Anonymous postings to non-personals newsgroups
Kenneth Herron
>Johan Helsingius (ju...@penet.FI, the owner of anon.penet.fi) and I have
>had a debate over the appropriatness of providing a service for anonymous
>postings covering the entire usenet hierarchy.
My main concern relates to control messages. We recently received a
newgroup message (for an alt group, I think) ostensibly posted through
the anonymous service. If the service in fact passes control messages,
there's an obvious huge capacity for mischief.
--
Kenneth Herron khe...@ms.uky.edu
University of Kentucky +1 606 257 2975
Dept. of Mathematics "Your ball goes over them, it sails off the edge into a
huge cauldren of fire-breathing dragons." "And they call this a par three?"
Wes Morgan
>Johan Helsingius (ju...@penet.FI, the owner of anon.penet.fi) and I have
>had a debate over the appropriatness of providing a service for anonymous
>anonymous service that we have seen before in the alt.personals.* groups,
>but which he has extended to all newsgroups.
Argh! Yech!
No no no no no no no no no no!
There are *very* few cases in which anonymity would be the *preferred*
means of posting. I can understand anonymous posting in groups such
as alt.sexual.abuse.recovery (where one may not wish to advertise one's
trauma), and those groups which support other lifestyles (it may not be
wise to advertise one's sexual preference in a close-minded company, for
example).
However, the anonymous postings I have seen in other groups
usually serve as a shield for the user's particular brand of hatred,
racism, or other prejudice. I don't mind seeing the miscellaneous
hatred/prejudice/racism; those things are part of our nature. However,
the notion of providing anonymity's shield for these ideas repulses me.
If they have such strong feelings, why can't they put their name(s) on
their postings?
There's also a societal perspective. Quite frankly, I loathe communication
with people who refuse to use their names. While some argue that pseudonyms
allow us to pay more attention to the content of one's speech, I take the
opposite view. Getting email (or Usenet postings) from "FireHawker"
"BlackScourge", "Trollop", or "Sunflower" does me no good at all; in fact,
it *degrades* the content of their postings.
Many Usenet sites are based in governmental and corporate environments.
I can't see them accepting anonymous postings in all newsgroups. Some
of them might decide to start filtering postings from the anonymous
server; that would be a disservice to other, more legitimate users
of the service, but it would happen nonetheless.
Anonymity also opens the door to the misuse of private/confidential
information. As others have mentioned, most corporate sites would
terminate their email/news feeds after just one "leak" or confidential
information. Of course, we'd also have to deal with outright illegality
as well.
I *strongly* urge Johan to restrict anonymity to newsgroups in which it
is needed.
--
MORGAN@UKCC | Wes Morgan | ...!ukma!ukecc!morgan
mor...@ms.uky.edu | University of Kentucky | mor...@wuarchive.wustl.edu
mor...@engr.uky.edu | Lexington,Kentucky USA | JWMo...@dockmaster.ncsc.mil
Mailing list for AT&T StarServer S/E - starserve...@engr.uky.edu
Tarl Neustaedter
> >>appropriatness [...] anonymous postings [...] entire usenet hierarchy.
> >My main concern relates to control messages. [...]
> I don't see how that follows. It is trivial to forge the origin of
> control messages already; the anonymous service doesn't make this any
> easier.
It makes it more difficult to track down. In the case of a continuing
problem (my only real objection), it is possible to trace down the origin
of forged messages, with a fair amount of work and cooperation of others
across the net. In the case of these anonymous messages, it is not possible
to track the origin without the intervention of the single owner of the
service, who may or may not be interested in helping.
My concern is more with the issue of providing a generalized anonymous
service; Providing the service to specific groups that want it is fine,
but I have problems in defaulting the entire net to receiving anonymous
service.
He is willing to debate the issue newsgroup by newsgroup, but his default
for all 2000+ groups is to allow anonymous postings until otherwise decided.
I don't know what criteria he will use - he didn't disable sci.astro from
his service upon my complaint, so presumably it takes a real vote.
--
Tarl Neustaedter ta...@sw.stratus.com
Marlboro, Mass. Stratus Computer
Disclaimer: My employer is not responsible for my opinions.
Jonathan I. Kamens
number of newsgroups in which anonymous postings are necessary in some cases,
and a larger number of newsgroups in which they might be necessary in very,
very rare cases, it isn't appropriate to set up an anonymous posting service
for the entire Usenet, simply because the potential for abuse is far greater
than any benefit that would be accrued.
It seems reasonable to set up an anonymous posting service for those
newsgroups whose readers have acknowledged that such a thing might be
necessary, and who are willing to accept anonymous pessages in the newsgroups.
However, it does not seem reasonable to set up anonymous posting service which
allows people to do things like post, without accountability, fabricated
"factual" articles with the sole purpose of annoying the readers of the
newsgroups in which they are posted.
It seems obvious to me that abuse of such a service will get worse, not better.
If someone REALLY needs to post a message anonymous in a newsgroup in which
this usually isn't done, they can usually find someone on the net to do this
for them. They don't need an automated service to do it, and the automated
service is by its nature incapable of making the judgment call necessary to
decide whether a particular posting really needs to be anonymous.
--
Jonathan Kamens j...@MIT.Edu
Aktis, Inc. Moderator, *.answers
Jonathan I. Kamens
|> In the case of these anonymous messages, it is not possible
|> to track the origin without the intervention of the single owner of the
|> service, who may or may not be interested in helping.
It's worse than this. The owner of the service is "promising" anonymity. He
*can't* help track down the sender of any particular message through his
service, without breaking that promise, and making it impossible for anyone to
trust the anonymity of the service in the future.
Therefore, as long as he is promising anonymity and intends to keep that
promise, messages sent through his service are not traceable.
Unless, of course, he does what Karl says and limits the promise of anonymity
in some way, i.e., tells people when they sign up for the service to exactly
what extent they will be protected by it.
|> He is willing to debate the issue newsgroup by newsgroup, but his default
|> for all 2000+ groups is to allow anonymous postings until otherwise decided.
|> I don't know what criteria he will use - he didn't disable sci.astro from
|> his service upon my complaint, so presumably it takes a real vote.
It seems obvious to me that the default should be *not* to allow anonymous
postings in a newsgroup. The Usenet has always operated on the principle that
the status quo should be kept unless there's a large number of people who want
to change it.
Matthias Urlichs
mor...@engr.uky.edu (Wes Morgan) writes:
>
> However, the anonymous postings I have seen in other groups
> usually serve as a shield for the user's particular brand of hatred,
> racism, or other prejudice. I don't mind seeing the miscellaneous
> hatred/prejudice/racism; those things are part of our nature. However,
> the notion of providing anonymity's shield for these ideas repulses me.
> If they have such strong feelings, why can't they put their name(s) on
> their postings?
>
: This anonymous mailing system exists in order to allow people to send
: mails and postings without having to fear retributions from narrow-minded
: peers and employers.
:
: However, the anonymous mailer does not exist to allow people to post
: nonsense, libel/slander/whatever somebody, promote their personal brand
: of hatred/prejudice/racism, or encourage or brag about criminal acts.
: (Example: It's OK to tell everybody how much you enjoyed your latest trip
: to LSD heaven. It's not OK to brag about how you kicked the shit out of
: your hispanic neighbors yesterday. Homework assignment: Find at least
: two reasons why.)
: If you do post or mail such things through my mailer, you _may_ get ONE
: warning. After that, or if your posting or mail is sufficiently illegal
: or offensive, your alias is revealed to the recipients of your posting
: or mail.
: If you have a problem with this policy, don't use this anonymous mailer.
My server is reserved for users in Germany, but they can use it to post
to any newsgroup and to send mail to any user. No problems so far.
--
Enough wit places one above his equal; too much of it lowers him to the
rank of mere entertainer.
--
Matthias Urlichs -- url...@smurf.sub.org -- url...@smurf.ira.uka.de /(o\
Humboldtstrasse 7 -- 7500 Karlsruhe 1 -- Germany -- +49-721-9612521 \o)/
Kenneth Herron
>>My main concern relates to control messages. We recently received a
>>newgroup message (for an alt group, I think) ostensibly posted through
>>the anonymous service. If the service in fact passes control messages,
>>there's an obvious huge capacity for mischief.
>I don't see how that follows. It is trivial to forge the origin of
>control messages already; the anonymous service doesn't make this any
>easier. It would be trivial for Johan to insert some filtering, but
>I don't see how it buys the net all that much: basically, you can't
>just let newgroup and rmgroup msgs proceed automatically unless you want
>to put yourself at the mercy of any net.dweeb who's found out what control
>messages do.
At least with conventional forgeries, one has a hope of tracking the
culprit. If they're posting through an anonymous gateway it's a dead
end.
Let me add that the "obvious huge capacity for mischief" lies more
with cancels and supersessions (?) than with newgroups and rmgroups.
Sridhar Venkataraman
)Clearly, to me, the default should be _not_ to support anonymous
)posting. The abuses happen often, as evidenced both by the system
)that ran here on Godiva, as well as what is now happening with
)anon.penet.fi. It wouldn't have come up here unless the bastards were
)still at it -- and it's self-condemning behavior.
)
)Johan, put the group-bouncer "case" back into the post script.
Ditto.
Soon after this server became known to some educated idiots on
soc.culture.* a virtual flame war happened due to postings with a
highly flaming nature. Johan was told (a pretty weak word actually)
about this, he had a look at the abuse himself, accepted that it was
quite unnecessary and abuse of his server and still refused to remove
the groups from his list.
The abuse still continues on the very same groups and the abusers are
hiding because he has assured that he won't reveal any names.
Sridhar.
--
Sridhar Venkataraman ASU, Tempe, Arizona USA sri...@asuvax.eas.asu.edu
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
khe...@ms.uky.edu writes:
My main concern relates to control messages. We recently received a
newgroup message (for an alt group, I think) ostensibly posted through
the anonymous service. If the service in fact passes control messages,
there's an obvious huge capacity for mischief.
Unless Johan has hacked the software yet more, it does not pass
Control: headers. It was intended to pass To:, Subject:, and
References: only.
Not that it would be tough to add passage of Control: (add
"^Control:|" to one egrep(2) regexp in the post script), but *sheesh*
this is _not_ how the system was designed...
--karl
Tarl Neustaedter
had a debate over the appropriatness of providing a service for anonymous
postings covering the entire usenet hierarchy. His site provides the
anonymous service that we have seen before in the alt.personals.* groups,
but which he has extended to all newsgroups.
The trigger for this discussion was the posting of a fabricated transcript
of post-explosion events in the Challenger, which I believe had been
previously published in Weekly World News or National Enquirer. The
posting was inappropriate for sci.astro and in poor taste for sci.space,
which resulted in a few flames, which then focussed on the anonymous
nature of the posting.
In any case, he would like to take this discussion to a more global forum,
and asked whether he could quote my letter to him in discussions about
anon remailers and the future of internet. I figured it would be more
appropriate for me to post the letter myself, so that I could receive
flames directly.
Letter follows. Excuse the personal characterizations, this was originally
intended as a private letter rather than a global posting. ">" indicates
text from Julf in an earlier part of the exchange (which I no longer have).
----------------------------------------------------------------
> But consider for a second the one-in-a-zillion chance that he might be right.
Even *HE* doesn't think that transcript is real. He's doing this just to piss
people off. If the transcript was real, he doesn't have to be anonymous to
publicize it (look at McElwaine). Besides, the source for this was Weekly
World News and National Enquirer, both of which have circulation in the
millions.
What angers me about this is that he's getting away with being offensive
without even having to expose who he is; at least in past cases of people
being assholes, we've eventually been able to get them to shut up by getting
a real person at their site to talk with them and remind them that there are
real people on the other end, not just bits on a wire.
> In that case the possiblity to post anonymously might be the
> only way to bring out sensitive or classified information. I have already
> seen cases of this happening in technical groups, where employees of
> computer companies have provided information about political decisions to
> drop support for product lines etc.
Bringing out classified information is flatly criminal. Do that, you will
have intelligence organizations tapping your wire, and probably criminal
proceedings brought against you - as an accessory to whichever crime. That
can be done through diplomatic channels - depending on who's classified
information and what the extradition treaties are, you may be tried in
finland or extradited to the offended nation. You *really* don't want to be
a part of publishing classified information.
Having insiders reveal confidential information about the internal decisions
at computer companies is also flatly criminal - it's also destructive to both
the companies and the networks on the long term. AT&T had *ONE* incident
where a marketing dweeb exposed some confidential information on
comp.dcom.telecom, and (besides firing the dweeb), that entire building simply
had it's network access cut off. The victims of this were the dweeb's
co-workers.
If your anonymous server provides an easy channel for this to happen, many
companies will simply cut off their network news feeds - they are already
hard to justify, and if they become a known path for leaking untraceable
insider information, the legal folks will have ample justification to shut
them down. Remember, usenet is a cooperative anarchy. When you add paths
for people to easily be destructive, the victim will be usenet.
> And anyway, anybody with
> any technical proficiency can falsify their identity anyway...
Not for long. A continuing source of problem articles can be traced to specific
sites. It takes a lot of work and it takes a long series of articles coming out
for a long time for this to work well, but it can be done. Once the specific
site is found, it's usually fairly trivial to figure out who the offender is
(it's rare for a site to have more than one sociopath). Besides, once the site
is identified, the sysadmin can do something about it (assuming it isn't the
sysadmin himself - in which case you can work on their feeds).
Also, whatever you else you do, please put a limit on the size of the messages.
Having people untraceably post erotica pictures to random groups is very
rapidly destructive. It takes only a few weeks for sysadmins to start removing
groups after this starts happening. And the load from these pictures shows up
very rapidly in the usenet flow statistics.
If it continues (and this shows all the signs of being the start of a
process, not the end of one), I'll strongly push for restrictions on your
feed; that's how Mutlu finally got the message.
[Note - I don't know if Mutlu still posts; the series of inappropriate
crossposts that I was seeing stopped with the announcement that anatolia
has lost it's affiliation with mn.org. He may live on for all I know.]
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
Johan Helsingius (ju...@penet.FI, the owner of anon.penet.fi) and I have
had a debate over the appropriatness of providing a service for anonymous
postings covering the entire usenet hierarchy.
I feel I should chime in on this issue, because Johan is using my
software.
As I wrote it, the software was specifically limited to a small number
of newsgroups; I think it was only 4 groups initially, or perhaps 5,
and eventually got up to about 8. All were within the out-of-control
alt.* hierarchy, and all but perhaps one were in "recreational"
newsgroups. The intended advantage of my system was specifically to
allow multiple group support, with a single anon identifier across
all. This was arguably the single biggest deficiency of previous anon
systems, in that each one supported just one group, and even if one
machine supports multiple groups (n7kbt.rain.com, f'rinstance), each
group has its own set of anonymous identifiers...which is just plain
silly.
When the system was running here, I routinely got requests to add more
groups to the supported set, notably other subgroups of alt.sex. (To
be sure, I openly invited people to suggest new groups to be added --
the invitation was part of the info blurb about the system. That was
how the later 3 or 4 groups were added, on the basis of requests that
people justified reasonably well.) Even so I usually refused,
especially under alt.sex, because the degree of childishness
threatening to express itself in such groups was already well out of
bounds.
Even as restricted as it was, my system was subjected to abuses to the
point where it was ordered dismantled by the facilities staff here.
