From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Fri Jul 31 1998 - 01:32:15 CDT
Seth Breidbart <sethb@panix.com> writes:
>> For example, we have some local consulting newsgroups here that are
>> only present on a single server. Every once in a while, someone posts
>> a question containing their password or some other such information,
>> and we want to cancel the post (as well as freezing the account, of
>> course, but people often pick passwords somewhat similar to their old
>> ones and we don't want the old information floating around just in
>> case). That sort of thing is what site cancel locks are suited for.
> You don't need any sort of cancel for that; if you're the administrator,
> just delete the message (if it's a file, that's trivial; if it's a fancy
> Usenet-DB system, surely there's a command to do so without going to the
> effort of generating a cancel article).
Correct for this one example, but that breaks as soon as you introduce
another local server not under the same administrative domain but part of
the same cooperating subnet.
>> Other examples are cancellation of locally-originating spam (although
>> frankly I'd rather see servers take measures to filter it out in the
>> first place than rely on that)
> It's hard to tell that the first one is spam until you've seen the next
> nineteen.
I think it's questionable whether cancels are the right solution for the
nineteen that leaked out. But again, that's my personal opinion, and I
don't believe that should be encoded in the standard either way.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>