Re: X-trace considered harmful

In <yln1xh5tfg.fsf <at> windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra <at> stanford.edu> writes:

>Charles Lindsey <chl <at> clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

>> The poster himself is reasonably treated as a site. All the concepts you
>> listed can (mostly) fit into this "site" model.

>How can you meaningfully treat the poster as a site?  We don't seem to be
>using that information for any of the things we use a site for; we aren't
>using it to control feeding, we aren't using it as a way to derive an
>e-mail address, we're not using it to determine the responsible party...
>we're using it for spam filtering and for information passed along in
>abuse reports.

The "poster" is conceptually a "site" insofar as it represents the seat
where the man sat in front of his machine. Thus it is in one sense the
originating "site". I agree that, technically speaking, it is not a "site"
insofar as software does not look at it for purposes like avoiding cycles.

--

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