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

[Dave Emery]

On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 05:17:31PM -0500, BMM wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Dec 2000, madmullah wrote:
> 
> > Regarding anonymous Usenet reading (vs. posting), 
> > what kind of logging do most nntpd's perform ?
> >
> 

> Managing a news feed is neat experience to have done once, but I don't
> think I'd want to make a career out of it.  

> > 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.


	Many many years ago, before the net became the ubiquitous
popular medium it mutated into in the mid 90's, I ran USENET as a part
time hobby for the various companies I worked for in that era.   And yes
I found out one could learn quite a bit more than one wanted to know
from the logs I routinely kept.   Was eye opening indeed to discover who
in the office read particular niche interest groups and who posted to
what...

	I don't know what a modern ISP typically keeps as far as logs,
but I do know the available packages allow quite detailed logging.
I think one can obviously assume that any postings are completely logged,
and in such a manner as to make it trivial to retrieve all those
from one user (but this is possible anyway via Deja).  Logs of specific
articles or newsgroups read are readily possible, but unlikely to be
routinely kept unless someone is nosey and looking for dirt.   A request
for articles from an unusual newsgroup might trigger a detectable log
entry, since some USENET spools only spool groups that people using them
read...
	

> > 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Brian

-- 
	Dave Emery N1PRE,  die at die.com  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. 
PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2  5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18