Subject: Usenet Censorship

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 22:10:51 -0500

Please excuse me if this in inappropriate or old news, but I found it
interesting ..

http://www.excite.com/computers_and_internet/tech_news/zdnet/?article=/news/19981117/2165696.inp

Synopsis:

Karl Denninger wants to censor everything posted to Usenet.  He claims
to want to get rid of all pornography and pirated software.  However, he
wants to accomplish this by making everyone who posts a binary file
required to sign it with a digital certificate and "Any anonymously
posted binary files, such as digital images or software programs, would
be automatically rejected."

This seems a bit "out there" to me.  IMHO, if this kind of system were
to go into effect you might as well turn all the news servers off.

Kyle George

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 09:05:56 -0700 (MST)

> From: [email-masked]

> ...
>                      expects certain subscribers with personal
>                      agendas to siphon Clean News's cancel
>                      messages into the general Usenet feed. 
>
>                      "Let's say that Reverend Falwell had an
>                      ISP," he says. Such a misuse of the
>                      cancel messages would, however, be "not
>                      my issue." 
>
> I can just imagine 500,000 cancel messages/day being fired back and
> forth between servers - obviously not a good idea.  

By long standing tradition, before making predictions of the death of
the net, it is a good idea to check some of the technical details.

First, by public accounts from those running the netnews anti-spam systems
last winter, 500K cancels/day would have been a major reduction in the
number of daily cancels they were issuing.  I assume the anti-spam robots
are still running at those old rates, although I've not checked for months.

Second, it is trivial to tell your computers to ignore a stream of cancel
messages that do not have forged Path: lines no matter where you are on
the net.  That fact is fundamental to the claims that the established
streams of spam cancels are and the various streams of black-list cancels
against various ISP's such as UUNET were advisary or voluntary.  (Of
course, it is also trivial to turn off all cancels, which puts the lie to
the claims of spammers and kooky "freedom knights" that spam cancels are
censorship.)  Any leaks of this or any other cancel feed, whether
intentionally leaked or not, no matter how kooky, would not be a problem
for more than a matter of minutes at any competantly run system.

Third, should the stream of cancels have forged headers, it is trivial
for the neighbors of the source to deal with it, provided the source does
not move around.  If the immediate neighbors do not deal with such
problems, they are treated as part of the problem and dealt with by their
neighbors.  Kooks, idiots, and cults have tried to kill netnews many times
with spews of cancel messages with forged headers, and failed.  Netnews
has been killed by its success, by turning into a 90's CB radio, but that's
another story.

Fourth, what's this about cancel messages "being fired back and forth"?
Cancelling a cancel message doesn't work.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]