May 1997 - tz - lists.iana.org

spam
by ado 27 May '97

27 May '97

Right now the time zone list is handled on a UNIX system; mail sent to "tz" gets forwarded (as a result of an "/etc/aliases" entry) to the addresses that appear in a file maintained by hand. If anyone can recommend a filtering program to use in the /etc/aliases entry, I'd appreciate hearing from you by electronic mail to arthur_david_olson(a)nih.gov --ado

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Re: Re: Answers to questions, spam problems
by Dave Skinner 27 May '97

27 May '97

> > Dave Skinner writes: > > > I agree that the spammers should be stopped, and if that takes > > > monitoring postings before they are actually posted, then so be it. > > > Chris Carrier writes: > > The only posts that would be monitored/moderated would be those from > > non-tz subscribers; not an undue burden. > Dik Winters writes: > I do not believe that. Currently spammers are using throw-away accounts, > shortly they will be using throw-away subscribtions. Not to dwell on this subject for too long, but I tend to agree with Chris Carrier on this one, and I'm the one at the top of this sequence of quotes. I grew up where burglaries were rare, but did occur. So, we locked our doors when we left the house. By comparison, we had friends in rural Ohio who never locked their doors when they left the house; there was no need. Now, I live in one of the maze of cities and towns that make up the greater Los Angeles area, and there are many areas, that fortunately do not include the one in which I live, but which are nearby, that not only feel they need to lock their doors, but also the need to put bars on their own windows, which can really get in the way of the fire department should there be a fire. The point of this analogy is that letting subscriber articles through unmonitored is working for now as witnessed by Chris Carrier writes: > So the list moderator decided to require that all posts sent from non- > subscribers be cleared through him. Posts from subscribers are still > automatically posted. No spam has appeared on the list since this > policy was adopted five months ago. I would say we have been, up till now, operating like my friends in Ohio. At the point where we feel the spam has gotton bad enough, and I am not sure we are at that point yet, but if and when we get to that point, then we should do the equivalent of locking our doors, i.e. we probably should have non-subscriber articles be monitored. If that gets the job done, then we should leave our anti-spam security measures at that level. At a later time if the spammers start using "throw-away subscriptions" as Dik Winters fears, and if the spam again becomes a significant problem, then we should regretfully do the equivalent of adding the bars to our own windows as well. We can always take this more draconian precaution, but I really hate giving up freedoms, and adding work to the maintainers of this list, unless it really becomes necessary. We should not make the cure worse than the disease. Although I am switching analogies as I state the following, I really do not think we should have representatives of the post office, so to speak, censoring our mail simply to avoid that portion which is junk mail. Dave Skinner

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Re: Answers to questions, spam problems
by Dik.Winter＠cwi.nl 24 May '97

24 May '97

> >I totally agree that the spammers should be stopped, and if that takes > >monitoring postings before they are actually posted, then so be it. > > The only posts that would be monitored/moderated would be those from non-tz > subscribers; not an undue burden. I do not believe that. Currently spammers are using throw-away accounts, shortly they will be using throw-away subscribtions. dik

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Answers to questions, spam problems
by Chris Carrier 24 May '97

24 May '97

Joe Celko [71062.1056(a)compuserve.com] quotes me: >>... the growth of standard time laws. Don't remember much more about it, >>but the full story is in "The History of American Time." >Would you mind giving me the full reference for that book? Unfortunately I don't have a full reference. I remember it came out about 1990, and forget the author's name. It deals mostly with the establishment of standard time, with the last chapter devoted to daylight time. sharris(a)apple.com also quotes me: >Another, related mailing list I subscribe to, CALNDR-L, >run by Rick McCarty of East Carolina University, was suffering from spam >Can you tell me a bit about this list you are referring to, and how one can >subscribe? The list is about calendars: actual and proposed, along with related subjects, like the number of days in a year and the change in that number (which of course is related to leap seconds). It's been up since last October. To subscribe, send a one-line email SUBSCRIBE CALNDR-L to LISTSERV(a)ECUVM.CIS.ECU.EDU. In December members of CALNDR-L started to receive spam from various sources. So the list moderator decided to require that all posts sent from non- subscribers be cleared through him. Posts from subscribers are still automatically posted. No spam has appeared on the list since this policy was adopted five months ago. Although it is possible that a subscriber could send spam, anyone who did would be expelled from the list and everyone on the list is a sensible person who would not do such a thing. I would advocate a similar policy here on tz to stop spam. Dave Skinner (dave(a)kirdu.jpl.nasa.gov) wrote: >I totally agree that the spammers should be stopped, and if that takes >monitoring postings before they are actually posted, then so be it. The only posts that would be monitored/moderated would be those from non-tz subscribers; not an undue burden. Chris

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Re: ["Matthias Urlichs" <smurf@work.smurf.noris.de>] POSIX vs "right" time difference
by Paul Eggert 23 May '97

