Re: Excluding articles from DejaNews

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 4:38 AM 3/23/96, Rich Graves wrote:
>I just noticed this in their FAQ, dated February 20th:
>
>     Q: I don't want my Usenet articles to appear in Deja News. What do I do?
>     A: We have implemented a feature whereby if your article contains an
>        X-Header looking like
>
>                   X-No-Archive: Yes
>
>     your article will be excluded from our database forever.
>
>Anyone know if other search engines support this? I think such a standard
>would be a Good Thing. Of course there will be the odd private archive,
>and of course some nastyfolks might grep Usenet just for X-No-Archive
>headers, but this is a good step for casual alt.support - type privacy.

Even facetiously, count me as one of the "nastyfolks." If someone has made
comments to the entire Usenet, any search engine which purports to index
articles on the Usenet and does not index _all_ articles is misleading its
customers.

(Being a market sort of person, I'll let market forces work. I don't user
DejaNews at this time, and now don't expect to. My preferred search engine,
Alta Vista, catches even posts marked "X-No-Archive: Yes", which I count as
A Good Thing.)

I don't think the security-through-obscurity approach is a good thing. It
is the security that ostriches have.

If folks don't want their words haunting them, they should either say
nothing or use anonymizing services.

--Tim May


Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
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