On Fri, Aug 08, 1997 at 01:38:25PM +0200, Anonymous wrote:
How about if it is an employee of yours, using your computer equipment, that sent the message, in explict contradition to your companies stated policy?
Use a retraction server (David's project)
I wonder if there is a problem of inconsistent levels in this debate...
At one level, many people on this list are in favour of infrastructure such as Usenet and the Web carrying all information without filtering with respect to content, to avoid censorship, oppression and so on.
At another level, almost everybody has personal preferences as to what they consider worthwhile information, what they want to read, what they want their children/employees to read, and what they want their privately-owned hardware to be used to carry.
At the content-free level, cancels are information just like anything else, merely a stream of octets. By definition, they _can't_ be morally wrong at that amoral level where we talk only about whether store-and-forward works properly or not. Cancels, "forged" or otherwise are just a tool, just bytes.
Within a particular value system, you might agree or disagree with a particular cancel, or with the idea in general. It's easy to configure a news server or reader to conform to your preferences, just people who hate spam are free to ignore it. At this level, you can make judgements as to which uses of that tool are justifiable. (Cancels by sysadmins, anti-spammers, spammers, system owners, governments, parents, copyright lawyers or nobody at all.)
Very good point. The problem exists at both levels, however. At the "content-free" level the equivalent of spam is a flooding denial of service attack. But thinking about it at the "content free" level puts the issues in a much better focus, for me. You can note the following: 1) at a "content-free" level filters, by definition simply don't work. [They don't really work for spam, either, of course.] 2) the issue is fundamentally bandwidth consumption [with spam the bandwidth is human attention bandwidth] 3) it's a damn hard problem, and no good solution exists 4) there is an analog to e-postage in QOS routing, but the problem of flooding is still not solved. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html