Re: [Dshield] Message posting formatting request

[Kenneth Coney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]

Total agreement.  Some people just hit reply and send the entire digest 
(although I haven't seen to much of that lately) with their two line reply 
at the end of it instead of just what/who they are replying to.  Others 
attach the last 6 days to the thread as if no one has seen it before and 
there is no way of looking it up.  Wireless or not it gets aggravating when 
three or four previous posts in the string are just packet intercepts. 
Scroll, scroll, scroll and at last "I agree."  While on the subject, why 
put a signature on a public post?  How paranoid is that?  How meaningless 
is that?  Why waste the bandwidth?

While on the subject (rant beginning), although recognized by public law 
electronic signatures are mostly worthless as a verification.  I got one 
once out of curiosity.  The online application asked me to provide my 
passport #, but didn't say which passport, nor did it ask what year the 
passport was issued, nor even by what country.  :)  Lots of threatening 
legal language for a false answer.  No verification whatsoever occurred on 
my entry involving an unusual passport.  Instead the certificate was 
transmitted as soon as the application was transmitted.  I could have said 
I was anyone and entered what ever data I wanted.  The certificate was 
transportable to a disk so I swapped PCs and used it till I got bored with 
the worthless thing and it expired.  QUID numbers (for those who count on 
them) can be faked.  (This PC has several, depending on who is asking.) 
That these signature things are used to arrange mortgages and the like is 
really scary.  I could have said I was you, the reader, and gotten the 
signature certificate.  If I knew your address and your DOB/SSN I could 
have put that down too.  I would have gotten the certificate and I could 
contact Quicken, Freedom Loans or whoever and arranged an equity loan on 
your home, sight unseen with the money going to the bank of my choice.  An 
independent contractor is hired to close the loan.  He calls the phone 
number supplied by the loan applicant and meets at a place picked by the 
loan applicant and checks a driver's license (we all know how easy they are 
to get, in any name desired) and the transaction occurs and the check 
arrives.  We almost deserve whatever happens to us because we are so wide 
open.


Subject: [Dshield] Message posting formatting request
From: Neil Richardson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 22:40:00 -0700
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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/me steps up to the microphone: "Um....hi.

First, my biases: I'm a relatively infrequent contributor to this
list.  And I'm not employed as a sysadmin (I only manage my home
machines), so I can only imagine how busy the majority of you guys
are.  I know you're doing a blameful / thankless job, with minimal
resources and orders of magnitude less time to do things than you're
allocated.  Please don't think I'm forgetting any of that with what
I'm about to say.

I have noticed lately (the past few weeks) that when someone posts a
long message to the list, there are quite a number of people who will
reply to the message in it's entirety and pre-pend only one or two
lines of text.  Within a day or two, the reply has the message quoted
5 levels deep--with 5 different copies of the "To change your
subscription options (or unsubscribe), see:
http://www.dshield.org/mailman/listinfo/list"; signature appended.

If the new text were "post-pended", things would become annoying very
very quickly.  ("Scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-delete.  Scroll-delete.
Scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-delete.")  With it at
the top, reading "untrimmed" messages isn't such a big deal--but the
annoyance is compounded if you're trying to read your mail via a
wireless connection, in which case having to download a 7KB message to
read 2 new sentences and a URL becomes very unpleasant.

Maybe I'm only seeing a small number of messages and thinking it's a
bigger problem than it is.  Or maybe I'm overestimating how many
people use wireless systems that'd be impacted by something like this.
(I know old Palm VIIx's had a max throughput of 1KB/s and you paid for
wireless by the byte, so those would be impacted--though whether
businesses are still giving them to their employees, I tend to doubt.
And everything these days is orders of magnitude faster).  But if I'm
wrong about either, I apologize.  Though it seems like in this group
there'd be a high percentage of people who use wireless at least once
a day, in which case proper trimming isn't just a courtesy, it can be
a true time- and $$-saver.

Am I on to something?  (Comments welcome.)  Or am I completely out of
line?  (Please reply off-list so the thread will die faster.


- -Neil R.


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