From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 07 2004 - 13:24:10 CDT
Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net> writes:
> On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> ...For example, anyone is welcome, so far as I'm concerned, to issue
>> control messages in the Big Eight provided that they don't forge
>> group-admin@isc.org.
> In other words, you *don't* actually think their control messages are
> legitimate, you just think that you have adequate defences against them.
No. Not at all. I think their control messages are fully as legitimate
as mine are, and they should have a perfect right to issue them.
As far as I'm concerned, if someone else can do a better job of
maintaining the Big Eight group list than the current n.a.n team, they
should feel free to do so in all ways, up to and including issuing control
messages and checkgroups. They should generate their own PGP key and
advertise it to news administrators, and I wish them the best of luck. I
don't think there's anything at all illegitimate about that. As
co-moderator of news.lists.misc, I would be happy to approve their
alternative list of newsgroups too, once they were well-established.
There is nothing at all special about the current n.a.n team other than
that we hopefully have a fair bit of experience and are following a system
that's been proven over time. There is certainly no reason to believe
that we have the best possible system, and I see no justification
whatsoever for *forcing* news administrators to follow our control
messages and no one else's.
The only requirement that I have is that they allow news administrators to
make a clear configuration choice by using their own control message
identity and not forging someone else's.
I feel this way about all hierarchies. Taking off the hierarchy
administrator hat and putting on the news administrator hat, unless
there's something abusive about the frequency of the control messages or
something somehow against our usage policy in the contents (and simply
issuing them is definitely not against our usage policy), I would ignore
all "abuse" complaints about anyone at Stanford issuing control messages
for any other hierarchy, provided that they don't forge someone else's
identity. I don't believe this is abusive; in fact, I don't think there's
anything wrong with it at all. This is how Usenet works.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>