Subject: Re: Attachment Stripped in Transaction

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 08:38:08 -0600 (MDT)

> From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>

> ...
> As has been said many times before, text attachments are both
> useful and reasonably safe. ...

> I could live with prohibiting almost anything else, but banning
> multiple-body-part MIME messages where all of the terminal body
> parts are plain text strikes me as pretty close to shooting
> ourselves in the foot.

Ok, would you support rejecting any submissions containing non-text
attachments?

If not that, then how about length restrictions on all submissions
or non-text submissions?

Or do you think that no censoring at all should be done, and that
those who want it should subscribe to via a secondary list?  If so,
you are changing a powerful precedent.  As someone else pointed out,
individual people have been banned from this list.  If it is now
decided that even viruses cannot be banned, then how could you ever
again ban people?

It has been proposed that submissions to the list be edited into
compliance by deleting some but not all attachments.  That would be
wrong because it would violate the spirit of the author's copyright.
The IETF's "NOTE WELL" might make such editing legal, or perhaps not
since it allows derivative works and if you don't publish the original,
how can you have a derivative?  Regardless, no matter how much people
say obnoxious, stupid, offensive, or irrelevant things, misspell words,
or otherwise beg for copy editing, their submissions should not be
corrected, fixed, improved or partially censored.  Every author should
be respected enough to be published or rejected, completely unedited.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2001 13:45:01 -0400

--On Wednesday, August 01, 2001 8:38 AM -0600 Vernon Schryver
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> I could live with prohibiting almost anything else, but
>> banning multiple-body-part MIME messages where all of the
>> terminal body parts are plain text strikes me as pretty close
>> to shooting ourselves in the foot.
> 
> Ok, would you support rejecting any submissions containing
> non-text attachments?

Personally, I probably would, although I can see a case for a
few other forms.  On the other hand, the one that would probably
end up on the list right after "text" is likely HTML or XML and
they are known to be dangerous.

> If not that, then how about length restrictions on all
> submissions or non-text submissions?

I could easily live with length restrictions on non-text.  But I
suspect that, if we go to length restrictions, we had best be
clear about what problem(s) we are trying to solve.   Due to a
server failure, I've recently (and temporarily, I hope) gone
from IMAP back to POP3, and the changeover has made me very
sensitive to lengths (again).  But, again, it is important to be
clear about what problems are being solved.

> Or do you think that no censoring at all should be done, and
> that those who want it should subscribe to via a secondary
> list?  If so, you are changing a powerful precedent.  As
> someone else pointed out, individual people have been banned
> from this list.  If it is now decided that even viruses cannot
> be banned, then how could you ever again ban people?

Well, first of all, wrt this issue, I'm just an IETF participant
like most others who read these lists and are impacted by them.
So my opinion isn't worth anything special.   But I think that
organizations ought to have the right to protect themselves and
the work they are doing against nonsense and deliberate and
inadvertent attacks.  After that, we can quibble about which
things are "noise removal" and "protection against attacks" and
which things are "censorship".    I tend to oppose the latter,
but my definition of the term is probably much narrower than
those for whom the idea of keeping anything off a list or out of
general circulation is a moral outrage.

> It has been proposed that submissions to the list be edited
> into compliance by deleting some but not all attachments.
> That would be wrong because it would violate the spirit of the
> author's copyright. The IETF's "NOTE WELL" might make such
> editing legal, or perhaps not since it allows derivative works
> and if you don't publish the original, how can you have a
> derivative?  Regardless, no matter how much people say
> obnoxious, stupid, offensive, or irrelevant things, misspell
> words, or otherwise beg for copy editing, their submissions
> should not be corrected, fixed, improved or partially
> censored.  Every author should be respected enough to be
> published or rejected, completely unedited.

Personally, I tend to agree -- on logical, moral, and technical
grounds and without needing to appeal to amateur lawyering or
copyright hair-splitting.  Any given submission should either go
through or be diverted, not "improved" by any process not under
the author's control.

     john

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 15:58:00 -0400

> through or be diverted, not "improved" by any process not under

Really!  Shades of the OPES debate.

..Scott