NODE 1fc756d3Re: Many Important Items in the News
Peter Honeyman <honey@citi.umich.edu>Wed, 24 Mar 93 22:06:35 PST
digital signatures for cancellation might allow "uncancellable"
messages, which has some attraction in the current climate.
(armm, macpgp muscled off of archives, the loss of pax and now penet.)
peter
NODE 0dcd347fRe: Many Important Items in the News
Marc Horowitz <marc@GZA.COM>Thu, 25 Mar 93 08:20:41 PST
>> digital signatures for cancellation might allow "uncancellable"
>> messages, which has some attraction in the current climate.
What's uncancellable? If someone starts abusing things with
"uncancellable" messages, then the USENET backbone gets together and
stops passing these "uncancellable" messages from site to site. The
messages will die very quickly, I assure you. If you change the
names/message ids/whatever, then *all* such messages will end up
getting nuked. Our protection here is that the backbone sites have
proven in the past to be very strong supporters of speech. If that
changes, we have worse problems.
>> (armm,
USENET would fall apart without the ability to cancel messages.
>> macpgp muscled off of archives
Huh? I don't care how many and whose signatures you put on something.
When the guy who owns the disk wants it to go away, it will.
>> the loss of pax and now penet.)
Same as above. When the network provider decides to remove the
connection for whatever reason, it's gone.
I'm all in favor of technological solutions when appropriate. And I
think that the use of ARMM on sci.* when there was no substantial
reason was irresponsible and wrong. However, I don't think problems
like volume abuse can be solved by purely technical means.
When some bonehead starts putting megabytes of noise on sci.crypt, I
want to be able to cancel his messages. Don't give me lines about
user filtering; The best user agent in the world isn't going to make
my net connection any bigger. I don't have the net bandwidth at my
site to suck over megabytes of trash in order to ignore it until it
expires.
Marc
NODE 76889cadMany Important Items in the News
Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>Thu, 25 Mar 93 23:15:24 PST
>USENET would fall apart without the ability to cancel messages.
Potential imminent death of the Usenet predicted!
Usenet has survived lots worse than anonymous flamers.
Eric
NODE a85698adre: new usenet
jet@nas.nasa.gov (J. Eric Townsend)Fri, 26 Mar 93 10:59:23 PST
I thought the whole point of alt.* was for sites that didn't mind
carrying a truly anarchic hierarchy...
(We're losing alt.* here at Ames, it appears, along with soc. and
talk.)
NODE b9f6a855Re: new usenet
Peter Shipley <shipley@gateway>Fri, 26 Mar 93 11:54:04 PST
>
>I thought the whole point of alt.* was for sites that didn't mind
>carrying a truly anarchic hierarchy...
>
>(We're losing alt.* here at Ames, it appears, along with soc. and
>talk.)
if you are needing a site to readnews from I can enable your system
to read news from my site (tfs.com)
-Pete