sandip uncle, i just saw this on the faq of gmane. it lists a few problems with gmane.
i hope this does not open a khan of worms on security, privacy, i-told-you-so, and other blah blah. LL *** Spam The first major problem is spam. I hate spam. You hate spam. We all hate spam. I get something like 100-200 spam/virus mail messages per day. Many people have stopped publishing their real mail addresses on the web, and on Usenet newsgroups. But on mailing lists, they have to identify themselves. If they don't, they aren't allowed to subscribe to the lists. Gmane makes it much easier for spam harvesters to gather these real, authentic mail addresses. Even though the Gmane web interface to the news spool obfuscates all addresses, a spam harvesting bot just has to point itself to the news interface to slurp down the entire spool. And there's not much I can do to stop that from happening. I have implemented a scheme for rewriting addresses in a manner that would make it difficult for address harvesters to use the addresses. In short, it rewrites the address [EMAIL PROTECTED] to be [EMAIL PROTECTED], and then TMDA is used to provide a challenge/response thing before forwarding any mail messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] See gmane.discuss for a more in-depth discussion on this issue. The idea is that mailing list administrators will themselves be able to say whether the Gmane group of that list should use address obfuscation or not. Each individual user will also be able to say so using a special header. Privacy The second major problem is the loss of privacy, and is a bit more difficult to program around. All the mailing lists archived in Gmane are open mailing lists. The subscription commands sent out by Gmane clearly identifies Gmane as a mail-to-news gateway, and any administrator running a closed mailing list should be able to refuse Gmane entry. Perhaps the subscription message should be made even more explicit, somehow. Still, even open mailing lists are somewhat less public than, say, a Usenet newsgroup. The assumption on (some) mailing lists is that whatever happens on the list will only be read by the other (few hundred) participants, and won't be archived anywhere. It's one step up from IRC. Pushing something that is somewhat public, but somewhat private, into the entirely public sphere is inherently problematic. Some people on these somewhat-private lists who learn about Gmane get a bit miffed. During Gmane's first six months, there's been about one request for list removals per month. What almost all of these have in common is that they are chat-oriented lists, and not technical lists. Of course, any request for removal is acted upon at once. All the requests were without incident, except one, which basically asked (among all the invective and not-so-veiled threats) -- what right do I have to do this? Rights When Digital started Altavista back in the mid-90s, the same questions were raised. People had been putting stuff on their web pages, and not thinking too much about what they were putting out there. Then came Altavista which made it trivial to type in the name of anybody and getting a whole heap of information on that person back. Some people were horrified. They wrote not very nice messages to Altavista and basically asked (among all the invective and not-so-veiled threats) -- what right did they have to do this? Information that is published is published. It's as simple as that. Web spiders settled on using a robots.txt file to specify whether something was not supposed to be indexed. DejaNews settled on using X-No-Archive to say whether something wasn't supposed to be archived. Gmane does the same. ? LL _______________________________________________ ilugd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