Such abuses started right after it was created: The first was a
(failed) attempt to double-forge a disgusting .jpg picture in
alt.sex.bondage, just 2 days after I set the beastie loose. It
continued with people attempting to mail-bomb certain newsgroups,
generally intercepted by me, and ended with a couple of spectacular
abuses in alt.personals with real-life legal recourses being pursued.
I kept it restricted exactly because of these problems. I don't agree
with Johan having made the modification to remove the per-group
restriction. Anonymous access should be reserved for those groups
where it is truly needed (alt.personals*, alt.sex.bondage,
alt.sexual.abuse.recovery, &c) and not supported elsewhere at all.
There is a pronounced tendency on the part of small children on the
net, of all ages, to take indecent advantage of such a service.
As for the arguments that people won't post those necessary-but-
personally-threatening notes about bad corporate policy and so forth
unless they can do so anonymously... That's a very large pile of
crap. If people want to do such things badly enough, they'll find a
way. There's a really good line of reasoning that doing so should be
made deliberately more difficult, not easier, in the interests of
ensuring that such revelations are taken seriously. (Cf. this
incident in sci.space.) Posting to the Usenet isn't the way to get
dramatic results of that type anyway; finding a sympathetic newspaper
reporter is going to be much more productive. I got these silly
arguments in some requests to add newsgroups, and I generally didn't
even lower myself to a reply in such cases.
Clearly, to me, the default should be _not_ to support anonymous
posting. The abuses happen often, as evidenced both by the system
that ran here on Godiva, as well as what is now happening with
anon.penet.fi. It wouldn't have come up here unless the bastards were
still at it -- and it's self-condemning behavior.
Johan, put the group-bouncer "case" back into the post script.
If I were ever to run an anonymous system again, I would severely
limit the promises of preservation of anonymity. Children above the
legal age of majority do not deserve such protection, and it is in the
best interests of the greater Usenet not to supply it.
--karl
Jurgen Botz
>>newgroup message (for an alt group, I think) ostensibly posted through
>>the anonymous service. If the service in fact passes control messages,
>>there's an obvious huge capacity for mischief.
>
>control messages already; the anonymous service doesn't make this any
>easier. It would be trivial for Johan to insert some filtering, but
>I don't see how it buys the net all that much: basically, you can't
>just let newgroup and rmgroup msgs proceed automatically unless you want
>to put yourself at the mercy of any net.dweeb who's found out what control
>messages do.
Right... control messages are easy enough to forge, and the biggest mischief
that you can wreak with a forged control message requires a valid (albeit
forged) "From:" line anyway. (Hmmm... I wonder if Johan Helsingius will
preserve the anonymity of a net.dweeb who uses his service to sendsys-bomb
himself! *grin*)
The only major effect here might be that forged newgroup/rmgroup's might
now be accessible to those dweebs too ignorant to even know who to forge
one otherwise. Come to think of it... that *is* scary.
--
Jurgen Botz, jb...@mtholyoke.edu
Northampton, MA, USA
Richard E. Depew
writes:
>sri...@asuvax.eas.asu.edu (Sridhar Venkataraman) writes in response
>to the complaint that anonymous postings are abused:
>
>>Soon after this server became known to some educated idiots on
>>soc.culture.* a virtual flame war happened due to postings with a
>>highly flaming nature. Johan was told (a pretty weak word actually)
>>about this, he had a look at the abuse himself, accepted that it was
>>quite unnecessary and abuse of his server and still refused to remove
>>the groups from his list.
>>The abuse still continues on the very same groups and the abusers are
>>hiding because he has assured that he won't reveal any names.
>
>folks.
[... first two questions deleted]
>
>Most importantly, on a forum that prizes itself on the freedom of communication
>that it enjoys, is there really such a thing as freedom of communication?
This isn't a serious question, is it? Freedom doesn't imply a
lack of standards, communication isn't possible without them! These
standards aren't only in the communications protocols, but also in the
social protocols of the net. The latter are evolving through trial
and error.
Think of the anonymous posting services as experiments. Karl
Kleinpaste's posting earlier in this thread gave a summary of one such
experiment - hopefully we can learn from it.
The consensus seems to be that a general anonymous posting service
such as that at anon.penet.fi seems sufficiently corrosive of the trust
and civility of the net that this particular experiment should be
ended. Perhaps the next time the question comes up we can say:
"We tried it - we learned it does more harm than good - and we stopped
it."
To civility!
Dick Depew
--
Richard E. Depew, Munroe Falls, OH r...@redpoll.neoucom.edu (home)
r...@uhura.neoucom.edu (work)
Best question in sci.archaeology: "z>I have a car for sale"
"How old is it?" - d...@col.hp.com
Subbarao Kambhampati
>In <C1w9x...@ms.uky.edu> mor...@engr.uky.edu (Wes Morgan) writes:
>
>...
>>I *strongly* urge Johan to restrict anonymity to newsgroups in which it
>>is needed.
>
>images, binaries postings, etc. without being identified.
>Also, Johan must have a database of anonymous ids and their real ids.
>How do I know that he's not going to misuse the database ? :-)
>
>-- budi
I second this strongly. The anonymous posting service of Johan has
significantly worsened the signal to noise ratio on one of the bboards
I read-- soc.culture.indian.
Perhaps could someone explain to me why the following excerpt from an
article posted by a anon.pinet.fi user on soc.culture.indian helps in
anyway in promoting discussions and allowing free commnication on a
soc. newsgroup? Perhaps Johan himself, who seems to be a great
advocate of free communication, could enlighten us on this issue:
|From: an4...@anon.penet.fi
|Subject: Hindu/muslims riots- A historic perpective on ethnic cleansing(war)
|Organization: Anonymous contact service
|X-Anonymously-To: soc.culture.indian
|Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1993 20:53:35 GMT
|Lines: 107
|[...]
|It is important for Indians to know how Indians are
|perceived in this country and rest of the world.Do
|Indians know that at one time US constitution
|prohibited Hindu migration to this country. Indians
|were perceived as ignorant, illiterate, poorly fed and
|starved, barely have clothes to cover their dark skin ,
|nomadic , full of superstition, timid and inferior. For
|many western scholars - witness to, with no
|reservations, the decline of Aryan superiority
|amongst the earlier settlers in India once the genetic
|mix has taken place with the darkies. After all, what
|is the achievements of Hindus. I do not see Great
|Conquerers, achievers or explorers. I don't see them
|as father of science or machines. Are they,
|inventors of computers, plastics, chemicals or jet
|planes. We gave you space. We taught you
|Western medicine. We told you how to dress up like
|humans and leave your loin cloth at home...
----------
Subbarao Kambhampati
Dept. of Comp Sci. and Engg.
Arizona State University,
Tempe, AZ 85287-5406
r...@asuvax.asu.edu (email)
602-965-0113 (Phone)
602-965-2751 (FAX)
Haakon Styri
(Brian W. Ogilvie) writes:
>
> My first experience with the anonymous posting service was on
> soc.college.grad, where someone used it to ask for advice about how to
> deal with a problem advisor. Given the potential repercussions of such
> a posting if it became known to said advisor, I think that the use of
> the service was justified. While it would be possible to find another
> channel for posting such messages, it strikes me that this sort of
> blanket condemnation is unjustified.
I'm repeating myself here, but I'd like to stress that the anonymity
depends on the system administrator(s) of the service, and the security
of the system running it.
I don't think the above example is a good argument. If I had a similar
problem I'd trust a friend and ask her/him to post for me rather than
some mail address in another country. The friend method may not work if
I wanted to post illegal information (unless I've friends in a country
where posting the info isn't illegal).
> The service provides a mechanism for forwarding mail to the original
> poster. [...]
And, your anonymity depends on the security of your mailbox as well.
Do you really want to trust a system like that?
---
Haakon Styri
Ken Arromdee
soc.culture.jewish.
> From: an8...@anon.penet.fi (Vitaca Milut)
> Subject: Y U G O S L A V I A
> Sender: an...@fuug.fi (The Anon Administrator)
> Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1993 19:30:55 GMT
>
> ( Pronounced: Vitacha Milut )
>
> Media Reports From Bosnia: A Mixture of Outright Lies, Staged Events and
> Untold Stories
>
> The Globe and Mail, Saturday, October 17, 1992
>
> "A lie that is repeated frequently becomes the truth", said the Nazi propaganda
> expert Josef Goebbels. Many people believe that our democratic society would
> never allow Goebbels style propaganda. Yet the media reports from former
> Yugoslavia prove just the opposite. ...
Followed by a number of outright lies, etc. -- but lies on the part of this
anonymous poster. (Such as Serbian propaganda which describes Nazi-puppet
Croatia during WWII as if it was somehow evidence that the Croatians today are
Nazis. After all, they both call themselves "Croatia", right?)
Worse yet, the poster seems to think it belongs in soc.culture.jewish just
because he mentions the Nazis a few times.
This is a little worse than just being rude and insulting like the Weekly
World News Challenger transcript; it's political propaganda deliberately
written to incite ethnic hatred, of the kind that gets people raped and killed.
For real.
--
"On the first day after Christmas my truelove served to me... Leftover Turkey!
On the second day after Christmas my truelove served to me... Turkey Casserole
that she made from Leftover Turkey.
[days 3-4 deleted] ... Flaming Turkey Wings! ...
-- Pizza Hut commercial (and M*tlu/A*gic bait)
Ken Arromdee (arro...@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu, arro...@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu)
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
no abuse of the anon tool itself caused the mayhem, but rather a
slanderous letter on part of a third person to Karl's site admins.
Abuses come in many forms. Bogus binary postings, numerous test
posts, threats of extortion...and the backhanded abuse induced by
someone at another site through the above-noted complaint to the
facilities staff. Abuse is abuse. It so happens that, with the
system dismantled, there was no recourse against the abuser in this
case. Postmaster@origin-site didn't even have the common decency to
ACK my request for information on the user who generated the bogus
complaint.
As far as the original topic be concerned: wouldn't the anon admin
hirself be able to take charge of the few sociopaths abusing his service?
Karl, you did write that fire extinguisher, right?
You bet your ass. And damn near got flamed into oblivion for _daring_
to _interfere_ with the users' surely-divinely-granted _RIGHT_ to post
anything they bloody well pleased!
([*cough*]. sarcasm off.)
I did take charge of the sociopaths as they made themselves known
through the service. I tried a lot of avenues by which to address
them. Shockingly few such avenues had any effect at all.
Irritating test postings: Write mail to individuals, asking them not
to do that; that the info blurb explains to test by mailing to one's
own anon userid, or to anonymus+0 (me, anonymously) and I'd forward
back exactly what I get. Near zero effectiveness. Significant (if
obscure :-) data point: Nurse Jones did it right, mailing to herself
_and_ to me. But then, NJ is one of the finest users an anon system's
admin could ever hope to have grace his service with her presence.
Bogus binaries in a.s.b: Send mailer logs to sysadmin at origin host
where bogons originated. No answer that I can now recall.
Exceptionally rude flames in alt.personals, esp. "chastising" another
anon system's admin for choosing to restrict the content his system
will support: Followup in the same group, observing that the user is
doing nothing but posting shit. Same user posts more shit.
Repeated test-posting, extortion in a.p, and "light bulb" posts in
a.s.b: Implement fire extinguisher, it being a mechanism preventing
certain users from posting, although point-to-point mail continues to
flow. Receive _HUGE_ number of flames for "interference."
**sIGh**
I only extinguished 3 people in the whole time that the extinguisher
existed. Fercryinoutloud...
Dave Hayes
to the complaint that anonymous postings are abused:
>Soon after this server became known to some educated idiots on
>soc.culture.* a virtual flame war happened due to postings with a
>highly flaming nature. Johan was told (a pretty weak word actually)
>about this, he had a look at the abuse himself, accepted that it was
>quite unnecessary and abuse of his server and still refused to remove
>the groups from his list.
>The abuse still continues on the very same groups and the abusers are
>hiding because he has assured that he won't reveal any names.
What a primal example of human nature. I have three questions for you
folks.
Do people really say different things to each other based upon whether
their identity is or isn't known?
Are people really so affected by what other people say that the verbage
is labeled "abuse"?
Most importantly, on a forum that prizes itself on the freedom of communication
that it enjoys, is there really such a thing as freedom of communication?
------
Dave Hayes - Network & Communications Engineering - JPL / NASA - Pasadena CA
da...@elxr.jpl.nasa.gov da...@jato.jpl.nasa.gov ...usc!elroy!dxh
What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy river to
save a solid gold baby? Maybe we'll never know.
--
Dave Hayes - Network & Communications Engineering - JPL / NASA - Pasadena CA
da...@elxr.jpl.nasa.gov da...@jato.jpl.nasa.gov ...usc!elroy!dxh
What we see depends on mainly what we look for.
Sridhar Venkataraman
) As far as the original topic be concerned: wouldn't the anon admin
)hirself be able to take charge of the few sociopaths abusing his service?
)Karl, you did write that fire extinguisher, right?
Ah. that is a nice way of making sure you don't get the other person's
gender wrong! :-)
It is probably "few" in a specific group. Multiply that few for 2000+
groups...
Surely, anon.penet.fi is not a problem these days. Yes, it is in the
same class as Mutlu or Argic right now... Thanks Johan for atleast
ensuring that people don't have the privilege of altering their From
lines. But I hate to think of the worldwide waste of resources on that
score.
Haakon Styri
(Tarl Neustaedter) writes:
>
> Johan Helsingius (ju...@penet.FI, the owner of anon.penet.fi) and I have
> had a debate over the appropriatness of providing a service for anonymous
> postings covering the entire usenet hierarchy. His site provides the
> anonymous service that we have seen before in the alt.personals.* groups,
> but which he has extended to all newsgroups.
Wrt. the argument about being able to post anonymously to certain groups
it's a great idea, but you forget one _big_ problem: Why on earth should
I trust you or Johan or any email address on the net to shut up about my
identity? And, if I could - what about site and net security?
>> In that case the possiblity to post anonymously might be the
>> only way to bring out sensitive or classified information. I have already
>> seen cases of this happening in technical groups, where employees of
>> computer companies have provided information about political decisions to
>> drop support for product lines etc.
>
> Bringing out classified information is flatly criminal. Do that, you will
> have intelligence organizations tapping your wire, and probably criminal
> proceedings brought against you - as an accessory to whichever crime. That
> can be done through diplomatic channels - depending on who's classified
> information and what the extradition treaties are, you may be tried in
> finland or extradited to the offended nation. You *really* don't want to be
> a part of publishing classified information.
But, of course you wouldn't always know if the poster was leaking real
classified information about any organisation. Somebody could post some
fake info about a competitor, and unless Johan breaks his wow of silence
we wouldn't know, would we?
>[Tarl quotes Johan]
>> And anyway, anybody with
>> any technical proficiency can falsify their identity anyway...
Sure, but because there are no perfect security you cannot justify helping
the culprits. And, even if somebody can pick a lock that doesn't justify
giving others help to pick that lock.
> [...] Besides, once the site
> is identified, the sysadmin can do something about it (assuming it isn't the
> sysadmin himself - in which case you can work on their feeds)
Well, I'd say `anon.penet.fi' is pretty well identified. The sysadmin may
of course claim Common Carrier status for the service. Don't know if I'd
prefer `anon.penet.fi' to a forged message...
