PC-DOS 3.3

[Scott Stevens]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:06:09 +0000
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> > On Tuesday 13 December 2005 18:33, Jules Richardson wrote:
> >> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 

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.

> > 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
>