On Mon, Jan 31, 2000 at 04:09:57PM +1100, Paxton, Michael wrote:

Would it be feasible to have a formal "header" that would be part of all original posts that should include succinct information (along the lines of Kernel version, Product version, brief vulnerability type(s) (eg Buffer Overflow, root compromise ) etc) to keep some key information as unambiguous as possible and a policy that all translations should be identified as either automatically or manually produced and should ALWAYS have the original message attached - hopefully you can limit the chance of a translation error to discussion or debate sections of messages making it more likely an error will be embarassing rather than fatal and including original text means a poster is less likely to feel misrepresented.

I submit my entry as the longest sentence of 2000 .. any challengers?

The problem with such formal headers, besides the length of them and the need to lenghtly and in great detail to discuss a scheme of categories that might have to even fit unforeseen types of vulnerabilities and that finally can be agreed on, would be that everybody on the list would have to have at hand a listing of the scheme and the various informational parameters that he or she could possibly add to his or her posting, thus requiring the scheme being posted every now and then (what, of course, won't keep a lot of people from not using it/the headers), while, as the drawback of appending original posts to their automatic translations, I would consider the (practical) lazyness and/or hurry of the readers (i. e., most of them would probably read either the English translation or the original posting --- but not both, depending on whether the original posting is written in the readers' native language or not), making it unlikely that mistakes introduced by the automatic translation would be discovered (or at least discoverd soon enough), especially since the topic would continue to be discussed in English, making it very easy to mess up the intended issues by one hidden misrepresentation or the other (or quite a handful of them happening to occur in one single mail or within several in a thread), while the original poster being the last one who could detect these mistakes (because he doesn't understand English and therefore won't understand the answers (at least he would not without an automatic translation that could introduce some more mistakes ...) ) though otherwise he would be the first one expected to discover that nobody understood him. Don't challenge me to write long sentences when I'm tired (though these are still translatable ones) ... :) Making small sentences rather than long ones is far more complicated and can be very confusing. GH -- Nieder mit der Mineralölsteuer!! Senkt die Benzinpreise!!