I was asked by a user how to read a "script" without having it run. I
suggested cat or more, which he said didn't work. To learn more about
this, I asked if I could try to read the file. At first he was reluctant
to tell me, but eventually did (partly because it was not his file in his
directory). It turned out to be a very cleverly ansi-animated ascii
example of school-age men's bathroom sexually explicit graffitti: the user
that wrote me wanted to see the ansi commands to learn how the effect was
implemented (clearly, a very educational goal). Through this experience I
learned about the command cat -v <filename> (by looking at man cat..as
they say, RTFM). However *that* is not the subject of this item. 

There must be an *enormous* amount of "school-age men's bathroom sexually
explicit graffitti" throughout cyberspace, and not just on
cyberspace.org's Grex. This is the "indecency" with which the Exon bill is
concerned. As I recall, there was a lot on the walls of Pompeii (now being
carefully preserved). It is "human nature", albeit not a very admirable
trait. The question is - what should Grex "do about it", if anything? 

My natural inclination is not to do anything about what people do in their
own private files (even if read permitted), or how they exchange this
information among themselves. I'd prefer, though, if the public face of
Grex got represented by the open, civilized, discussions in the
Conferences, and not by the smut buried throughout the ostensibly private
filespace. But we don't exercise any significant control over that, and
anyone wishing to could probably do some browsing and create an "Exon
file" on Grex (as on practically any other bbs). 

What do you think? Do we want to undertake the Hurculean task of cleaning
the Grex-Augeas Stables? And , if so, can we find our Alpheas and Peneus? 

123 responses total.

Wouldn't this question better be discussed in the coop conference?

I think as long as grex is not officially handing such stuff to people
we're OK.  We shouldn't try to control content that people find on the net.

Yeah, the Coop conference would be a better place for this.

Not a better place, but an appropriate place (say robh, if it had been
posted there, wouldn't you have linked it here?). It was posted here
because it came up as a *helpers* issue: I was confronted with the
dilemma. What should helpers do about it? 

Rane, you asked a much more general policy question: should we try to
clean up this kind of thing.  If the answer is no, then presumably helpers
are free to help, or not to help if they have objections.  I wouldn't
help someone debug code intended to crash a system, even if I knew the
particular method used wouldn't work on Grex, for example.  But the
general question you raised *definitely* belongs in coop.

Obviously I have no problem with it being linked to coop - at which time
it won't matter where it began. There is a policy question here, as
davel notes, and there is question of how helpers should deal with it,
since they often look a user's directories in the course of helping. Let's
stop discussing where it belongs, and start discussing the topic (and
would any fw thinking this item should be linked somewhere, please do so).

I've already mailed th fw's of Coop about linking it.

I really don't think Grex helpers should be dictating what's
appropriate behavior on grex and what isn't.  If there's
any confusion, one can always start up an item in Coop, or mail
the staff, to discuss it.

Whenever a help-seeker asks for help on something illicit, I
tell them it's illicit, and that's all.  (I recently had a
fellow who needed help because the GIFs he was uploading for his
home page weren't working.  No problem, kid, you're not supposed
to have them anyway...)

I hate it when I get behind on the conferences . . . well anyway, 
Helpers 30 is now linked to Coop 72.  

Enjoy!

From a philosophical standpoint, I feel this is none of our business and
users should be free to do what they want as long as they don't attempt to
"force" this material on other users. Their lack of taste is not our concern.

From a *legal* standpoint, I think it would be even worse for us to try to
patrol this sort of thing. If we designate this behaviour as a Bad-Thing
and attempt to control it, then we are in effect, accepting responsibility
for it's presence on the system. If we then happen to miss an instance of
it and someone get's bent out of shape about it, we could wind up being
accused of 
"not doing our job" and being responsible for the missed item.

I think it's better to take the viewpoint that this is the user's
responsibility and not get ourselves mixed up in it.

The "catch 22" (dates me, that does ;->) is that others can (and will)
do the patrolling for us, and hold us up to the world as a purveyor
of indecency. We can't say "what? indecent files here?". That would
be pretty dumb. So, from a practical legal standpoint, you  are
damned if you do and damned if you don't. But I am not sure which way
it is better to be damned.

