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Re: forged cancels (Re: Entrust Technologies's Solo - free download)
Ryan Anderson <[email protected]> writes:
> At 02:03 AM 7/31/97 +0100, Adam Back wrote:
>
> >It's censorship. If you didn't write it, you have no business
> >cancelling it.
>
> Have you considered the actions of the news-admins that are auto-canceling
> anything with more than a certain number of cross-posts, or posts with "Make
> Money Fast" in the subject?
Here's the problem: once you start censoring anything, you've started
on the slippery slope. Everyone has their pet things which annoy
them.
Newsadmins who auto-cancel cross-posts are acting counter-productively
and censorously. Cross-posts result in only one copy in the
news-spool. Most newsreaders will only display the article once to
each reader -- it doesn't save the readers time to cancel 99 of the
100 articles leaving 1 in a random group. Probably these admins are
cancelling all 100 on the assumption that anything cross posted that
widely is garbage anyway. That is a value judgement and something I'd
prefer not done to a newsfeed I read.
Dumb spammers who individually post to each of 100 groups are the ones
who really consume bandwidth. What they should be doing is
compressing their news spools and down-stream feeds by converting the
same article individually posted to many groups to articles
cross-posted to the same set of groups.
If they take issue with the number of posts an individual is making
total (eg a bot perhaps auto posting in response to articles
containing certain keywords), they should be thinking of working
towards a (low) postage requirement for each post. Hashcash might be
an interesting interim payment method.
That'll slow down the bots and people who repost large posts too
frequently.
Other than that I think getting involved in cancelling posts is
getting dubious. A better way to do register your negative opinion of
some posts is to issue NoCems.
> "Make Money Fast" are killed because they're illegal scams in the US and I
> think in most of the world.
Foo on illegal. Cryptography is illegal in some parts of the world.
Showing pictures of females revealing leg above the ankle, or showing
their faces is illegal in other parts.
If suckers want to fall for the pyramid scams let them. Why should we
have dumb laws protecting dumb people. There are scant enough
evolutionary pressures as it is. Think of dumb pyramid scams, and
lotteries with sub 50% pay-outs as evolution in action.
There is no place for dumb laws on USENET. This is the Internet man,
we don't need politicians or governments messing with it's content
thanks kindly.
Adam
--
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`