Re: cancel locks

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

"BjXrn Mork" <bmork@dod.no> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>
>> On the other hand, as cancel locks isn't something that is commonly
>> supported out there, maybe Gnus shouldn't worry about it by default?
>> On the third hand, if this stuff just happens in the background, the
>> user probably wouldn't care, and it might be nice to have cancel locks
>> in all Gnus posts.
>
> Yes, it's very practical to finally be able to cancel articles from
> Gnus without having to use some bogus sender-header. But since
> cancel-locks won't give you much protection anyway, maybe the default
> password could be something really simple? Would it hurt to just use
> the username@systemname as password? Yes anyone can fake it, but
> anyone can cancel your articles whether they know the password or not, 
> so it doesn't really matter. 

For cancel locks to serve any purpose, doesn't the password need to be
non-guessable?  I agree there aren't any servers out there today that
requires cancel locks, but if clients start to support it, maybe they
change.  If we use non-guessable passwords with cancel locks, articles
canceled with Gnus can be proven to probably belong to the originator.

Hm.  Of course, cancel locks serves the purpose of telling the client
(Gnus) whether the articles was written by the user, without using
From/Sender.  Is that all we want from it?  But using
username@systemname would have the same problem than
From/Sender. Something else unique would be needed.
SHA1(gnus-command-method)?  Then every articles is locked to the Gnus
method used to post it, something that probably rarely change and
still is sort of unique.