From: Ralph Babel (rbabel@babylon.pfm-mainz.de)
Date: Mon Oct 15 2001 - 15:41:35 CDT
Brad Templeton wrote:
> USENET is effectively all about a group of sites
> cooperating and using the same formats, protocols
> and systems to a network -- that's what a network is.
Honoring authenticated cancels doesn't require
any more or less "cooperation" than carrying
only correctly signed articles.
> The idea is, similar to the principle of the moderated
> newsgroup that most or all sites agree to define a
> newsgroup as requiring some form of signature, just as
> today we define a moderated newsgroup as requiring an
> approved header.
If they all (or most of them) agree, why don't the net.cops
simply _drop_ "offending" articles as soon as they reach
one of their machines instead of attempting to control
other people's news spools by issuing cancels?
You still haven't explained why third parties, including
"site admins", should be able to cancel and what this
would mean regarding parallel injection of articles.
>>> So you want to be able to cancel that post
>>> in your name that says "all hail bin laden"
>>> that's getting you the death threats.
>>
>> I understand that. It doesn't work, though.
>
> What doesn't work?
Issuing cancels to make articles "disappear".
> In a network with standardized authentication, I expect
> most sites to be happy to honour a cancel from somebody
> who has a certificate verifying that they own the E-mail
> address in the From line or Reply-to line of the original
> article -- whether or not they posted the original.
Fine. To provide some sort of basis for your speculation,
I'd suggest you come up with an implementation and a
sufficiently large cooperating subnet that makes use of it.
> News and mail are tightly bound,
Not at all. As we've discussed before, news could
exist quite nicely even without the "From:" header.