Re: #1416 Injection-Date: proposed diff

[Russ Allbery <rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> CNEWS out of the box is configured to use UUCP, and its facilities for
> using NNTP are somewhat rudimentary. But if you provide it with a script
> that will call some NNTP server using the proper POST command, then it
> will use it.

Then that script is reinjection software.  So the person who wrote that
script is doing reinjection, and is responsible for following the rules
for doing so.  And that person *wrote* reinjection software, so certainly
knows that he's doing reinjection.  (He may not, however, know that's what
it's called, or that it's potentially dangerous.)

> Now you may argue that using a full-fledged server such as CNEWS at home
> is a dangerous tool in the hands of the unskilled, but lots of people
> find it convenient to do it, and you may be sure that some of them are
> less skilled than others.

CNEWS is just fine on this particular front.  CNEWS contains no
reinjection software.  The script is what's causing any potential
problems, since it's now doing reinjection, which is inherently tricky and
must be done carefully.

> But for sure you cannot say that this guy "knew" that his system might
> reinject;

But he wrote a script that didn't otherwise exist specifically to do so!

> What is "regular news software"?

Software like CNEWS, or trn, or Netscape, or any other bit of software
that uses the normal convention of POST for injection and IHAVE for
relaying and which doesn't POST articles it obtained from elsewhere.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>