From: seth@startide.ctr.columbia.edu (Seth Robertson)
Subject: Re: Hack Question...
Organization: Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 08:16:06 GMT
X-Posted-From: startide.ctr.columbia.edu
X-Posted-Through: sol.ctr.columbia.edu

In article <1992Sep10.213216.23658@ctr.columbia.edu> foo@bar.edu writes:

>Anyone know how to get rid of the little annoying "X-Posted-From:"
>line that sol.ctr.columbia.edu likes to append to it's posts...It's
>REALLY annoying.

Speaking as the person who implemented those restrictions, I know of
no way to defeat those header lines for articles POSTed via NNTP.  The
system name is determined from the TCP/IP connection via
getsockname(2) and is *APPENDED* to the headers in anne.jones via
defhdrs.awk.  It is the appending this which makes it hard to defeat
since if you try to override the headers like you normally do for all
other headers, they would just appear twice, making it utterly obvious
to all and asundry that you are an idiot.

The backup to this tracing is a mostly duplicate article which is
posted locally.  Yes, I DO make copies of all articles which are
posted.  I like to maintain an idea of what my site is being used for,
but I have never used, and hopefully will never be forced to use, this
information to restrict sites.

Now if you want to know *why* I did this, it is for two reasons.  The
first, and by far the most important, is that I got fed up with people
forging articles from my site; articles which were so annoying to
other people that I was asked to trace them, articles which were
boasts (to this very newsgroup, if I am not mistaken) saying that it
was impossible for the articles to be traced (it is this last which
annoyed me the most since a lot of even stupider idiots fingered sol
and since I was logged on, assumed that I posted the article and
bombarded me with mail).  The other reason is somewhat less important:
load.  Sol is being greatly overloaded with people reading and posting
news articles (401 sites reading 119630 articles) and I will be ****ed
if I am going to add to this load by making it easy for people to
forge articles from my site.

This is actually curiously anomalous since I support the idea of people
being able to post anonymously.  There are certainly good reasons why
someone might want to do this, but unfortuantly the idiot factor
overwhelmed me.  In any case, there are still plenty of easy ways to
post anonymous without using sol (and no, I will not tell you unless
you are from my site, ask your own sysadmin.)

If any of you are still with me, I would like to take this time to
urge you to lay off sol.  The remote news reader loads imposed on it
recently, due an unfortunate posting, will probably force me to (very
reluctantly) impose maximum usage limits on sol.

ObHack1:  The hack above--contact me if you are a news admin running Cnews
	  and would like my changes.

ObHack2:  My two favorite subroutines from Xkernel 2.0 (yes, I am
	  working on it; expect to see it sometime after the Epoch :-)
	  They are small hacks, but ``No hack is too small'' :-)

print_pattern ()
{
 [...]

 echo "Possible choices include:"
 for f in $1*
  do
   c=`echo "$f" | sed s/$1//`
   echo -n "$c	"
  done
 echo
 echo
}


check_pattern ()
{
 [...]

 ok=0
 for f in $1*
  do
   if [ "$1$2" = "$f" ]
    then
     ok=1
     break
    fi
  done

 if [ $ok -ne 1 ]
  then
   cat << EOF
WARNING! This choice is not included in this distribution!
If you answered correctly, you will have to generate the
information yourself.

EOF
   ask_to_die
  fi
}



                                        -Seth Robertson
                                         seth@ctr.columbia.edu