Stuart Smith enscribed thusly:
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In article <v02110105ac99c03922dd@[204.179.132.4]> you write:
The downsides of having the mechanism (especially unauthenticated) we see now: official and unofficial squelching of articles that someone doesn't like for whatever arbitrary or situational reason.
You miss an important point in the mechinism - individual sites *choose* whether or not to pay any attention to cancels. Theoretically, they could be configured to only listen to cancels from certain places etc etc. By all means these should be authenticated, but it is vital to remember that this is still (for now..) an anarchy. I don't have to honour anyones cancels, and if I do, and you don't like it - you don't have to get a news feed from me.
(No doubt, you are going to get hammered heavily on this from multiple sides, but here is my shot anyways.) Actually you miss a very critical point. This choice is, in fact, a "Hobsens Choice", a choice that is no choice. If any site between you and the article source choses to honor that cancel, you never get the original article to begin with. All you get is the cancel message and your choice to honor it or not is totally meaningless. To be worth anything all of the intermediate nodes would have to chose to ignore cancel messages and then the leaf nodes would have the privledge of honoring or ignoring them. But it will be a VERY cold day in a VERY warm place before that ever happens, even if it did make sense (It doesn't). Yes yes, I know - article loss is contigent upon the cancel arriving there before you pick up the article from them, this effect would just serve to add a level of chaos and indetermanancy to the mechanism. Obviously (because of time elements involved in realization and forging of cancels) it is much more likely that you will receive originals for article where a forged cancel is received. That depends on the latency involving all of the news feeds between you and the article source and the latency involving the forger and his ability to recognize a message he wants to cancel and to get that cancel out. The human factor adds a lot here. Perhaps we should add a "time-limit" to cancel messages? This too would be highly indeterminant as propagation times stretched out. End result is that most sites currently do honor cancels, so many of the originals never reach a lot of the leaf nodes while all of us continue to be subjected to a FLOOD of cancel control messages. In terms of message count and article numbers (not total bytes of storage) my control group is the largest newsgroup group on my system! Regards, Mike -- Michael H. Warfield | (770) 985-6132 | mhw@WittsEnd.com (The Mad Wizard) | (770) 925-8248 | http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/ NIC whois: MHW9 | An optimist believes we live in the best of all PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471 | possible worlds. A pessimist is sure of it!