---
Haakon Styri
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
My first experience with the anonymous posting service was on
soc.college.grad, where someone used it to ask for advice about how to
channel for posting such messages, it strikes me that this sort of
blanket condemnation is unjustified.
Blanket condemnation would be one thing; the issue at hand is
condemnation of abuse, and the problem of having recourse in the face
of that abuse.
This is why I've said that, were I to be in the position of offering
such a service again, my promises of protection of anonymity would be
limited. Not on the basis of personal opinion of what gets posted,
but on the basis of postings which disrupt the smooth operation of the
Usenet. The most obvious and direct recourse would be to "out" the
abusive individual. Less drastic possibilities exist -- the software
supports a "fire extinguisher" by which individuals can be prevented
from posting.
Any mechanism like this is liable to abuse, but the benefits as well as
the costs must be weighed. Limiting the service to alt groups, or
specific groups, would not help those who want advice on sensitive
issues in more 'professional' newsgroups.
There must be means by which to address the abuse, and this is what
lacks in Johan's installation. Abusers exist. _Nothing_ can be done
about them. There are no mechanisms by which to address the question
of appropriate behavior. The usual social structures of the Usenet,
already weak, can't do a thing.
This is wrong.
Alexander EICHENER
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu writes:
>Even as restricted as it was, my system was subjected to abuses to the
>point where it was ordered dismantled by the facilities staff here.
>Such abuses started right after it was created: The first was a
>(failed) attempt to double-forge a disgusting .jpg picture in
>alt.sex.bondage, just 2 days after I set the beastie loose. It
>continued with people attempting to mail-bomb certain newsgroups,
>generally intercepted by me, and ended with a couple of spectacular
>abuses in alt.personals with real-life legal recourses being pursued.
as the eventual shutdown of his anonymity service is to be lamented,
it should be pointed out here that neither of all these annoying events
did cause its untimely demise. This was due to Michael Stroucken's
*real-name* posting to k-12 (at least thus he said), where his .sig -
and merely his .sig - contained a reference to his anon.address. Thus,
no abuse of the anon tool itself caused the mayhem, but rather a
slanderous letter on part of a third person to Karl's site admins.
chastize me where necessary :-).
As far as the original topic be concerned: wouldn't the anon admin
(c...@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de)
Brad Templeton
the net, they can't be tracked down (if they do it well) under any
circumstances. That includes if they break laws. They may, if being
hunted, move their posting location around and use different headers each
time -- this is a good idea of you want to avoid being caught.
If a person uses an anonymous posting service, then you can e-mail complaints
back to the person. If they break the law, their identity can be revealed
by search warrant. If they break the policies of the anon site, if it has
any, they can be revealed by the anon site.
Most importantly, however, they will tend to have the same anon ID for all
their postings -- which means if they do things which are simply annoying,
rather than illegal, you can put them in your kill file or filter file and
be done with them. You can't do that for real anonymous posting because
the name is likely to change.
I can think of no disadvantage caused by anon posting sites that doesn't
already exist, other than the fact that they do make more naive net users
who don't know how to post anonymously the old way more prone to do it.
I would support an anonymous posting site that put down the following
guidelines:
a) No posts to groups that do not wish any pseudonymous postings
b) Psydonyms must be used in order to avoid consequences in the
real world of written material on the net, not to cause trouble
on the net.
Enforcement would be simple enough, though a pain for the operator. (I
could see the operator charging for this to make up for it.) If a person is
perceived as hiding behind the pseudonym just to cause trouble on the net,
they get a warning describing the bad behaviour, and if it doesn't stop, they
are unmasked. Perhaps more than one warning.
Psydonymous posting is vital to sex groups and corporate criticism by
employees, and a number of other valid purposes. While a relay site with
policies could easily be superseded by one without them, users might well
arrange to just put the annoying sites in their kill files, reading only
from a site that doesn't hide net.troublemakers.
--
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Sunnyvale, CA 408/296-0366
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
Most importantly, on a forum that prizes itself on the freedom of
communication that it enjoys, is there really such a thing as
freedom of communication?
Weak reasoning.
With freedom comes responsibility.
The Wolfe of the Den
>
>What a primal example of human nature. I have three questions for you
>folks.
>
>Do people really say different things to each other based upon whether
>their identity is or isn't known?
Yes. There are some classical psych experiments that show this
tendancy. Not only in the words used, but in the intensity of electric
"shocks" delivered to a subject when the identity of the shocker is not
available to the shockee.
>Are people really so affected by what other people say that the verbage
>is labeled "abuse"?
Do you forget the adage -- The Pen is mightier than the Sword. ?
The power of words to offend is well known, you, in fact, are quite a
master at using words in an offensive way yourself! Likewise, there are
lots of folks who don't have the thick skins that most of the long time
Usenet participants develop after a few rounds in a flame war.
>Most importantly, on a forum that prizes itself on the freedom of communication
>that it enjoys, is there really such a thing as freedom of communication?
Of course not. The Golden Rule (II) guarantees that whoever has
the most gold makes the rules. Usenet likes to think of itself as a
vast liberal bastion of "free speech" but has nothing of the kind. The
speech is only as free as the administrators of the systems desire it to
be.
We have had several rounds of flame wars over the nature of
Usenet in several different forae on this network. No one has ever
really shown me that it can't be modelled as a confederation of fuedal
barons.
--
Usenet Net News Administrator @ The Wolves Den (G. Wolfe Woodbury)
ne...@wolves.durham.nc.us news%wol...@cs.duke.edu ...duke!wolves!news
"The flame war is a specific Usenet art form." --me
[This site is not affiliated with Duke University. (Idiots!) ]
Brad Templeton
not a minus.
Anybody can do a truly untraceable anonymous posting, but they can't get
mail back. Anonymous posting services provide not anonymous posting,
which is easy to do anywhere, but pseudonyms. Your real name is known to
your publisher, the posting service.
This means that most anonymous posting services can set policies, and warn
abusers that they are subject to being unmasked. They can define what abuse
is, but most would probably include:
a) Control messages
b) Illegal messages
c) Just being deliberately annoying in the wrong newsgroup.
These services mean that there is a way to track down the poster if there
is a real problem, but provide a pseudonum when there is not, which is
quite valuable for many reasons, ranging from frank discussion of sex to
whistle blowing.
jl...@msd20.ssc.gov
> sri...@asuvax.eas.asu.edu (Sridhar Venkataraman) writes in response
> to the complaint that anonymous postings are abused:
>
> >Soon after this server became known to some educated idiots on
> >soc.culture.* a virtual flame war happened due to postings with a
> >highly flaming nature. Johan was told (a pretty weak word actually)
> >about this, he had a look at the abuse himself, accepted that it was
> >quite unnecessary and abuse of his server and still refused to remove
> >the groups from his list.
> >The abuse still continues on the very same groups and the abusers are
> >hiding because he has assured that he won't reveal any names.
>
> What a primal example of human nature. I have three questions for you
> folks.
>
> Do people really say different things to each other based upon whether
> their identity is or isn't known?
I would say yes. As examples: Anonymous news leaks, Office politics, criminals wearing masks, crackers and their nom de guerres and so on. The purpose of the anonymity is to hide, to escape responsibility for ones actions, to hurt and hide.
> Are people really so affected by what other people say that the verbage
> is labeled "abuse"?
Again yes. Else why are there libel laws, self-esteem professionals, psychiatrists and such. Also, in some areas such as sexual harassment, child abuse and others, verbal/verbage abuse can be grounds for conviction.
> Most importantly, on a forum that prizes itself on the freedom of communication
> that it enjoys, is there really such a thing as freedom of communication?
For the purpose of this thread (Anonymous postings to non-personal newsgroups), I think that a very valid question is whether or not anonymous postings should be considerd communication? Communication tends to be defined (dictionary wise) as a two way free exchange of information. Anonymous postings by their vary nature are only one way. As one who has waded through some of the anonymous postings IMHO the utilizers of this service are those who wish, not to communicate, but who wish to dictate. To use
the service to lambast someone or something, or to post X rated material to inappropriate newsgroups.
My personal opinion is that these types of anonymous postings should be treated as noise. And as such should be filtered out.
[Portion of signiture deleted]
> Dave Hayes - Network & Communications Engineering - JPL / NASA - Pasadena CA
> da...@elxr.jpl.nasa.gov da...@jato.jpl.nasa.gov ...usc!elroy!dxh
>
> What we see depends on mainly what we look for.
My answers.
Jerry L. Cox
jl...@msd20.ssc.gov
Budi Rahardjo
...
>I *strongly* urge Johan to restrict anonymity to newsgroups in which it
>is needed.
Yes. Picture this, I could "bombard" discussion (eg: *.d) groups with
images, binaries postings, etc. without being identified.
Also, Johan must have a database of anonymous ids and their real ids.
How do I know that he's not going to misuse the database ? :-)
-- budi
--
Budi Rahardjo <Budi_R...@UManitoba.Ca>
Unix Support - Computer Services - University of Manitoba
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
Responsibility isn't real if it is enforced. True responsibilty comes with
no coercion.
You've just made my point for me. Thank you.
What do you do with individuals who demonstrate (especially in
repetition) that they haven't _got_ any "true responsibility?"
Niven's 4th Law, FxS=k. Abusively increase F, and Mother Nature will
deal with S.
Doug Sewell
: How about judging each anonymous post on a case by case basis instead of
: lumping them all together and making hasty generalizations....
Ok so far.
: I think anonymous posts do help in focusing our attention on the content
: of one's message. Sure lot of anonymous posts are abusive or frivolous but
: in most cases these are by users who find the anon facility novel. Once
: the novelty wears off they are stopping their pranks...
I'm not so sure about hhis...
: All usenet readers are well grown up adults and if any post is needlessly
: abusive they will make their own judgements about the poster and his message
: and they CAN always press their n' or F-3 keys. (all usenet readers need to
: get more familiar with their keyboards, it seems)
This statement alone discredits everything else you've said. How long have
you been reading usenet ????
--
Doug Sewell, Tech Support, Computer Center, Youngstown State University
do...@cc.ysu.edu do...@ysub.bitnet <internet>!cc.ysu.edu!doug
uuencode bunny.dropping < core | mail j...@tygra.michigan.com
Brian W. Ogilvie
>However, the anonymous postings I have seen in other groups
>usually serve as a shield for the user's particular brand of hatred,
>racism, or other prejudice. I don't mind seeing the miscellaneous
>hatred/prejudice/racism; those things are part of our nature. However,
>the notion of providing anonymity's shield for these ideas repulses me.
>If they have such strong feelings, why can't they put their name(s) on
>their postings?
My first experience with the anonymous posting service was on
soc.college.grad, where someone used it to ask for advice about how to
deal with a problem advisor. Given the potential repercussions of such
a posting if it became known to said advisor, I think that the use of
the service was justified. While it would be possible to find another
channel for posting such messages, it strikes me that this sort of
blanket condemnation is unjustified.
The service provides a mechanism for forwarding mail to the original
poster. Since most Usenet readers don't know John Smith from Jane Doe
except by their opinions and their address, the effect of having an
anonymous posting to which mail replies can be directed is minimal,
except for those who personally know the poster--and in the case of
vengeful advisors, the lack of anonymity could be serious. Any
mechanism like this is liable to abuse, but the benefits as well as
the costs must be weighed. Limiting the service to alt groups, or
specific groups, would not help those who want advice on sensitive
issues in more 'professional' newsgroups.
--
Brian W. Ogilvie DISCLAIMER: You think I have time to
b-og...@uchicago.edu think about everything I post?
Joe Buck
>ta...@sw.stratus.com (Tarl Neustaedter) writes:
>
>>Johan Helsingius (ju...@penet.FI, the owner of anon.penet.fi) and I have
>>had a debate over the appropriatness of providing a service for anonymous
>>postings covering the entire usenet hierarchy.
>
>the anonymous service. If the service in fact passes control messages,
>there's an obvious huge capacity for mischief.
I don't see how that follows. It is trivial to forge the origin of
control messages already; the anonymous service doesn't make this any
easier. It would be trivial for Johan to insert some filtering, but
I don't see how it buys the net all that much: basically, you can't
just let newgroup and rmgroup msgs proceed automatically unless you want
to put yourself at the mercy of any net.dweeb who's found out what control
messages do.
--
Joe Buck jb...@ohm.berkeley.edu
Matthias Urlichs
j...@jshark.inet-uk.co.uk (Joe Sharkey) writes:
> In article <1krjbf$p...@smurf.sub.org> url...@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs) writes:
> >The policy statement for my anonymous mailer/poster:
> >
> >: This anonymous mailing system exists in order to allow people to send
> >: mails and postings without having to fear retributions from narrow-minded
> >: peers and employers.
>
> Worrying, in a sense...
>
Why?
> >: If you do post or mail such things through my mailer, you _may_ get ONE
> >: warning.
>
> So:
>
> You personally vet all postings? "Accessory before the fact!"
>
Of course not. Reading other people's mail is (a) unethical and (b) I don't
have enough time to do it even if I wanted to ignore (a).
If the recipient is has any problems with it, they'll forward the mail
or posting in question back to me.
Besides, the policy seems to be sufficiently strong-worded that this hasn't
even happened yet. The last test posting to a non-.test newsgroup was about
four months ago, probably because I posted a sufficiently heavyhanded
followup. (The perpetrator admitted to having actually read the help text
and said help text states that test postings will be summarily cancelled.)
--
Disclose classified information only when a NEED TO KNOW exists.
--
Matthias Urlichs -- url...@smurf.sub.org -- url...@smurf.ira.uka.de /(o\
Humboldtstrasse 7 -- 7500 Karlsruhe 1 -- Germany -- +49-721-9612521 \o)/
Joe Sharkey
>The policy statement for my anonymous mailer/poster:
>
>: This anonymous mailing system exists in order to allow people to send
>: mails and postings without having to fear retributions from narrow-minded
>: peers and employers.
Worrying, in a sense...
>: If you do post or mail such things through my mailer, you _may_ get ONE
>: warning.
So:
You personally vet all postings? "Accessory before the fact!"
>Matthias Urlichs
joe.
--
Joe Sharkey j...@jshark.inet-uk.co.uk ...!uunet!ibmpcug!jshark!joe
150 Hatfield Rd, St Albans, Herts AL1 4JA, UK Got a real domain name
(+44) 727 838662 Mail/News Feeds (v32/v32bis): in...@inet-uk.co.uk
John Hascall
}I agree with everything Tarl Neustaedter wrote. While there may be a limited
}number of newsgroups in which anonymous postings are necessary in some cases,
}and a larger number of newsgroups in which they might be necessary in very,
}very rare cases, it isn't appropriate to set up an anonymous posting service
}for the entire Usenet, simply because the potential for abuse is far greater
}than any benefit that would be accrued.
Since when is Usenet a democracy? If someone wants to run an anonymous
service, that's their business. If you want to put that host in your
killfile, that's your business. If a newsadmin wants to blanket-drop
all postings from that site, that's between them and the other people
at that site. If everyone ignores a service, the service effectively
doesn't exist.
John
--
John Hascall ``An ill-chosen word is the fool's messenger.''
