NICE-ESG-Libs Digest        Sun, 18 Feb 96       Volume 2 : Issue  10 

Today's Topics:
                         Privacy of archives


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Date: Sun, 18 Feb 96 18:55:49 PST
From: bertrand@eiffel.com (Bertrand Meyer)
Subject: Privacy of archives
To: NICE-ESG-Libs@atlanta.twr.com

Steve Tynor wrote:
 
> As might be expected, I have complete archives of _all_ the lists from
> the very beginning and can email them to members upon request.  I've not
> made them available by FTP or HTTP specificially because of the NICE
> board's concern about privacy (there was all sorts of discussion about 
> restricting access to specific groups to NICE members only).
> 
> If members are going to unilaterally make the NICE discussions public 
> [I don't think this is a good idea given the oft unflattering "debate"
> that sprouts up -- I prefer something that can be restricted to the
> membership] 

Our archive has only been announced so far to people who receive NICE-lib.
The only way others can learn about it is through one of those recipients
telling them. But then the same person may just as well re-mail message,
or post them to alt.sex.binaries or soc.culture.adzerbaidjan or even
comp.lang.eiffel.

The added value of our (Eric Bezault's) archive is that it is thematically
indexed. Now that I know about it I don't think I will ever need to go
back to the ``digest'' format, which is organized chronologically and hence
less convenient in the long term.

If NICE members don't want us to make that archive public we'll return it
to its private status. But then don't forget to ask our Cardiff friends
to remove their material too - as well as anyone who may have made
copies. At least our archive contains technical material only, not
administrative or political discussions (unless related to technical
arguments), and we have said we would remove any comment whose author
doesn't want it to remain.

A personal comment: I think that it's hopeless. There are too many recipients to NICE
list to hope to keep the discussions private. A year and half ago or so
I screamed rather loudly when I found out that some mail that I thought
was going to my colleagues on the board was actually being broadcast much
more widely, including to people who were not even remotely members of NICE.
Since then a precise policy has been adopted (which I think says roughly
that  any member can ask to receive all NICE mailing lists, with a special
status for NICE-All which goes to anyone, member or not, who cares to receive it).
This means that any message we sent goes to too many sites to leave any hope
that we can keep it under a lid.

That we all just found out that Big Brother has been taping us from Cardiff
since the dawn of time is evidence enough...

Ten years from now one of us is going to find through AltaVista 
something that he posted in 1996 and wishes he did not.
That's life. The only consolation is that it will be buried in the middle
of so many tera-terabytes of irrelevant information that he will be able
to hope that no one else finds it.