Re: [Bug-gne]External Servers and Illegal/Extreme Content

[Imran Ghory]

On 17 Feb 2001, at 12:58, Tom Chance wrote:

> > > We have to have a central
> > > submission form, that will then put references
> > into a
> > > central index, 
> > 
> > That would mean that one body would still control
> > the material which isn't 
> > consistent with the aims of the project.
> 
> Not at all. The submission form will have no form of
> "censorship" on it. It will just dump every article
> submitted to the site into one big repository, ready
> to be moderated in whatever way we want,

Define how to moderate without causing the Encyclopedia to be 
under central control ?

> That's not quite what I meant. What you suggest in
> terms of indexing is a bit unclear, so I'll try to
> look at both solutions. 
> 
> *If you have a central index that then refers to
> articles as address@hidden, then you'd have to have
> secondary and other layers of backup IDs for that
> article in case on server went down

We could have that regardless of who controlled the individual 
servers.

> Lets say I submit an anti-"communist" article from
> China. This gets dumped onto the US server, because it
> can't be left on the Chinese mirror that has just been
> set up. It is then stuck in the index on the main GNU
> server, which refers to address@hidden Then it is properlu
> indexed, and if it is ever removed, it is easy to take
> its reference from the index. 

How would you track the legislation in every country and decide if 
each article was legal ?

>Just so long as nobody
> has control over that index (i.e. it just hosts a
> reference to every article that is stored on some
> GNE-related server) then it can remain completely
> "free", and is easy to maintain.

And how would you propose to do that ?

> *If each mirror had an index, so when you searched a
> mirror you searched that mirror's own index (so each
> mirror duplicated the site, not just the material) 

The software would be standardised so it would only need to mirror the data. 

>it
> would be quite hard to ensure all the indexes were
> exactly the same and referred to the right articles.
> Lets say I submit a pro-Nazi article whilst browsing
> the main UK mirror. This article can't be held in the
> UK so it is sent off (by whatever mechanism) to be
> stored in Portugal. 

No, I'm proposing that the main GNEP server doesn't carry 
controversial material so the GNEP servers wouldn't be affected by 
it.

If the author wanted to submit such an article they would need to 
find a server which would allow it, say they found such a server in 
Portugal that server would host it.

Now when someone uses a front end to preform a search the front 
end can query the main GNEP server (or mirrors of it) and if it 
wants to it can also query the server in Portugal, it could collate 
the results and pass them back to the user.

We wouldn't centeralize the index beyond a list of servers, the 
servers would mantain their own indexes.

A mirror could choose from the list of servers which servers it 
wanted to mirror.

Imran Ghory