Re: Stand up and be counted

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Wolfgang Bechstein  on Thu,
31 Oct 2002 07:50:39 +1100


> I'd like to
> belatedly cast a minority vote in favor of changing the list settings so
> that only members can post, and no attachments of any sort are allowed.
> This is easy to accomplish and will keep out a lot of noise while
> sacrificing nothing in terms of usefulness. XPL programs can still be
> distributed using the "in-message" format developed (I think) by Carl,
> and other programs shouldn't be distributed anyway, at least not to the
> list in toto.

A "lot" of noise? "No attachments"? At times, it does make sense to
distribute small files to the whole list. There's really very little attaching
here anyway. Simpler rules are: just be careful, even with attachments from
"trusted sources"; and don't use Outlook. And have some external service probe
your ports (do a port scan) from time to time, to see what might be open to
malicious entry (http://www.dslreports.com/scan is fairly fast and effective).

There are actually a bunch of "in-message" formats (encoders/decoders), all
contained in U2, the main ones being Quoted-Printable and Base64 (XyWrite-ized
by Carl), UU/XX (XyWrite-ized by me, and labeled the "Moronic Utilities"
because UU/XX coding is such a supremely silly thing to try to accomplish using
XPL), and the more-or-less "raw code legible" format we commonly use in Email
msgs, XPLeNCODE/XPLDeCODE (invented by me).

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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