Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes:
One issue with the system is that censors will issue cancel messages for the articles. Not too much which can be done about this. Some trends tend to help this problem:
The vast majority of cancels in the "control" newsgroup are the so-called "third party cancels" (a.k.a. forgeries). In the U.S. many major ISPs like America Online and Earthlink are ignoring cancels outright. It's easy - start the latest version of INN with the -C flag, or apply Dave Hayes's patches at http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet.
Cancel message abuse by people running cancel bots reflecting their censorous views have resulted in some sites ignoring cancel messages.
Quite a few, I might add. The only reason why Demon processes cancels is that Ade Lovett is a homosexual who wants to be able to censor "homophobic" Usenet articles. :-) Forging cancels is easy -- see the cancelbot I posted last year.
Another aspect of the system is that it relies on news archival services such as dejanews and altavista; these presumably don't listen to cancel messages for already archived data (? guessing here). The archive maintainers presumably don't want to get involved in disputes over which old articles should be purged from their archive anyway.
Correct: none of the 3 major archival services (dejanews, altavista, reference.com) delte articles based on cancel or supersedes once they receive them. However an author can explicitly ask dejanews to delete his articles. All 3 now don't archive articles that say 'X-No-Archive: yes'. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps