Subject: CLOSE ASRG NOW IT HAS FAILED

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 05:10:43 -0700

> But that's not the requirement.  The requirement is to 
> disclose knowledge
> of the existence of IPR, not to try to secure a license to it.
> 
> Given that, do you still disagree with the requirement?

I disagree with the requirement because I don't think there is 
an enforceable requirement. I think that if there is a problem
and a court case results, that the way the IPR policy has been
enacted will allow any barely competent lawyer to get arround
it.

The way to reference the RFC 2026 text is by stating that the 
group will be run according to RFC 2026. I am not a lawyer
but I do know something about the difference between specifying
a policy by reference and by direct quotation.

I disagree with any requirement imposed by a working group chair 
who believes he is not accountable to the group. I do not think
that the way an IPR regime should be specified is a unilateral
statement from the chair that a decision has been taken.

An IPR policy should not be something that members of a group 
discover when they are told it has been imposed from above. 

What happened to open and inclusive?

So far we have had a deliberate campaign of heckling that the 
chair did nothing to stop followed by the chair taking sanctions
against anyone who complained about the hecklers.

Five members of the group have resigned in disgust at the heckler
faction.

You will note that none of the posts I have sent on this topic
have made it to the list. So even if I do make a statement
concerning IPR the chances are that the post will be seen are
nil.

The chair has admitted that the reason my posts are blocked is 
that I am working on starting anti-spam groups in other forums,
I am not aware that that type of move has EVER been sanctioned
by IETF process.

The chair has contributed nothing of value to this debate, his sole interest
in the group appears to be exploiting it for PR value to promote his
company, not the group.

I have no confidence in Paul Judge as chair. I believe that his handling of
the group is damaging the IETF. The group may be in the IRTF but the mailing
list bears the name IETF and it the group is being presented to the press as
having been charged by the IETF to solve the problem.

The FTC testimony was dire. The ASRG chair stated that he believed the group
would come up with a technical solution. Every one of the other members of
the
technical panel then stated that they thought it had already failed. It made
the IETF look ridiculous. 

If group chairs are going to have this degree of power it would probably be
a good idea to have a process that is a little more formal for selecting
them than choosing the first person to make a proposal. It would probably be
a good idea to choose chairs that have some experience of being an ordinary
working group member before they act as chair.

It would be a really good idea to allow groups to have input into the
selection of chairs. This top heavy dictatorial style is not working, is not
open and is not inclusive.

At this point the heckler faction have been allowed to drive away most of
the productive members of the group. 

		Phill

---

From: Paul Vixie <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 Jun 2003 16:27:26 +0000

> What happened to open and inclusive?

it didn't scale.  but, rather than change the written rules, more emphasis
has been put on "design teams" and "directorates" in order to get work done
in ways the written rules don't cover.  note that i think this is bad, and
that the written rules should be changed, and then followed, and that the
way things are trying to get done now has scaled even less well than before.

> I have no confidence in Paul Judge as chair. I believe that his handling
> of the group is damaging the IETF. The group may be in the IRTF but the
> mailing list bears the name IETF and it the group is being presented to
> the press as having been charged by the IETF to solve the problem.
> 
> The FTC testimony was dire. The ASRG chair stated that he believed the
> group would come up with a technical solution. Every one of the other
> members of the technical panel then stated that they thought it had
> already failed. It made the IETF look ridiculous.

three different people came to me (as a known associate of verisign's) to
ask "who the hell is this hallam-baker idiot and why does verisign let him
out in public???" after your various tirades and misbehaviours at the ftc
thing.  therefore it's possible that your rant about paul judge's activities
lacks credibility.
-- 
Paul Vixie

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 11:27:23 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Paul Vixie <[email-masked]>

>  ...  therefore it's possible that your rant [about ASRG moderation]

That raises an issue that I think the IETF and IRTF and certainly the
ASRG moderator should consider.  All contributions that are rejected
by any moderators (including spam filters) of any IRTF or IETF mailing
lists must be archived and should be published on web pages somewhere.
Archiving is obviously critical for the defense of the moderators
against charges of unfairness, self-dealing, and so forth.  Publishing
the rejected contributions would go a long way toward defusing or even
refuting such charges with minimal embarrassment to those making them
and disruption of valuable IETF and IRTF activities.  There might be
some extreme contributions perhaps involving child pornography or
libel that could not be published, but those are surely rare and could
be dealt with individually.

