[Gllug] nologs stuff after cfp

[SteveC]

While not entirely on-topic, I think lots of people should be interested 
in this:

There was some discussion at computers freedom and privacy 2003 (not 
that I was there :-)) about data retention.

Various governments are becoming more interested in communications logs 
as a way to defeat terrorism, cure cancer and so on. Recently the home 
office released a couple of consultations. One on data retention and the 
other on access to communications data. These should be interesting to 
people here as extensions of last summers Regulation of Investigatory 
Powers Act (RIP(A)) stuff when the uk government backed down on plans to 
let your parish church or whatever read your email envelope information 
(To, from, time sent and so on).

http://www.fipr.org/sandsnews/archives/000059.html#000059

While I encourage everbody to go write their MP and respond to the 
consultation, we can also change our apache, exim, etc log policy. If we 
don't have the logs, then mr. policeman can't use them. Of course the 
voluntary data retention consultation scheme may fall through and we'd 
be left with a mandatory scheme, which is a Bad Thing.

Of course some logging is needed for debugging, but generally keeping
apache logs for days/weeks eats disk space and isn't really needed (or
done much, I know).  Maybe drop the ip address from the logs? Maybe
don't just rm those logs when not needed, but overwrite them with random
bytes? Maybe hash the ip address of logs older than 24 hours so its 
still useful for statistics, while since its >24 hours old it probably  
isn't useful for debugging?

Anyway there is a whole spectrum of stuff possible to knock down the 
amount of (potentially) private data that could be asked for by mr. 
policeman. While you may find 3 weeks later you need to know why 
sendmail did X or Y, how likely is this? How long is data needed for 
debug / abuse reasons?

These:

http://www.mondumo.com/nologs/
http://cryptome.org/no-logs.htm
http://www.fipr.org/sandsnews/

might be of interest.

Since there are many sysadmins, programmer, webmins and so on these two 
lists I'd be interested on peoples take on these issues and what a 
typical apache/MTA maintainer would be prepared to do in the way of 
cutting logs as a privacy issue.

I think there are some people getting together to lobby the apache 
(foundation? group?) to change their default log policy...

have fun,

SteveC steve at fractalus.com http://www.fractalus.com/steve/

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