Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Decrypting the P&W Digest Etc.
Message-ID: <2021@looking.UUCP>
Date: 11 Sep 88 19:32:54 GMT
References: <13971@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <2015@looking.UUCP> <14105@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 36

Keep the history of the rot13 concept in mind.  (And it is encryption,
or enciphering if you prefer.)

Rot13 is only partially there to protect the reader.  It is largely there
to protect the poster, and the net.  It originated when a secretary, so
the story goes, started reading net.jokes.q (questionable) and got offended,
and things hit the fan.  Newsfeeds were pulled.

I want rot13 to be explicit, because if you took an explicit extra step to read
the article, I feel you have no right (certainly less right) to complain about
the nature of the joke.  Of course, I still get complaints, and they all get
my form reply, but I hope they are reduced.

If auto-decrypt is the default, then the whole point is defeated, as Mr.
Smith agrees.  But what if the user has to deliberately configure auto-decrypt?

This is still not acceptable.  Consider rec.humor where rot13 means nothing,
because the rot13 decision is taken by hundreds of different posters, with
no standards.  We get people who rot13 jokes because they contain the word
"damn" or because they're "offensive to Republicans."  You can't tell
these from the ones that are racist or entries in the "most disgusting joke"
contest.

I believe for rot13 to be useful that it has to be consistent.  Because I'm
the only one who makes the rotation decision in my group, it's more consistent
than rec.humor, but not consistent enough.  It depends of the submissions
I am getting.  Say I get several weeks of relatively tame submissions.
This will lead a newcomer to try auto-decrypt, if it's easy to do.
And again the purpose is defeated.

And sure, perhaps at first it's 30 lines of emacs-lisp.  But soon it's an
example in the manual, and later it's just source including a file.

Sorry.  Flame away.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473