I hope that all of the rejected contributions to the ASRG mailing list
have been archived.  Based on "courtesy" copies of messages that have
been sent to me, I suspect that publishing the messages rejected for
the ASRG list would be quite helpful.  Publishing them would do no
harm to the work of the mailing list.

The cycles of noise on the main IETF list about some other mailing
lists would be helped by this policy.  Besides squelching a lot of
the noise by making the moderation obviously justified, it might also
satisfy those who really want their words published.

An easy way to implement such a policy is to use the usual mailing
list software to create parallel "lists" which to not allow subscriptions
or contributions except from the moderator of the main list but that
has an open archive.  The moderator could send copies of any rejected
documents and any relevant coorespondence to the parallel "list."

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 10:46:04 -0700 (PDT)

> harm to the work of the mailing list.

Why not just have two lists, a -signal and a -noise
list in parallel and let people choose which list they
want to read?

	Mike

---

From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 10:50:16 -0700

At 11:27 AM -0600 6/16/03, Vernon Schryver wrote:
>All contributions that are rejected

FWIW, some of the IETF WG mailing lists that IMC runs get >10 spams a 
day, and often get the virus/trojans that are >120K each. This is not 
an insignificant amount of junk to wade through when looking for 
proof of moderator badness/goodness.

And there's also the problem of robots that harvest everything, 
regardless of your robots.txt file. If we had a system like you 
describe, it would be believable that the archives would get a fair 
number of hits from people searching for pr0n but finding our archive 
of spam instead.

I think that having all bounces (for whatever reason) archived is 
fine; I think having it as "web pages somewhere" is overkill. Access 
to one of the big text archives can be a trivial password given to 
anyone who wants it for research purposes.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 13:56:10 -0400 (EDT)

I think this is just a smokescreen. The real problem is that it didn't get
the outcomes desired by a certain group.  It has nothing whatsoever to do
with scaling. Democracy scales just fine.

Also, the last paragraph is nothing but an inappropriate ad hominem attack
on Mr. Hallam-Baker. I am speaking as someone who has some disagreements
with Mr. Hallam-Baker, but I prefer to couch those disagreements in facts,
rather than hyperbole.  Despite my disagreements, Mr. Hallam-Baker makes
some credible points that can't be dismissed as easilly as Mr Vixie would
like.  Such ad hominems are a violation of the Code of Conduct of the IETF
as documented in RFC 3184. I ask that the chair take the appropriate
action to halt this inappropriate activity.

		--Dean

---

From: Scott W Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 14:34:08 -0400

On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 01:56:10PM -0400, Dean Anderson allegedly wrote:
> I think this is just a smokescreen. The real problem is that it didn't
> get the outcomes desired by a certain group.  It has nothing
> whatsoever to do with scaling. Democracy scales just fine.
> 
> > it didn't scale.  but, rather than change the written rules, more
> > emphasis has been put on "design teams" and "directorates" in order
> > to get work done in ways the written rules don't cover.  note that i
> > think this is bad, and that the written rules should be changed, and
> > then followed, and that the way things are trying to get done now
> > has scaled even less well than before.

The original issue was that he felt like "they" were imposing an IPR
policy on him "from above".  The IETF IPR policy, which ASRG was copying
from, has been worked out over more than ten years with lots of input
and a number of iterations.  This has nothing to do with democracy or
design teams.

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 12:45:34 -0600 (MDT)

> To: [email-masked]
> From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <[email-masked]>

> proof of moderator badness/goodness.

I disagree in general, but perhaps that's because I look at several
100 spam every day.
Not logging messages > 30 Kbytes (or 10K or even 10K) would be fine
Even better would be logging but truncating.

> number of hits from people searching for pr0n but finding our archive 

You say that as if it's a bad thing.  I really don't see the problem.

> anyone who wants it for research purposes.

"Openness" and "transparency" are good things in general but best and
most effective when you don't notice them.  Keeping things secret not
only feeds the paranoia of kooks, but does no good and it makes it
hard to check a suspicion or a charge without making a federal case.
The proximate example is a perfect case.  It is impossible to check
whether the other person's charge that the ASRG moderator is rejecting
contributions because of some sort of self-dealing without the IETF
equivalent of going to court to get a subpoena.  That's not any sort
of "openness and transparency."

The suggestion of having two lists, one filtered and a second named
whatever-noise, both with open archives, sounds fine to me, but wouldn't
help the ASRG case.  I think that the ASRG case would be instantly
resolved if the moderator would publish all of the rejected messages
and related corresponce without any additional commentary...not that
I think there's any case there, but passers-by might not have seen the
first several weeks of traffic in the ASRG mailing list not to mention
those "courtesy" copies I mentioned.

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 14:42:01 -0400 (EDT)

Disks are cheap.  250Gig is under $400, and works just fine for slightly
long term storage.

		--Dean

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 15:38:34 -0400

> fine; I think having it as "web pages somewhere" is overkill.

both the volume of spam, and the ratio of spam to legitimate content are
so high, that I'm not sure how much longer it will be practical to
archive it.  if we were to archive rejected messages, it should probably
only be for a few weeks.

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 16:01:37 -0400 (EDT)

The IPR policy (controversial as it might be), has nothing to do with who
can post to an IETF list. There is no reasonable basis to limit posts
because a person is involved in other groups. It has nothing to do with
any so-called 'emphasis on design teams and directorates', which seems to
be little more than a codeword for suppression of certain viewpoints.

This is merely a transparent and inappropriate attempt to suppress certain
viewpoints, in apparent violation of RFC 2026 10.4(A). The IETF is to take
no position on the topic.

I note that Mr. Vixie has told me in the past that he supports the concept
of software patents. This is something that I and others involved with the
LPF, and John McCarthy, Don Knuth, Richard Stallman, and many, many other
luminaries of Computer Science, have fought against for many years.
Indeed, there is recently renewed interest in changing these laws, as
venture capitalists are finally beginning to come over to our side of the
debate.

It is quite clear where some people stand on the issue of intellectual
property. However, it is inappropriate for them to use their influence at
the IETF to suppress competing viewpoints in violation of the IETF
non-position.

Dean Anderson
Speaking as President of the League for Progamming Freedom

---

From: Scott W Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 16:28:33 -0400

> be little more than a codeword for suppression of certain viewpoints.

Go back and look at Phillip's original message.  The complaint about
democracy was not about posting rights.  Enclosed:

> > I disagree with any requirement imposed by a working group chair who
> > believes he is not accountable to the group. I do not think that the
> > way an IPR regime should be specified is a unilateral statement from
> > the chair that a decision has been taken.
> >

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 14:38:15 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

> archive it.  if we were to archive rejected messages, it should probably

My rolling 40 day log of all spam sent to my traps or real addresses
contains about 34,484 samples in a total of about 242 Mbytes or an
average of about 7 KBytes/spam.  (Each sample is truncated to ~32 KBytes.)

Judging from DCC numbers from a bunch of medium sized ISPs, the typical
consumer mailbox receives about 10 messages/day (more than 5, less
than 20), of which about half are spam.  (Never mind that judicious
"unsubscribing" can reduce that by about 50%.)

So in round numbers, assume 10 spam/list/day.  If the IETF has 100
mailing lists, archiving all IETF list spam would involve 1000 spam/day
or about 7 MBytes/day or 2.5 GBytes/year.  