There is a difference between actively seeking out indecency,
and refusing to do anything about it when it's shoved under
your nose.  Even if you have a general practice of ignoring
such things, if someone makes it obvious to you that there's
something here that doesn't belong, we become responsible for it.

That states what's bothering me, perhaps better than I did. If
the indecent "graffiti" is here, even if we ignore it we acquire
a responsibility for it. I've noticed that schools (eventually)
scrub the indecent graffiti off the men's room walls and stalls,
even though *they* didn't put it there. I think they do it because
it reflects poorly upon the intended character of the institution.
Do the indecent files, publically accessible, here, reflect poorly
upon Grex?

Isn't this really the same old "should there be some kind of censorship on
Grex" question that seems to come up every few months here?  I don't see what
the big deal is about.  Sen. Exon is an idiot, and his bill is
unconstitutional, and  very unenforcible.  I think we should maybe relax a bit
and quit worring about upsetting the prudes out there.  I also wish we would
all quit being so high and mighty with our attitudes.  Saying "We shouldn't
censor even if it is sopmoric and crude (IE something which =I= would never be
a consumer of), because we shouldn't judge others no matter how little taste
they have"  Well I for one am willing to admit that although I am an
intelligent and articulate person with sophisticated sensability, I have, in my
life, read and viewed crude and indecent things and have enjoyed the
experience, and I bet a bunch of others here have too.  There is a time and a
place for everything-including smut.  I am REALLY not going to pass judgement
on these things, and I am not going to be party to censorship.  If Grex ever
decides that it needs to start legislating the morality of it's members and
users, I will be gone from here in an instant, and I will not come back. 

When the "thought police" begin to tackle the job of censoring the net, my
bet is that they will be so daunted by the task early on that they will only
be able to make an example of a few hapless systems.  Is there some way to
avoid being made an example?  Censoring grex in any way is not worth 
considering for the above (and many other) reasons, IMHO.

Well, I'm glad that *I* didn't say any of the things cicero diapproves of,
ala "censoring". By the way, is scrubbing the graffiti off the bathroom
stall walls "censorship"? I think cicero misses the point, which is that
Grex, as a promoter of low-cost and open internet access, has a public
image, and it would be detrimental to that image to be widely judged as a
purveyor of smut. There are other criteria by which we should want to be
judged. Putting concepts of (perhaps less admirable) individual freedom
ahead of Grex's mission of public service, appears to me to be putting the
horseshit ahead of the cart. 

After giving some thought to how to keep individual rights more apart
from public rights, I would like to suggest that the default perms
for users' home directories be 711. The public will then not have
open access to users' home directories, unless they are given specific
filenames to read. 

Exceptions would be for staff with root, of course. I'd also suggest
that identify still be able to display users' .login/.profile files,
for the use of helpers (there may be a few other files to which
helpers should have access, such as .cf... files). 

It would seem to me that changing the default file and directory
permissions such that new users' files are not pubilcally-readable
is not really in the spirit of promoting the free exchange of
information, which is one of Grex's founding principles (or something
like that).

  That's a fuzzy founding principle: mailboxes accessible only by the owner
also impede info-sharing.  I think it's a tough question, with a somewhat
arbitrary answer either way.

Grex should in no way even allude to a policy of content control
'cause there is now way, no how we could ever have control unless
we change the whole of Grex.  If someone doesn't like what someone
else has in his or her directory then I guess they shouldn't go
reading that person's directory.  If someone hears that something
offensive might exist is someone's directory and is bothered by
that then it's time that person grows some tolerance.  And this is 
as good a place to do that as anywhere.  

Grex should strive for the reputation of trusting its users to 
do the right thing.  I see no reason to think that in the vast
majority of cases that isn't  exactly what will happen.  

any helper, of course, has the option of deciding whether or not to
help, for reasons compatible with that helper at that moment.
  
that being said, i think it would most distasteful to discover that
someone(s) around here would become an active extention of the
Exon, et al., thought police. That son of a bitch doesn't need any
"help."

I'm sorry, TS, but you've lost me.  Who's the "son of a bitch"?

This response has been erased.

correct-o-mundo, Sen (sic) Exon.

