From owner-freebsd-isp Thu Apr 17 14:04:27 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id OAA05501 for isp-outgoing; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 14:04:27 -0700 (PDT) Received: from house.multinet.net (house.multinet.net [204.138.173.37]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id OAA05489 for ; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 14:04:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from graydon@localhost) by house.multinet.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) id RAA13660; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 17:04:04 -0400 Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 17:04:03 -0400 (EDT) From: "Graydon Hoare ()" To: Michael Dillon cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: News... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Thu, 17 Apr 1997, Michael Dillon wrote: > Rira bien qui rira le dernier > MPPS"$Q//$P?##,D#Q0P'PA,&!Q(3`A$"$P,.`@[#$Q(3#Q,/PQ(#`@,"!P," Yet surely you know that, with a couple hours programming, I can make an 'encoder' which chooses the 65,536 most popular (small) sentences from usenet and uses them as an 'alphabet' with which to XXencode binaries. They'd be a little bigger, but then, base64 is a little bigger than binary too. And any scanner/parser would then be faced with having to read a great deal of the traffic and do extensive analysis. > This is readily discernible by both humans and by automated programs. if the encoding is well-marked, this is true. It all comes down to whether the time taken to cull is less than the time taken in the long run to accept the file and serve it. I imagine with today's traffic it is highly advantageous to cull XXencodings, but this will not always be the case. > I think it can happen. I agree. I think the best method for implementing a saner usenet is to dump the alt. hierarchy and flesh out the others, and make comprehensible rulesets for postings that servers can enforce (i.e. no more than X from a person in a day, no more than X in a single posting -- would help with spammers too) -graydon