Re: sci.cryonics activity

Dave D <Dave.DeGroote@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I guess I'm vaguely curious why anyone would oppose Yahoo groups,
but not a home brew group.

I refuse to subscribe to any Yahoo group, or click on any Yahoo URL,
for several reasons:

* They demand lots of personal information, and ask if they may sell
it to spammers.

* They pre-check "yes" on that question.

* If you select "no," they will eventually revert it to "yes."

* They attach ads to everything, including outgoing email sent by
their users. If someone wants to get free service in return for
being bombarded by ads, that's their business, but when uninvolved
third parties are also bombarded by their ads, that's crossing the
line. The ads are often made to appear as if the sender was saying
them himself. (Some people, unlike me, have even gone so far as to
block all email from any Yahoo address.)

* On several occasions they have, in violation of their own privacy
policy, outed pro-democracy people in China to the Communist Chinese
government, causing them to be sentenced to many years in prison.
In other words, Yahoo is an agent for a communist power, working
against the interests of the free world.

Especially when the Yahoo/Google/etc. groups have such massively
better user interfaces.

Better than what? I run three homebrew email lists -- one for a local
cryonics organization -- and they have much better user interfaces
than either Yahoo or Google Groups.

Google Groups is just a repackaging of Usenet. The search function is
useful, but trying to use Google Groups in lieu of a proper newsfeed
is painful and slow. I wish they'd stick to being an archive service.

I can't think of any privacy issues that don't exist with any group
on the internet.

On the lists I run:

* I block all HTML and attachments, ensuring that viruses, worms, and
other malware can't propagate. (The lists are intended for plain
text discussion only.)

* I block all email that isn't from a member of the appropriate
organization. Or rather it goes to me, so I can figure out if it's
from a members' email address that I didn't know about. But one
doesn't have to be a subscriber to the list to post to it, just a
member of the organization the list is for.

* I keep indexed web archives of the lists where members can find
them, but where outsiders, and search engines, cannot.

* Just in case outsiders or search engines do find the archives, I
munge every email address in a way that a human being can decode,
but an automated process, such as those used by spammers to harvest
addresses, cannot.

* There are no ads in the archives or in the messages. In fact, I
do my best to snip off any ads that are automatically appended to
messages by Yahoo, Juno, etc.

* I promise not to sell (or give away) any information to spammers or
others, ever. And, unlike Yahoo, I keep my word.

* As yet, after more than six years, not one spammer has succeeded in
getting even one email through to any of the lists.

It's been years since I've been active on the Cryonet mailing list
(which I have never run), but it has several intriguing features,
such as automatically trimming off HTML crud, instead of letting it
through as some lists do, or blocking the whole message as my lists
do. And such as tracking participants' reputations, as judged by other
participants, and blocking messages from senders whose reputations
are too low.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

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