Motion for a new POST NSF AUP

Mon Oct 16 16:49:53 UTC 1995

    I support the notion of a non-binding AUP, on the grounds that it
    wouldn't be _that_ much work to do, but would give us (Internet
    denizens) something to point to when our respective governments give
    us the "clean up your act before we do it for you" number again.
    
    I don't expect such a non-binding AUP to have any short-term or
    dramatic effect on end-user behaviour, however.
    
    Thus, I also support the idea of PGP/listserv and PGP/news-server
    integration. At present, I can allow or disallow posting on our news
    servers by IP address or range, and by FQDN or domain name.  I think
    it might be useful to allow PGP-authenticated validated users to post
    from any location or host.    The creation of a user-list based
    permissions scheme would also clear the way for automatic invalidation
    of individual users who post to too many newsgroups within too short a
    period of time, a la deactivating user accounts after too many
    successive failed logins.  I disagree with the proposition that this
    would place too great a burden on servers...  authentication need be
    done only at the time the posting is introduced into the Usenet system
    or onto the listserv...  If someone wants to go to the trouble of
    spoofing a whole listserv, perhaps that should be recognized as a
    whole we don't feel like dealing with in an initial implementation...
    News servers obviously support a limited number of inter-server
    connections, which could be easily validated themselves, so they're a
    more easily closed system.
  
                         -Bill Woodcock

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bill woodcock  woody at zocalo.net  woody at applelink.apple.com  user at host.domain.com