Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tekcrl!tekfdi!videovax!bart
From: bart@videovax.tv.Tek.com (Bart Massey)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Forwarding Cancels For Unreceived Articles (Re: Supersedes problems with rapid-fire articles)
Keywords: anecdotal, long
Message-ID: <5553@videovax.tv.Tek.com>
Date: 11 Sep 89 02:41:44 GMT
References: <5200@looking.on.ca> <66812@uunet.UU.NET> <1989Sep7.151826.11816@i88.isc.com> <3919@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Reply-To: bart@videovax.tv.tek.com (Bart Massey)
Organization: Tektronix TV Measurement Systems, Beaverton OR
Lines: 41

The reason that I, at least, am persuaded that cancels should be forwarded
whenever there is any doubt about whether the downstream site will receive
them is simple cost-benefit analysis.  Generally, cancel messages are only
sent when a poster has done something really stupid -- the consequences of
the cancel failing to reach some machines can be devastating, either
emotionally/psychologically or, as in the case described below, legally.
The cost of spreading extra cancel messages is very low -- they generally
are just a collection of headers, with a zero or one line body.  Given the
low cost and the high benefit of the redundancy obtained, IMHO there is only
one correct choice.  Note that, as earlier posters have pointed out, even if
every site were running the latest, most perfectly functional software (fat
chance :-), cancels might be dropped during transmission...

About 5 years ago, a person broke into the account of a Reed College
professor (who had chosen a truly lame password), and posted a demo version
of a copyrighted commercial Macintosh program with its copyright notice
altered to state that the program was "shareware" written by said professor,
for which he was charging $25.  As the sysadmin and asst. sysadmin were out
of town at the time (my first week on the job, but that's another story :-),
it fell to me to handle the situation.

Well, of course, by the time I found out about this, 2 days had passed
(Saturday and Sunday).  The first thing I did was send a cancel message
off.  The second was to post a note apologizing, asking people to remove any
copies they'd saved, etc.

Imagine my surprise when a number of people sent me flames of the form "why
the @#$% didn't you cancel the article??".  These were followed about a day
later by guru-level explanations of why cancelling the article only caught
(in this case) about 10% of the net -- since these explanations have been
given many times in this forum, I won't bother to repeat them.

As a result, the professor in question was threatened with legal action -- in
part because we had supposedly been somewhat negligent in taking remedial
action.  I, at least, am convinced that we would have experienced much less
hassle if everyone had propagated cancels regardless of whether they
received the article first...

					Bart Massey
					..tektronix!videovax.tv.tek.com!bart
					..tektronix!reed.bitnet!bart