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From: john@chalmers.UUCP (John Hughes)
Newsgroups: net.news.stargate
Subject: Monitoring net.sources is impossible
Message-ID: <219@chalmers.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 5-Feb-85 21:51:36 EST
Article-I.D.: chalmers.219
Posted: Tue Feb  5 21:51:36 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 6-Feb-85 02:13:11 EST
Organization: Dept. of CS, Chalmers, Sweden
Lines: 16

There's a potential problem in monitoring newsgroups such as net.sources
that I haven't seen pointed out. First, a question:

If a program transmitted via Stargate prints an obscene or libellous
message when it is run (or perhaps just on a particular date), is the
carrier/monitor/whoever legally liable?

If so, I can't see any way of preventing this happening short of not
transmitting programs. Reading a 500K program just to check there's
nothing libellous in the COMMENTS would be bad enough. I doubt if a
monitor would notice an obscene message disguised by as simple a
subterfuge as writing the ASCII codes instead of a character string, and
we can all think of far, far more obscure disguises than that. I don't
believe there's any way to detect such things before the evil deed is done.

John Hughes, Chalmers University, Gothenburg.	john%chalmers%ykxa@ucl-cs