Re: Rethinking the utility of netnews "cancel" control messages

At 9:50 10/5/95, Rich Salz wrote:
>Cancel/Supercede is a useful model -- architecting them out of Usenet
>is a very bad idea.  Ask Clarinet.

Is it? The principal effects of not having the mechanism is a slightly
higher disk storage requirement for netnews - something completely unheard
of in the annals of USENET.

The downsides of having the mechanism (especially unauthenticated) we see
now: official and unofficial squelching of articles that someone doesn't
like for whatever arbitrary or situational reason.

In the long run, which is the more detrimental effect? It isn't desireable
for systems to be perfectly efficient, if they generate imperfect results;
as I understand it, the ponderousness of our federal legislative system was
designed in for precisely this reason: they were optimizing for long term
correctness, instead of efficiency.

Frankly, I think that if the question were posed correctly, I'm sure that
Brad Templeton (President of Clarinet) would think carefully about
answering it, since it has quite a few aspects.

I'm just trying to stimulate a little more careful thought about this as a
philosopical issue, before you go whack on INN again...

Erik Fair

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In article <v02110105ac99c03922dd@[204.179.132.4]> you write:
>The downsides of having the mechanism (especially unauthenticated) we see
>now: official and unofficial squelching of articles that someone doesn't
>like for whatever arbitrary or situational reason.

You miss an important point in the mechinism - individual sites *choose*
whether or not to pay any attention to cancels.  Theoretically, they could
be configured to only listen to cancels from certain places etc etc.  By all
means these should be authenticated, but it is vital to remember that this
is still (for now..) an anarchy.  I don't have to honour anyones cancels,
and if I do, and you don't like it - you don't have to get a news feed from
me.

- --
 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  *   Stuart Smith  *  28 24 2E C6 03 02 37 5C 
     <stu@nemesis.wimsey.com>  *  http://www.wimsey.com/~ssmith/

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Stuart Smith enscribed thusly:
> 
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> 
> In article <v02110105ac99c03922dd@[204.179.132.4]> you write:
> >The downsides of having the mechanism (especially unauthenticated) we see
> >now: official and unofficial squelching of articles that someone doesn't
> >like for whatever arbitrary or situational reason.
> 
> You miss an important point in the mechinism - individual sites *choose*
> whether or not to pay any attention to cancels.  Theoretically, they could
> be configured to only listen to cancels from certain places etc etc.  By all
> means these should be authenticated, but it is vital to remember that this
> is still (for now..) an anarchy.  I don't have to honour anyones cancels,
> and if I do, and you don't like it - you don't have to get a news feed from
> me.

	(No doubt, you are going to get hammered heavily on this from multiple
sides, but here is my shot anyways.)

	Actually you miss a very critical point.  This choice is, in fact,
a "Hobsens Choice", a choice that is no choice.  If any site between you
and the article source choses to honor that cancel, you never get the
original article to begin with.  All you get is the cancel message and your
choice to honor it or not is totally meaningless.  To be worth anything
all of the intermediate nodes would have to chose to ignore cancel messages
and then the leaf nodes would have the privledge of honoring or ignoring
them.  But it will be a VERY cold day in a VERY warm place before that ever
happens, even if it did make sense (It doesn't).

	Yes yes, I know - article loss is contigent upon the cancel arriving
there before you pick up the article from them, this effect would just serve
to add a level of chaos and indetermanancy to the mechanism.  Obviously 
(because of time elements involved in realization and forging of cancels)
it is much more likely that you will receive originals for article where a
forged cancel is received.  That depends on the latency involving all of
the news feeds between you and the article source and the latency involving
the forger and his ability to recognize a message he wants to cancel and
to get that cancel out.  The human factor adds a lot here.  Perhaps we
should add a "time-limit" to cancel messages?  This too would be highly
indeterminant as propagation times stretched out.

