Newsgroups: tor.news
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Munged article in tor.news.stats
Message-ID: <1989Apr19.052915.6467@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Apr18.063300.2852@tmszfI.uucp> <1660@dciem.dciem.dnd.ca>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 89 05:29:15 GMT

In article <1660@dciem.dciem.dnd.ca> tim@dretor.dciem.dnd.ca (Tim Pointing) writes:
>... If the problem didn't happen
>during transmission, how did utzoo have the right line count (or does that
>number just stay with the file, regardles of what the file actually look like)?

The number just stays with the file; it's put in by the originator.
(C News does not even deign to notice it, as we consider it useless.)

Utzoo has both a clean copy (which came tmsoft-dptcdc-utzoo) and a dirty
one (???-attnts-attcan-lsuc-utzoo).  It looks to me like a compressed
file got mangled somewhere along the line -- there are consistent bits
of corruption that suggest decompression after mangling.

Moreover, there's a fragment of another article appended, and the
main one has both "Path" and "Pdth" lines.  Both the Pdth line and
the fragment's Path line have "adtcan" at the front.  Looks to me like
it got mangled between attcan and attnts, and then came back out to
the world through attcan.  (The damage managed to mangle both the
message ID and the "Path" header, disabling both of the loop-breaking
mechanisms in news.)
-- 
Welcome to Mars!  Your         |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
passport and visa, comrade?    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu