Announce: "secret-admirers" mail list(usenet)

madmullah madmullah at crosswinds.net
Sat Dec 16 09:26:45 PST 2000


Regarding anonymous Usenet reading (vs. posting), 
what kind of logging do most nntpd's perform ?

I've never had the opportunity to setup nntp daemon softwarez 
so I have nada idea as to the level of default logging that they 
perform by default, or how they can be tweaked further.

Is it possible to log HEAD and BODY requests for individual articles in
individual newsgroups along 
with a userid on the clients end ?  Worse, can the ip address of the
client newsreader software be logged
along with its individual nntp commands ?

What I'm thinking about is that there might be a massive potential for 
piercing a users anonymity through the examination of such logs, but
since
I don't know what kind of logging the major news server packages perform
by default 
I don't know how much of a threat this type of scenario would be.

Any news gurus out there ?
Forgive me for the amateurish sound of this message, I think that these
issues are sort of germane 
the larger set of anonymity issues associated with usenet.





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