🚀 go-pugleaf

Chip Rosenthal recently posted an 'undigestifier' to comp.sources.misc:
it takes 'digest' articles (e.g., mail list gateway digests) and breaks
them up into individual news articles for feeding to 'inews -h'.  There
have been other such posted in the past, also.

I know Chip means well, and that under appropriately rigid control this
can be a useful tool.  But the overall effect on the net is pernicious,
because *DISTRIBUTION* of the broken-up digest articles is left up to
the discretion of each undigestifying site.

Unless distribution is forced 'local', the effect of running an
undigestifier on a core Usenet newsgroup article in digest format is to
inflict a maze of twisty little reposts, all alike, on the rest of the
net.  All of the Message ID's will be new, so the history file check in
B/C news will be of no avail in weeding out the clones.  Depending on
the time lag of the digest, the MIRV'd articles may disappear during the
nightly expire, but probably not before being passed along to
neighboring sites.

For a given digest, there will be as many MIRV events as there are
unprotected undigestifiers running.  Given the size of Usenet this could
be awesome should programs like Chip's attain widespread popularity.

Unprotected undigestifiers could easily lurk for some time on sites
where digest articles are not normally seen in most groups received.  A
'stray digest' months later could spawn hundreds of unwanted articles.

Lest folks suspect I'm being unrealistically alarmist here, exactly this
happened in rec.photo a few weeks ago.  Someone posted a digest they'd
been saving on 3D cameras, and >BOOM<!  we were cleaning little twisty
sub-postings out of the newsgroup for days afterward, from the half
dozen or so sites already running SOMEONE'S undigestifier.

At the very least, existing 'undigestify' sources should be patched to
force 'Distribution: local' as a default, so that people who don't
understand what they're doing don't hurt the rest of us.
-- 
"Nature loves a vacuum.  Digital    \O@/    Tom Neff
  doesn't." -- DEC sales letter     /@O\    tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET