Manoj Srivastava wrote: > Why is using a newreader on Debian machines strictly > forbidden? (Incidentally, on IRC, Jason and AJ insist that the > paragraph above explicitly allows access to usenet servers, and they > say the intent was not to forbid access. Not being a teleapth, I took > the policy document at its word, and if indeed the intent was not to > prohibit, this error needs be corrected. If the intent is to restrict > access. why?)
For whatever reason, access to usenet has almost always been granted at the ISP level[1]. Unlike servers for the web, mail, irc, quake or nearly anything else, publically accessable news servers are rare and typically due to a misconfiguration[2]. Thus, you are limited to using news servers provided by your ISP. News server access is typically limited by only letting people in a given IP block or in a given domain access the news server. If you want to read news and your ISP has a rotten news server or no news server, your alternative is to get a login on a computer that has access to some other news server (or arrange for someone to feed you news, which is often outside the purvue of the common usenet user). This is often a quite honest and aboveboard thing to do, but it can shade into a grey area. The debian project's machines are in one such grey area. We are donated machines and bandwidth, but as a side effect this also may give us access to the news servers accessable from the donated machines. So, when the DMUP speaks about "access to such a news server", it is referring to said access. The DMUP is trying to clarify that grey area, and let people know that donators have not given us permission to use those servers, and we should not do so. It is not restricting general use of news from debian machines, although it might as well, since there are basically no publically accessable machines one could use! I guess this must not be clear to people who don't administer news servers but it seemed very intuitivly obvious to me when I first read the DMUP (and I was glad to have that point clarified, as I was at the time looking for a good news feed). -- see shy jo [1] I have no idea why, and I think usenet would be a better place if this were not so. Except it would probably generate even more spam and even more abuse of binary newsgroups. [2] And will be found by scanning robots and abused in a matter of days.