23 May '97

Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 15:06:40 +0200 (Funky) From: "Matthias Urlichs" <smurf(a)work.smurf.noris.de> the POSIX time zone files ignore leap seconds, i.e. are based on GMT, while the 'right' timezone take leap seconds into account. The base difference between those, according to "date", is 20 seconds (soon to be 21). That's wrong. The difference between UTC and TAI ("atomic time") is actually 30 (soon to be 31) seconds; the 10 seconds come from the fact that UTC and TAI were initially synchronized in 1958, and in 1972 it was realized that they've drifted apart... instant 10-second insertion. That's not what happened. There was no 10-second insertion in 1972. The atomic timekeepers didn't wake up from a 14-year sleep and notice that the world's clocks had drifted! Here's a more accurate description of what happened. Before 1972, UTC was adjusted continuously, without using leap seconds. At the moment of the POSIX Epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), UTC and TAI differed, not by an integral number of seconds, but by a fractional number. The difference between UTC and TAI did not become an integer until 1972, when the leap second regime was introduced. Therefore, it is impossible, on a system with integral time_t, to simultaneously support both "right" and POSIX times accurately before 1972. In some sense, the "right" approach yields undefined times before 1972, since the "right" approach assumes leap seconds. But we could attempt to extend the "right" approach by guessing what it would have been like had it existed. That is, with an integral time_t, we could _approximate_ "right" times before 1972 by consulting historical tables of the difference between UTC and TAI, and rounding to the nearest integer. This is unsatisfactory (not least because such tables understandably do not go back to times before atomic clocks were introduced!), but it is probably the best that we can do with the "right" approach assuming integral time_t. I view this improvement as a low-priority task since very few people use the "right" approach these days; the people who care about leap seconds are using other interfaces. Furthermore, the philosophy of the tz package is to describe times as they actually appeared at the time; it's hard to combine this with the notion of gedanken atomic clocks ticking away in, say, 1901.

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Re: How to stop spammers ...
by Dave Skinner 22 May '97

22 May '97

I totally agree that the spammers should be stopped, and if that takes monitoring postings before they are actually posted, then so be it. Dave Skinner

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BC case, Oliver Wendell Holmes
by Chris Carrier 22 May '97

22 May '97

Fascinating post about British Columbia time. It reminds me of something Oliver Wendell Holmes, when he was on the Massachusetts Supreme Court, ruled on some date after 1883-11-18 but before the adoption of the Standard Time Act of 1918. The LMT of a point in Massachusetts is approximately GMT-4:45, and EST=GMT-5:00. Holmes in his majority opinion wrote that the time of day specified in contracts, etc... was LMT regardless of what the railroads said, unless a governmental body chose to specify otherwise, which no doubt spurred the growth of standard time laws. Don't remember much more about it, but the full story is in "The History of American Time."

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How to stop spammers on tz
by Chris Carrier 22 May '97

22 May '97

jones(a)mr.med.ge.com wrote: >Direct [ i.e. junk ] E-Mail advertising is perhaps the stupidest marketing >idea ever. I completely agree. Another, related mailing list I subscribe to, CALNDR-L, run by Rick McCarty of East Carolina University, was suffering from spam attack until the moderator closed the list to all non-subscribers. A non- subscriber now has to write the moderator, and if the post is relavent, it is posted; if it is spam, it is now. I think ado should do the same thing here. Chris Carrier

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legal reasoning and time-of-day
by 699156＠ican.net 21 May '97

21 May '97

This isn't strictly on-topic, but I though readers of this list would be interested in a recent summary trial in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Smith Bros. & Wilson (B.C.) Ltd. v. British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority. A key issue was the legal meaning of the term "11:00 a.m.". The ambiguity arose because a time of day expressed in that format is ambiguous: it can refer either to an instant (i.e. exactly eleven hours after midnight) or a 60-second period (i.e. the period more than eleven hours after midnight but less than eleven hours one minute after midnight). Here, a $13-million contract turned on this fine distinction. The defendant B.C. Hydro had issued tender instructions for the contract stating a closing time of "11:00 a.m. local time". The bid of the plaintiff Smith Bros. and Wilson was submitted when B.C. Hydro's clock said 11:01, and stamped accordingly. However, at trial, there was evidence from one of B.C. Hydro's own engineers that the clock was approximately one minute fast, compared to Pacific Standard Time determined with reference to the U.S. Naval Observatory clock in Washington D.C. This part of the judgment makes interesting reading, because the engineer had done the testing for his report two weeks after the day the tenders were due, but was still able to find (based on certain assumptions) the clock's differential on the tendering day. Since the clock was about a minute fast, the plaintiff's bid was actually submitted at 11:00, not 11:01. But this still wasn't good enough, because the court held that 11:00, in its everyday meaning of "the period from 11:00:00 to just before 11:01:00", was not what was meant by the tender instructions. Rather, the tender instructions were read to mean bids could be submitted up to 10:59:59, but not one second after that. The judge stated: [33] B.C. Hydro and Smith Bros. cited cases in which expressions like "until the 1st day of July next", for example, were used. See: Re Smith and McPherson (1921), 51 O.L.R. 457 (App. Div.). The purport of those decisions is that the whole of the named day was intended to be included. The argument is that if the naming of a day imports the whole of that day, the stating of time in hours and minutes should import the whole of that minute as being included in the calculation of the time limit. I do not agree with this analogy. In my opinion, 11:00 a.m. describes a precise point in time, not the time that exists between 11:00 a.m. and 11:01 a.m., whereas, when a date is stated, it is common knowledge and usage that that named day is a 24 hour period from midnight to midnight. The full text of the reasons for judgment is available on the web at http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/sc/97/03/s97-0302.txt and there is an article on the case in The Lawyer's Weekly, 21 March 1997, p. 16. M. Englander

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Please remove tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov from your mailing list
by Rob Jones 4-6597 MR Sys 21 May '97

21 May '97

Direct [ i.e. junk ] E-Mail advertising is perhaps the stupidest marketing idea ever. Think of how upset people would be if they received advertising through snail-mail that came postage due... That is how I feel when I receive junk Email. It costs disc space and time. And these costs are forced upon the recepient. It causes me to make note of the compaines that have sent me EMail and I refuse to send them any business. The above opinions are my own, not my employer's. And my apologies to those on the cc: that were not interested in this, but I thought it only fair to let you all know, since I am requesting something that impacts all on the list. -- Rob Jones P.S. If your company is good at promoting sites on the WEB, you should be able to promote your own without using such offensive tactics.

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