jas@proteon.com (John A. Shriver) (06/04/90)
I will admit that many peoples' counter arguments to me have been interesting (many sent just to me), including a cute peice of forged SMTP mail. I appreciate the comments, and do admit a anti-netnews bias. Apologies to those offended. However, I was glad to see that some comments came out that might address the problem. David noted that there is a cancel function in netnews, and that it nabbed this message fairly quickly. Maybe the netnews/SMTP "gateway" agents could put in a delay, maybe an hour or two, that would allow the "cancel" to do it's work. Also, maybe there should be a crude filter program. I think that we should focus on how to improve this system, rather than assert that complaining about problems is unfair or evil. There is a problem, let's not stick our heads on the sand. Research is under way on secure SMTP mail, maybe research is needed elsewhere. Be constructive. My concern, which I may not have made clear enough, is that the US Government is potentially watching us. If they don't like what is being done with the money the subsidize the Internet with, they might cut it off. We live in a glass house, as Barry noted. The fellow with the *big* rock is in Washington, D.C., not some hacker. By the way, my other point about the netnews gateway just came home to roost. There is a mail loop on this list, with a delay of over 6 weeks, that just kicked in. Groan, will that be hard to find.
perry@MCL.UNISYS.COM (Dennis Perry) (06/05/90)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 90 12:49:31 EDT From: jas@proteon.com (John A. Shriver) My concern, which I may not have made clear enough, is that the US Government is potentially watching us. If they don't like what is being done with the money the subsidize the Internet with, they might cut it off. We live in a glass house, as Barry noted. The fellow with the *big* rock is in Washington, D.C., not some hacker. I might illustrate the above point with a true example from my experience while I was at DARPA 'responsible' for the Arpanet. It seems that a note was posted to a netnews list. The note requested that those interested in helping a certain central american country to volunteer their services. Well, the help requested was for the side of the controversy that the U.S. government was not interested in helping, at the time. This note was picked up by a distribution list on the Arpanet and was eventually collected and read by certain people located in a certain place. I was shortly thereafter contacted by the DOD Inspector General's Office in the Pentagon. There inital concern was to shut down the Arpanet. After a more logical discussion, a course of action was identified which amounted to an educational experience for the person posting the note and the institution passing the note on to the Arpanet. The above details may not be totally correct, since this happened about four years ago now, and I try not to remember the things that are unpleasant in my life. dennis
lear@turbo.bio.net (Eliot) (06/06/90)
John Shriver:
> ...maybe research is needed elsewhere.
You might be relieved to know that there are a number of us working on
the problem, most notably Stan Barber and Brian Kantor.
--
Eliot Lear
[lear@turbo.bio.net]