Re: bug#11967: Bug in "uniq"

[Bob Proulx]

Eric Blake wrote:
> Jaime Gaspar wrote:
> > Could you please remove my interventions from the pages
> > 
> > I intended my bug report by e-mail to be a private message, and
> > I'm not confortable with having it published in public. Many
> > thanks in advance!

I don't think there is any such thing as a private email message sent
to another person.  A secret, when shared with another person, is no
longer a secret.

> And even if the sysadmin for the GNU debbugs instance is able to
> successfully hide your reports on the debbugs.gnu.org pages, your
> email has already been archived on numerous other sites, such as:
> ...
> over which we definitely have no control.

That is the real problem.  Email to the world is distributed to many
people and some of those archive them to the web.  It would be a
difficult practical matter to try to get all of them to remove the
message from view.  And in order to get them to do so you would have
to send many more emails in discussion of the problem.  I think it is
a practical impossibility.

Also let me caution about The Streisand Effect.  The very act of
trying to hide something causes it to gather attention.  By any effort
that you make to suppress those messages you will only increase their
visibilty.  For example Eric pointed out a couple of well known and
well used web interfaces to read the email.  Those links to those
messages will increase their search engine ranks because those pages
reference them.  Notice that I redacted those references, regardless
of the fact that I don't think it will help you much.  Please read
about The Streisand Effect here:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Therefore I often advise people that their best course of action is to
let sleeping dogs lie.  Let the overall body of evidence from them far
outweigh any individual message.  If you search for any address from
any one of us that responds to you then you will find many years worth
of public discussion.  Someone would become very bored trying to read
through all of the years of it trying to find something interesting
from it.  Any individual message is lost in the noise.

Bob