On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 08:33:26PM -0700, J C Lawrence wrote:
> The second order costs of SPOF, let alone single points of control and
> concentrated target effects are massive, and to my mind, far exceed any
> possible gain from such a concentration.
Well, I certainly share the concern about SPOF. (For example, I'd
really really really like it if Google donated a complete copy of the
Usenet archive to archives.org or some other entity that could be
reasonably relied on to take good care of it.)
> If/when VA folds or pulls most/all the support for SF the cumulative
> effect on the hosted projects and mailing lists will not be small.
Hmmm...yeah, you could be right. But a lot of those projects actually
live elsewhere, and their mailing lists are hosted elsewhere. To be sure,
SF folding up its tent would disrupt things (and cause a stampede to
FreshMeat) but I think things would be spliced back together
reasonably quickly...months?
> This is not to say that Google will fold, but it is to note that Google
> is not immortal or immune to external forces.
Understood. My biggest concern would not be that it would go away, but
that it would be purchased by someone intent on unethically exploiting it
for gain. [Where what "unethical exploitation" means is probably a whole
debate in and of itself, but my prime worry, based on previous episodes,
would be that it would fall into the hands of marketroids.]
> > In the interim, all of my mailing lists include:
>
> > X-No-Archive: yes
>
> I should probably note that I configure my systems, and my archiving
> setups in particular to ignore the X-No-Archive header. I'm no fan of
> rewriting history, popular tho others may find it.
I don't have it there to rewrite history. I have no intention of doing
that. I have it there because (over the years) I've caught several
different entities archiving my lists and doing things that I don't
approve of -- like selling access to it for profit. (All my lists are
free and I don't put advertising on them. I've paid all their costs for
many years. I get annoyed when someone else starts charging for what I'm
giving away.) Or publishing the archives on the web, thus exposing
subscriber addresses to spambot harvesting. And so on. (And yes, this
is all covered in the signup info that every new subscriber gets.)
The archives [of my lists] that I have are complete to the best of
my technical ability to make them so and are available to subscribers.
I have no intention of rewriting them other than cosmetic changes
to make them more usable and the removal of any spam that leaked through.
---Rsk
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