1996-08-02 - Re: Information gathering by news servers

Header Data

From: “Mark M.” <markm@voicenet.com>
To: svmcguir@syr.edu>
Message Hash: 353fd1620a18e8034177255874c147487c20ec68aaaa4ba1b75752ac3a0640f1
Message ID: <Pine.LNX.3.95.960802141613.1319A-100000@gak>
Reply To: <ML-2.2.839003612.7349.scott@homebox>
UTC Datetime: 1996-08-02 22:00:47 UTC
Raw Date: Sat, 3 Aug 1996 06:00:47 +0800

Raw message

From: "Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>
Date: Sat, 3 Aug 1996 06:00:47 +0800
To: svmcguir@syr.edu>
Subject: Re: Information gathering by news servers
In-Reply-To: <ML-2.2.839003612.7349.scott@homebox>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.95.960802141613.1319A-100000@gak>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

On Fri, 2 Aug 1996, Scott McGuire wrote:

> How much information about what someone reads can be gathered
> by a news server?  Is there an anonymous way to read a public
> news server, or would a server have to be set up intentionally
> to allow anonymous reading?

It depends on how much logging the news server software does.  For INN, it
logs the hostname of every client that invokes the "group" command.  This
means that if you are on a machine that uses identd or on a SLIP/PPP account,
it is possible to also find out the complete email address.  I suppose hacking
the news software could allow a news admin to find out every article you read,
but the log would be very large.  The best way to read news anonymously is
to either get an anonymous shell account that has a full news feed, or get an
account on a trusted NNTP server.  An NNTP server could be setup to not log
at all by commenting out all the calls to syslog().

- -- Mark

PGP encrypted mail prefered
Key fingerprint = d61734f2800486ae6f79bfeb70f95348
http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/  


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3
Charset: noconv

iQCVAwUBMgJHT7Zc+sv5siulAQHZ8gP+NywhqrmlOls1ibbpdXac0qp7/LacT+2j
UXiBare4Lk0qOJAM9UUAc+xbyzxAugdWwLAyo2NW8Bi5ZK1QojFvCKvHcQzWYNA6
baz7Qmy9x7Beup6HG+7M/bOmGonjml+ZSXbWAFMuSmItd5V2vZRmqBGdu8oglY7m
MiGmXLaLkFw=
=To5D
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----





Thread