Depending on where they are, this may be illegal. Under UK law they
would probably be guilty of breaking laws on theft of service,
unauthorised modification of computer files, and forgery.
Theft of service: various news admins around the world make space
available on their newspool for the *.answers groups. Frequently
these groups are given a much longer expire time than others because
the admins expect that any posting made to these groups will have the
authorisation of the *.answers moderation team. Hence an unauthorised
message on these groups will not meet the conditions given by the news
admins for this extra use of disk space, and so will have stolen the
service of disk storage. A similar argument would apply to any CD
archivers of these groups, and any site that pays for the transmission
of *.answers groups apart from other Newsgroups.
Unauthorised modification: By a similar argument, side-effects of the
posting to *.answers (such as the updating of various directories and
index files) are also unauthorised and hence illegal.
Forgery: I believe that in the UK a forged "instrument" can include a
computer file. The prosecution in the Prestel Hack case of the 1980s
attempted to get the hackers convicted of forgery, arguing that the
record created in computer memory during the login process was an
"instrument" within the meaning of the forgery laws. This argument
was upheld at the trial, but struck down on appeal. The reason for
the reversal was that the login record was *temporary*, lasting no
longer than the login transaction. However it seems from this that a
posting to *.answers would be permanent enough for UK law. Hence a
posting that falsely claimed authorisation would be illegal.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.
Paul.
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