Senior Systems Geek
Project Vincent
Iowa State University Computation Center + Ames, IA 50011 + 515/294-9551
Wes Morgan
>In article <C1w9x...@ms.uky.edu>, mor...@engr.uky.edu (Wes Morgan) says:
>>
>>However, the anonymous postings I have seen in other groups
>>usually serve as a shield for the user's particular brand of hatred,
>>racism, or other prejudice.
>>
> preach hatered/racism/prejudice and how many are reasonable posts made
> with good motives....
Well, the posts I've seen indicate about a 60-40 ratio between the two poles,
with the abusers on the larger side of the equation. This observation is
slanted by the fact that I don't read alt.personals or alt.sex.*, where
anonymous postings are (presumably) more prevalent. I can certainly see a
need for anonymity in the sexual abuse recovery newsgroup, even though I
don't read it.
> How about judging each anonymous post on a case by case basis instead of
> lumping them all together and making hasty generalizations....
Again, the postings I've seen don't make it worth the effort.
> I think anonymous posts do help in focusing our attention on the content
> of one's message. Sure lot of anonymous posts are abusive or frivolous but
> in most cases these are by users who find the anon facility novel. Once
> the novelty wears off they are stopping their pranks...
Tell that to the person who just delivered an anonymous 150-message mailbomb
to me by replying to a Usenet posting over and over. Tell that to the folks
who have sent (vituperative) anonymous mail to ro...@engr.uky.edu since this
discussion began, *all* of which would be classified as "improper" (to say
the least) by most readers.
I will be the first to admit that I hold some controversial opinions; indeed,
I'm sure that none of us are completely orthodox in our opinions. However,
I've received *hundreds* of anonymous email messages over the last few years;
fewer than 20 of them were "reasonable posts made with good motives." It's
getting more and more difficult to remember why we need anonymity at all; the
abusers are (once again) lousing things up for those who truly need the service
(or those who would put it to good use).
> All usenet readers are well grown up adults
No, Usenet readers are not exclusively adult. There are thousands of
readers in K-12 networking projects, on BBSs, and on public access sites.
I suspect that the average (and the median, for that matter) age of Usenet
readers has been dropping for the last few years.
> and if any post is needlessly
> abusive they will make their own judgements about the poster and his message
> and they CAN always press their n' or F-3 keys. (all usenet readers need to
> get more familiar with their keyboards, it seems)
Yeah, right. Remember that anonymous services also specialize in email;
the problem isn't limited to Usenet. Bringing email into the picture
changes it significantly.
> Talking about the anon server in Finland it provides a double blind system,
> and if any post preaches hatred/racism/prejudice then indignant readers
> can send abusive flames to him, choke his mailbox or whatever...., which
> automatically contains the level of abuse by the pranksters. A built-in
> thermostat!!!
If you believe that this works, you haven't paid much attention to
"controversial" posters in recent memory. We *desperately* need
Usenet History 101........8)
Mailbombing is useless; it achieves nothing but network congestion and
larger phone bills (for those sites which pay for their news/email feeds).
Of course, mailbombing also causes problems for innocent third parties;
on one occasion when my site was hit by a mailbomber, /usr/mail was filled
to capacity; none of my users could receive email, thanks to some ignorant
person who thought that "choking mailboxes" was a valid statement. What's
the point?
> I do think it would be better,if all anon servers have a policy on what can
> and cannot be posted, if the administrators warn abusers once in a while.
> (mainly not to give an excuse to some big-brotherly elements, to shut them
> down) But all this talk about the inherent evilness of the anonymous servers
> is pointless,crazy and smacks of totalitarianism.
I'm not suggesting that we should ban anonymous servers; as I've said, there
are several situations in which anonymity is a Good Thing (tm).
However, the notion that anonymity's shield should be automatically extended
to every Usenet discussion is ridiculous; it opens the door to further abuse.
--Wes
--
MORGAN@UKCC | Wes Morgan | ...!ukma!ukecc!morgan
mor...@ms.uky.edu | University of Kentucky | mor...@wuarchive.wustl.edu
mor...@engr.uky.edu | Lexington,Kentucky USA | JWMo...@dockmaster.ncsc.mil
Mailing list for AT&T StarServer S/E - starserve...@engr.uky.edu
Jay Maynard
>Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu writes:
>>With freedom comes responsibility.
>Responsibility isn't real if it is enforced. True responsibilty comes with
>no coercion.
Dave, once again your wacko politics get in the way of reasoned discussion.
You make no provision at all for irresponsible people...and yes, this is not
your utopia, and there _are_ irresponsible people.
--
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can
jmay...@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu | adequately be explained by stupidity.
"begin 666 foo B22!C86XG="!B96QI979E('EO=2!D96-O9&5D('1H:7,A"@ ` end"
-- David Charlap
Jay Maynard
>I would support an anonymous posting site that put down the following
>guidelines:
> a) No posts to groups that do not wish any pseudonymous postings
How would you decide this? For new groups, this isn't much of a problem, as it
becomes an item in the group's charter; for existing groups, it's a bit more
of a problem.
> b) Psydonyms must be used in order to avoid consequences in the
> real world of written material on the net, not to cause trouble
> on the net.
I think I understand what you're trying to say here, but some things that are
trouble on the net - most notably, unauthorized posting of copyrighted
material - are trouble _precisely_ because of their real world consequences.
Perhaps making it "avoid consequences, except for legal ones, in the real
world..." would be a Good Thing?
>Enforcement would be simple enough, though a pain for the operator. (I
>could see the operator charging for this to make up for it.) If a person is
>perceived as hiding behind the pseudonym just to cause trouble on the net,
>they get a warning describing the bad behaviour, and if it doesn't stop, they
>are unmasked. Perhaps more than one warning.
Something I'd like to see is a public warning: the last warning someone gets
for offenses that occur in a newsgroup is posted to that group as well. This
woul dhave the effect of giving those who complain about a problem anonymous
poster assurance that you are indeed not ignoring the problem, and puts him on
public notice that they're about to step over the line.
>Psydonymous posting is vital to sex groups and corporate criticism by
>employees, and a number of other valid purposes. While a relay site with
>policies could easily be superseded by one without them, users might well
>arrange to just put the annoying sites in their kill files, reading only
>from a site that doesn't hide net.troublemakers.
...kinda like people are doing now for alt.* group messages that come from or
through Bruce Becker's site. Were I in a position to have any impact on news
flow, I'd be dropping anon.penet.fi postings on the floor as long as it's
being run with its current (lack of) policies.
Jurgen Botz
>...
>>I *strongly* urge Johan to restrict anonymity to newsgroups in which it
>>is needed.
>
>Yes. Picture this, I could "bombard" discussion (eg: *.d) groups with
>images, binaries postings, etc. without being identified.
Actually, with the cooperation of the anon admin you could be identified
more easily than if you just "forged" the messages and were reasonably
clever about it.
>Also, Johan must have a database of anonymous ids and their real ids.
>How do I know that he's not going to misuse the database ? :-)
I think that what both these points show clearly is that an anonymous
posting service has a great deal of responsibility, both towards its
clients and towards the Net as a whole. Such a service should (IMHO)
have a set of well-defined rules and a contract that its clients should
sign, under the terms of which they are assured anonymity.
--
Jurgen Botz, jb...@mtholyoke.edu
Northampton, MA, USA
Ray Dunn
>no coercion.
Good grief, what a load of meaningless jingoistic cobblers!
--
Ray Dunn at home | Beaconsfield, Quebec | Phone: (514) 630 3749
r...@philmtl.philips.ca | r...@cam.org | uunet!sobeco!philmtl!ray
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
a) No posts to groups that do not wish any pseudonymous postings
jmay...@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu writes:
How would you decide this?
I was asked to add rec.nude to my system's supported group list. It
seemed a tough call, so I asked the rec.nude readership.
Reaction was nearly unanimously opposed, so I didn't add it.
Alexander EICHENER
>images, binaries postings, etc. without being identified.
responsible admin) would kick you out of the anon database when sub-
sequent founded complaints reach him.
>Also, Johan must have a database of anonymous ids and their real ids.
>How do I know that he's not going to misuse the database ? :-)
areas). Honestly, now - this is an inherent liability of all anon
systems, except those operating wit a public key, like the now-defunct
fine Australian one (sigh).
Greetings, Alexander Eichener <c...@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
Nicholas Kramer
system is to "bombard" some one or some thing with mail. If it doesn't
exist already, why not put a restriction on the number of anonymous
letters a single person can send in a given period of time? One or two
per day seems more than sufficient to me, but anything under 20 would
have a positive effect on mail terrorism.
Nick
Sridhar Venkataraman
)Johan, you haven't commented on this group yet, other than in my quoted
)email. Since this discussion centers around your service, could you offer
)some comments on what you would accept for modification of your policies?
If people haven't noticed yet, anon.penet.fi now has an A record in the DNS.
That seems the only major change I have seen yet. Whether it is for the good
or bad for Usenet is anybody's guess.
Karl L. Barrus
Erik Oliver writes:
>I find "handles"/usernames helpful to me in remembering who a person is,
>with anon addresses, I can't even link you to anything. That
>depersonalizes the conversation and prevents the building of any sort of
>relationship, IMHO.
This doesn't make sense. Not all usernames are convenient memory joggers
- for instance, my other account is ele...@menudo.uh.edu. I don't see
how that username is better than one an anonymous service provides.
Besides, the anonymous service at penet allows you to choose a nickname
for your anonymous id, so messages have a from line that looks like this:
From: an????@anon.penet.fi ("Nickname")
or something like that...
--
/-----------------------------------\
| Karl L. Barrus |
| bar...@tree.egr.uh.edu (NeXTMail) |
| ele...@menudo.uh.edu |
\-----------------------------------/
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
The readers speak for the newsgroup they inhabit. rec.nude readers
spoke for rec.nude. It worked fine when I asked -- a civil question,
a lot of very civil responses, no flames over the issue, for once.
ta...@sw.stratus.com writes:
I think an accurate question is "what are the mechanics of this vote"?
Who calls for the vote, who counts the votes, what defines a result?
I for one am not interested one whit in a discussion/vote formality
about such things. Reasonableness criteria apply. I was asked to do
something which seemed questionable; I forwarded the question to the
relevant forum; the answer came back solidly and opposed. That was
the end of it. I didn't collect votes in a formal sense, though I did
set Reply-To: to a poll-oriented mailbox of mine.
In your case, you ran the anon service, you ran the vote, and you decided
what constituted a favorable and/or unfavorable result.
If there is some perception that something stronger than this is
necessary for the determination of the acceptability of anon servers'
presence in any given group, then something is very deeply wrong.
Rigged votes, phooey; there just isn't (or shouldn't be) that much ego
involved.
even repeated abuse has not
resulted in the fire extinguisher being applied.
Social bug. It's time Johan at least chimed in on this discussion.
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
What are you _supposed_ to do? Take away any chance they might have of
developing real responsibility by removing the ability to demonstrate it?
Initially, yes. It's a pretty weak punishment, all things considered.
Following extinguishment of a user to prevent him from posting again,
further attempts to post are rejected, being returned to the user with
a copy to me. Along with the returned message is an explanation for
the rejection, including a synopsis of what exactly has been done.
The explanation concludes with:
If you wish to question this, feel free
to write to anonymus+0 to discuss it.
Note first that I get a copy of the rejected messages, so I can see
immediately if they're trying to be responsible right away. Second,
I don't require a whole lot of convincing -- I am not interested in
control per se, but rather am interested in the continuing smooth
operation of the Usenet. This is just my means by which to achieve it
insofar as I can affect it. So the extinguished user can darn well
drop me a note and discuss it with me. It is not a goal to keep the
extinguisher armed; I would prefer it remain unarmed at all times.
Dave, the fact that you can't think through these issues to some sort
of compromise speaks volumes.
KOND...@purccvm.bitnet
>
><KOND...@PURCCVM.BITNET> wrote:
>>In article <C1w9x...@ms.uky.edu>, mor...@engr.uky.edu (Wes Morgan) says:
>>>
>>>However, the anonymous postings I have seen in other groups usually serve
>>>
>> It would be more helpful if we have info on how many anonymous posts preach
>> motives.
>
>> I think anonymous posts do help in focusing our attention on the content
>> of one's message. Sure lot of anonymous posts are abusive or frivolous but
>> in most cases these are by users who find the anon facility novel. Once
>> the novelty wears off they are stopping their pranks...
>
>Tell that to the person who just delivered an anonymous 150-message mailbomb
>to me by replying to a Usenet posting over and over. Tell that to the folks
>who have sent (vituperative) anonymous mail to ro...@engr.uky.edu since this
>discussion began, *all* of which would be classified as "improper" (to say
>the least) by most readers.
>
I should not have specifically followed up your article but should have
commented on the 'shut down those anon servers' discussion. (also reading
'usenet 101' would have helped, it seems)
In the light of information and facts i gathered (or bought to my notice
by some mild and not so mild flames) since my earlier post i'd like to share
my modified/clarified opinions with you.
* Anon service seems unnecessary for technical newsgroups. The anon service
believes all users will behave responsibly, and apparantly not all of them
are. So the question boils down to:
Can we expect everyone to behave responsibly? Personally i would like to
believe that we can expect all usenet users to behave responsibly, and
even if some of them do not, the usenet community can absorb the cost
and the increased signal-to-noise ratio in the light of the greater
benefits the anon service promises. Since users are so vehement in their
position on tolerating 'peurile' anon posts it would be better if tech.
groups are removed from all anonymous servers' scope. It seems some tech.
newsgroups will have vote on this issue & it would save everyone a lot of
bother if all the anon administrators change their defaults to no anon to
technical newsgroups. (judging from the discussion on this issue the vote
result seems to be a foregone conclusion)
* Also i dont see any need for providing anonymous mail facility.
(the Finnish anon news server is also a anon mail server). I do not see
what good ends anon mail might ostensibly achieve. An anon mail facility
seems scary to many .......
* Should the default be 'anonymous or no anonymous ' for all groups?
I think it should be no anon for the tech. groups and 'anon yes' for
others.
Implementing these changes will give a better chance to the anon servers
to achieve their greater objectives................
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
OFF. PH: (317) 494-4426 BITNET : kondared@purccvm
USMAIL : 126-2, Andrews Place INTERNET: kond...@mace.cc.purdue.edu
W.Lafayette, IN47906 : kond...@degree.ecn.purdue.edu
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I disgree with what you say but will fight for your right to say it'
- Voltaire (?)
Kate Gregory
>In article <C1w9x...@ms.uky.edu> mor...@engr.uky.edu (Wes Morgan) writes:
>
>>However, the anonymous postings I have seen in other groups
>>usually serve as a shield for the user's particular brand of hatred,
>>racism, or other prejudice.
>
>soc.college.grad, where someone used it to ask for advice about how to
>deal with a problem advisor. Given the potential repercussions of such
>a posting if it became known to said advisor, I think that the use of
>the service was justified.
>
posters. One was about changing jobs so as to work less hours,
job sharing and so on, from a woman who didn't want anyone at her
current place of work to know she was thinking of looking for work
elsewhere. The next was from a woman who is thinking of having a
baby sometime soon and doesn't want coworkers, friends, family etc
etc to know all about it, but who wants advice. The third is about
sex after parenthood -- actually this was started by people posting
in the usual way but then it was pointed out that the anonymous posting
service might let more people participate.
Misc.kids doesn't seem to be suffering any harm from the presence
of anonymous posters; in fact it seems to have been helped by it.
