14 Dec
2005
14 Dec
'05
1:31 a.m.
On Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:06:09 +0000
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Patrick Finnegan wrote:
And in the process, turns Usenet into another proprietary AOL-type
newsgroup service. Unless the feeds from 'Google News' are freely
distributed to other news hosts, which of course defeats their
whole mechanism for 'hidden email addresses.' So a tidy rationale
for Google to privatize the news feed emerges.
It's essentially the same thing as trusting MSN or AOL to
permanently archive public discussions. Or Yahoo groups. It's a
private reserve, like the 'commons' area of a shopping mall, and
administraton of it is at the discretion of whomever happens to be
the owner. Right now the 'commons' is owned by Google, who some
view as an enlightened despot. Who will 'own' it in ten years has
not been determined.
It's a terrible degradation of the old way. Which can be blamed
on 'spammers' or, perhaps, on the pathological fear and loathing
of 'spam' and the way we allow said loathing to change how we
behave.
On Tuesday 13 December 2005 18:33, Jules
Richardson wrote:
Except that a lot of people from posts > 3 years aren't around
on the same address any more, and people who have been posting
for < 3 years have been generally well aware of the spam issues
and so using munged addresses to post to (or creating an
address specifically for Usenet posts).
Meanwhile, Google's posting interface itself appears to prevent
users from munging their addresses and actually posts to Usenet
with a live non-munged address.
Google's masking of the address seems to be
either one of two
things: >
1) Dumbing down of the medium in order to provide
for idiots
with no > common sense.
2) Typical corporate mentality; force users to use Google's
interface >
rather than their own email client in order to
contact people.
I'm pretty sure it's #3:
3) Prevent spammers from acquiring email addresses from the
google usenet archive. Would you
rather have absolutely none of the old posts that
they now have indexed and freely available, or deal with not
having email addresses available?
I'd rather have it back how it was to be honest. I've never had
a problem with spam, even when I had perfectly valid addresses
amongst lots of archived postings in Google's archive whilst
their old interface was in place.
If they're that worried about spam, then at the very least force
users to sign into the system and put one of those "read the
letters out of this graphic" security systems in place before
the user can see an actual email address in a post in order to
prevent harvesting. Not rocket science, but at least they data
is all available.
Personally, I find the content of usenet posts
generally to be
more useful than the From: address on them...
... except when it doesn't go into enough detail, or some
offhand comment in a post is relevant and chasing it up would
be useful. If the author left a human-parsable email address in
the header the assumption is that they weren't averse to
someone contacting them, after all.
For an analogy, think of it like preserving old software but not
noting down what format / system the software's for. It's still
great when the system works, but there are going to be cases
when it doesn't. Not archiving or making available all the data
will always cause problems at some point further down the line.
cheers
Jules