I remember quite well when a large disk drive was a ~2 meter cube,
weighed over a ton, used 220 volts and compressed air, and held only
48 MByte, but those days are long past.  2.5 Gbytes would fit on a
single DVD, not to mention modern magnetic media.

I keep unique (as determined by DCC checksums) copies of all of the
spam sent to my trap addresses permanently on CDROM.  I have ~1000
trap addresses, although only a several dozen are hit more than half
dozen times/week.  (These records help me answer complaints about my
blacklist.)

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 16:38:27 -0400 (EDT)

What sort of message volume do you see?

How much disk storage do you have?

		--Dean

---

From: "Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 15:18:48 -0400 (EDT)

My understanding is that The Mail Archive
(http://www.mail-archive.com/lists.html)  will provide free storage for
mailing lists.  I think every WG list should be permanetly archived in
this manner.

-- 
		Please visit http://www.icannwatch.org
A. Michael Froomkin   |    Professor of Law    |   [email-masked]
U. Miami School of Law, P.O. Box 248087, Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA
+1 (305) 284-4285  |  +1 (305) 284-6506 (fax)  |  http://www.law.tm
                        -->It's hot here.<--

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 11:24:57 -0700 (PDT)

> way things are trying to get done now has scaled even less well than before.

I'm not big fan of rules... But the way it is now is not working too well 
- especially for ASRG. I do agree with Paul Judge that we CAN come with 
tecnical solution (but it may still need to be backed up by some laws as 
well). But the problem is with ASRG itself, there are some there who are 
truly interested in spam research issues, but nothing is really being done
and one or two topics are complete predominant (plus couple additional 
people on the list who just try to critisize everything) and the group 
itself is not producing the results as a result of that. I would personally
very much like to work withing ASRG but I stayed away lately because of 
the above problems and I'm just keeping some watch over what is happening.

I do agree that problem with ASRG is in part due to its chair and his inability 
to get things in order, in which case ultimate control would fall on IRTF
and IETF leadership which has not done anything either and in fact IETF as
many pointed out has tried to avoid taking on the spam issue. Good thing 
is IPR issue is now being worked on there (I've that needs to be looked at 
3 months ago and that no IPR for ASRG is worst scenarioa - nobody listed then)
but that is small step and rather procedural one at that.

And BTW - is this correct that I'm hearing that Phillip is not being allowed
to post at ASRG? If this is so - that is completely inappropriate - whatever
his comments and work outside ASRG is, I've not seen anything within ASRG 
that should have prompted removal of posting priviliges - he's been good 
contributor for ASRG early one and shutting him up is just improper 
exerscise of his powers by ASRG chair (if that is what is going on).

---
William Leibzon
Elan Communications Inc. 
[email-masked]

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 17:38:06 -0400 (EDT)

Apparently, you didn't read the entire message:

Here is the rest of it:
------------------- From [email-masked] ("Hallam-Baker, Phillip")
What happened to open and inclusive?

---------------------

Phillip has a complaint about the IPR policies. This complaint is not
getting to the list, which is another complaint.  Vixie tries to justify
this suppression in his message:

On 16 Jun 2003, Paul Vixie wrote:

> emphasis has been put on "design teams" and "directorates" in order to
> get work done in ways the written rules don't cover.  note that i think
> this is bad, and that the written rules should be changed, and then
> followed, and that the way things are trying to get done now has scaled
> even less well than before.

To which I refute Vixie, as you quote me:

---

From: Bill Strahm <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 17:49:57 -0400 (EDT)

I am always leary about business models that I don't understand how they
make money.  So tell me, how will mail-archive.com make money to guarantee
that it will be around in 2050, 2100, and beyond.

I am not all that interested in a mail archive that might exist for a few
months, or a year, frankly I prefer the mail archives that the IETF
provides for my list, if the IETF goes out of business, then I don't think
the archives of the IETF will be all that interesting anymore

Bill

---

From: David Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 16:30:11 -0700 (PDT)

> mailing lists.  I think every WG list should be permanetly archived in

What a great way to help address harvesters ... one site ... one 'API' to
program against to harvest many valid addresses. This particular archive
example hides email addresses, but it took me less that 5 minutes to
determine how to recover addresses from the page data.

