Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: inews
Message-ID: <1991Mar8.182124.15370@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1991 18:21:24 GMT
References: <00668200458@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <00668200458@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM> elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM (Eric Lee Green) writes:
>The real killer will be "inews". My code is currently just whipping up the
>appropriate headers and tacking them onto my postings. It does none of
>the fancy censorship etc. stuff of Unix "inews". Before I release my code
>to the public, I'm going to have to do something about that. Not that it
>really matters -- since the Amiga has no protection mechanisms...

It still matters.  Even on Unix it is fairly trivial to forge news.  The
point of inews's various bits of censorship is to keep stupidities from
being propagated *accidentally*, either by out-and-out error or by naive
users who simply don't know any better, and in general to deal with problems
in a user-friendly way.  (For an example of the latter, relaynews simply
discards unapproved articles in moderated groups, while inews deals with
the situation intelligently.)  It's a user interface, not a protection
system, and user interface is important.
-- 
"But this *is* the simplified version   | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
for the general public."     -S. Harris |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry