From the gmane site:
"..what's published is published..."
When you publish something, you have the lawful right to control its
distribution and use.. not absolutely, but for instance if you publish an
article in a magazine, you have the right to control whether or not it is
reprinted, or published in a different magazine or newspaper.
It's a bad attitude. It's an attitude that relies on the fact that what is
being usurped has little enough value on a per-item basis, that the effort
for individuals to object is prohibitive. It's the converse of spam.
"..AltaVista.."
When DEC originally wrote AltaVista, it was a showcase for the power of the
Alpha chip. That it got used and became popular was a side effect...
probably not entirely welcomed, and not entirely by malcontents (without
AltaVista I never would have found NOSC's Planet Earth.. one of my favorite
sites at the time).
As more resources get devoted to fighting spam, and as more people get
tools for dealing with it, the effect of spam will ultimately decrease.
Sure, Google, WebCrawler, Altavista, Deja, Archive.Org, etc are "useful".
Printing your own money is "useful", too. Somewhere there is indeed some
balance (I personally don't object to search engines which are open to the
public, refer the user to the original pages, and provide query
information.. I even link to Google from a few pages... I *like* Google,
and since I use them, I consider their listing of my content as
consideration for services rendered), but I think that balance has yet to
be found.
When a service like gmane "subscribes", it is not an individual
subscribing, but a usurpation of control over subscription. People running
mailing lists will start to apply countermeasures (for example obfuscating
identities, possibly with out of band techniques to the extent that copies
of posts "in the wild" can be tracked to individual subscribers)... when
the need to do so is felt acutely enough. Ultimately the same thing will
happen with even web pages, and more people will start running robot traps
and the like. Should be fun; I'll probably try it myself one of these days
when I get motivated enough to run my own "full-on" public server.
Eventually, people offering a new "service" will grok that they have to ask
permission; but it will take a while.
I pretty much gave up on usenet a long time ago. Not entirely, but for the
most part. I don't know if that's really because the content has changed
(it certainly has, considered in its entirety), as that I don't have as
much interest as I used to in topics of general enough interest to support
active newsgroups. Ironically, part of it is that I don't seem to be able
to get the same quality of newsfeed any more... yet another reason to quit
leeching and run my own server.
Meanwhile it's just another lesson that "..what's published is
published..." and may be usurped, rehashed, quoted out of context, forged,
plagiarized, or stashed away by man||dog for purposes unknown or unintended
at the time of publication.
I can't decide whether this is off-topic or not. Procmail is, primarily, a
tool for content management. So in that greater context, no, I don't think
it is off-topic. Does it directly concern procmail? No. For the procmail
list itself, there is a policy question: is subscription supposed to be by
individuals, and is relaying or other en masse subscription welcomed,
tolerated, or discouraged? It's not a question which needs to be answered
today IMO, but it is a question every list maintainer probably needs to
ponder. I periodically evaluate whether I need to be subscribed to any
particular list. I don't find myself providing that much in the way of
useful input here, and if I can get it from gmane, maybe I'll just
unsubscribe: view it as an indicator of success, that procmail has become
mainstream enough that de facto it now has its own newsgroup. It's not like
I can't (or won't, or don't) e-mail somebody directly if I feel the need to
(or vice-versa).
Well I'd like to thank the original poster for the "heads up". That's all.
--
Fred Morris
m3047(_at_)inwa(_dot_)net
_______________________________________________
procmail mailing list
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail