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

[petro]

>On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 04:00:38PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>>       --
>>  At 11:24 AM 12/16/2000 -0800, Eric Murray wrote:
>>   > Only by running your own mail or news server can you prevent the ISP
>>   > from monitoring your email or news reading.
>>
>>  My newsreader, like most people's newsreaders, automatically downloads
>>  those newsgroups I am interested in full, in the background.   Therefore
>>  there is no way anyone can no which particular message of
>>  "alt.anonymous.messages" I have read.
>
>Interesting.  I didn't know that newsreaders did that.  None of my
>newsreaders do, but then I use rn or trn and not the newsreaders built into
>browsers, which I assume is what you mean by "most people's".

	I believe that most download all of the headers, and then 
only download the articles one is interested in--at least the 
"Online" newsreaders do it this way.


>Not completely- it wouldn't work for people with newsreaders like trn which
>don't always grab everything from the subscribed newsfroups.
>Simple to fix, but something to be aware of.

	Trn (and IIRC slrn) can be configured to read from the local 
spool. If one is using Linux, there is also leafnode, a "small site" 
news server that gets it's feed via NNRP (the news reader protocol) 
as opposed to NNTP. It is fairly trivial to set up, and can be cron'd 
to grab all the articles in a newsgroup at regular intervals, and 
expire the messages from disk in short order.
-- 
A quote from Petro's Archives:
**********************************************
"Despite almost every experience I've ever had with federal 
authority, I keep imagining its competence."
John Perry Barlow