Re: Information gathering by news servers

["Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>]

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On Fri, 2 Aug 1996, Scott McGuire wrote:

> How much information about what someone reads can be gathered
> by a news server?  Is there an anonymous way to read a public
> news server, or would a server have to be set up intentionally
> to allow anonymous reading?

It depends on how much logging the news server software does.  For INN, it
logs the hostname of every client that invokes the "group" command.  This
means that if you are on a machine that uses identd or on a SLIP/PPP account,
it is possible to also find out the complete email address.  I suppose hacking
the news software could allow a news admin to find out every article you read,
but the log would be very large.  The best way to read news anonymously is
to either get an anonymous shell account that has a full news feed, or get an
account on a trusted NNTP server.  An NNTP server could be setup to not log
at all by commenting out all the calls to syslog().

- -- Mark

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