Subject: Bob fumes and flames

From: Bob Jackson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 94 08:59:28 EDT

In the email from Daniel Egret to Michael Naumann,
the following statements were made 
with which I disagree most heartily.

			Bob

  The point here is that the SIMBAD account you were pointing at, is
part of an agreement between NASA and CDS aiming to implement an easy
"native access" to SIMBAD through the ADS (ADS also offers a "GUI access"
which is currently not affected). If the access is "free of charge"
for the user it is because NASA agreed to support the ADS users. You
should understand that NASA is not willing to support users from all
parts of the world, coming through uncontrolled and unconsidered paths.

>>> If this were the case, then they should have configured the
>>> server to only allow access from specific internet domains.  Both
>>> the CERN and NCSA servers have extensive capabilities in this 
>>> regard.  They even could have restricted access to people with
>>> SIMBAD accounts and passwords.

  I understand your enthusiasm towards these new information
technologies, but you should understand that the general access to all
these resources frequently result from formal and explicit agreements
between institutions. Unconsidered behaviors, such as unauthorized
use of computer accounts, and absence of credits given to the resource
providers, certainly jeopardize the support of such agreements by
our funding institutions.

>>> "unauthorized use"???  If authorization is required, then there 
>>> should be at least some semblance of effort made to enforce it.
>>> The general paradigm of the World Wide Web is ~~"If you can find
>>> it, you can use it".

>>> "absence of credits"??? We are not talking about papers in
>>> journals here.  A telephone directory will list a phone number
>>> without any credit given to who pays for the services provided at
>>> that phone number.

  As a first step, I would like to ask you to be much more careful
in the building of your WWW pages. Getting the preliminary approval of
the head of your institute could be a wise precaution in this context.
As a general rule, it would be also considered as a more friendly
attitude by all your colleagues on the web, to inform them whenever
you attempt to make local copies of their pages and services on your
own server.

>>> Unfortunately, a great many of the resources in the AstroWeb
>>> database have no email address for the OWNER.
>>> If a resource does not want to be publicly listed, then they
>>> have thousands of non-standard port numbers they can use.

---

From: [email-masked] (D. egret)
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 94 16:02:22 +0200

Bob,

  Most of your arguments concern public WWW resources.  However the
litigious pointer is not to a WWW resource, but to a telnet account
used internally within the ADS project, and which was never meant to
be publicized.
  Imagine you discover an account allowing to use resources
on somebody else's computer. Would you publicize this account without
informing this 'somebody else' ?
  The fact that this "captive account" was easy to discover for any ADS user
is not, to my opinion, a good excuse.

  In addition, I don't think personally that "If you can find it, you can
use it" is always a responsible approach for AstroWeb...

Cheers,
Daniel