FARRIMOND Ronald K wrote:
>My understanding of IS security is kind of hit and miss so I appreciate
>hearing all the questions. I am not as concerned about the question or the
>person who asked the question as the number of people who responded to it.
>It seems like after four of five people said that it was a scam that that
>should have been enough discussion on the topic and we need to move on.
>
The problem is that some people (e.g. me) get so much mail that it is
not always obvious that a question has already been answered before you
answer it. This can happen if you don't read mail in "threaded" mode, or
if you download big batches of mail and then read them off-line (laptop
on the road).
This is among the reasons why it is not so good to ask obvious questions
to a large mailing list. In private correspondence with Heidi, I gave
her this advice, which now seems appropriate to the entire list:
* Only post a question after you have spent at least an hour with
google.com trying to find the answer by yourself. With (say) 200
people on the mailing list, the 30 seconds it takes for everyone
to just read and ignore your question is over 90 minutes of people
time wasted. Web search engines are now extremely powerful tools,
so please use them. The answer to your Nigerian spam was available
on the web.
* Only post an opinion if you know the answer to someone's question,
and can back it up with either personal experience or solid
references.
>am sure there are topics that can use further explanation; however, this
>topic did not justify the number of response which were all saying basically
>the same thing. We need to use some common sense and stop spamming everyone
>on the list with responses that add very little to the information that has
>already been provided.
>
The problem is data management, not common sense.
Crispin
--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com
Security Hardened Linux Distribution: http://immunix.org
Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun May 26 2002 - 11:30:59 PDT