Re: [LI] [Adminstrativa] Additional policies in place for the LI

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 27, 1999 at 09:12:00AM +0530, Raj Mathur wrote:
> I haven't yet seen a situation on the LI mailing list which requires a 
> message to be signed.

True.

> And sending your PGP key in an e-mail to a public mailing list is
> pretty sort of oxygen-starved in any case.

Sure. People who send their PGP key in every message to the list deserve
to be shot. But PGP key != PGP signed message :)

In general, there are situations under which messages need to be signed.
In fact, most of the security related messages you forward to the list
are signed. A lot of list admins use PGP sigs to authenticate themselves. 

So I don't see why someone who sends PGP signed messages to the list should
be punished. Similarly, if someone asks a question and someone else 
responds: hey, try this config file A or try this patch B and sends an 
attachment, that's a perfectly valid use of the list, IMO. Everyone on
the list benefits by being able to get a copy of the attachment verbatim,
by punching a key or clicking the mouse.

Sure, we could use uuencode or shar, but all those are cumbersome and
hard to use compared to MIME.

Summary: If it is hard to enforce a certain kind of restriction on the
content (say no more stinking alternate HTML on the list), it is okay to
ban a wider variety of content (say vcards and PGP signatures) for 
_practical_ reasons. However, we should be clear about the reason why
we did that instead of branding a perfectly valid practice evil, because
we don't have the tools to grok it.

	-Arun

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