From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Sat Jan 20 2001 - 12:42:48 CST
On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 04:10:44AM -0500, J.B. Moreno wrote:
> On 1/19/01 3:38 PM, Brad Templeton at <brad@templetons.com> wrote:
>
> -snip reading via server A and posting via server B-
> > However, most news software does not support this. Some support multiple
> > servers, but you post from the same server you're reading the group from.
>
> I'm not sure this is really that relevant, but...on the Mac (the platform
> which I am most familiar with) this is easy to do on a case-by-case basis in
> five newsreaders: Cyberdog, Hogwasher, MT-NW, Outlook Express and finally
> Mozilla 0.7 (not yet ready for prime-time but will probably have a
> significant user base).
>
> On the PC, I'm fairly sure it's possible with Xnews, probably with Gravity,
> plus programs like NewsPro which are more binary readers/posters than
> general purpose newsreaders, although it can be used that way undoubtably
> have this capability. It's possible (although a bit of a pain) with Outlook
> Express.
>
> Some recent comments concerning slrn and multiple servers lead me to believe
> it'd be fairly simple to have it do this and Gnus can do anything...
>
> Is it in every newsreader? No. Would it be difficult to find a newsreader
> that has it? No.
That's only a minor sub-point though. The point is that if you're
designing it you should protect rights by default, not make people go out
of their way to get them. Certainly they shouldn't have to change
newsreaders or buy extra accounts.
Of course, this all depends on whether you agree that systems should be
designed by default to protect the privacy of their users. If you don't
think that you wouldn't agree. If you do think that, the answer "they can
get privacy if they go out of their way" isn't an answer. It's an
answer that has been pushed time and time again and every time shown to be
wrong.
I was once at a crypto conference and was sitting next to Phil Zimmerman.
In the session, I asked Phil how much PGP encrypted mail he gets. Not
very much was his answer. Yet everybody knows that he is sure to have
a copy of PGP. But because you had to go out of your way to use it,
people only used it when they were doing something that called out for
the extra inconvenience.
That's the way privacy works. You often only find out after the fact that
you wish you had kept your privacy. How many of us have wished that
we hadn't posted to USENET with an address that got harvested by spammers?
(I now use special filtered addresses, my old addresses have become
useless and now get nothing but spam.) The privacy protection has to
happen by default, without you having to do anything, to have the real
benefit.