ietf-nntp BCP for RFC977 server/RFC1036 interaction

[Evan Champion]

On Wed, 18 Dec 1996, Rich Salz wrote:

> Really?  Please tell me how you would handle Brad not wanting to send "bad"
> jokes to UWaterloo.  Please promise me that something like this will never
> happen again.  Please tell me why I, as a user, can't put "!synapse" so
> that you never see my postings.

I'd put the question the other way around -- if UWaterloo doesn't want bad
jokes, it shouldn't accept them, rather than someone hacking the path so
that they not receive them.  What happens when more than UWaterloo decides
that they don't want to see the postings?  Are you going to add them all
to the path? 

If I didn't want to see you're postings, you'd be in my killfile.  And if 
I didn't want to see anything on my server from you, I'd use the new 1.5 
filters, or if I didn't have 1.5, I would roll my own local cancel 
program, and junk your posts from my spool.

> It would also require the gateway to know, e.g., about the moderated
> status of anything it gateways.

Hum, that's true.  Well, you could allow postings from localhost 
through.  Again, that's something that could be site configurable.  It is 
something that only a handful of people are going to want, and I am more 
interested with what should be done on 99% of the hosts rather than the 
remaining 1% (actually, I suspect that in this case it is _much_ less 
than 1%).
 
> If I bang-on the IP address of the client then this is not necessary,
> in fact it is unduly restrictive.

I still don't understand why anyone would want to forge the path to make
sure an article doesn't get to a particular site.  If the best reason is
that UWaterloo doesn't want bad jokes, that really doesn't do anything for
me.  90% of my newsfeed is garbage, and at least based on volume, half of
it is probably illegal in Canada.  Adding another site's worth of garbage
posts is like a grain of salt in the ocean. 

Evan
--
Evan Champion            * Director, Network Operations
mailto:evanc at synapse.net * Directeur, Exploitation du reseau
http://www.synapse.net/  * Synapse Internet