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From: kre@cs.mu.oz.au (Robert Elz)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: "fascist" option (or posting security)
Message-ID: <kre.673167648@mundamutti.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Date: 2 May 91 07:00:48 GMT
References: <1991Apr26.070028.705000@zeus.calpoly.edu> <17196@celit.fps.com> <1991May1.124919.8706@ohm.york.ac.uk> <1991May1.211353.346@zoo.toronto.edu>
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henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

>However, you need to be careful to guard against
>several other back doors.

For what most people seem to want FASCIST for (never used it myself)
I doubt that that matters - anyone able to get around it, and actually
willing to go to the trouble, probably isn't who you really want to
stop (stopping the real bastards is better done with vipw (or similar)).

Rather, the idea is to deflect the noise from the newcomers, who accidentally
type 'f', then various combinations of 'ZZ' ':wq' ... in an attempt to
escape from what they've done, and then post the result.

Its not easy to detect this automatically (by looking at the contents of
the article), but if you're able to simply prevent postings from anyone
who hasn't convinced you that they know how to use an editor, etc, then
you'll be a long way towards keeping you local part of uesnet clean.
Anyone able to "cat file | uux - utzoo!rnews" obviously knows what
they're doing enough to be able to post news (and clearly isn't just
making an innocent typo).

kre