Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 14:04:39 -0700 (PDT) From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Binaries in Usenet (was: News...) Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.93.970420135811.10900L-100000@sidhe.memra.com> In-Reply-To: <199704202011.NAA23909@kirk.edmweb.com>
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On Sun, 20 Apr 1997, Steve wrote: > IANAL, but I don't think zapping binaries in newsgroups provides a > great deal of legal protection. You have to deal with newsgroups, > email, Squid cache, etc... Email is already protected legally. In the USA there is a specific law, the ECPA that protects the privacy of email and requires the ISP to deliver it without looking at it. In Canada, the government recently confirmed that the regular laws apply to the Internet and special legislation is not needed. This would mean that ISP's fall under the same rules as the postal service, i.e. we cannot look at email contents and must deliver it to the customer. Only a court order can change that and ISP's like the post office, are not liable for content. Stuff in a Squid proxy cache is the same as stuff that is in transit and may be buffered in any number of places. The Squid cache is just a buffer and neither the ISP nor the user can detect when a page comes from the cache and when it is retrieved directly from a web server. But USENET is very different, and IMHO it makes the ISP very vulnerable. Now that OCAF is educating the police about how things really work, USENET is becoming a dangerous thing to have on your servers. However, if you remove all binaries no matter where they are posted, then you stand a much better chance in front of the law, IMHO. 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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