Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!hellgate.utah.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!bfmny0!tneff From: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Undigestifiers Considered Harmful Message-ID: <15037@bfmny0.UU.NET> Date: 28 Dec 89 02:28:51 GMT Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) Lines: 39 Chip Rosenthal recently posted an 'undigestifier' to comp.sources.misc: it takes 'digest' articles (e.g., mail list gateway digests) and breaks them up into individual news articles for feeding to 'inews -h'. There have been other such posted in the past, also. I know Chip means well, and that under appropriately rigid control this can be a useful tool. But the overall effect on the net is pernicious, because *DISTRIBUTION* of the broken-up digest articles is left up to the discretion of each undigestifying site. Unless distribution is forced 'local', the effect of running an undigestifier on a core Usenet newsgroup article in digest format is to inflict a maze of twisty little reposts, all alike, on the rest of the net. All of the Message ID's will be new, so the history file check in B/C news will be of no avail in weeding out the clones. Depending on the time lag of the digest, the MIRV'd articles may disappear during the nightly expire, but probably not before being passed along to neighboring sites. For a given digest, there will be as many MIRV events as there are unprotected undigestifiers running. Given the size of Usenet this could be awesome should programs like Chip's attain widespread popularity. Unprotected undigestifiers could easily lurk for some time on sites where digest articles are not normally seen in most groups received. A 'stray digest' months later could spawn hundreds of unwanted articles. Lest folks suspect I'm being unrealistically alarmist here, exactly this happened in rec.photo a few weeks ago. Someone posted a digest they'd been saving on 3D cameras, and >BOOM