Mac Forum / General / General / October 2008

Of course, but there's nothing wrong with bringing up the use of a
proper sig dash to someone who doesn't have one.

That's a mostly good answer, the weakness of course being that any
arbiter's own biases are going to factor into his or her evaluation of
the posts.  Does your company have an ombudsman process for customers to
contest a decision (such as newspapers generally provide)?

Thanks for being up front about that.

Perhaps my question wasn't written clearly enough; sorry about that.  
How does your policy address spam appearing to be sent by a customer of
your service, through the use of forged headers, hacked client
computers, hacked servers upstream from your own (I am assuming here
that you have steps in place to make sure your own servers are not
compromised), etc.?

The freedom of speech issue, of course, is that commercial speech is
protected under the First Amendment as determined in multiple decisions
by SCOTUS beginning, IIRC, in 1976.  There are, as I recall, four
conditions established by SCOTUS for commercial speech to be considered
protected.  These decisions mostly focused on governmental limits on
commercial speech but could conceivably apply to Usenet server operators
as well.  

There is also AFAIK an unresolved question as to whether Usenet server
operators policing of content on their serves puts them beyond the
protection of being a common carrier.  Common carriers by definition are
not responsible for the content of the items they carry, whether
physical (e.g., post office) or analog/digital representations (e.g.,
phone company).  When common carriers start examining the content of
those items, they may become responsible for the content and thus become
content providers rather than common carriers.  

This may apply to a Usenet server operator, although the DMCA and other
legislation do provide some protection in this regard for removing
illegal material such as copyrighted content, illegal pornography, etc.  
I am not sure to what degree that unsolicited commercial postings would
fall under this versus being protected speech.  I would imagine that
Altopia's management has discussed this with their lawyers.  

The Internet has stretched and challenged the traditional definitions-
it used to be easy to distinguish between a common carrier (e.g. post
office) and a content provider (e.g., magazine publisher).

Thanks for adding the signature separator!

If I gave a stuff about binaries nowadays I might well have gone with
Altopia. Their plans seem decent and the company appears stable
(compared to some of the fly-by-night Usenet service providers out
there).

Question: is there anything decent in binary groups one can't get more
easily via BitTorrent? It's been AGES since I even took a look. Who here
subscribes to a full feed?

Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet