response 16 of 110:

Aug 31 02:57 UTC 2003

It took me a few responses to follow the rationale behind what was 
done.

Why was the polytarp account forwarding all of it's mail to staff, dah?

response 18 of 110:

Aug 31 07:31 UTC 2003

Perhaps the origins of this policy need to be explained, so I'll attempt to
do that.

Staff gets lots of request from people who have lost their passwords, and
needs some way to verify that the person sending the request is in fact the
owner of the account.  To do that, in general, staff looks at information in
the account to find some contact information put there by the account's owner.
Most commonly used are phone numbers or e-mail addresses from the .plan file
(what shows up in finger output), but if that's not good enough, staff
sometimes needs to look elsewhere.  One of those "elsewheres" is the user's
.forward file, on the assumption that the account holder is by definition the
legitimate user of an account, and anywhere mail to that account gets
forwarded can be assuemed to be that person.

Then came the problem of impersonations, generally a case where somebody
creates an account and claims to be somebody else.  There wasn't a policy for
that, but it fit nicely into the password reset policy, in that if somebody
claimed to be somebody else, and that somebody else wanted it stopped,
it was quite legitimate to give control of an account to the person whose
account it claimed to be.

From there, I assumeit to have been a relatively easy jump that if forwarding
mail to an address established that that address belonged to the account's
owner, giving control over an account to the person whose address the accounts
mail was being forwarded to was quite legitimate.

Of course, in most of thsoe cases, staff could easily claim that as far as
they knew, and had been told by hte owner of the account, the account belonged
to the person whose address showed up in the account.  In polytarp's case,
staff knew the account wasn't staff's.  Still, this strikes me as a pretty
basic application of policy and past precident as written.  Do any of
polytar's clones have suggestions for how this might be changed for the
better?

response 20 of 110:

Aug 31 16:53 UTC 2003

David, if you don't want any of your mail, you can forward it to /dev/null.

response 22 of 110:

Sep 1 01:52 UTC 2003

For various reasons, I don't find the second paragraph of #17
to be credible.

I'm comfortable with how this was handled.

response 26 of 110:

Sep 1 05:58 UTC 2003

O please, valerie.  You know for a FACT that you gave the polytarp account
to staff.  You said you did.  That means, of course, you've also given them
permission to read various private files; and, as you said, they don't need
the password to do that.  This is a chilling and BLATANT violation of privacy.

response 28 of 110:

Sep 1 14:23 UTC 2003

Re #22: I find the first paragraph of #17 even less credible, somehow.

response 30 of 110:

Sep 1 16:00 UTC 2003

This soap opera just keeps getting better!  Or is it a cartoon,
with poly in his various guises as e.g. the coyote?

response 32 of 110:

Sep 1 22:16 UTC 2003

"Absurd" is exactly the correct word, indeed.

response 34 of 110:

Sep 2 01:08 UTC 2003

I know, it's plot-element trials for "Dumb and Dumber-er-er"!

response 36 of 110:

Sep 2 02:42 UTC 2003

Why is it a privacy violation?  Staff could have looked at polytarp's
`private' files at anytime *if staff had wanted to*.  Staff didn't want
to, and doesn't now; so far as I'm aware, no one's gone looking at
polytarp's files.  So what, exactly, is the privacy violation?

response 38 of 110:

Sep 2 03:34 UTC 2003

Polytarp, one day when you're older, you may come to the understanding taht
constantly attempting to annoy some group of people will likely cause them
to do things to you that you'd rather they not do.  In some cases (not going
out of their way to do things for you) it will be an entirely reasonable
response.  In other cases, the responses may well turn out to be things that
people shouldn't do no matter what the reason, but which still wouldn't have
been done to you had you not provoked them.

Frankly, I think the staff has been remarkably restrained in dealing with you.

response 40 of 110:

Sep 2 15:22 UTC 2003

Staff has been remarkably restrained in dealing with an obvious troll.  I
don't see any justification in dah/polytarp's complaints.  He's just looking
for attention.