Ryan Anderson <randerso@ece.eng.wayne.edu> 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`