response 18 of 31:

Jul 29 03:03 UTC 2013

resp:16 That too.  I personally think it is more important that
users have something they are actually interested in using than
that we may, again *may*, eventually get a take-down notice for an
image file.  Turning off a working service because of a microscopic
risk seems misguided to me.

I don't really understand all the excitement about images; Grex
never prohibited other types of media files (PDF, newer image and
video formats), or archive files (zip, tarballs, etc), or even
executable files (Windows .exe files and so on).  Any of them could
be used to hold content that might be "an issue"; probably more so
than images.  Should we prohibit users from hosting those, as well?

What happnens when people start hosting images wrapped in text
encodings?  Should we ban text files?  How about an HTML file with
embedded javascript that translates inline text-encoded data to an
image on the fly?  Should we ban Javascript?  How?  What about use
of the HTML5 canvas widget?  Should we ban HTML5?  How about banning
HTML in general?  If we're so worried about user content, why are
we allowing users to post content at all?  Why not just turn off
user web sites?

I'm serious: if we want to ban image files, what's the point of
letting users use the web server?  In 1993, that might have made
sense: images were big and expensive in terms of bandwidth, which
was something Grex didn't have a lot of.  In 2013, providing a "web
server" that doesn't let users host image files is just weird.

How do we know that users won't move content between Grex and other
sites using FTP, or some file transfer thing running over SSH?

Maybe we just shouldn't let users log in to Grex at all.