Xref: utzoo comp.sources.d:5173 news.sysadmin:2878 news.groups:19694 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!van-bc!ubc-cs!alberta!atha!aurora.AthabascaU.CA!lyndon From: lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,news.sysadmin,news.groups Subject: Re: Security, not obscurity --> unmoderated Message-ID: Date: 11 Apr 90 16:09:26 GMT References: <16900@well.sf.ca.us> <1990Mar29.055350.2922@Jhereg.Minnetech.MN.ORG> <1990Apr7.141218.1442@imax.uucp> <11054@hoptoad.uucp> Sender: news@cs.AthabascaU.CA Followup-To: news.sysadmin Organization: Athabasca University Lines: 35 In-reply-to: gnu@hoptoad.uucp's message of 8 Apr 90 20:49:22 GMT In article <11054@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes: [ lots of good arguments against moderation, but ... ] In summary, a mod group doesn't provide any benefit over an unmod group, and it provides an additional point of control which can and will be abused to provide obscurity rather than security. Your points are well taken, however I'm still not convinced that moderation is an Evil Thing. How many times have you seen Dire Warnings about the Evils of the emacs mailer interface posted to groups hither and yon ?? These are the sort of things that a moderator would keep out of the newsgroup. For the group to work, you have to maintain a high signal to noise ratio. Sysadmins will only pay attention if they know the quality of the postings are high. Given the nature of the postings, I would want to be pretty careful about installing a "new and improved" version of {su,passwd,ls,whatever} from joe_average_hacker@foo.baz. An experienced system administrator would know to look closely at the code before installing it, however the not so experienced system administrators (the people who this group would cater to) might not know to do the same (ie a bad case of blind trust). Therefore, there has to be some sort of filter for bogus postings. Moderation has the potential to be abused, but then again, so do most things in life. I prefer "innocent 'til proven guilty" and not the other way around. I guess the bset example of what I'm talking about is news.groups versus news.newgroups. Both talk about the same thing - which one do *you* read? -- Lyndon Nerenberg CF6BBM / Computing Services / Athabasca University {alberta,decwrl}!atha!lyndon || lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA