From: morgan@ms.uky.edu (Wes Morgan)
Newsgroups: alt.culture.usenet,news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk,misc.legal.computing,misc.int-pr
Subject: Re: NetNews/CD - USENET News Available
Date: 30 Jul 92 12:44:41 GMT
Organization: The Puzzle Palace, UKentucky

In article <T9HFoB6w164w@lorc.UUCP> lowen@lorc.UUCP (Lamar Owen) writes:
>
>distribution: slo, @homecare.com, !@psych.fido.org
>
>This would, of course, route the article to homecare.com, prevent routing to
>psych.fido.org, and route to the whole slo area.
>
>How could this be implemented?  Simple.  Upon article batching, check the
>distribution line.  Perform normal distribution processing to determine
>whether it gets batched to a site or not (the !@ syntax) and exclude the
>article from the batch if so.  If a specific inclusion is made, use e-mail
>to send it to the other machine using a special username (maybe news-in).
>Note that this would be a sender-processed section of the distribution
>line, as opposed to the way "normal" distributions are processed.

ergh! ugh! feh! yech!  What a headache!

Usenet was developed, in part, into a means of eliminating the burden created
by large mailing lists.  Why do you think that so many newgroup proposals are
greeted with comments like "start a mailing list; if the traffic's there, we'll
make the newsgroup later"??  Your scheme would dramatically increase the amount
of email flying around the net(s). 

There's also the problem of ambiguous names.  For instance, the College of
Agriculture here at UK has the domain name of ca.uky.edu.  Since I'm also
part of that domain, I can refer to that domain, in email, as "ca".  HOWEVER,
if I put "!ca" in a Distribution line, some other site may think it refers
to Canada ("ca" is the top-level domain for Canada); if that happens, the 
folks in Canada never see my posting!

This leads to another problem.  Many sites refer to themseleves by different
names.  For instance, one of my machines knows itself as:
	d.ecc.engr.uky.edu (its machine name)
	engr.uky.edu (this machine is the mail hub for the domain)
	ukecc (its uucp name)
	engr (if another machine in uky.edu sends mail to "foo@engr",
	      it's delivered here) 
	d.ecc (if mail is sent from within the engr.uky.edu domain)
Now, let's suppose that I receive news through several media; this is not
uncommon on Usenet.  If a message from outside has "!engr.uky.edu" in its
Distribution: line, BUT I RECEIVE IT VIA UUCP, it will not be dropped, since
the machine's uucp name is "ukecc".  See the problem?

What about not-quite-unique names?  If I place "!soc" in my Distribution:
line, am I excluding the soc.* hierarchy, soc.uky.edu, the "soc" uucp site,
or the "SOC" bitnet node? 

While we're at it, how would one go about excluding Fidonet nodes?  Would
we have to see something like "!2:240/34"?  (I'm not sure of the Fidonet
node syntax, but it's something like that)  Would we even be able to ex-
clude individual nodes, or would we have to do a global "!fidonet"?

Of course, there's another concern, namely:

	>Distribution: !lorc
	>
	>Hey everybody, I just cracked lowen@lorc's password; it's f4br1c8

or, perhaps:

	>Distribution: !foo.bar.edu
	>
	>Hey everybody, foo.bar.edu still has the hole in /bin/login!

In addition, this would greatly increase the learning curve for new Usenet
users; I'm not particularly pleased at the notion of trying to explain this
"completely user-driven" distribution mechanism.

>Note that excluding a site would be easy to implement because only one end is 
>affected.  However, everyone would have to implement in order to secure it
>net.wide--and to allow the inclusion mechanism.

It would NOT be "easy to implement", for the reasons mentioned above.

>How many times have you ever mentioned k*bo in a message, and really didn't
>want to get a k*bo cookie back?  Simple, then.  Under the above system, you
>could write distribution: !@world.std.com and k*bo probably wouldn't
>see it.  Don't want a mutlu after you?  Exclude his site from your article's
>distribution.  BTW: this is not censorship by any stretch of the imagination:
>if the mechanism was available, then the poster has every right to prevent
>a machine from receiving the post. Somebody mail-bombing because of your 
>post's content?  Next time, exclude his site.

OK, here's a question for you.

I'm about to start a Usenet site with 2000 users.  If one of 
those users angers you, are you going to prevent the other 1999
users from seeing your posts with a "!engr.uky.edu" distribution?

Even worse, what if you and I are participating in a wonderful, rational
discussion with 50 other people, and some third party (at either of our
sites) starts "pulling a mutlu"?  If you or I slap a "!whatever" in the
distribution, we've cut off someone with whom we really want to communicate!

>It all boils down to one issue: which is more important, the poster's right
>to restrict an article's distribution, or the reader's right to read any and
>all articles?

I don't post anything that I wouldn't want to see published.  What's wrong
with that rule?  If there's something truly needy of protection, post an
announcement and require email contact for distribution.  That scheme pro-
tects everyone.  This recently occured with some cryptological software
developed by a fellow at Bellcore.  He placed the material in an anonymous
FTP archive, but it was encrypted.  If you wanted to use it, you were re-
quired to contact him via email (or postal mail) to obtain the decryption
key.

That, in my opinion, is an acceptable compromise.  The poster can control
the distribution, and the readers know how to obtain the material(s).  

--Wes 

-- 
MORGAN@UKCC         |       Wes Morgan       |        ...!ukma!ukecc!morgan 
morgan@ms.uky.edu   | Engineering  Computing |   morgan@wuarchive.wustl.edu
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