Kate
Damon
>no coercion.
Yes, I think you have a point there. And an absence of enforcement is
not an excuse for bad behaviour. But human nature being what it is...
However, the subject of responsibility is an interesting one in the
present company. B^> B^>
Damon
--
Damon Hart-Davis d...@hd.org London UK [1.40]
Tel/Fax: +44 81 755 0077======Two jobs:
(1) Parallelogram Editor, (2) Seller of public-access news/mail & cheap Suns.
Tod Pike
*COST* of this thing in terms of bandwidth on the international link. I
mean, people in the U.S. who are posting megabytes of data to alt.binaries.*
have to mail their posts over to Finland, where they get sent *back* to the
U.S. Seems kinda silly to me, and I'd hate to be paying the phone bills on
the international link. And who pays for that link, anyway?
Tod Pike
t...@sei.cmu.edu
Internet: t...@sei.cmu.edu
Mail: Carnegie Mellon University
Software Engineering Institute
Pittsburgh, PA. 15213-3980
Gary Heston
|In article <1kpgu0...@transfer.stratus.com>, ta...@sw.stratus.com (Tarl Neustaedter) writes:
||> In the case of these anonymous messages, it is not possible
||> to track the origin without the intervention of the single owner of the
||> service, who may or may not be interested in helping.
|
|It's worse than this. The owner of the service is "promising" anonymity. He
|*can't* help track down the sender of any particular message through his
|service, without breaking that promise, and making it impossible for anyone to
|trust the anonymity of the service in the future.
Fine; so put his site in your sys file entry at each of your feed sites
as an alias of your own, which will cause all articles from that site
to not be forwarded to you.
After a deafening silence meets their postings, they can either change
their mind or not be in touch with the rest of us.
--
Gary Heston SCI Systems, Inc. ga...@sci34hub.sci.com site admin
The Chairman of the Board and the CFO speak for SCI. I'm neither.
Remember: A majority of the American people voted against *all* of the
Presidential Candidates. How encouraging....
Richard M. Hartman
control messages out to prevent them from being posted anonymously.
Second to that, perhaps he ought to formulate a policy wherein he
has the right to breach anonymity under certain conditions, such
as abuse of net resources.
Best of all, of course, would be to only accept anonymous
postings in groups which have requested the service. A default
of anonymous for all groups is ridiculous.
-Richard Hartman
har...@ulogic.COM
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Moderation in all things.... ....especially moderation.
Carl M. Kadie
[...]
>Yet, I can have one foisted on my so I can be bombarded by anonymous
>mail at anyone's whim. I feel this aspect of the Anon server is
>unaceptable.
[...]
There is a do-it-yourself, technical solution to this problem: email
filtering. I'm enclosing details.
- Carl
===========================================================
Newsgroups: alt.censorship
From: mor...@ms.uky.edu (Wes Morgan)
Subject: Re: Public posting of private e-mail.
Message-ID: <1992Aug24....@ms.uky.edu>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1992 13:23:53 GMT
sbra...@scic.intel.com (Seth Bradley) writes:
>I agree that one should be able to stop offending e-mail.
Sure! There are several "mail filtering" programs available; one of the
best of these is "procmail", which is availabel from many FTP sites. Get
procmail and install it; you can then filter your mail to your heart's
content.
>However, before
>one posts private e-mail, there is another step that can be taken, namely
>mailing to the offender's sysadmin. From (second hand) personal experience,
>this is often effective.
> [ ... ]
>The main point is, talking to a sysadmin is likely to be far more
>effective than posting e-mail.
The effectiveness of "talking to a sysadmin" varies greatly. If the site
is commercial, you may very well succeed. If, however, the site is aca-
demic, your chances are "not so good".
I'm the sysadmin for the UK College of Engineering (engr.uky.edu, NOT
ms.uky.edu (from which this posting originates)), and I routinely receive
messages such as "your user XXXX called me a YYYYY on the mailing list!
Terminate his email NOW!". I usually get a chuckle from this. I've never
rescinded a user's email privileges; with the exception of illegal activi-
ties (emailing pirate software after repeated warnings, for example), I
doubt that I ever will.
One must accept the good with the bad. If you enjoy full communications
privileges (and wish them extended to others), you WILL, eventually, be
offended. It's part of the virtual territory.
--Wes
--
MORGAN@UKCC | Wes Morgan | ...!ukma!ukecc!morgan
mor...@ms.uky.edu | Engineering Computing | mor...@wuarchive.wustl.edu
mor...@engr.uky.edu | University of Kentucky | JWMo...@dockmaster.ncsc.mil
Mailing list for AT&T StarServer S/E - starserve...@engr.uky.edu
From caf-talk Caf Mar 5 00:00:00 1992
Newsgroups: uiuc.cs.problems
From: ull...@suna3.cs.uiuc.edu (Brygg Ullmer)
Subject: Article 11--Re: Is there a way I can block-out certain e-mail?
Message-ID: <1992Mar5.1...@sunb10.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1992 16:40:36 GMT
In <1992Mar3.0...@m.cs.uiuc.edu> so...@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Khaled S. Soufi) writes:
>I was wondering if anyone out there knows of any simple (?!) way to
>block-out certain people (addresses) from sending e-mail to me! I
>guess I can write a little utility that can search my mail file and
>delete all messages that came from undesirable addresses but is there
>anything better than that? Thanks in advance for any *wise*
>suggestion.
Yes... you can use the filter program, if elm has been installed on your
system. If you haven't run elm before, run it once so that it can create
the appropriate directories in your account. Then, you have filter invoked
by the reception of new mail by putting "| /usr/local/bin/filter" (with the
quotes) in your .forward file (the directory may be different from system
to system; type "which filter" to get the appropriate directory). Finally,
you set up a filter-rules file in your .elm directory, which might contain
the following:
if (from contains "unwanted-person-name") then save unwanted.message
#alternatively, replace "save unwanted..." with "delete"
if (always) then leave
Be sure to check your filter-rules out for proper working order by
running "filter -n < sample.msg" on both messages which should be deleted and
messages which should be saved (including the header); filter will tell you what
it would do with the message if run with the current filter-rules.
Check the filter man page for more information.
Brygg Ullmer
------------------------------
From caf-talk Caf Mar 5 00:00:00 1992
Newsgroups: uiuc.cs.problems
From: schw...@cs.uiuc.edu (Mike Schwager)
Subject: Article 12--Re: Is there a way I can block-out certain e-mail?
Message-ID: <1992Mar6.0...@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 1992 02:19:36 GMT
In article <1992Mar3.0...@m.cs.uiuc.edu>, so...@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Khaled S. Soufi) writes:
|> I was wondering if anyone out there knows of any simple (?!) way to
|> block-out certain people (addresses) from sending e-mail to me! I
|> guess I can write a little utility that can search my mail file and
|> delete all messages that came from undesirable addresses but is there
|> anything better than that? Thanks in advance for any *wise*
|> suggestion.
+------------------------------------+--------------------------+
I suggest using MH. There are manuals in the library. Basically, you can create a .forward file that looks like this:
"| /local/lib/mh/slocal -user schwager"
and then you can have a mail delivery file that looks like this:
from nastyperson qpipe ?: "/bin/cat > /dev/null 2>&1"
addr schwager qpipe ?: "/local/lib/mh/rcvstore +Sysadm"
Automagic!
Many more configuration options are available.
-Mike
--
Carl Kadie -- I do not represent any organization; this is just me.
= ka...@cs.uiuc.edu =
Tim Pierce
>Best of all, of course, would be to only accept anonymous
>postings in groups which have requested the service. A default
>of anonymous for all groups is ridiculous.
Of course, how does one determine whether a "group" requests the
service? A flat majority of posters voting in favor? A positive
margin of 100 votes? Or what? No one speaks for a newsgroup.
I'm not convinced by the arguments that an anonymous posting service
for all newsgroups is inherently a bad idea, simply because it's a
diversion from the status quo. Since the status quo previously
permitted anonymous posting to *no* newsgroups, any anonymous posting
service would reject the status quo.
--
____ Tim Pierce /
\ / twpi...@unix.amherst.edu / Rocks say goodbye.
\/ (BITnet: TWPIERCE@AMHERST) /
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
One thing I haven't heard mentioned in this discussion is the enormous
*COST* of this thing in terms of bandwidth on the international link. I
mean, people in the U.S. who are posting megabytes of data to alt.binaries.*
have to mail their posts over to Finland, where they get sent *back* to the
U.S.
*giggle* *chortle* *laugh*
That's the funniest thing I've read all day...
Last September, when my service had been live for 8 days, Johan first
wrote to me about the possibility of getting a copy of my software.
His reason for asking for it was because of the use of anon servers in
Europe:
...it feels kind of stupid to have all the messages go off to
the states just to return over the atlantic anonymified.
What goes around, comes around...
Richard M. Hartman
>ta...@sw.stratus.com writes:
>I feel I should chime in on this issue, because Johan is using my
>software.
[...]
>I kept it restricted exactly because of these problems. I don't agree
>with Johan having made the modification to remove the per-group
>restriction.
You didn't happen to reserve the right to approve modifications
to your software before releasing it, did you? What does your
copyright notice (if any) say? If you did not explicitly release
the rights, you may be able to take "real life" legal action
to prevent this abuse of your system. Should you feel that
strongly about it.
I personally feel as you do, that anonymity is useful, or even
necessary in certain situations, but easily abused by those
who merely see it as a chance to put on a mask and wreak havoc.
(Verbal or otherwise.)
>Johan, put the group-bouncer "case" back into the post script.
Seconded.
>If I were ever to run an anonymous system again, I would severely
>limit the promises of preservation of anonymity. Children above the
>legal age of majority do not deserve such protection, and it is in the
>best interests of the greater Usenet not to supply it.
??? If I am over 18 I shouldn't be provided anonymous posting
services??? You must've meant something different....
-Richard Hartman
har...@ulogic.COM
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Badges? I don' got to show you no stinkin' badges!"
Erik Oliver
one hand, I find myself in support of the idea on groups where the
content is potentially sensitive in some way shape or form. On the
other hand, from the moment I read about the creation of the Finish Anon
server, I was very uncomfortable. First of all, the server offerred one
new and in my mind scary feature, you can be anonymized by anyone who
wants to send you mail.
A frightening idea. What if I don't want an anon address at all. Yet,
I can have one foisted on my so I can be bombarded by anonymous mail at
anyone's whim. I feel this aspect of the Anon server is unaceptable.
Finally, the fact that the server allows _global_ anonymous posting is
just downright annoying. First off it is unnecessary, there is nothing
that absolutely has to be said in say, alt.toys.lego, which requires
anonymity. Secondly, it causes a complete dissociation between the
poster of the message and any human. I find "handles"/usernames helpful
to me in remembering who a person is, with anon addresses, I can't even
link you to anything. That depersonalizes the conversation and prevents
the building of any sort of relationship, IMHO.
I believe that the rule of thumb should be no-anonymous unless requested
by some sort of group vote. A CFV for Anon posting of sorts.
-Erik
Richard M. Hartman
>to any newsgroup and to send mail to any user. No problems so far.
Does the server work in reverse, allowing me to send a reply to
someone using your anonymity service? That is, I should be able
to send mail to anyone who can send mail to me, even if I don't
know his/her name, if only to address whatever complaints he/she
may have about me. Similarly argument would apply to someone
posting anonymously in a newsgroup.
-Richard Hartman
har...@uLogic.COM
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Ideas are not responsible for the people who believe them."
Alexander EICHENER
har...@ulogic.UUCP (Richard M. Hartman) writes:
>>In misc.kids there are three threads going on started by anonymous
>>posters. One was about changing jobs so as to work less hours,
>>Misc.kids doesn't seem to be suffering any harm from the presence
>>of anonymous posters; in fact it seems to have been helped by it.
>>
>>Kate
>
>no bearing upon whether it is appropriate for ALL newsgroups to be
>accessable, by default, through the anonymous posting service.
Upon re-reading his words, Mr. Hartman might have found out about the
logical fault therein. Actually, the anonymous posting showed that it
was in no way detrimental to the group - but first, it had to be tried.
I still strongly support the universal access provided by Julf.
Abuse can - and should - be dealt with on an individual base. May I
remind you of the fine and effective policy of Matthias Urlichs'
German anon service? Such a solution would be feasible for anon.poenet.fi
as well.
Greetings, Alexander Eichener <c...@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
Brad Templeton
>Maybe somebody would like to test this? What would happen if articles from
>clarinet were copied through `anon.penet.fi'? Would Johan tell Brad who
>did the re-posting (if he was able to name the culprit)? Would Brad bring
>the problem to court if Johan didn't tell him?
In the case of a civil suit, ie. copyright infringement, you would be
surprised to find out that, in the USA at least (I don't know about Finland)
you do not have your rights to avoid self-incrimination or keep certain
secrets.
In the discovery phase, you could be required by the court to disclose
information related to the suit, even if it incriminated you. In a criminal
case you could decline.
I think I am not the only one who would be concerned if anonymous sites
were to be used for wholesale copyright infringement. However, USENET's
anarchy also has an answer, the cancel message. If somebody posts one of
my copyrighted messages, I have full right to cancel it, since I'm not
cancelling somebody else's messages, but rather cancelling one of my own
that somebody else fradulently put their name to.
Far more controversial would be a site that just kept doing it and doing it.
I think it would be an unfair burden on a copyright holder or licencee to
have to track every posting to cancel them as they come. It would be
interesting to see the net reaction to an auto-canceller that zapped
anything from the site that matched the parameters of a copyrighted
article. Writing such would be trivial with my Newsclip programming
language -- the political reprecussions are far more interesting.
--
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Sunnyvale, CA 408/296-0366
Richard M. Hartman
|In article <1993Feb6.0...@jato.jpl.nasa.gov> da...@jato.jpl.nasa.gov writes:
|>Responsibility isn't real if it is enforced. True responsibilty comes with
|>no coercion.
|
|Yes, I think you have a point there. And an absence of enforcement is
|not an excuse for bad behaviour. But human nature being what it is...
|
|However, the subject of responsibility is an interesting one in the
|present company. B^> B^>
"With great power comes great responsibility."
-Peter Parker
<g>
Richard M. Hartman
[...reversing the paragraphs here...]
>I'm not convinced by the arguments that an anonymous posting service
>for all newsgroups is inherently a bad idea, simply because it's a
>diversion from the status quo. Since the status quo previously
>permitted anonymous posting to *no* newsgroups, any anonymous posting
>service would reject the status quo.
Where do you get this? Anonymous posting services have been
being set up independantly for individual groups for quite
a while. Nobody seems to object when this has been done
on a per-group basis.
>Of course, how does one determine whether a "group" requests the
>service? A flat majority of posters voting in favor? A positive
>margin of 100 votes? Or what? No one speaks for a newsgroup.
I don't know. How has it been determined in the past? I think
for new groups it should just be part of the RFD/CFV process,
like moderation status. For older groups ... ? Perhaps the
same process already in place for change from unmoderated to
moderated? Perhaps something w/ different voting thresholds?
