Re: Excluding articles from DejaNews

At 4:38 AM 3/23/96, Rich Graves wrote:
>I just noticed this in their FAQ, dated February 20th:
>
>     Q: I don't want my Usenet articles to appear in Deja News. What do I do?
>     A: We have implemented a feature whereby if your article contains an
>        X-Header looking like
>
>                   X-No-Archive: Yes
>
>     your article will be excluded from our database forever.
>
>Anyone know if other search engines support this? I think such a standard
>would be a Good Thing. Of course there will be the odd private archive,
>and of course some nastyfolks might grep Usenet just for X-No-Archive
>headers, but this is a good step for casual alt.support - type privacy.

Even facetiously, count me as one of the "nastyfolks." If someone has made
comments to the entire Usenet, any search engine which purports to index
articles on the Usenet and does not index _all_ articles is misleading its
customers.

(Being a market sort of person, I'll let market forces work. I don't user
DejaNews at this time, and now don't expect to. My preferred search engine,
Alta Vista, catches even posts marked "X-No-Archive: Yes", which I count as
A Good Thing.)

I don't think the security-through-obscurity approach is a good thing. It
is the security that ostriches have.

If folks don't want their words haunting them, they should either say
nothing or use anonymizing services.

--Tim May


Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1  | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

On Fri, 22 Mar 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:

> At 4:38 AM 3/23/96, Rich Graves wrote:
> >                   X-No-Archive: Yes
> >
> >Anyone know if other search engines support this? I think such a standard
> >would be a Good Thing. Of course there will be the odd private archive,
> >and of course some nastyfolks might grep Usenet just for X-No-Archive
> >headers, but this is a good step for casual alt.support - type privacy.
> 
> Even facetiously, count me as one of the "nastyfolks." If someone has made
> comments to the entire Usenet, any search engine which purports to index
> articles on the Usenet and does not index _all_ articles is misleading its
> customers.

AltaVista doesn't index web sites that follow the Robots Exclusion
Standard. Does that mean you won't use AltaVista anymore, either? 

Interesting and correct opinion, but they're not saying they index _all_
of Usenet. They're saying, "We archive Usenet." "Well, what about
excluded articles?" "Oh, we don't archive _those_ articles, of course," 
they say. The proposed exclusion standard is posted publicly. Ain't 
their fault that I didn't read that part of the FAQ until just now.

Agreed, anyone really concerned about their privacy should be using
anonymity/pseudonymity, but a temporary hidey-hole is a Good Thing. 
But I can think of a lot of reasons you might want to post something
under your real name, or your regular pseudonym -- gaining the benefit of
your good (or bad) reputation, mostly -- but on the other hand, you don't
want that post archived. It's called an "aside." 

For example, I might want to say, "Tim May is a big fat idiot because of
what he just said." I do want to say that, publicly, under my name and
address, but for various reasons, I don't want that saved in the
archives. Since X-Headers are readable by most newsreaders, and are in
fact shown by default in at least the default install of trn, I don't
think I'm doing anything particularly "sneaky." If you (or someone else)
wants to make sure that I am on record saying, "Tim May is a big fat
idiot," then you'd post a followup, perhaps pointing out that I'd tried
to be sneaky by using an X-No-Archive header. 

X-No-Archive is like preceding your remarks with "Off the record..."
People and bots can heed, ignore, or flaunt that disclaimer at their 
option. 

OK, you've convinced me that this isn't a privacy thing, really, but I
think is a valid and useful thing. What's the alternative, really? If I
want to say something, now, are you going to tell me that I don't have
the right to request that you not take my comments on the record? That
sounds sort of totalitarian. I either have to create a new, unique nym on
the fly, in which case my comments lose anything associated with my name,
or I have to keep my comments to myself. Recognizing "Well, the full
context is recorded too, you can defend youself with that" only makes it
worse, really. 

Just thinking out loud, my thoughs being recorded for posterity on
hks.net and Exon-knows where else... 

-rich