On 12:32 AM 9/5/97 EDT, the following was submitted for consideration by C:
>On Thu, 4 Sep 1997 18:31:30 -0600 Dan Lester said:
>I wouldn't feel comfortable speaking to a room full of people wearing
>black hoods.  And I feel the same way about posting to a list where
>everyone is anonymous.

"know your enemy" ???  Some things about the Internet in general should be
clearly understood up front by everyone that gets on it.

1.) Nothing is secure.
2.) If you share a comment with only one person, it's no longer private.
3.) Accidents happen.
4.) You can't always clean up after yourself.
5.) The Internet remembers everything.

I'll pick a safe topic.  Genealogy.  Ever go see how many genealogy related
mailling lists there are?  Quite a few.  In excess of 1000.  And you'd
think that there would be things you can say on one regional list that
won't get onto another?  Doesn't happen.  Make a statement, form an
opinion, do anything that makes it look like you are an expert or know what
you are talking about or have the goods on someone, and it goes not only on
the list you are on, but to several others as well.

You should always assume that what you say on one list, will make it's way
to any 1 of over 100,000 others or more.  Now unless you want to review
every list that exists, you're not "safe".  You may not feel comfortable
talking to a room of hooded strangers, but even with one list set to review
open, your room of hooded strangers only has a couple people without their
hoods on.

Some examples:

I had made some comments about the Freedom of Information Act on a
genealogy list that was focused on the state of Georgia one time.  I later
had a response from a lady on the New York list wanting to know more
information.  I don't even sub to the New York list, but someone on the
Georgia list did and passed my comment on.

I am a member of the TECHWR-L and WINHELP-L lists which discuss techwriting
and use of help authoring tools.  Their audiences share members greatly.

I am on LSTOWN-L and Majordomo-Users lists.  I don't use Listserve but
there are issues (like this one) that I think are important and like to
read about.  I recently cross posted (mea cupla) the Subjective Tolerance
question to both lists.  (Ironically I got more action on it here than on
the majordomo list.)

So, while you may think you are safe on one list, consider how unsafe you
are on others.  To recoin a phrase based on an anti-aids campaign "When you
send mail to someone, you're not just sending mail to that person, you're
sending mail to everyone that has sent mail to that person."

Who was that masked man?


Paul

------------------------------------------------------------
(o)(o)  Paul Rice
   >    Listowner: CircleJoke and Underground Mailling Lists
  \/    mailto:[log in to unmask]
------------------------------------------------------------
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards
could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks
to the Internet, we know this is not true."
                 --Robert Wilensky, University of California