On Wed, 14 Oct 1992 16:53:05 PDT Richard Childers [log in to unmask]>
said:
 
>"I  am tired  of  this  discussion and  very  tired  of this  particular
>poster."
>
>Then don't contribute.
 
The only reason I do is that I  don't want non technical people to get an
incorrect picture  of the  situation due to  the misinformation  you post
routinely to this list (and not just  about faked mail). If you were just
kind enough not to post incorrect information, a lot of people would save
time. But then we have already had this discussion, and it seems that you
actually take pride in spreading misinformation.
 
>I made  it pretty clear that  my statements were predicated  on logging,
>Eric.
 
And you stated that  LISTSERV had a copy in its logs,  which it doesn't -
not being a LISTSERV maintainer, there was no way for you to know whether
it did  or not, and thus  no basis for  you to state it.  Furthermore the
issue was not whether the origin can be traced if logs exist and the logs
do  point to  the hacker.  It doesn't  take much  technical expertise  to
understand that,  in such a case,  the origin can be  traced provided the
people with access to the logs cooperate.
 
>But I'm not clear  that _anyone_ is an expert on  the Internet, since it
>is, by definition, a superset of everything we know of, as a community.
 
Nobody here claimed to be an Internet expert (certainly not me - unix and
the Internet are clearly outside my  sphere of expertise). Nor did anyone
say you  have to  feel bad for  not knowing everything  there is  to know
about e-mail forgery.  The only thing that  was said is that  it would be
nice  if  you   did  not  make  silly  statements  all   the  time  which
non-technical people have no way to tell from accurate statements and may
end up  believing. It  is dangerous  to make  people believe  that, while
forging e-mail  is possible, it is  always possible to track  it and that
such  tracking  is  "cakework"  for  the  FBI  (a  particularly  ironical
statement in  light of the way  the FBI handles computer-related  cases -
see the EFF newsletter for countless examples).
 
  Eric