	End result is that most sites currently do honor cancels, so many
of the originals never reach a lot of the leaf nodes while all of us
continue to be subjected to a FLOOD of cancel control messages.  In terms
of message count and article numbers (not total bytes of storage) my control
group is the largest newsgroup group on my system!

	Regards,
	Mike
-- 
 Michael H. Warfield    |  (770) 985-6132   |  mhw@WittsEnd.com
  (The Mad Wizard)      |  (770) 925-8248   |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
  NIC whois:  MHW9      |  An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471    |  possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

In article <v02110105ac99c03922dd@[204.179.132.4]>,
Erik E. Fair <fair@clock.org> wrote:
>At 9:50 10/5/95, Rich Salz wrote:
>>Cancel/Supercede is a useful model -- architecting them out of Usenet
>>is a very bad idea.  Ask Clarinet.
>
>Is it? The principal effects of not having the mechanism is a slightly
>higher disk storage requirement for netnews - something completely unheard
>of in the annals of USENET.
>
>The downsides of having the mechanism (especially unauthenticated) we see
>now: official and unofficial squelching of articles that someone doesn't
>like for whatever arbitrary or situational reason.

	There is another benefit to the current system which is being
ignored.  That is, it allows for the removal of unauthorized postings.
Posting of copyrighted materials without authorization does occur and I
think the current cancel mechanism (with its lack of authentication) is an
important safety valve for dealing with irate copyright holders.  I can't
say that the disadvantages of the current spoofable cancel system don't
outweigh this benefit, but I think that any system designed to replace it
should include this capability.  Someone asked the question if one was a
librarian/archivist would/should they honor cancels.  Under the circumstances
I describe, I think they have to do so.

	Rather then eliminate cancels, I think a general authentication
system for all USENET posts makes more sense.  The news system itself
doesn't need to authenticate general posts.  That can be left up to the
decision of the individual reader.  In most case, I don't care as a news
reader if the real 'Erik Fair' posted this message.  It can stand on its own
merits.  In the case of cancels, as a news administrator I probably want to
restrict them to the original poster and a small set of authorized agents.
With new group and remove group messages, I probably want to only have a
small set of agents for the 'big seven' hierarchies and perhaps others.  I
see no downside to standardizing on a mechanism for including authentication
in news posts as long as we allow the user and site administrator to make
the decision about whether to pay attention to the authenticity of a
message.  Those who want the current system will set up the authentication
system to always say 'yes'.  Those who want to eliminate cancels can setup
the authentication module so it always says 'no'.  I would setup my system
somewhere in between these extremes.

				Bill Bogstad
				bogstad@cs.jhu.edu

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 "Erik E. Fair" (Time Keeper) <fair@clock.org> wrote:
> At 9:50 10/5/95, Rich Salz wrote:
> >Cancel/Supercede is a useful model -- architecting them out of Usenet
> >is a very bad idea.  Ask Clarinet.
> 
> Is it? The principal effects of not having the mechanism is a slightly
> higher disk storage requirement for netnews - something completely unheard
> of in the annals of USENET.
> 
> The downsides of having the mechanism (especially unauthenticated) we see
> now: official and unofficial squelching of articles that someone doesn't
> like for whatever arbitrary or situational reason.

<snip>


Look just replace "cancel" with "mark as worthless and sign".  Then 
each reader may choose to "honor" the "cancel" or not.  If you are 
reading clari.news.world then you completely "honor" cancels signed by 
ClariNet.  If you are reading alt.religion.scientology, then you have 
your user agent specifically bring "cancelled" articles to your 
attention for reading.  :-)


(As an aside this serves for moderation as well.  Just tell your
user agent to honor messages marked as "cancelled, signed Bob The 
Moderator" and you have entered a moderated newsgroup.  And the 
protocol that's gonna bring it to you?  NoCeM and its relatives.  Real 
Soon Now, I think.)


Bryce

signatures follow


            "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."   
    <a href="http://ugrad-www.cs.colorado.edu/~wilcoxb/Niche.html">

                          bryce@colorado.edu                   </a>

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