        I don't care particularly who the "son-of-a-bitch" is..
What I read I do not believe..
Why is it, that I propose a censorable cf, and it gets met with
loud and obnoxious "NEVER!"s, but now this is even given
the dignification of a response! Private-file censorship??
        WHat precisely have you been smoking??

No one has suggested private file censorship - yet. What has been
suggested, given the potential liability to Grex of publicly exposing a
lot of smut in users' files, is to create users home directories with the
default permission of the user only (i.e., 711). This has no effect at all
upon the content of any user's files, nor the permissioin status of any
user's files. In addition, the user could, if they wished, change the home
directory permission. 

I have discovered, as a helper, that many users already have done this
themselves - i.e., depermitted their home directory to others. Many have
also created directories in their home directory that others cannot read.
This is really no different, as has been pointed out, than having mail
files permitted only to the user. Having home directory default permission
be to the user only would do what we do with most of the rest of our lives
- consider our private lives private, and only share them at our own
volition. Users could still have www homepages openly readable, and files
that helpers might want to check (like .login and .profile) are still
readable even if the home directory is not. 

I don't consider a degree of individual control over one's private life to
be censorship. 

  I think that is an excellent idea.  Several weeks ago on party I heard
someone with whom I was not familiar claim to have read someone else's
mail.  It seems that if an old mail folder is renamed and left in the
home directory, it is no longer protected and can be read like any other
file.  I dont think that it is really necessary for everyone to have
access to everyone else's files.  There are plenty of less computer
literate computer users who might well not know enough to protect their
own files from this kind of snooping.  So I think its a good idea.

I wouldn't expect an old mail folder to be readable by anyone but the
owner unless it were explicitly permitted. Regardless of where it was.

This response has been erased.

  From what this user was saying, someone was using their unix files like
you would folders in pine, thus had lots of mail files like "joemail" or
"suemail" for instance based on however they grouped their old saved mail.  And
while the saved messages in "mbox" were not readable, the sorted mail in
these other files apparently was.
  I would think a way to solve this would be to disable the unix mailer and
force people to use pine or elm, which I think most people do anyway.

No!!!  Don't disable the unix mail program.  Mail is very useful for
quickly checking and sending mail without the big programs, and for some
people who don't have their term type set, mail is the only program they
can use.  But I'm sure something can be set so that mailboxes created by
mail are not world-readable.  I forgot about that feature myself recently. 

This response has been erased.

That really is a defect in that particular mailer. No mailer should
do that. Yuck.

At some point I'd like to have more discussion of my suggestion to make
the default home directory perms be "user only", as a means to give users
better control over their files - while they are learning the ropes - and
also as a means to make users' files less inadvertently public.

Re: ## 29, 30 - The actions you describe, Valerie, are scary. A deliberate
invasion of privacy and misuse of the system is, to me, a malicious
act that should have consequences.  It is troubling to have
individuals using this system who demonstrate such an extreme lack
of basic moral training.  Behavior such as you describe cannot
be long tolerated. 

How hard would it be to make mail set the umask properly?

That is, in particular: would it break anything to do so?

This response has been erased.

        Ah, a misread on my part. Well, if it's truly a problem,
putting a 711 on home is probably a fine idea.

I like to see an open user file system.  I can not begin to measure how much
I have learned by looking at other people's script files, .logins, etc.
this works especially well if you already know someone is doing something
similar to what you want to do, like say setting up .mailrc options or
something like that.
 
on the other hand I do understand the concerns of people's privacy, especially
when it comes to mail.

With the exception of the (defective, imo) ucb/mail mailer, the system 
takes care of privacy wrt mail. I also like the open look. 

The problem is not the umask, it is the perm requested on the file open
(which is anded with umask, typically). It's too broad in ucb/mail.
It should be a matter of modifiying the source code and recompiling
ucb/mail. no? 

I didn't give much thought to the open home directory until this matter
of smut files came up. I think grex is protected better from random
searches and accusations of promoting smut if it is not stored in
the "store window". Making the default perm on home directories 711
takes care of this for ll new users - it could then be up to users
how open they want their directory and files to be. I'm pushing this
as a *substitute* for even thinking about censorship.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss