jgd@rsiatl.UUCP (John G. DeArmond) (11/06/90)
rbc@cuuxb.ATT.COM (~XT6561210~Rick Clark~C24~H15~6011~) writes: >Isn't this much more proof than necessary? Someone correct me if I am wrong. >I thought in a libel (is that the same as slander?) suit, th e person accused >of libel did not have to prove what they said was true. I thought the >accuser had to prove what was said was false, that the libeler had reason >to doubt that it was true, and that the libeler had malicious intent. That's not the issue in this case. The issue is whether one can prove to the degree required by law that a given person posted a given article. On Usenet that would be practically impossible unless the poster admitted ownership of the article later. Of course, you'd have to prove ownership of the admission too. As someone who has been the victim of some rather tastless forgeries, I can tell you that it is startling to suddenly find your mailbox full of hate mail from dweebs who flame before thinking, about a posting in a group you never participate in and have no interest in. For that reason I recommend that anyone who is active on Usenet take 2 very simple precautions. First, archive all postings that originate from your site. An uninterrupted string of sequence numbers in articles from this archive, especially if the archive is retrieved from off-site storage, is powerful proof that a forgery is exactly that. Secondly, use nn's capability of merging all groups together into one large group and its capability of searching for strings in that super group as a means of early detection of forgeries. The command line to do this is: nn -mxX -n/armond all which tells nn to grep for my name across all articles currently in my spool. If you're not running nn, Wellll..... :-) John -- John De Armond, WD4OQC | "The truly ignorant in our society are those people Radiation Systems, Inc. | who would throw away the parts of the Constitution Atlanta, Ga | they find inconvenient." -me Defend the 2nd {emory,uunet}!rsiatl!jgd| with the same fervor as you do the 1st.