So I don't think the suggested policy is a good idea without much more
effective blocking of access to email addresses.

Dave Morris

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 18:40:42 -0600 (MDT)

> From: David Morris <[email-masked]>

> effective blocking of access to email addresses.

Hmmmph!  So only the addresses of authors of messages that are not
spam or otherwise rejected by IETF and IRTF moderation should be
harvested from the existing archives?

It's clear that the price of admission to a public, technical anti-spam
mailing list like the ASRG list should include sufficient practical
knowledge of spam including enough spam defenses to obviate any worries
about exposing one's address.  A similar de facto policy in other IRTF
and IETF lists to discourage tourists would not be a bad thing.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 20:59:33 -0400

> "unsubscribing" can reduce that by about 50%.)

well, some of the IETF lists that I maintain seem to get around 50 spams/day
(at least, if I go away for a day before I cull through the posts from 
nonsubscribers, I am likely to wind up with 60+ messages on some of those
lists, of which 59.5 are spam)

but it's not the cost of the disk that matters, it's the cost of backing it
up.  I can think of better things to spend IETF money on.

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 11:01:52 +0200

> those "courtesy" copies I mentioned.

the ICANN DNSO GA list operated with "ga" and "ga-full" lists ("full" being 
all spam, crosspostings and postings from moderated posters in addition to 
the normal list traffic).

the ga-full list was, I believe, not archived.

it served to silence the complaints that it wouldn't be possible to see if 
moderation was fair or not, which richly repaid the work of setting it up - 
I think it had approximately 5 memebers.

               Harald

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 20:43:51 -0400 (EDT)

Anyone interested in harvesting addresses would simply subscribe to the
various lists.  There is no way to prevent this type of abuse.  It is a
non-issue. Only certain radical anti-spammers (and those duped by them)
believe it to be problem. Coincidentally, only lists frequented by such
radical antispammers seem to suffer these problems. I guess they've proven
the point: Mail lists can be abused.

Of course, that isn't the same point as "(Type 1) Spammers abuse mail
lists".

		--Dean

---

From: James M Galvin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 09:26:24 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:

    > help the ASRG case.

    the ICANN DNSO GA list operated with "ga" and "ga-full" lists
    ("full" being all spam, crosspostings and postings from moderated
    posters in addition to the normal list traffic).

    it served to silence the complaints that it wouldn't be possible to
    see if moderation was fair or not, which richly repaid the work of
    setting it up - I think it had approximately 5 memebers.

The presence of the second list may have served its purpose in this case
but I believe the mechanism is flawed.  A temporary archive is also
required.

The point should not be to require people to subscribe to the "full"
list in order to review the actions of the moderator but rather to
have the full list available for review should an issue arise.

To require the subscription begs the question of why have two lists?
Two lists give the *perception* of fairness and positive action but
provide marginal (at best) support for review beyond what can be done
when only the "moderated" list is available.  You still have to contact
one of the members to get prior messages or depend on the "victim" to
provide copies of messages submitted that were rejected.

What is required is a full list (with or without subscribers) with an
archive that includes everything (except viruses and obvious spam) for a
period of time.  I happen to like 10 days but I've heard others suggest
that it really needs to be much longer, perhaps 30, 60, or even 90 days.

Jim

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 07:45:32 -0600 (MDT)

> From: James M Galvin <[email-masked]>

> ...
> period of time. 

yes, provided you error on the side of inclusion when it comes to anything
that might or might not be spam.  I'd forward any spam or viruss to
news.admin.net-abuse.sightings for permanent archiving by Google.

