Declan McCullough sent out a message to his Politech list subscribers recently, saying that he planned to go through the online list archives and obfuscate the email addresses published thereon to frustrate spammers' harvest-bots.
John Gilmore's written a stirring and principled response.
Why have you fallen into the all-too-common fallacy of thinking that
if email addresses aren't published anywhere, that will help "solve"
the problem of unwanted communications? I had an idiot come after me
several times, demanding that my archive of the USENIX Face Saver
images remove his email address, because he was trying to obliterate
every reference to it on the web. I refused, of course. Have we
reached a Brave New World in which we all start rewriting online
history to suit today's prejudices? That sounds like what you propose
for the Politech archives.For the record, please keep my email address INTACT in the Politech
archives. I don't want my communications to be "obfuscated" in the
historical record.Unwanted communications would exist even if every "spammer" was flayed
and burned at the stake. You should know — reporters get more unwanted
press releases than anybody.
