Text 25960, 78 rader
Skriven 2006-02-26 23:44:02 av Dale Shipp (1:261/1466.0)
  Kommentar till text 25947 av Michiel Van Der Vlist (2:280/5555)
Ärende: Re: Elist mergers
=========================
 -=> On 02-26-06  17:30,  Michiel Van Der Vlist <=-
 -=> spoke to Dale Shipp about Elist mergers <=-

 >   It is annoying behavior by definition of P4, section 2.1.4. unless all
 >   links in the chain have given express permission.
 
 >   The two reasons that I can think of it being annoying are
 > that
 
 >   a. the sysop who the mail is passing through cannot verify
 > (if need be) that the mail does not contain illegal or commercial
 > traffic. That is the reason given by P4.

 MVDV> A bogus argument.

   Tell that to the author's of P4 and to those who are charged with
   enforcing it.  In some sections, it would seem to be putting a burden
   onto the sysop to not participate in the transmission of illegal or
   commercial activities.  In other places, it would seem that the sysop
   is only liable to fidonet if such mail originates on their system,
   i.e. from a user, point or gateway.

 MVDV> The sysop has no need to verify hat other than for
 MVDV> satisfying his own curiousity. In fact a common legal 
 MVDV> opinion holds that you can not be accountable for what you 
 MVDV> do not know, but if you DO check, you better make sure you 
 MVDV> miss nothing, or else you can be held accountable for 
 MVDV> missing it. And since there is no way to guarantee you miss 
 MVDV> nothing, it is safe not to attempt to check at all. By this 
 MVDV> reasoning one should one should refuse to route all mail 
 MVDV> /unless/ it is encrypted.
 
   I've heard that argument applied to ISPs.  It has merit.

  >   b. Encryption methods may well expand the message considerably.

 MVDV> Another bogus argument.

   Expansion from 8 characters to 1000+ is not trivial.
 
 > For example, to send an 8 character password encrypted using
 > a PGP public key of the receiver, one would need to send more
 > than 1000 characters.

 MVDV> PGP has build in compression. For very short messages, the overhead
 MVDV> makes the  encrypted version longer than the original. For longer 
 MVDV> messages it actually gets shorter because the compression 
 MVDV> take the upper hand. I tested this out many years ago for 
 MVDV> messages ranging from less than 1 100 bytes to messages of 
 MVDV> hundreds of kilobytes. If I remember correctly for PGP 2.6 
 MVDV> the turnover point was around 600 to 700 bytes and for very 
 MVDV> long messages their was some 30% gain.

  Reason for that is that there is a fixed overhead based on the number
  of recipients (which is a reason that PGP does not scale well to
  messages sent to a large number of recipients).   As you say, you gain
  on message length (at least for the typical fidonet message) as a
  result of the compression.  Eventually, with long messages that
  compression overtakes the fixed overhead.

  In normal fido traffic you get that savings by the usual compression
  done.  Compression algorithms applied *after* encryption will not
  compress because of the random looking nature of the enciphered
  message.  PGP (and some other encipherment programs) compensate for
  that by compressing before encryption.
 
  Have you gotten any of my netmails yet?

                               Dale Shipp
                  fido_261_1466 (at) comcast (dot) net
                              (1:261/1466)


... Shipwrecked on Hesperus in Columbia, Maryland. 22:47:33, 26 Feb 2006
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