In article , Tony P. wrote:
What would be the point? If you encrypt it, then no one can read it. Or everyone can read it. Think about how public key encryption works. If you encrypt with your private key, then everyone can read it via your public key. If you encrypt with your public key, then only you can read it. duh. If you use someone else's public key, then only those specific people can read it. Not very useful for a newsgroup.
I suppose you could sign the postings, maybe to support automatic cancelation of spammed postings, but there doesn't seem to be much of an issue with unauthorized postings lately.
John Meissen snipped-for-privacy@aracnet.com
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, for a long time what I did was use a mild form of encryption on the 'approved-by' line on Usenet for the comp.dcom.telecom newsgroup. It was like 'md5'. My approved-by line was always created using a group of passwords piped through md5 and then at three other major 'backbone sites' around the USA and Europe used for Usenet, those three or four News Admininstrators had the required key on their systems. I did not encrypt the entire contents of all messages, just the 'approved-by' line. Now those three or four news admins had phishermen of their own sitting there at the stream of news as it came along. Those phisher-bots had only one concern: looking for articles in the news group comp.dcom.telecom nothing more or less; it is not my concern to monitor other people's newsgroups. When an article for c.d.t. came long, the phisher-bots would look it over closely; if it had that md5 encryption and it was correct, they would toss it back in the stream and let it go on its way. If the article for c.d.t. did _not_ have the proper encryption on it the bots would fish it out of the stream and do a couple things with it. (1) They would send it in _email_ to me to look at; (2) they would issue a control: cancel on it to be forwarded far and wide; (3)they would warn the other phisher-bots elsewhere to be on the look out for it; and (4) they would destroy it entirely without any word at all to the person who polluted the stream with it to start with. When I got the email copy of the 'message' I then decided either to manually approve it and put it back in the stream but most of the time I pitched it also. I used that system for a couple years back in the early 1990's and it seemed to work rather well, as long as there were human beings upstream who knew the (automated) routine. And since the 'approved-by' encryption line was based on the entire message and the author's name, etc it was impossible for 'someone' to just take a sample message and 'cut and paste' the encryption line. I suggested it would work for almost any newsgroup which required an approved-by line. I had had a bad seige of spam in c.d.t. about that time, people would just add crazy 'approved-by' lines and get them though. But my system brought that almost entirely to a halt, although I did get a _huge_ amount of worthless junk in my own email, but the newsgroup stayed mostly clean.Then I went to my father's funeral for about a week (I lived in Chicago at the time, he and mother and grandmother lived here in Independence.) The Digest ran for that week or so on 'autopilot' and when I came back someone had dismanted the md5 encryption thing entirely. About that time I had the first of my heart attacks and a couple 'Usenet gurus' insisted my plan would not work; that it would take too many resources. It was never explained to my satisfaction why it would not work, and as for resources it did not take much time to maintain. But, that was the end of my stream-phisher-bots. I honestly feel several moderators working together like that could eliminate most Usenet spam. PAT]