The question "how does one determine whether a group requests
the service" is a subject to be discussed after it has been
agreed that the all-groups-permitted service is a bad idea,
not an argument that such a service is a good idea.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Blasting, bursting, billowing forth with |
the power of ten billion butterfly sneezes, | -Richard Hartman
Man, with his flaming fire, | har...@uLogic.COM
has conquered the wayword breezes. |
Eric Schilling
[stuff deleted for brevity]
> benefits the anon service promises. Since users are so vehement in their
> position on tolerating 'peurile' anon posts it would be better if tech.
> groups are removed from all anonymous servers' scope. It seems some tech.
> newsgroups will have vote on this issue & it would save everyone a lot of
> bother if all the anon administrators change their defaults to no anon to
> technical newsgroups. (judging from the discussion on this issue the vote
> result seems to be a foregone conclusion)
IMHO, that relies pretty heavily on the cooperation of the anon administrators.
With just about anyone being able to set up such a service nowadays, you
will likely get a mixed response when it comes to asking that they put such
restrictions on their anonymous users.
> * Also i dont see any need for providing anonymous mail facility.
> (the Finnish anon news server is also a anon mail server). I do not see
> what good ends anon mail might ostensibly achieve. An anon mail facility
> seems scary to many .......
I don't see a "need" either. If people want it though, they can get it. I
look at it the same way I look at a lot of the other stuff that goes
across the net that *I* don't see the need for. I try to ignore it.
> * Should the default be 'anonymous or no anonymous ' for all groups?
> I think it should be no anon for the tech. groups and 'anon yes' for
> others.
>
> Implementing these changes will give a better chance to the anon servers
> to achieve their greater objectives................
The main point I would like to make here is that while we can go through and
revise the news sw to "reject anon posts to technical newsgroups" or some
such thing, I think the attempt will prove futile. Each attempt to modify
news can result in a changed approach by anon service providers to thwart the
change. I think this would be pointless.
Another point I'd like to bring up is that anon services can make it hard to
discipline unruly users. For example, Joe Fubar posts a ton of crap to USENET
and I take his posting privs away. Joe then goes to an anon provider and
gets an id. He then posts more crap to USENET and sends abusive mail. I
can't do anything until I find out for sure it was him (which is kind of
hard!). Maybe the anon service will disconnect him if it gets complaints,
maybe not.
--
Eric Schilling
gan...@cyberspace.org
Brad Templeton
anon service operator would set the default to no posting, and accept
requests to enable it that sound reasonable. The operator's definition
of reasonable.
Not everybody will want to jump on the anon posting bandwagon. I think
that if you do set up such a service, you lay yourself open for a
considerable amount of legal liability. I expect the courts would treat
this quite different from ordinary usenet forwarding, since it is
centralized at your site and offered as a service. I believe the courts
could very well rule that the author and anon posting service are publisher
and author, and co-liable for any infraction.
The press have always been able to publish material under pseudonyms and
to use "un-named sources." But they also take on much of the liability
for what is thus published.
It is worth noting that several of the major online services offer
pseudonym status as the *default*. Many of them, such as Compuserve,
give only a meaningless numeric id to users. The addition of real names
varies from subservice to subservice, with some requiring real names and
some not. The chat services have largely never used real names, though
GEnie provides some access to this by users.
This makes sense in the commercial world. In that world, there is a market
for anonymous and identified services, and there should be both. USENET
has yet to bifurcate, except for the odd sets of moderated/unmoderated pairs.
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
I think
that if you do set up such a service, you lay yourself open for a
considerable amount of legal liability. I expect the courts would treat
this quite different from ordinary usenet forwarding, since it is
centralized at your site and offered as a service. I believe the courts
could very well rule that the author and anon posting service are publisher
and author, and co-liable for any infraction.
Actually, it seems to be not so bad as all that.
On the one hand, UUNET represents a 39% "influence rating" in Reid's
Top 1000 Sites list; one might argue that a great deal of forwarding
is "centralized" at UUNET, and it is surely offered as a service, for
a fee and under contract.
I asked mnem...@eff.org about this when I set up my system.
Initially, I was more concerned with my liability insofar as
inadvertent "outing" of the users was concerned -- what if my software
blew up and passed someone's real address, or what if someone got into
Godiva and nosed into the match file?
His response was that I was probably not liable unless there existed
some sort of contract between myself and the users. He mentioned
something called a tort of "publication of embarrassing private
facts," but said this would be negligent at worst, and I shouldn't
worry about it.
When the extortionist came through here, never having imagined in my
worst nightmares that someone might do such a thing, I asked him about
my situation again. He saw "no legal risk" in my position at all. He
just said it's "tricky and unusual" but that, again in the absence of
a contract, my position was pretty safe.
(I don't mind mentioning that, once the victims had identified the
extortionist by name without clues from me [context of his postings
had provided enough information for them to realize who he was and
what he was threatening to do], I fairly bent over backward to help
them in any way they needed. I volunteered to testify if it ever came
to court.)
Caveat, of course: I didn't retain mnem...@eff.org as my attorney; I
didn't pay him to do any real research; and he's an attorney, not a
judge hearing an actual case. But he works in the field, and gave me
a considered opinion which I thankfully accepted. Technically, worth
what I paid for it; practically, worth quite a bit in peace of mind.
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
You didn't happen to reserve the right to approve modifications
to your software before releasing it, did you? What does your
copyright notice (if any) say?
I regard copyright notices in small systems as pointless. I regard
copyright notices in large systems as impractical. The core programs
of my anon system (ping, assign, mail, post) are 4 shell scripts, for
a total of about 100 lines -- all the rest is fluff, convenience, and
logging.
I wrote my anon system in reaction to the demise of wizvax, up to that
time the anon server for a.s.b. It seemed to me that anon servers
were not a tough issue and that a lot of anon servers expended a great
deal of energy doing such work. I set out to prove it wasn't tough; I
think I succeeded. That original core system took just a few hours to
write, test, and unleash on a.s.b and alt.personals*. It's an
extremely _stupid_ system, deliberately.
If you did not explicitly release
the rights, you may be able to take "real life" legal action
to prevent this abuse of your system. Should you feel that
strongly about it.
I don't feel that strongly about anything. I am not a litigious
person, engagement to a lawyer notwithstanding. Nor do I have a few
tens of thousands of dollars to waste on such an irrelevant question.
??? If I am over 18 I shouldn't be provided anonymous posting
services??? You must've meant something different....
You read it backwards. I was delivering a backhanded insult to those
whose age is over 18 but who nonetheless exhibit the emotional
stability and maturity of 4th graders.
Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu
Of course, how does one determine whether a "group" requests the
service? A flat majority of posters voting in favor? A positive
margin of 100 votes? Or what? No one speaks for a newsgroup.
The readers speak for the newsgroup they inhabit. rec.nude readers
spoke for rec.nude. It worked fine when I asked -- a civil question,
a lot of very civil responses, no flames over the issue, for once.
Since the status quo previously
permitted anonymous posting to *no* newsgroups, any anonymous posting
service would reject the status quo.
The first anon servers were set up for alt.sex.bondage, and I have
(by now, admittedly dim) memories that a.s.b was asked about it,
around the time of the P&W Digest. Also, alt.personals went rather
directly for anon support very soon after it was created.
You wouldn't get a very great deal of the important contributions to
alt.sexual.abuse.recovery without anon servers -- they are very
clearly emphatically welcome there, and have been since its creation.
Haakon Styri
writes:
>[...]
>
> For example: apparently somebody posted a Challenger transcript to
> sci.space; something that was printed in the Weekly World News (or
> something like that). All I've read are (mostly) calls for the shutting
> down of anonymous posting services, but nothing about the printing press
> that first published the article.
Probably because the proper way of responding to that article would be to
approach the publisher/editor.
> Why is this? People are accustomed to having freedom of the press, but I
> guess electronic communication is too new for some people to adjust to.
I'll quote Brad. However, I guess the problem is that our legal systems
haven't defined all entities on Usenet, Internet and other networks yet.
Many laws refer to the world of printed paper.
In article <1993Feb09.2...@clarinet.com>, br...@clarinet.com
(Brad Templeton) writes:
> [...]
>
> The press have always been able to publish material under pseudonyms and
> to use "un-named sources." But they also take on much of the liability
> for what is thus published.
That's the important point. Also, there is no tradition of having a _right_
to publish any statement anonymously. If no publisher/editor will print it
anonymously, it will not be printed that way (except maybe as graffiti in
a public place).
However, Brad also writes:
> [...] I think
> that if you do set up such a service, you lay yourself open for a
> considerable amount of legal liability. [...] I believe the courts
> could very well rule that the author and anon posting service are publisher
> and author, and co-liable for any infraction.
Two obvious problems are: what court, and would the ruling apply in the
country where the anonymous service is (and the country where the author
is)?
Maybe somebody would like to test this? What would happen if articles from
clarinet were copied through `anon.penet.fi'? Would Johan tell Brad who
did the re-posting (if he was able to name the culprit)? Would Brad bring
the problem to court if Johan didn't tell him?
The problem may be real for Johan. A popular group for posting copyright
infringement is `alt.binaries.pictures.erotica'. Using grep to estimate
the number of articles originating from `anon.penet.fi' in our news spool
I got something like 36%. That would make Johan some kind of a target for
a publisher. I'm not saying this example is valid or real, I didn't bother
to check neither volume nor content of the a.b.p.e posts. I'm just pointing
out a potential problem.
---
Haakon Styri
Dan Hoey
science courses to get their homework done by the readers of
comp.theory, I was somewhat dismayed to see the anonymous posting
service used for the purpose. So far there has been only one such
use, though that seems to be the only use of the service on
comp.theory so far.
While there has never been any real security against anonymous or
forged postings on Usenet, the process has until now been sufficiently
inconvenient, error-prone, and undocumented to limit its use by
persons who have not learned the culture of the net.
On the other hand, a recent use of the anonymous posting service on
sci.math seemed seemed to be a student asking help on a homework
problem. It has now been attributed to a teacher, asking for an
explanation of a dubious answer in his teaching guide. He says his
news posting is broken, so he is using the anonymous service as a
mail-to-news gateway.
Gateways from mail to news have provided a fairly easy method of
forgery and anonymity in the past, though they are somewhat less prone
to abuse for several reasons. First, their use does not provide
anonymity by default, nor does it promise anonymity. Such gateways
may in fact keep enough records to trace back to the poster in most
cases. Second, the gateways do not provide a covert address for
private, anonymous communication with the poster. Thus the cheating
student must either provide a private address or make do with that
information that gets posted in the newsgroup. The inherently greater
risk of detection would be likely to reduce such abuse.
For these reasons, I think such gateways are much less harmful than
the anonymous posting service. It is unfortunate that no well-known
mail-to-news gateways seem to exist outside of the anonymous posting
service.
Dan Hoey
Ho...@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil
Ed McGuire
>Since when is Usenet a democracy? If someone wants to run an anonymous
>service, that's their business. If you want to put that host in your
>killfile, that's your business. If a newsadmin wants to blanket-drop
>all postings from that site, that's between them and the other people
>at that site. If everyone ignores a service, the service effectively
>doesn't exist.
I would like to know how to junk all articles posted by the anonymous
service currently being discussed. Ideally I would actually tell my
feed site not to feed me articles posted by the anonymous service.
Assuming the C News Performance Release, what is a simple way to
accomplish this? Or where should I look to learn how to do it myself?
--
Ed McGuire 1603 LBJ Freeway, Suite 780
Systems Administrator/ Dallas, Texas 75234
Member of Technical Staff 214/620-2100, FAX 214/484-8110
Intellection, Inc. <e...@intellection.com>
Raise Usenet quality. Read news.announce.newgroups and vote.
Richard M. Hartman
>Disclose classified information only when a NEED TO KNOW exists.
Classify information only when a NEED FOR SECRECY exists.
-Richard Hartman
har...@ulogic.COM
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"If we shadows have offended, Think but this and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream."
Richard M. Hartman
>posters. One was about changing jobs so as to work less hours,
>Misc.kids doesn't seem to be suffering any harm from the presence
>of anonymous posters; in fact it seems to have been helped by it.
>
>Kate
Fine. So misc.kids should be registered for the service. This has
no bearing upon whether it is appropriate for ALL newsgroups to be
accessable, by default, through the anonymous posting service.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Between the silence of the mountains |
and the crashing of the sea | -Richard Hartman
there lies a land I once lived in | har...@uLogic.COM
and she's waiting there for me. |
Dave Hayes
>>Responsibility isn't real if it is enforced. True responsibilty comes with
>>no coercion.
An obviously enlightend judgment. After all, what I said is entirely
unreasonable and how dare I contradict your own holy sensibilities! <grin>
>You make no provision at all for irresponsible people...and yes, this is not
>your utopia, and there _are_ irresponsible people.
I am not responsible for other people. I have enough trouble with my own life.
How can you say that what I say is unreasonable when _you_ ask anyone else to
take responsibility for the irresponsible? Not only does that deny the
irresponsible a chance to demonstrate responsibility, but that also makes some
societal unit (in this case USENET) take awkward and fascist pains to provide
for those who are still irresponsible.
Reason, did you say?
--
Dave Hayes - Network & Communications Engineering - JPL / NASA - Pasadena CA
da...@elxr.jpl.nasa.gov da...@jato.jpl.nasa.gov ...usc!elroy!dxh
Complete possession is proved only by giving
All you are unable to give posseses you
Richard M. Hartman
> believes all users will behave responsibly, and apparantly not all of them
> are. So the question boils down to:
>
> Can we expect everyone to behave responsibly? Personally i would like to
> believe that we can expect all usenet users to behave responsibly, and
Many people would like to believe in world peace too. That doesn't
make the warmongers go away. Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect
world, and cannot make our policy decisions on the hopes that we do. We
must acknowledge that persons exist who not only will abuse the anonymous
services, but positively revel in it.
The question is not, really, whether an anonymous posting capability
should exist. It should. The questions are:
* should an anonymous posting be allowed to a group that
has not requested it
* should an anonymous posting service be extended to e-mail
as well as newsgroup postings
* should an anonymous posting service be run with no stated
policy on abuse of priviledge?
I think the answer to all three is "no". If a group's content
is such that anonymous postings are likely to be useful, the
readership of that group is best able to make that decision,
not some sysadmin in Finland who has never bothered to check.
It might be something to add to CFVs in the future, next to
moderated vs. unmoderated. But for existing groups (except
those that already accept anonymous postings) the "default"
should be "no anonymous" unless and until the issue is
discussed, first in the groups, then in news.groups, and
passed with a vote.
This suggestion, btw, is just that -- a suggestion. It isn't
because I want to be "big brother", but rather to prevent newsgroups
from being signed up for anonymous posting service by the request of
a single user w/o some sort of bittrail that can prove that the
request is authorized by the readership. If another method can
be agreed upon, fine. But we have a mechanism in place for
modification of group characteristics and we may as well make use
of it.
-Richard Hartman
har...@uLogic.COM
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Disco isn't dead... ...it's just in witness protection!
David Clunie
South Australia where until recently I ran an anonymous and
encrypted remailing and posting service, I would like to make a
few comments about this recent thread.
As someone astutely pointed out, running such a remailer from a
foreign country could conceivably (though no-one seems to have
statistics) result in considerable consumption of bandwidth on a
relatively expensive link. This was one of the reasons quoted by
the US site that complained to the AARNet administrator that
resulted in their insistence that I close the service.
The other reason quoted was that there seemed to be no valid reason
to justify anonymous posting and hence the consumption of valuable
bandwidth.
I don't have control of the link to the US and do not pay for it, and
hence was not in a position to argue with the ruling and hence
aquiesced gracefully.
Be that as it may, I consider the demise of the service to have been
rather unfortunate, and I wish the Finnish remailer luck ! It is a
pity that there are very few if any similar services provided with in
the US. I guess that's the benefit of having a constitution that
guarantees one freedom of speech and a legal and political system
that conspires to subvert it in the name of the public good.
As to the comments regarding postings to non-personal newsgroups,
the value of such postings, the incidence of inappropriate
behaviour, and the role anonymous service administrators should play
in controlling the situation, let me say the following ...
In all the time that the PAX service was running, I had 3 or 4 complaints
about matters other than technical issues, none of which resulted in a
need for any action by myself or other administrators, all of which were
settled with a friendly exchange of email which resulted in greater
understanding on the part of all parties concerned. In a handful of other
cases I noticed large volume picture postings going through and I asked
the posters to refrain from doing this due to the limited US/Aus link
bandwidth and they stopped.
I read a lot of newsgroups. I see a lot of what I regard as "noise" and
I skip over it. I just don't read it. I don't actually bother with kill
files though many people do. It seems to me that there is so much "noise"
already that a few anonymous postings that one might personally take
exception to are only a drop in the bucket.
The conventional wisdom of Usenet has always been "press the n key" and I
see no reason to change now. When people have tried to exert control in the
past, two phenomena occurred ... moderated news groups and an alt hierarchy,
giving one a choice of environment !
It would seem to me that the same should apply to the concept of anonymous
posting. We all know how to post "almost anonymously" by manipulating the
nntp servers directly, but this approach precludes any response. Clearly
anonymous posting is not going to go away in a hurry. Allowing a more
meaningful form of anonymity hardly seems to be any worse a threat.
Many seem to question the value of anonymity. But who are they to say what
risks another individual should take ? There is no question that in this
rather conservative society that we live in, holding certain views, making
certain statements, adopting a certain lifestyle, are likely to result in
public censure, ridicule, loss of status, employment, or even legal action.
Given the heterogeneity of the legal jurisdictions from where the many
contributors to usenet post, who knows what is legal and what is not !
Some say that anonymous posters are "cowards" and should stand up and be
counted. Perhaps that is one point of view but what right do these detractors
have to exercise such censorship ?
So the bottom line is this. Why don't we all just lighten up and tolerate
what we may personally dislike, rather than getting on our high horses and
promulgating "guidelines" for this and "rules" for that ? Don't we have
enough restrictions on what we are allowed to do and what we are allowed to
read and watch and what we are allowed to say, without curtailing the
relative freedom that exists on the Internet ? Some will undoubtedly say
that if we don't regulate ourselves then someone else will do it for us.
Look what self regulation has done for the film and advertising industry
over the years ! The Internet is big enough to live with this issue and
leave it alone, so why can't each of us ?
So let's forget about rules for anonymous services, groups that refuse
anonymous postings (unless moderated), mail "wars" against individual
abusers (who inevitably just go away if ignored), demands for traceability
and responsibilty, and so on.
Let's exercise a little tolerance and common sense, and encourage freedom of
speech on the network.
---
David A. Clunie (dcl...@pax.tpa.com.au)
Tarl Neustaedter
> Of course, how does one determine whether a "group" requests the
> service? A flat majority of posters voting in favor? A positive
> margin of 100 votes? Or what? No one speaks for a newsgroup.
>
> The readers speak for the newsgroup they inhabit. rec.nude readers
> spoke for rec.nude. It worked fine when I asked -- a civil question,
> a lot of very civil responses, no flames over the issue, for once.
I think an accurate question is "what are the mechanics of this vote"?
Who calls for the vote, who counts the votes, what defines a result?
In your case, you ran the anon service, you ran the vote, and you decided
what constituted a favorable and/or unfavorable result. I doubt Johan
is planning on running such votes for all the groups he services.
I asked Dave Lawrence, and he will not allow a CFV to be posted on the
known "official" channel (news.announce.newgroups) because it doesn't fit
the charter of that group (we aren't asking for a new group). So someone
(who?) would have to post a simple call for votes on only the newsgroup
itself, and then defend him/her/itself against charges of a rigged or
marginal vote (remember rec.music.makers.synth?). Then, get the results to
every provider of an anonymous service, and hope they all agree on what an
acceptable vote is.
Another question is whether we really want to have 2000+ votes. It seems
like a massive waste of resources. Could a set of common-sense defaults
eliminate the majority of these votes?
I don't think there is much debate over the utility of anonymous services
in general, when managed in such a way as to prevent abuse (I.e., with a
heavy hand, or in very restricted forums). The problem with this anonymous
service (anon.penet.fi) is that the administrator has defined his management
essentially in terms of "no interference", and even repeated abuse has not
resulted in the fire extinguisher being applied.
[At least, the case of sci.space, where the same poster wrote five articles
each of which generated complaints to Julf without obvious action. I hear
that the same happened in some soc.culture.* groups. I'm waiting for someone
to read the newusers documents - lots of hints of where to start flamewars.]
Johan, you haven't commented on this group yet, other than in my quoted
email. Since this discussion centers around your service, could you offer
some comments on what you would accept for modification of your policies?
--
Tarl Neustaedter Stratus Computer
ta...@sw.stratus.com Marlboro, Mass.
Disclaimer: My employer is not responsible for my opinions.
Dave Hayes
>The power of words to offend is well known,
And given to others by the offendee.
--
Dave Hayes - Network & Communications Engineering - JPL / NASA - Pasadena CA
da...@elxr.jpl.nasa.gov da...@jato.jpl.nasa.gov ...usc!elroy!dxh
Don't teach the blind until you have practiced living with closed eyes
Dave Hayes
>> Responsibility isn't real if it is enforced. True responsibilty comes with
>> no coercion.
>repetition) that they haven't _got_ any "true responsibility?"
What are you _supposed_ to do? Take away any chance they might have of
developing real responsibility by removing the ability to demonstrate it?
--
Dave Hayes - Network & Communications Engineering - JPL / NASA - Pasadena CA
da...@elxr.jpl.nasa.gov da...@jato.jpl.nasa.gov ...usc!elroy!dxh
You possess only what will not be lost in a shipwreck.
Tarl Neustaedter
In article <1993Feb9.2...@jato.jpl.nasa.gov>, da...@jato.jpl.nasa.gov (Dave Hayes) writes:
> >What do you do with individuals who demonstrate (especially in
> >repetition) that they haven't _got_ any "true responsibility?"
>
> What are you _supposed_ to do? Take away any chance they might have of
> developing real responsibility by removing the ability to demonstrate it?
Dave, I don't care if "they" never develop true responsibility. That's their
problem - I only care about behaviour on the net, and am utterly unmoved
by whether that behaviour comes from inner beauty or external oppression.
Ed Carp
: I'm not suggesting that we should ban anonymous servers; as I've said, there
: are several situations in which anonymity is a Good Thing (tm).
:
: However, the notion that anonymity's shield should be automatically extended
: to every Usenet discussion is ridiculous; it opens the door to further abuse.
Agreed. On the anonymous server at khijol.uucp, the sendmail hack won't
work, as it is on the other end of a dialup line - and the dialup line is
dialout *only*, for obvious security reasons. It also won't post to any but
a very limited set of newsgroups.
I don't agree with the anon.penet.fi site being able to post anonymous stuff
to *any* newsgroup.
--
Ed Carp e...@apple.com, e...@saturn.upl.com 801/538-0177
(and the Gang of Four - Snowcat, Isis, Blackie, and Sandalwood the Rabbit!)
"It is your resistance to 'what is' that causes your suffering." -- Buddha
Tim Pierce
>twpi...@unix.amherst.edu writes:
> Of course, how does one determine whether a "group" requests the
> service? A flat majority of posters voting in favor? A positive
> margin of 100 votes? Or what? No one speaks for a newsgroup.
>
>The readers speak for the newsgroup they inhabit. rec.nude readers
>spoke for rec.nude. It worked fine when I asked -- a civil question,
>a lot of very civil responses, no flames over the issue, for once.
Fine, but suppose the situation were reversed. If, say, nine out of
ten rec.nude readers who spoke to you favored an APS, and the
remaining tenth opposed it, would you consider that reason to add
rec.nude to the newsgroups supported by your service?
> Since the status quo previously
> permitted anonymous posting to *no* newsgroups, any anonymous posting
> service would reject the status quo.
>
>You wouldn't get a very great deal of the important contributions to
>alt.sexual.abuse.recovery without anon servers -- they are very
>clearly emphatically welcome there, and have been since its creation.
I agree -- the point is that I find the "status quo" argument to
collapse under its own weight.
--
____ Tim Pierce /
\ / twpi...@unix.amherst.edu / Rocks say goodbye.
\/ (BITnet: TWPIERCE@AMHERST) /
Tim Pierce
>In article <C2610...@unix.amherst.edu> twpi...@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce) writes:
>
>>Since the status quo previously
>>permitted anonymous posting to *no* newsgroups, any anonymous posting
>>service would reject the status quo.
>
>Where do you get this? Anonymous posting services have been
>being set up independantly for individual groups for quite
>a while.
At some point, there were no anonymous posting services, and the
status quo was one of non-anonymity.
>Nobody seems to object when this has been done
>on a per-group basis.
Exactly.
Tim Pierce
>In article <1l340f$9...@smurf.sub.org> url...@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs) writes:
>
>>Disclose classified information only when a NEED TO KNOW exists.
>
>Classify information only when a NEED FOR SECRECY exists.
Agreed, but I maintain that this cannot be determined flatly for an
entire newsgroup. For any newsgroup you name, I bet I can envision a
scenario involving a need for secrecy. If an accurate content-based
filter of each anonymous posting could be devised to screen out those
that don't require secrecy, wonderful. But it can't be done.
Richard M. Hartman
>
>I am not responsible for other people. I have enough trouble with my own life.
>How can you say that what I say is unreasonable when _you_ ask anyone else to
>take responsibility for the irresponsible?
There is a difference between "taking responsibility for the
irresponsible" and "taking precautiouns AGAINST the irresponsible".
One is symptomatic of the bleeding heart, and denies the ugly
reality that we sometimes have to face in this world. The other
is an ugly neccessity for security. If we lived in an ideal
world it would not be needed, but until we do it is best to
lock your doors if you want to keep your valuables.
>Not only does that deny the
>irresponsible a chance to demonstrate responsibility, but that also makes some
>societal unit (in this case USENET) take awkward and fascist pains to provide
>for those who are still irresponsible.
It is facist to suggest that a newsgroup is best able to decide
whether it wants to allow anonymous postings instead of having
them forced upon them by an service administrator?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
But now I'm grasping |
that understanding | -Richard Hartman
is only part of love. | har...@uLogic.COM
Richard M. Hartman
>In article <C26wnB...@cs.cmu.edu>, Karl_Kl...@cs.cmu.edu writes:
>> Of course, how does one determine whether a "group" requests the
>> service? A flat majority of posters voting in favor? A positive
>> margin of 100 votes? Or what? No one speaks for a newsgroup.
>>
>> The readers speak for the newsgroup they inhabit. rec.nude readers
>> spoke for rec.nude. It worked fine when I asked -- a civil question,
>> a lot of very civil responses, no flames over the issue, for once.
>
>I think an accurate question is "what are the mechanics of this vote"?
>Who calls for the vote, who counts the votes, what defines a result?
>In your case, you ran the anon service, you ran the vote, and you decided
>what constituted a favorable and/or unfavorable result. I doubt Johan
>is planning on running such votes for all the groups he services.
I think we only need worry about the mechanics once the more basic
question of whether the group should be the one to allow anonymous
postings is decided. Currently it seems your view is still that
anyone setting up an anonymous service has the "right" to decide
to provide that service to any group he likes, whether the group
approves or not.
Once you have said something that indicates you now believe
otherwise, THEN we can discuss how best to go about implementing
it. Until then it is just a "straw man" argument and really
just a distraction from the basic question about whether this
service recently started in Finland is acting in an acceptable
fashion.
David Clunie
>service currently being discussed.
That's a bit draconian isn't it ? Have your users unanimously decided
that they would like you to do this or have you decided for them ?
>Raise Usenet quality.
By junking 4.4% of usenet traffic.
Bengt Larsson
>>The power of words to offend is well known,
>
>And given to others by the offendee.
If you can't be offended, then you're not really communicating.
--
Bengt Larsson - ben...@maths.lth.se
Kennelmeister
> I think I am not the only one who would be concerned if anonymous sites
> were to be used for wholesale copyright infringement. However, USENET's
> anarchy also has an answer, the cancel message. If somebody posts one of
> my copyrighted messages, I have full right to cancel it, since I'm not
> cancelling somebody else's messages, but rather cancelling one of my own
> that somebody else fradulently put their name to.
Fine, except that some software only makes a note of the cancel message,
and doesn't actually erase the original posting.
A certain uucp bbs program springs to mind almost immediately......
Lasse Hiller|e Petersen
har...@ulogic.UUCP (Richard M. Hartman) writes:
>It is facist to suggest that a newsgroup is best able to decide
>whether it wants to allow anonymous postings instead of having
>them forced upon them by an service administrator?
Is it fascist to suggest that a newsgroup is best able to decide
whether it wants to allow postings instead of having
them forced upon them by an administrator?
No it is not. It is so commonplace that it has a name: moderation.
Now why is my "paraphrase" equivalent to what you said?
Because (IMHO) anonymous servers are in no significant way different
from other public access servers, or for that matter "ordinary" hosts.
From my point of view, "har...@uLogic.COM" might or might not be
Richard Hartman, all the way up to being the legendary experimental
AI-system.
I can only judge a poster by his or her words, and it doesn't matter
whether the address is anonymous or "real".
Suppose that the anon.penet.fi server constructed a fictional user name,
for instance by letting the user send a "real" name. Then there would be
_no_ way to distinguish the anonymous server from an ordinary host.
I suspect that there even may exist some servers of this kind. Perhaps
nyx.cs.du.edu would qualify.
I have watched this thread now and then, and it seems to me that lots of
time is wasted on debating a non-issue. The actual issue is the abuse of
servers, anonymous or not, that takes place, which has little relation to
anonymous servers. Anonymous _does not imply_ Abusive.
If a newsgroup wants to be noise- and nuisance-free, then it should call
for moderation. This should happen on a per-newsgroup basis, and not as
a general USENET ban on anonymous postings. Of course one principle of
moderation might be to keep out all anonymous postings, and could be
achieved automatically. It would still be _moderation_. Personally I
would prefer moderation criteria being based on actual content.
Pardon me if I have only stated (or restated) the obvious.
--
Lasse Hiller|e Petersen ! "-- Denn es gibt ein Salz, das Gutes mit Boesem
l...@daimi.aau.dk ! bindet; und auch das Boeseste ist zum Wuerzen
Information&Media Science ! wuerdig und zum letzten Ueberschaeumen:--"
Aarhus University, DENMARK ! Nietzsche, _Also sprach Zarathustra_
Matthew Crosby
>
>Now why is my "paraphrase" equivalent to what you said?
>Because (IMHO) anonymous servers are in no significant way different
>from other public access servers, or for that matter "ordinary" hosts.
>From my point of view, "har...@uLogic.COM" might or might not be
>Richard Hartman, all the way up to being the legendary experimental
>AI-system.
