From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Wed Jan 17 2001 - 15:40:51 CST
On Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 11:59:17AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I was being restrained compared to what I wanted to say. I find your
> choice of presentation of your personal ethical preferences to be
> offensive.
Please let me know which statement offended you. These are not
actually simply personal ethical preferences, but matters of concern
to large numbers of people -- the vast majority if you believe surveys.
There are whole conferences about how to deal with these issues, and
organizations like the EFF, EPIC, ACLU and others devoted to fighting for
them. I'm involved in this stuff, so it's appropriate for me to point
out where those principles are not being followed. You're free to
disagree, and say as one poster here that privacy rights are unimportant, or
of such minimal importance that the convenience of spam hunters is
more important.
However, while I haven't tried to offend, I will say I don't mind offending
when pushing for important civil rights. Those who would give up
liberty for security or convenience deserve none of those, to paraphrase.
Fortunately, it's not even necessary to make such a tradeoff.
> If you don't see that in practice, in my experience, being able to tell
> someone the origin of the problem and asking them to check a log file to
> determine the origin of the problem is the difference between having the
> problem be solved and having it continue, I guess I don't have anything
> more to say on this specific point.
No, I fully understand that if you have to go through the local sysadmins
to discipline an abuser, that it's harder to do.
The question is:
a) Does it become so hard as to be impractical resulting in too much
spam? Or is it just an annoyance that it's more work?
b) Are there other means to assure the local admins deal with their
abusers?
For example, if you find that a local site isn't dealing with abusers or
doesn't know how to grep in a logfile, you can encourage them to either
improve or to put in the IP address which you want. That is their choice,
it just shouldn't be the default. If they won't, you can blacklist their
site.
Though the IP address is the wrong thing to put in. For DHCP users, it
can result in punishing the innocent, and for dedicated IP users it
violates their privacy.
I and many others have found that a just society presumes innocence until
there is evidence of guilt. You should give people privacy until there
is a need to take it away, not take it away for everybody and give it to
those who fight for it.
I fought the government's idea that we should all store our encryption keys
with them so they can wiretap us when they get a warrant. It's more
extreme, but it's the same principle.
Why not encourage that all postings include the poster's street address
records or phone number? The ISP has that, and it would certainly make
spam hunting a great deal easier. Far easier than just the IP address?
If you don't agree with that (I hope you don't!) what is special about the
IP address that makes you draw the line.
> I will say this, however: I'm interested in standardizing and documenting
> Usenet. Usenet is not a theoretical construction that we all get to make
> up; it's already out there, already functioning, and is long overdue for
> some standardization updates to reflect how it actually works.
>
> Out there on that existing Usenet, there were 57,341 articles posted to
> the misc.* hierarchy in the past 14 days or so. Of those 57,341 articles,
> 42,523 (74%) had NNTP-Posting-Host headers.
You're rehashing. I know how the header came to be. Now is the time to
fix what I view as a mistake that was made in implementing it.
One major mission of the standards group is to look at the various ad-hoc
additions to the net, and clean them up, standardize them and fix what's
wrong with them.
This one has something wrong with it, in my view, so it is entirely
appropriate for me to be pointing that out and proposing something better.