Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!att!chinet!patrick
From: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Obligations (Re: Freedom of hate)
Message-ID: <8176@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 9 Apr 89 10:01:14 GMT
References: <14130@gryphon.COM> <8132@chinet.chi.il.us> <8154@chinet.chi.il.us> <3763@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 69

In article <3763@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
  
>I have no problem with the rest of your message, but this paragraph seems
>to imply that every site on the net has the obligation to pass any message
>originating from a site upstream.
    
>I dispute that. No site other than uunet has entered into any legal agreement
>to provide a feed. No commercial site has any first-amendment obligation to
>pass objectionable messages.
    

There is no first amendment involved, so please do not bring it up. Certainly
in a case like uunet, where a contract has been entered, the news has to be
passed in both directions unmolested and intact.

But I say this applies to the voluntary arrangments between all sites. If
I say to you 'pick up the news from me every day' you have every right to
assume what I give you will be intact and the way I got it.

What you display on your local machine for your local users under your
immediate supervision is one thing. Cancel out anything or everything. Give
your users only what you want to give them, because after all, it is your
machine and your phone lines.

And likewise, what I display on my machine will be what I choose to display
or store where my users are concerned.

But what we pass between each other other, using the other's site as a 
gateway must be intact. Would you like writing a message, fully expecting
it to be seen everywhere only to have the first guy down the line who
polled you every day look at it and decide to zap yours and pass along the
rest?

If you are really, truly saying you feel it is perfectly okay to zap any
messages you personally don't like while passing the rest of it along, then
I sure would hate to be a site downstream from you, trusting you for a full
feed every day!

Do as you wish with the feed you offer your users, but don't you DARE tamper
with what is entrusted to you to pass to the backbone, or from the backbone
to some other site.

Do you presently poll other sites, or feed news to other sites now? I think
I will find out, and sent their sysadmins a note telling them you feel no
obligation to play with a full deck of cards when they hand you their
traffic every day.

Tell me this: do you at least have the courtesy to tell the sites on 
either side of you that you have zapped the stuff you did not want to pass
along, or do you just send it minus a message here and there and assume
with the heavy volume they won't know the difference?

I would really hate to be a site dependent on moving traffic through you.
How would I know any of it got anywhere, if you were on some kind of a
tangent the day a user on my site happened to post a message you took a
dislike to.

I think if you are presently feeding anyone you ought to resign, and ask
them to find a feed elsewhere considering your attitude about the system.

No one is telling you to allow stuff to stay in your machine you disagee
with, but how could you even think of screwing up someone else's traffic
in the process?  Shame on you.


-- 
Patrick Townson 
  patrick@chinet.chi.il.us / ptownson@bu-cs.bu.edu / US Mail: 60690-1570 
  FIDO: 115/743 / AT&T Mail: 529-6378 (!ptownson) /  MCI Mail: 222-4956