>
>I can only judge a poster by his or her words, and it doesn't matter
>whether the address is anonymous or "real".
Exactly. I used to have a friend whos account name was....
cls2834a
Tells you a lot, eh? I can't see the difference between that and an anon account,
to be honest.
>
>Suppose that the anon.penet.fi server constructed a fictional user name,
>for instance by letting the user send a "real" name. Then there would be
>_no_ way to distinguish the anonymous server from an ordinary host.
>I suspect that there even may exist some servers of this kind. Perhaps
>nyx.cs.du.edu would qualify.
Nope. Not any more. Nyx now requires notarised (!) forms with ID for posting
accounts, so anyone posting from there is almost certainly who they claim to be.
Nyx has actually started allowing people to get anon. accounts...again with the
system knowing the identity with the notarised forms. It's currently experimental
and may well be shut down, but so far there doesn't seem to be many complaints.
Note that this gives you a proper unix account with full posting and mail to/from.
>I have watched this thread now and then, and it seems to me that lots of
>time is wasted on debating a non-issue. The actual issue is the abuse of
>servers, anonymous or not, that takes place, which has little relation to
>anonymous servers. Anonymous _does not imply_ Abusive.
Exactly, and anonymous posts are so easy to do without servers. Anyone who
doubts me, send me an email address of your choice and I will send you a message
from that address. darth...@deathstar.mil? No problem! I'll even post from
the address if you wanta! (Yes, its tracable, though I could probably manage it
so it's VERY hard to do...big deal, so are anon posts/mail)
--
-Matt cro...@cs.colorado.edu
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the net!
Tarl Neustaedter
> Exactly. I used to have a friend whos account name was....
>
> cls2834a
>
> Tells you a lot, eh? I can't see the difference between that and an
> anon account, to be honest.
That was not his full mailid. That would have been cls2...@foo.edu.
That would have told us
a) he's at an educational site,
b) he's almost certainly a student (cls probably means "class"), and
c) the educational institution was "foo".
It also gives the rest of the net some access to control (yes, the horror
word brought up by the anonymous idiot) over the user's actions. If his
network activity is inappropriate, and he refuses to change his behaviour,
one can contact his sysadmins to see if they have better luck. In most
cases, a conversation with a real human being will work where mere bits on
a wire won't. This is not being a fascist; the sysadmin has to agree that
actions were inappropriate, or the e-mail will simply get ignored.
The most notorious abusers of the net are individuals who are insulated
from personal contact; e.g., JP, BB, ect (Names not spelled out in full
to protect myself against virtual lawyers). Individuals who are utterly
protected from personal disapproval (nobody at their site can be reached
who can have a face-to-face conversation with them) are currently in a
tiny minority - The anon service at anon.penet.fi expands this pool of
potential immune abusers to everyone reachable via email.
I don't think anyone believes that an8785 has been using his posting
privileges appropriately. The original ghoulish postings did not belong
on sci.astro, and were in poor taste for sci.space. The various insulting
comments he posted as follow-ups were simply flame-bait. The original
series of postings on news.admin contained threats in his signature (his
legalese basically said "If you send me email, I will bombard you with
offensive messages"). His current series of postings are inappropriatley
cross-posted to a couple of sci.* groups.
The threats in his signature alone would have normally caused me to ask
his sysadmin to have a word with him. They were entirely inappropriate.
Were he to have a real email address, I might have said so to him myself -
but I refuse to converse with someone who hides behind a shield of
anonimity. Particularly with the threats he's made.
It is notable that Mattias' anonymous service has not caused a problem;
He makes it quite clear that he will use an iron hand against inappropriate
use. It is equally notable that it took very little time for anon.penet.fi
to become a source of offensive postings on many groups. Johan makes it
clear that his policy is "no interference unless my site is endangered".
(Johan, if I am mis-representing your policy, please correct me. You
actually state you will shut off abusers, but have made it abundantly clear
from your actions that nothing will trigger this action).
Ed McGuire
>>I would like to know how to junk all articles posted by the anonymous
>>service currently being discussed.
In <1ljs8t...@flash.pax.tpa.com.au> dcl...@pax.tpa.com.au (David Clunie) writes:
>That's a bit draconian isn't it ? Have your users unanimously decided
>that they would like you to do this or have you decided for them ?
Good question. Nobody has decided. I have no definite plan to do
this, just wanted the technical data.
Richard E. Depew
(Elisa J. Collins) writes:
[...]
>I had been posting to a nontechnical misc newsgroup about an intimate topic
>for which I felt I required privacy. I have received immeasurable help from
>the people in that newsgroup, and I have never used anonymity to behave in
>an abusive, immature, or unethical fashion toward anyone.
>
>Please, folks, believe me, I *need* this service. Please consider my point
>of view and permit ad...@anon.penet.fi to turn the service back on, at least
>for the misc newsgroups.
It's not up to us, but to the readers of each newsgroup. If you
want to be able to post anonymously to, for example, misc.kids, go
find out whether it is OK with the readers in that group. If there is
general agreement, then you don't even need to take a vote... just
find some way to convice Johan that the readership approves of
anonymous posting. I expect he'll turn the service back on for that
group. He seems a reasonable sort of person, if a bit stubborn. :-)
Best wishes,
Dick Depew
--
Richard E. Depew | `Without persistence of identity, there
r...@uhura.neoucom.edu (work) | can be no nontrivial social behavior.'
r...@redpoll.neoucom.edu (home) | - Soren Renner in sci.virtual-worlds.
Brad Templeton
>> Cancel a copyrighted posting
>
>Fine, except that some software only makes a note of the cancel message,
>and doesn't actually erase the original posting.
>
>A certain uucp bbs program springs to mind almost immediately......
Sites that run such software put themselves at risk. While there is
hope that individual usenet sites would not be held liable for having
copyrighted information on file if they didn't know about it -- and they
can rightly argue that they can't check all of usenet personally -- it is
generally the case that if you are informed that you have illicit material
on your system (copyrighted, defamatory, obscene, kiddie porn) and after
being informed you do not remove it, then you are liable for it.
So if you run software that does not do something with a cancel, and an
item gets a cancel message because it is pirated material, then you are,
in theory, liable for ignoring the instructions. However, the chances of
being hit for this are small, unless it gets some publicity and your site
is very high profile.
--
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Sunnyvale, CA 408/296-0366
Johan Helsingius
In article <1lojcf$j...@transfer.stratus.com> ta...@sw.stratus.com
(Tarl Neustaedter) writes:
> It is notable that Mattias' anonymous service has not caused a problem;
> He makes it quite clear that he will use an iron hand against inappropriate
> use. It is equally notable that it took very little time for anon.penet.fi
> to become a source of offensive postings on many groups. Johan makes it
> clear that his policy is "no interference unless my site is endangered".
> (Johan, if I am mis-representing your policy, please correct me. You
> actually state you will shut off abusers, but have made it abundantly clear
> from your actions that nothing will trigger this action).
Well, I have tried to stay out of this discussion, and see where the
discussion leads. But now I rally feel like I have to speak up. Tarl, I am a
bit disappointed. I have repeatedly made clear to you over mail that I *do*
block users if they continue their abuse after having been warned. In many
cases the users have taken heed of the warning and stopped, and in some cases
even apologized in public. And when the warning has not had the desired
effect, I have blocked a number of users. I have also blocked access to groups
where the readership has taken a vote to ban anonymous postings, although I
feel changing the newsgroup status to moderated is the only permanent solution
for newsgroups that want to "formalize" discussion.
I think I also made my point clear to you that I feel that due to the very
different character of various groups, it has to be up to individual groups to
decide on disallowing anon postings. It is not something that can be done on a
global level in this newsgroup.
Yes, I am definitely open to suggestions and discussion about problems caused
by the server, and I really try to react on abuse as well as I can. But I feel
this newsgroup is not the right forum for this discussion.
Julf
--
Johan Helsingius Kuusikallionkuja 3 B 25 02210 Espoo Finland Yourp
net: ju...@penet.fi bellophone: int. +358 0400 2605 fax: int. +358 013900166
Richard E. Depew
(Johan Helsingius) writes:
>Well, I have tried to stay out of this discussion, and see where the
>discussion leads. But now I rally feel like I have to speak up.
Well, thank you for finally joining the discussion in public!
>Tarl, I am a
>bit disappointed. I have repeatedly made clear to you over mail that I *do*
>block users if they continue their abuse after having been warned. In many
>cases the users have taken heed of the warning and stopped, and in some cases
>even apologized in public. And when the warning has not had the desired
>effect, I have blocked a number of users. I have also blocked access to groups
>where the readership has taken a vote to ban anonymous postings, although I
>feel changing the newsgroup status to moderated is the only permanent solution
>for newsgroups that want to "formalize" discussion.
Does this last sentence mean that you are volunteering to issue a
Request For Discussion to ban anonymous postings or to moderate each
of the 4000+ newsgroups that your server can reach? I don't think so,
but this illustrates the trouble that your server is causing!
>I think I also made my point clear to you that I feel that due to the very
>different character of various groups, it has to be up to individual groups to
>decide on disallowing anon postings. It is not something that can be done on a
>global level in this newsgroup.
This newsgroup (news.admin.policy) is not for micro-managing
disputes about individual postings or individual news administrators,
but (as the name implies) the policy issues that arise in
administering news. Your server has raised a global question, and
the discussion of this question is perfectly appropriate for this
newsgroup.
>Yes, I am definitely open to suggestions and discussion about problems caused
>by the server, and I really try to react on abuse as well as I can. But I feel
>this newsgroup is not the right forum for this discussion.
If you are open to suggestions, then please listen to the
consensus of the news administrators in this group: any newsgroup
should be consulted *before* letting your server post messages to that
group.
If you ignore the advice of the experienced news administrators
who have been offering this advice, based on *experience*, then you
run the risk of becoming known as the Finnish John Palmer. jp
ignored our advice, also. If you haven't been on the net long enough
to know the stories about him, then I'm sure someone in this group
will be glad to fill you in. His is a fate we'd rather you avoid. :-)
Best regards,
Dick Depew
--
Richard E. Depew, Munroe Falls, OH r...@redpoll.neoucom.edu (home)
r...@uhura.neoucom.edu (work)
Most foreboding forcast: "There is a greater than 100% chance of
precipitation tomorrow." - heard on a Cleveland FM station.
Richard M. Hartman
>In article <9...@ulogic.UUCP>
>har...@ulogic.UUCP (Richard M. Hartman) writes:
>
>>>In misc.kids there are three threads going on started by anonymous
>>>posters. One was about changing jobs so as to work less hours,
>>[...]
>>>Misc.kids doesn't seem to be suffering any harm from the presence
>>>of anonymous posters; in fact it seems to have been helped by it.
>>>
>>>Kate
>>
>>Fine. So misc.kids should be registered for the service. This has
>>no bearing upon whether it is appropriate for ALL newsgroups to be
>>accessable, by default, through the anonymous posting service.
>
>logical fault therein. Actually, the anonymous posting showed that it
>was in no way detrimental to the group - but first, it had to be tried.
I see no logical fault. Anyone who thought of making an anonymous
posting could also have started discussion about whether anonymous
postings should be allowed.
Although the subject of changing jobs may be one deserving of
anonymity for fear of reprisals from one's employer, the subject
of whether anonymous postings should be allowed bears no such
penalties.
Once anonymous postings have been agreed upon, and the service
started, the threads in question could have been started.
And (before you ask), no -- I do not think that suggesting
anonymous posting services be started for a group automatically
means that you have anything to hide or would be the first
person to use it. If I were a regular contributor of a group
that I thought would benefit from such a service, I would not
hesitate to suggest it. Whether I had any reason to make use
of immediately or not.
> I still strongly support the universal access provided by Julf.
>Abuse can - and should - be dealt with on an individual base. May I
>remind you of the fine and effective policy of Matthias Urlichs'
>German anon service? Such a solution would be feasible for anon.poenet.fi
>as well.
But this "fine and effective policy" you cite is very different
from the stated policy of the new service causing all this furor,
which seems to be to preserve anonymity, period.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
But I am frightened for you, children, |
that the life that we are living is in vain, | -Richard Hartman
and the sunshine we've been waiting for | har...@uLogic.COM
has turned to rain.... |
Alexander EICHENER
r...@redpoll.neoucom.edu (Richard E. Depew) writes, first quoting Julf:
>>I have repeatedly made clear to you over mail that I *do*
>>block users if they continue their abuse after having been warned. In many
>>cases the users have taken heed of the warning and stopped, and in some cases
>>even apologized in public. And when the warning has not had the desired
>>effect, I have blocked a number of users. I have also blocked access to groups
>Request For Discussion to ban anonymous postings or to moderate each
>of the 4000+ newsgroups that your server can reach? I don't think so,
>but this illustrates the trouble that your server is causing!
First, only a fraction of these groups has yet ever seen anonymous postings.
Second, in most of those that have, anonymous posting has not created major
problems aside from angering irate people (like you?) who would rather ban
anonymous/pseudonymous posting altogether because "real men can stand up
for what they said" or comparable puerile arguments as others have brought up.
Third: those groups that do suffer from abuse, like it has been shown in
this discussion before, can take the appropriate action. This would mostly
be an individual request to look after certain abusers, rather than to shut
up the whole group. But *if* alt.culture.tuvan or de.rec.fahrrad or what-
ever minuscule I could invent decided (that is, either via an analogous
RfD/CfV or sending mail to the server admin), then Johan has declared he
would respect it. Nothing more to request, I should say.
> If you are open to suggestions, then please listen to the
>consensus of the news administrators in this group: any newsgroup
>should be consulted *before* letting your server post messages to that
>group.
maybe you would like to invent one. There is a sizeable number of
people who are concerned about the possible (and, to a minor extent, about
the actual abuse of the server as it is configured now). These concerns
are respectable; Johan is dealing with them. There are people who feel
there is no justifiable need for an anonymous email facility (maybe
even I would count among them). There are some (few) who rage with foam
before their mouth and condemn the service altogether. And a number who
defend it, pointing out, like Kate Gregory, that even a group like
misc.kids. can benefit from pseudonymous postings.
> If you ignore the advice of the experienced news administrators
>who have been offering this advice, based on *experience*, then you
>run the risk of becoming known as the Finnish John Palmer. jp
>ignored our advice, also. If you haven't been on the net long enough
>to know the stories about him, then I'm sure someone in this group
>will be glad to fill you in. His is a fate we'd rather you avoid. :-)
convincing to me - and certainly make Mr. Depew's ideas look less appealing.
Alexander Eichener
<c...@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
Kennelmeister
> In article <5JPyyB...@dogbox.acme.gen.nz> dog...@dogbox.acme.gen.nz (Kenn
> >> Cancel a copyrighted posting
> >
> >Fine, except that some software only makes a note of the cancel message,
> >and doesn't actually erase the original posting.
> >
> >A certain uucp bbs program springs to mind almost immediately......
Did someone say "waffle"?
>....
> So if you run software that does not do something with a cancel, and an
> item gets a cancel message because it is pirated material, then you are,
> in theory, liable for ignoring the instructions. However, the chances of
> being hit for this are small, unless it gets some publicity and your site
> is very high profile.
Perhaps this should be mentioned to waffle's author....
--
=> Dogbowl <=