Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!agate!garnet!weemba
From: weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Forgery Funnies
Message-ID: <8254@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 2 Apr 88 10:06:49 GMT
References: <9l7O@ingrate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5121@ihlpg.ATT.COM>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student)
Organization: Brahms Gang Posting Central
Lines: 72
In-reply-to: apeed@ihlpg.ATT.COM (Andrew B. Peed)


I hate to spoil the fun, but news.sysadmin is supposed to be boring.

In article <5121@ihlpg.ATT.COM>, apeed@ihlpg (Andrew B. Peed) writes:
>In article <9l7O@ingrate.BERKELEY.EDU>,
>            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

>> |Message-Id: <738O@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>

>> This one is a fake message-ID.
>  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

>> ucbvax!garnet!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720
>>     "Take 2*3*5*7*11*13.  It's divisible by 59." --Matt Crawford

>	Okay, folks. Look at the things which are "highlighted". Do the first
>two look similar? I am not an expert on the use of Netnews, and certainly not
>on the techniques of forgery, but it looks VERRRRY suspect to me.

Item #1: There really were two attempts to post forgeries in my name to
         comp.sources.unix.  If you don't believe me, you can check with
         Richard Salz, who forwarded them back to me--he thought it was
         real at first!--and Erik Fair, whom I asked about the headers
         long ago, who also thought I was pulling his leg at first.

Item #2: Except for the differing headers, the article was the same both
         times--namely the stuff that was |-quoted.  I didn't make that up.

Item #3: The reply to the |-material was my own stuff, and the phoney
         headers to the posted ARTICLE, etc, was all my stuff.  If I
         can't laugh at myself, I have no right to laugh at anyone else.

Item #4: Matt Crawford knows, from e-mail, about my adoption of the above
         signature quotation; I hadn't used it in public before, although
         a CC recipient did.  You may or may not have noticed (alt.flame)
         that Matt returned the favor and reminded everyone of a "gaffe"
         of my own.

>	I assume that it's partially because of idiocy like this that AT&T
>management is going on the warpath against Netnews.

Sadly, the idiocy seems to be from AT&T's own people.  I'm sure the forger
is just soooooo proud of his cleverness now.

>						     Much as I enjoy Netnews-
>both the technical and entertainment aspects- I can't blame them. This sort of
>thing wears REAL thin after a while.

The April Fools' stuff I don't mind.  It happens every year, and is usually
quite good.  Rather humorously, in another article, you didn't notice that
the Spafford warning about phoney messages was *itself* a forgery.  (Also,
the Message-ID was Avogadro's number, not Planck's constant.  SHeesh.)

I thought I'd perhaps pre-empt a bit with a double-level April Fools' of my
own.  I've posted several articles, in fact, that I wanted people to *THINK*
were phoney, but were actually genuine.  In talk.philosophy.misc, there was
the quotation from the incredibly obscure but genuine "Journal for the Philo-
sophy of Sport", and in rec.arts.sf-lovers the amazing revelation about the
real James Tiptree, Jr, although as expected, others read and posted the same
news story too.

Plus if anyone, say at ihnp4, wants to make sense out of the headers from
the comp.sources.unix forgeries, they can do so.  I don't really care; you're
right about it wearing thin.

>(I will give him/her/it credit for supplying the Followup: line correctly,
> however. Had to go 'round my elbow to get to my a** just to post this to
> news.sysadmin....)

You're welcome.  I try to think about where my articles are going.  I'm
sorry to hear that your software causes so much trouble--may I recommend
you try Gnews 1.4?

ucbvax!garnet!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720