews.com/ &
& ---> bu...@dejanews.com | &
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Prof. L. P. Levine
comments public or private on my arguments. Is the reality of
UseNet completely different from the banners and net.guide
documents, or am I being completely silly for assuming there was
any expectation of privacy when posting to obscure newsgroups?
Except for one thing, and that is that the Copyright owner is the
original author and s/he has the right to reserve publication even
though the material is widely available.
Thus, if I post something with the caviat "not for commercial use" or
some such logo, I have the right to restrict those who wish to use my
material for gain.
In the case of Deja News they clearly intend to do this for profit and
wish to use my postings as the source of that profit.
They do contribute value in that they organize the postings but they
then deliver as a product my work for their gain and without my
permission.
By the way the compilation of names in some order, like the phone book
has been shown to be insufficient value added to allow for copyright.
--
Leonard P. Levine e-mail lev...@cs.uwm.edu
Professor, Computer Science Office 1-414-229-5170
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Fax 1-414-229-6958
Box 784, Milwaukee, WI 53201
PGP Public Key: finger lle...@blatz.cs.uwm.edu
Erik Rensberger
profile could show someone as posting to groups like the
article you followed up to which had a "unusual" follow-up line.
Something like that ought to look good on a quick check of what you
do online.
Mike Bates (mi...@ssd.fsi.com) wrote: For what it's worth, Deja
News doesn't archive alt.*, soc.*, talk.*, or any of the binaries
groups. At first I thought this was odd, perhaps just a strategy
to eliminate junk from the database. It also provides a way for
eliminating most of the controversial groups from the database and
from an author's profile.
I've seen a couple people mention this--that Dejanews doesn't cover
alt.* groups--but I have FOUND alt.* articles in the indexes returned.
It's a bit hard to figure out just how this thing works; sometimes
relatively recent posts in high-profile ngs don't appear, while much
older comments in more obscure places do. But DON'T think that the
alt.* hierarchy or any other hierarchy is specifically not covered!
-- crowdog
F Young
comments public or private on my arguments. Is the reality of
UseNet completely different from the banners and net.guide
documents, or am I being completely silly for assuming there was
any expectation of privacy when posting to obscure newsgroups?
I don't know if any newsgroup should be considered "obscure", the local
ISP carries over 8000 newsgroups, some of them will likely never be
touched. But there are probably lots of people using them in other
areas.
I consider anything I post to Usenet public, just as if I were writing
a letter to the editor of a newspaper. Deja News is archiving news
opening, how do we know if our government(s) or other organizations are
not doing it secretly?
On the other hand, I oppose to using information obtained from usenet
postings for marketing purposes. But can we stop that, or is it too
late? Everytime we send in a registration card for a piece of tool,
equipment, software, etc. Our names and addresses are put into various
databases, then bought and sold around the world.
Fred Baube
doing it now ;-), but consider what governments, law enforcement
agencies, corporate security depts., human resources depts., etc.
might do with their own version of dejanews.
In "The Puzzle Palace", Bamford suggests that as a rule of thumb,
assume that the NSA is technologic- ally five to ten years ahead of us
mere mortals.
I have little doubt that somewhere in the NSA, or elsewhere in the US
gov't, there's a quiet little office with a nice big budget,
unobtrusively vacuuming up email and news postings and applying
AI-based analysis to it. All for national security, dont'cha know.
Yours paranoiacally,
--
F.Baube(tm) * How is Hallowe'en like Christmas ?
G'town U MSFS '88 * Because 31 (Oct) == 25 (Dec)
fred....@utu.fi * [ from Dr Dobb's ]
Information Junkie *
Dick Mills
Thus, if I post something with the caviat "not for commercial use"
or some such logo, I have the right to restrict those who wish to
use my material for gain.
In the case of Deja News they clearly intend to do this for profit
and wish to use my postings as the source of that profit.
In a court of law in a dispute over copyright fair use I would be hard
pressed to explain the legal distinction between:
1) A news feed (more or less real time rebroadcaster),
and who runs the service for profit.
2) A news archive which rebroadcasts on demand at a later date,
and who runs the service for profit.
3) A news client program which reorganizes articles into
threads-by-topic, and who licenses the program for profit.
4) The Deja news service which archives and reorganizes articles into
threads-by-author, and who runs the service for profit.
5) An improved news client program which allows me to make
cross-newsgroup-threads-by-author without use of Deja News,
and who licenses the program for profit.
It seems that either all of these or none of these fall under the fair
use doctrine. Are there lawyers out there who can cite case law
specifically regarding Usenet articles and copyrights?
More important than legalities is practicality. http, ftp and gopher
servers can all make a case for copyright protection but the nature of
Usenet news is different. To maintain copy rights it would require
every country in the world, plus vessels at sea, to have compatible
views about copyright law and fair use. All it takes is one node
anywhere in the world to render home country copy rights meaningless.
I think the reality is that it is very foolish to post material on
Usenet and still expect to exercise any meaningful control over its
future use.
--
Dick Mills +1(518)395-5154
http://www.albany.net/~dmills
Dean Ridgway
was on moderated newsgroups where the moderator claims a
compilation copyright that either directly or indirectly (through
the comp. (c)) prevented the archiving of that newsgroup.
I haven't read everything about the "new" copyright laws, but it seems
to me that you could get a lawyer to serve them with papers saying they
are violating your copyright and to cease immediately. I notice in
your message that they are ignoring the copyright issue for compilation
copyrights so maybe they are worried about this.
Standard "not a lawyer" disclaimers apply.
/\-/\ Dean Ridgway | Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
( - - ) InterNet rid...@peak.org | I took the one less traveled by,
=\_v_/= FidoNet 1:357/1.103 | And that has made all the difference.
CIS 73225,512 | "The Road Not Taken" - Robert Frost.
http://www.peak.org/~ridgwad/
PGP mail encouraged, finger for key: 28C577F3 2A5655AFD792B0FB 9BA31E6AB4683126
Chip Rosenthal
article header such as "X-NoArchive: "
They do. It's spelled "Path:".
I'd urge the DejaNews people to publicize their news hostname, so that
people may opt out of selected archiving if they wish. I feel that
would be the responsible thing to do.
This ties back to my CLID analogy -- to quell the privacy woes there,
the company offered the initiator a way to opt out of Caller*ID (the
*67 code here in SWB land.).