>                  I happen to like 10 days but I've heard others suggest

The ASRG case, including the recent effort involving out of context
quoting, demonstrates that more than 90 days is required.  
If there were a problem with permanent archiving, the one could archive
the full list but not the filtered list, with some kind of added X-header
indicating messages that were filtered.  The non-spam that is not
filtered had better be a trivial number of bytes (for this century)
or someone should be cut off by an ISP.

About the supposed high costs of archiving spam--perhaps Google's
archive of spam has been overlooked.  See
http://groups.google.com/groups?scoring=d&q=group%3A*.sightings
It's valuable when dealing with spammers claiming to not be spammers.

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 07:28:31 -0700

a look at the paper post i receive every day would lead me to believe
that an archive that includes unsolicited commercial post would be
on the order of ten times as large as that for legitimate post.  why
will the internet email be any less polluted?  and you want folk to
archive the <bleep>?  so the search engines can have even more hits
on the slime?  cool.

randy

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 04:52:08 -0700 (PDT)

I think the original idea was better - to only have web archive of those
posts that did not make it through to the main list. If technically easily 
possible I'd also suggest marking on the main index if post was denied by
moderator or denied by spam filter. And having this archive for only past 
3 months seems just fine for that purpose.

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 19:14:08 -0600 (MDT)

> lists, of which 59.5 are spam)

Some judicious unsubscribing and reporting of spam can reduce that load
radically.  Contrary to the religous claims of some commentators,
many spammers do try to avoid "internet anti-commerze netcop nazi flamers."
Many just try to avoid send to those who care enough to object.
Of course, some spammers take "remove" requests as confirmation, but
an address that is receiving 50 spam/day doesn't need to worry about not
already being confirmed.

> up.  I can think of better things to spend IETF money on.

What's the cost of backup it up?  Writing a CDROM once a week is
essentially free in materials and can be pertty cheap in labor costs.
A CDROM is cheaper than even plain oiled (no Mylar) paper tape used
to be.  It's not as if anyone suggested making serious archives that
would be available within 30 minutes for disaster recovery or that
will survive the end of civilization as we know it.

One hopes that the real mailing list archives are already backed up
sufficiently.  Adding several dozen MBytes of spam and moderation
rejects to those datasets would be literally free if you are using giant
media like CDROMs--not to mention DVDs.

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 16:41:26 +0200

--On tirsdag, juni 17, 2003 09:26:24 -0400 James M Galvin 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>     > whatever-noise, both with open archives, sounds fine to me, but
> wouldn't     > help the ASRG case.
>

In that particular instance, some people even questioned the integrity of 
the archives at the hosting site. So telling them "if you don't trust us, 
just archive this yourself, here's the feed" was actually a feature.

Now that I think of it, the list *was* archived on the server of the list, 
and the archives are even still available.... 
http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/ga-full/Arc00/maillist.html contains the 
archive, if anyone's interested...

                Harald

---

From: James M Galvin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 10:53:01 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Randy Bush wrote:

    a look at the paper post i receive every day would lead me to
    believe that an archive that includes unsolicited commercial post
    would be on the order of ten times as large as that for legitimate
    post.  why will the internet email be any less polluted?  and you
    want folk to archive the <bleep>?  so the search engines can have
    even more hits on the slime?  cool.

Spam and other kinds of unsolicited commercial post are a second order
problem.  The issue on the table was objective review of moderator
actions.

In any case, I did say the archive need not contain "obvious" spam.  For
me, "obvious spam" means I set a medium-high threshold for SpamAssassin
and discard it if it crosses the threshold.  Other methods will work
equally well, including doing nothing.

Search engines are not our problem.  In my experience they will figure
it out if they need to and deal with it.  "Harvesters" are a second
order problem.

This is not rocket science.  Many "second order" tweaks are possible.
Conceptually, the proposal is no different than the way local sites
would previously manage USENET newsgroups (roll off after 10, 20, or 30
days).  Yes, lots of disk, but that is cheap enough these days.  Heck, I
wouldn't even backup these particular archives.

Jim

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 09:39:17 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>

> just archive this yourself, here's the feed" was actually a feature.

