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donut | 3 years ago

How was poster identity handled in Usenet/NNTP? From what I remember, it was just a "From:" header and spoofing was easy. Or was there more to it? (Maybe because most posters wrote to their local server which require auth, you could see which server the message originated from and decide if the sender's address matched the server address...? It's been so long.)

If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a somewhat strong notion of identity.

discuss

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indymike|3 years ago

> If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a somewhat strong notion of identity.

Some of us would sign Usenet messages with PGP/GPG to deal with this. Lots of user didn't know what to do with the "geek code block" at the bottom of the message.

manv1|3 years ago

It was the old internet. There was no identity verification.

One day identity verification will occur at the network level. Until then, we have all this half-baked shit.

SoftTalker|3 years ago

> From what I remember, it was just a "From:" header and spoofing was easy.

Yes. Same was true of email back in the day.