On Sat, 6 May 2006 14:20:11 +0000, Iitoi wrote:

Following thoughtful article seen on another medium.....

Amateur Radio Newsgroups: Total Meltdown
Paul W. Schleck (K3FU) on April 26, 2006


Way back in 1972, before there was a World-Wide Web, even before there
[snip]

This is a very predictable post from the indivdual involved. It also
pretty much ignores the details about how Usenet moderated groups have
traditionally worked.

First mistake: It is for all practical purposes not feasible to turn
an unmoderated news group into one which is moderated. Instead, you
need to create a new, moderated news group such as
rec.radio.amateur.policy.moderated. You have to hope that the news
servers which receive the control message which creates the moderated
group process the message properly. Many news server admins simply
think that moderated groups really don't work well, and they ignore
such messages.

That's because moderated Usenet groups have mostly been a failure.

Why? It was trivial to spoof the standard moderated groups in the
past by supplying your own Approved header. Right up through the
middle 1990's, people who understood the basics of Usenet could easily
post to any moderated news group, completely bypassing the moderator's
control. I know: I used to post to a couple of moderated news groups
by supplying the header "Approved: of course" and the posts would
appear in spite of any moderator (c.f. alt.2600.moderated).

After the advent of asymmetric key authentication (such as that used by
SSL/TLS or GPG), there was an attempt to harden moderation by
requiring that approvals be cryptographicaly signed by the moderator.

Similar requirements were put on cancel and rmgroup control messages.

Unfortunately, neither approach really worked. The Usenet server
admins weren't particularly interested in adding crypto capability to
their servers, and the method foundered. Even now, if you take a look
at control.cancel, you'll see that most cancel messages do not use any
kind of public/private key authentication. They are mostly in the
original format first used by Usenet back in the 1980s.

Mr. Schleck, in spite of his claims to a long tenure on Usenet, seems
to misunderstand its technical details. He also wants to deal with
problem news groups by asserting control over them so that people "do
it his way."

And that completely ignores decades of Usenet history.

For decades, Usenet readers have been admonished to take
responsibility for cleaning up news groups into their own hands. Such
responsibility is carried out by means of local filters (a kill file
in the old terminology). If you don't like what you see, drop the
poster or his whole domain into a kill file and be forever done with
him.

I've been successfully killing 99% of the junk posts in rrap/m while
allowing the useful posts to get through. It isn't rocket science; it
doesn't require moderation, but it DOES require the kind of technical
ability that hams supposedly possess.

Go out and download the free Xnews or slrn news readers (the latter runs
on all popular OSes) and learn how to get rid of the junk posts
instead of expecting someone else like a moderator to do it for you.

Don't let the control freaks like Schleck attempt to have their way
(BTW, he's in my kill file and has been there for years). Make a
serious effort to take responsibility for what you read yourself.