Agreed, but the interesting purposes can only involve convincing
reasonable people.  Giving a kook a feed won't convince it of anything
except that the feed is fake.  The goal should be to support quiet
inquiries by third parties, without forcing them to file IESG equivalents
of freedom of information act paperwork.  What the kooks, spammers,
and others subject to moderation think or say is entirely uninteresting.

As for giving more search engine hits to spammers--I've found Google's
pointers to spammers' work in IETF lists useful.  Such pointers tend
to shut up "cartooneys."

I've not noticed any real opposition to at least open archiving of
moderation rejections.  Is there anything that needs to be done to
make this an official recommendation, IESG policy, or whatever?

---

From: "Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 13:59:57 -0400 (EDT)

I submit that it's better than the alternative of no archive at all.  If
you can think of solution that is likely to be implemented and has fewer
faults, I'm all for it.

---

From: "Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 14:04:56 -0400 (EDT)

I was one of the ga-full subscribers.  I thought it was a great mistake
not to archive it -- further institutionalizing the idea that only
approved persons could speak, and creating a santized public record.  The
calculus was different for ICANN, as it's quasi-governmental in a way the
IETF is not, so what was necessary there might not be necessary here.

I sould also note that ICANN killed the ga-full list with no discussion
and essentially no notice.

The ga-full list, as used by ICANN, certainly served to silence people,
but not quite exactly in the manner described below.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 23:59:10 -0400

On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 20:43:51 EDT, Dean Anderson said:
> radical antispammers seem to suffer these problems.

This is no more surprising than the realization that DNA forensic evidence
is only being found by labs that have the capability of DNA forensic analysis,
or that Uri Geller wasn't debunked until he happened to run into
James Randi.

If (for instance) a list of poodle enthusiasts gets trawled for addresses,
and said list doesn't have any radical anti-spammers on it, then the victims
of the subsequent spamming runs will merely say "Oh Foo.  I wonder how they
got my address".

If one of the subscribers is a radical anti-spammer who is subscribed to
the list using the address [email-masked], and said
address gets spammed, the radical anti-spammer knows *VERY* well *exactly*
how the spammers got the address.....

When only radical anti-spammers are deploying methods for tracing how a
spammer gets addresses, *of course* only lists that have said anti-spammers
on it will have this problem.

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 10:05:38 +0200

> make this an official recommendation, IESG policy, or whatever?

IETF mailing list policy is supposed to be grounded in RFC 2418 (WG 
guidelines), RFC 2026 (standard process) and RFC 3005 (IETF list charter).
But these documents are a bit high-level to be useful.

at the moment the only documents of any status that talk about how to run 
IETF mailing lists in any kind of detail are IESG policy documents:

http://www.ietf.org/IESG/STATEMENTS/mail-submit-policy.txt
http://www.ietf.org/IESG/STATEMENTS/moderated-lists.txt

Since the posting of the spamcontrol one (mail-submit-policy), the spam 
problem has grown significantly worse. So it should probably be updated.

And we've had calls for such policy-like things to be more reviewed by the 
community and permanently archived - which usually translates to "RFC 
publication".

It might be a good idea to think about a document or two in this space; I'm 
thinking of:

- IETF mailing list policy: what you should and should not do (BCP)

- IETF mailing list guidance: How to implement the policy using Mailman, 
Majordomo, xxx and yyyy (Info)

A good thing for someone to start writing.....?

---

From: Frank Solensky <[email-masked]>
Date: 18 Jun 2003 08:52:37 -0400

On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 07:52, [email-masked] wrote:
> posts that did not make it through to the main list...

The downside of this approach, though, is that one would lose the
context in which the discarded message was offered.  OTOH,..

>  If technically easily 
> moderator or denied by spam filter.

you'd want to differentiate between the two.

>  And having this archive for only past 

The spam, yes.  The other, I'm not so sure -- if someone's making a
charge of unfairness or whatnot, you need to keep that longer.