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Date:      Thu, 17 Apr 1997 18:19:35 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>
To:        freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: News... 
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.3.93.970417181224.26558G-100000@sidhe.memra.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.970417164915.13573A-100000@house.multinet.net>

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On Thu, 17 Apr 1997, Graydon Hoare () wrote:

> 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.

If it is not easy for people or their newsreaders to recognize a binary
posting then this would only be of academic interest because very few
people would ever bother to post such messages. And the net effect would
be the same as

find / -print |xargs cat -tv |post-em-all

where post-em-all splits the stream into short pieces and spews it into an
NNTP server.

> > 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)

alt.* has a lot of useful stuff in it. For instance alt.conspiracy makes
great entertainment. But I think you are right that the trend is to more
formal management of Internet services and maybe we should be moving
towards a formal structure for managing USENET. Most of this is already
in place, it just isn't formalized in some sort of international
organization. However, this would not happen quickly. I think it would
take at least two years of public discussions to hash out the details.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com




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