Jeff Waugh wrote: > <quote who="SLUG feeding spam to the world"> > >>Google groups can obviously do it. If gmane.org and others can not, then >>we should stop their access. > > > Gmane does the right thing, as stated elsewhere in the thread.
Well, obviously they need new glasses much more than I do. NNTP clearly feeds addresses. HTTP allows the addresses to be quickly reconstituted by a simple text sunstitution. Apparently aware people seem to make the same mistake and believe that all spammers are unskilled script kiddies. The worst spammers I've met were skilled computer people. > But Terry, > remember that anyone can subscribe to SLUG (no, we should definitely not > moderate subscription requests), and what they do with the mail is up to > them. I disagree about moderation. If you look around, you will see that the FOSS/OSS/???/linux/*nix communities are covered in layers of licences. We need to require people to sign up to an ethical/whatever statement as to what they will do with content/addresses. All laws have limitations, but no one has ever demonstrated that having no law was better. As, it is not just a matter of what the law says now, but what the law could reasonably say in the future. It is also about that much abused term "community". Just what sort of community do you want the Slug community to be? > * Create a full or partial public archive of the mailing list, Then we should require people not to redistribute email addresses. SLUG does it for their web pages, Google manages. Why can we not ask/demand that other people/places do so? > but the 'net has changed our perception and use of copyright, > in large part for the better. It is not about copyright. It is not about spam on the slug list. Nor is it about the knowledge base. It is basically that SLUG could do be doing something more. > So who are we to complain? We can always > politely ask that those archives be removed (particularly if they don't > obfuscate email addresses, or if they attach advertising, etc). Yes. We can also take action to stop future feeds. Even if I have farted around doing other projects first, even I recognised that my email addresses on my web pages needed changing. Slug recognised in 2002 (?) that it wasn't a good idea to post peoples email addresses on their web pages, but we dropped the ball on requiring other peoples to do so. It is time to pick up that ball. > > If you find specific abuses of SLUG mailing list content, then I'd encourage > you to let the committee (or the whole community) know about it, such that > it can be dealt with. But this paranoia and reckless lashing out isn't going > to help anyone. You're coming across as a bit of a kook. Care! Shrug Not. OTOH, all I am hearing from is the usual football hooligans of the Slug Community. "Oh look, I have a bigger willy because I beat my self over the head with XXXXX spam messages a day. WTF is wrong with you wimp!". > The 'net is wild. SLUG can't fix all of it. Yelling ever louder won't help. But SLUG can get off its arse and do its/it's share. It can start with even small actions 1) Warn people that when they suscribe that their posts are redistributed. 2) Require people to agree to a set of conditions of use when they confirm their subscription. 3) Apply similar conditions on other feeds of SLUG material. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
