From owner-freebsd-isp Thu Apr 17 18:24:47 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA22338 for isp-outgoing; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 18:24:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pinky.junction.net (pinky.junction.net [199.166.227.12]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id SAA22327 for ; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 18:24:40 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sidhe.memra.com (sidhe.memra.com [199.166.227.105]) by pinky.junction.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id SAA11228 for ; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 18:24:39 -0700 Received: from localhost (michael@localhost) by sidhe.memra.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id SAA11226 for ; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 18:19:36 -0700 Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 18:19:35 -0700 (PDT) From: Michael Dillon To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: News... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Organization: Memra Software Inc. - Internet consulting 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, 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