15 April 1995 Ottawa Canada
 
Regarding Trish's concerns over restricting all users from a certain
domain to a list.
 
First of all, there really is no such thing as International law.  There
are movies with INTERPOL cops driving around New York City in Blue
Volkswagens but in point of fact, each nation on earth is sovereign and
it can make anything it wants legal or illegal.
 
However countries do enter into agreements on various topics with other
nations.  Things like Pirates for example.
 
Piracey, at least in the sense of its practise on the High Seas is
pretty well universally illegal but only because each country passed a
law making it illegal in that country and not some magic International
law.
 
On the bbs network side of things, many networks such as RIME, also
known as RELAYNET, I-LINK and INTELEC have a network wide code of
conduct.
 
If a conference (newsgroup) moderator orders a user be barred from the
newsgroup and the user's home sysop does not do so within 7 days, the
sysop can have their entire network feed killed.
 
That happened on one network to a very large 200 or more line bbs after
repeated warnings and problems.
 
After the network manager told me why he killed the feed to the bbs I
agreed with him as i had been a member of the bbs in question a couple
of years ago and found it was as out of control as he stated.
 
If a listowner doesn't want someone on their list or a group of people,
hey, it is their list and they can set the service area as they see fit.
 
Also note that some networks such as FIDONET do not permit uu encoded
traffic or encrypted traffic through their gateways.
 
I think listowners can, legally choose who they want on their list using
any criterea they want.
 
If someone does not like the membership eligibility, they can go to the
courthouse and get a court order requiring they be allowed into the
list.
 
Although many people will threaten this, few will actually do it.
 
They will just mumble, mutter, grumble and spam a lot to try and get
even.
 
When they do not get anywhere, they will go away and not bother people
or if their home service provider thinks they are abusing the service,
will kill their access.
 
So filter whom you wish but in general, it seems the pevailing attitude
here is filtering should be done as a last resort and I agree.
 
However once in a while with my own list I do a quiet delete of
particularly hot headed users and after a week or two they figure they
have been disconnected and ask what gives.  I tell them they somehow got
dropped and they can re-subscribe.
 
This works wonders for cooling hot heads and is simpler and less
permanent that filtering.
 
Happy Easter or passover or whatever this season is to you.
 
Brian Lingard
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