Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 21:32 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net by JoeBuck
Parent article: Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

But maybe you're thinking of Usenet and not UUCP, which used a flooding algorithm and recorded paths. When two machines connected, each would offer the other a set of messages, by message ID, excluding any that had the other machine's name in the delivery path. The delivery path could be used to trace not only the origin of the message but also who's connected to whom.

Usenet had a "cancel" control message, allowing any user to delete a message. It was completely insecure, but it was the only thing that kept Usenet alive once the spammers discovered it. If cancels were made cryptographically secure, there would need to be some mechanism to control spam or vandalism.