LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 09:47:23 +0930

Re: Luke Warmwater

This is a "verbose and occasionally inaccurate" e-mail.
So if you prefer succinct and precise e-mails, please skip to
the next item.... Especially if you're only interested in linux.

First let me way that I strongly urge no one to respond to this post.
Certainly not on the list.
There have been so many flame wars in the last couple of months
that the linuxSA group is in danger of becoming either 
beyond all salvation or else only revivable with the help of
moderation for a month, say, as a circuit-breaker.
(That's just my personal opinion.)
Last night, I stopped reading certain kinds of linuxSA posts as
part of my personal "circuit breaker".
That's a good rule, I think: "If you feel like you've been
flamed, or you feel like you want to send a flame, or you feel
like a flame war is underway, just walk
away from the computer and do something else until you lose 
interest. Or just don't read that thread."

Anyway, Mark Collis has phoned and clarified everything and I am completely
happy that everything is under control there, and I know as much
as I need to know about this.
No one needs to apologize for anything. 
An understandable sequence of false hypotheses lead to an
escalating series of misunderstandings.
Out of the handful of hypotheses I had about what was going on,
the best one turned out to be true.
It just shows that the lack of human voice tone in e-mails, and the
relative ease of anonymization and impersonation, can lead to a 
complete lack of trust when faced with apparently contradictory evidence.
I'm sure that this is behind 99% of flame wars.
And that's why the occasional smiley helps to convey the right
tone of the plain ascii renderings.

On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 07:29:40PM +0930, Mark wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> please take the time to look at http://www.topology.org/attacks/trinity1.html
> 
> Near the end of the page, Alan implies that I was responsible for the attack.
> I would like to say that I find this offensive. While I find Alan's 
> postings rather verbose and occasionally inaccurate, I would hardly go on 
[....]

As soon as I realised that there was a flurry of interest in this web page,
which was intended for a very narrow readership, I removed it, as many of you
may know by now. Only two people got to see it.
That page was supposed to be an ongoing compilation of the formation of
my _hypotheses_ on the matter. 
All of my attack analyses are "hypothesis formation pages" where I think
out loud about what is going on out there on the net.
It's difficult to think out loud with 30 other people looking over your shoulder!
In this case, Mark found the page through a set of links which I have now
removed. These pages were started about 2.5 years ago to help inform
sys admins as to what was emanating from their sites, not for the
general public.

> do yourself a favour (and me) and remove the page.
> 

As I said, I did so already, even though I had not seen your request to
do so. No one would have seen it if you had not advertised it.
It's certainly strange that in order to stop people reading something
you would advertise it to 300+ people.
But that's neither here nor there.
Please don't feel provoked by this observation.
It's just a query which can be optionally discussed offline.

Once again, the contradictory indications in an e-mail are difficult to
reconcile. If someone finds something offensive, why would they
tell 300+ people to go look at it?
I can form some hypotheses, but I don't really know.
As it happened, I guessed that something like this might be afoot without
even reading your post. And to reduce further exacerbation, I removed the thing.

Several times in the past, I have unsubscribed from linuxSA because
of the flamage, but each time I have returned because of the
good value in the list.
I suspect that flamage will continue, and worthless and aggravating
posts will continue to spark flame wars, as I have witnessed
since I first started reading Usenet groups in 1985.
If they do continue in linuxSA, I think that all the cognoscenti (of whom I
certainly do not claim to be one, by the way) will leave.
Therefore a "circuit breaker" of one month's moderation by a few
people could be required.
But we're all so busy - who would do it?
The only real hope for linuxSA is that enough people of good will
realise that they can't get the good value out of the other participants
if they ignore the nuisance that their pointless postings cause to
the innocent bystanders. Occasional bad behaviour is easy for everyone
to forgive, but not when it goes on for 50-100 posts.

In the olden days, contributors to Usenet lists would often say:
"Please send all responses to me personally, and I'll summarize
to the group."
This was an attempt to keep volume down.
Since the typical site at that time had a 1200 bit/sec modem which
would collect the mail and news once every 6 hours,
keeping the volume down was important then.
But nowadays, the resource to be economised is human time and
energy reading the stuff.

So.... I intend to go and do some work, and not read any responses
(of which I hope there will be zero) to this post or any related
thread until they're all part of ancient history (a couple of
days in linuxSA time!).

My whole purpose in this post, which is a meta-item having nothing
to do with linux at all, is simply to clarify that nothing else
needs to be discussed on this subject.
It's all been settled offline.
And any outstanding issues can be dealt with likewise.
I.e. no need for further public posts on this topic please...

Cheers and verbosity (but not too much inaccuracy, I hope),
Alan Kennington.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
    name: Dr. Alan Kennington
  e-mail: akenning@topology.org
 website: http://www.topology.org/
    city: Adelaide, South Australia
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