(FWD) WHAT MOTIVATES FORWARDERS?

Actually, no, it's not really a forward of anything at all.  It's just
that this forwarding business is *really* getting out of hand.  For
Christ's sake guys, if *you* can read stuff on other groups, credit
us with the intelligence of being able to find it too.  If this keeps
up we'll have the who 20Mb/day of usenet funnelling through cypherpunks.

How about in future just saying "Hey, anyone who doesn't know about
talk.politics.crypto, go have a look at it on usenet.  By the way
there's an interesting thread going on just now about blah blah blah."?

G

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> How about in future just saying "Hey, anyone who doesn't know about
> talk.politics.crypto, go have a look at it on usenet.  By the way
> there's an interesting thread going on just now about blah blah blah."?

Tim actually did just that when he posted his pointer.

IMHO a more serious and prevalent problem is the onslaught of spam
whenever EFF, CPSR, EPIC, NSA, or EIEIO issue press releases even
tangentially related to crypto. Not only do I usually get a copy in my
main inbox (since my filter doesn't catch it because it's not via
toad.com), there are always some helpful folks who forward it verbatim
without checking the list first. There are even a few hardcore
crossposters who will post the same article _multiple_ times when they
don't see the first one appear instantly.

- -Paul

- -- 
Paul Robichaux, KD4JZG      | Why did an NSA agent threaten to kill Jim Bidzos?
perobich@ingr.com           | Of course I don't speak for Intergraph.
	       

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C'punks,

On Fri, 1 Jul 1994, Graham Toal wrote:

> . . . this forwarding business is *really* getting out of hand.  For
> Christ's sake guys, if *you* can read stuff on other groups, credit
> us with the intelligence of being able to find it too.  If this keeps
> up we'll have the who 20Mb/day of usenet funnelling through cypherpunks.
> . . .

Well, I for one like to see forwarded stuff.  I have no desire to chase 
down likely references.  Maybe I'm lazy for letting others filter stuff 
for me, or maybe you're lazy for not hitting "D".  Quien sabe?


 S a n d y

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In article <Pine.3.87.9407010826.A503-0100000@crl.crl.com> you write:
>Well, I for one like to see forwarded stuff.  I have no desire to chase 
>down likely references.  Maybe I'm lazy for letting others filter stuff 
>for me, or maybe you're lazy for not hitting "D".  Quien sabe?

... maybe I don't like paying for 20 copies of the EFF press
release coming down my UUCP link?

Just a thought...

Perhaps the EFF people would like to include a little header in
their releases explaining the groups/lists which already
receive the text automatically and explain the concept of
reference pointers.

- --
 Baba baby mama shaggy papa baba bro baba rock a shaggy baba sister
shag saggy hey doc baba baby shaggy hey baba can you dig it baba baba
        E7 E3 90 7E 16 2E F3 45   *   28 24 2E C6 03 02 37 5C 
   Stuart Smith                           <stu@nemesis.wimsey.com>

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# Perhaps the EFF people would like to include a little header in
# their releases explaining the groups/lists which already
# receive the text automatically and explain the concept of

I've thought about automating this from the user end.

Define some characteristic signature for a paragraph, and some
way to recognize one inside a text file.

Here's my best approach.  Only pay attention to the letters and
numbers [A-Za-z0-9].   Treat everything else as white space.
Use some kind of hashing or checksum to digest the body of
a paragraph.  Ignoring punctuation and newlines lets you recognize 
a paragraph even if it is quoted or re-fmt'ed.

Define paragraphs to recognize two different formats:

	1.  Lines with letters, delimited by lines without letters.
	    That will recognize the format I've used until now,
	    which I find most readable in email.

   2.   Lines that are indented more than the previous line
begin new paragraphs.  That will recognize the paragraphs from
here on.
   3.  It would probably also help to recognize some important
things that are not paragraphs of readable text, such as uuencodes
and C source and unreadable PGP blocks.
   The idea, of course, is to keep a database of paragraph
signatures that you have seen, and probably whether or not you
bothered to read it before.  When a new message arrives, it can
be characterized like "18% new, 23% read before, 51% skipped before,
8% not text".
   You still have the problem of finding truncated paragraphs
like the one I quoted at the top of this message.
   Those could be recognized if you did lines instead of
paragraphs.  It would take some experimentation to fine tune.
   Finally, a mailing list itself could remember what has been
sent on it, and attempt to reject large messages of mostly 
redundant paragraphs.

					>strick<