gam@amdahl.amdahl.com (Gordon A. Moffett) (08/26/87)
In response to the objections of the use of the -f flag of expire(8),
here is a trivial patch that will disable the -f flag and report such
to the user.
I've always looked upon this flag with horror, and now I see realized
my objections to having it in the first place: censorship.
The patch #ifdef's the code for the -f flag (not all of it, but
the important parts); you can't use the -f flag unless the
symbol BADUSER was defined when expire.c was compiled.
*** /tmp/da4616 Tue Aug 25 19:27:24 1987
--- expire.c Tue Aug 25 19:25:53 1987
***************
*** 244,249 ****
--- 244,250 ----
usepost++;
break;
case 'f': /* expire messages from baduser */
+ #ifdef BADUSER
frflag++;
if (argc > 2) {
strcpy(baduser, argv[2]);
***************
*** 250,255 ****
--- 251,261 ----
argv++;
argc--;
}
+ #else
+ fprintf(stderr, "The -f flag has been disabled.\n");
+ exit(0);
+ /* NOTREACHED */
+ #endif
break;
case 'u': /* update the active file from 2.10.1 fmt */
doupdateactive++;
--
Gordon A. Moffett gam@amdahl.amdahl.com
"When I make a mistake they call it 'Evil',
but when He makes a mistake they call it 'Nature'!"wcs@ho95e.ATT.COM (Bill.Stewart) (08/26/87)
In <12916@amdahl.amdahl.com>, Gordon Moffett writes:
: In response to the objections of the use of the -f flag of expire(8),
: here is a trivial patch that will disable the -f flag and report such
: to the user.
:
: I've always looked upon this flag with horror, and now I see realized
: my objections to having it in the first place: censorship.
The purpose of the -f flag is not to censor real people such as Mr. Nobody
or Rich Rosen; it's mainly to censor berserk notesfile gateways and similar
programs, which occasionally break and dump 85 Megabytes worth of old
articles, all of which appear to be from notesfiles@somewherevax.
It's worth keeping for that reason, on spite of the risk of abuse.
--
# Thanks;
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcsgrr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) (08/27/87)
In article <1680@ho95e.ATT.COM> wcs@ho95e.ATT.COM (Bill.Stewart) writes: > In <12916@amdahl.amdahl.com>, Gordon Moffett writes: > : In response to the objections of the use of the -f flag of expire(8), > : here is a trivial patch that will disable the -f flag and report such > : to the user. > : I've always looked upon this flag with horror, and now I see realized > : my objections to having it in the first place: censorship. > > The purpose of the -f flag is not to censor real people such as Mr. Nobody > or Rich Rosen; it's mainly to censor berserk notesfile gateways and similar > programs, which occasionally break and dump 85 Megabytes worth of old > articles, all of which appear to be from notesfiles@somewherevax. > It's worth keeping for that reason, on spite of the risk of abuse. Furthermore, if anybody thinks I'm going to run expire after every news processing cycle just to get rid of the emanations of one of these silly net.blabbermouths, they're plumb loco. Much simpler just to put a little fix in inews, assuming one really feels such action is required. BTW, I have installed no such patch, though truly I have been tempted by several persons from time to time... -- George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {ihnp4|seismo|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing arpa: cbmvax!grr@seismo.css.GOV Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by mooans , i
jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) (08/28/87)
In article <1680@ho95e.ATT.COM> wcs@ho95e.ATT.COM (Bill.Stewart) writes: >In <12916@amdahl.amdahl.com>, Gordon Moffett writes: >: I've always looked upon this flag with horror, and now I see realized >: my objections to having it in the first place: censorship. > >The purpose of the -f flag is not to censor real people such as Mr. Nobody >or Rich Rosen; it's mainly to censor berserk notesfile gateways and similar >programs, which occasionally break and dump 85 Megabytes worth of old >articles, all of which appear to be from notesfiles@somewherevax. >It's worth keeping for that reason, on spite of the risk of abuse. The example on the official expire man page demonstrates how to censor Rich Rosen! When I was hacking on the beta release of 2.11, I asked Rick Adams to change the example; possibly because of an oversight, it was never changed. Here it is: -f asks expire to remove messages sent by a particular user, regardless of the newsgroup that they are in, and regardless of how old they are. This option is intended not so much to selectively censor voluminous posters (though it has certainly been used for that) but to recover when a notesfiles site (running different news software) accidentally releases a duplicate batch of old news. An example of its use is expire -f rlr@pyuxd.UUCP Any article whose From: field exactly matches the argument to the -f option will be removed. Seems it would have been more consistent to give the example expire -f Unknown@hplabs.UUCP (remember that one?) if this really isn't about censorship. -- - Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com {uunet,ucbvax,sun,decwrl,<smart-site>}!epimass.epi.com!jbuck Old arpa mailers: jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net