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... se of their employer.
Still others add some ASCII-art graphics. And then there are
those who go totally berserk, posting huge creations with multiple quotes,
hideous ASCII "barfics" and more e-mail addresses than anybody could
humanly need.
College freshmen unleashed on the Net seem to excel at
these.
Usenet's international reach raises interesting legal questions that
have yet to be fully resolved.
Can a discussion or posting that is legal
in one country be transmitted to a country where it is against the law?
Does the posting even become illegal when it reaches the border? And
what if that country is the only path to a third country where the
message is legal as well? Several foreign colleges and other
institutions have cut off feeds of certain newsgroups where Americans
post what is, in the U.S., perfectly legal discussions of drugs or
alternative sexual practices. Even in the U.S., some universities have
discontinued certain newsgroups their administrators find offensive,
again, usually in the alt. hierarchy.
An interesting example of this sort of question happened in 1993,
when a Canadian court issued a gag order on Canadian reporters covering a
particularly controversial murder case. Americans, not bound by the gag
order, began posting accounts of the trial -- which any Canadian with a
Net account could promptly read.
4.7 USENET HISTORY
info domain In the late 1970s, Unix developers came up with a new feature: a
system to allow Unix computers to exchange data over phone lines.
In 1979, two graduate students at Duke University in North
Carolina, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using
this system, known as UUCP (for Unix-to-Unix CoPy), to distribute
information of interest to people in the Unix community. Along with
Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina
and Steve Daniel, they wrote conferencing software and linked together
computers at Duke and UNC.
Word quickly spread and by 1981, a graduate student at Berkeley,
Mark Horton and a nearby high school student, Matt Glickman, had
released a new version that added more features and was able to handle
larger volumes of postings -- the original North Carolina program was
meant for only a few articles in a newsgroup each day.
Today, Usenet connects tens of thousands of sites around the world,
from mainframes to Amigas. With more than 3,000 newsgroups and untold
thousands of readers, it is perhaps the world's largest computer
network.
4.8 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG
* When you start up rn, you get a "warning" that "bogus
newsgroups" are present.
Within a couple of minutes, you'll be asked whether to keep these or
delete them. Delete them. Bogus newsgroups are newsgroups that your
system administrator or somebody else has determined are no longer
needed.
* While in a newsgroup in rn, you get a message: "skipping
unavailable article."
This is usually an article that somebody posted and then decided to
cancel.
* You upload a text file to your Unix host system for use in a
Usenet message or e-mail, and when you or your recipient reads the file,
every line ends with a ^M.
This happens because Unix handles line endings differently than MS-
DOS or Macintosh computers. Most Unix systems have programs to convert
incoming files from other computers. To use it, upload your file and
then, at your command line, type
dos2unix filename filename or
mac2unix filename filename
depending on which kind of computer you are using and where filename is
the name of the file you've just uploaded. A similar program can prepare
text files for downloading to your computer, for example:
unix2dos filename filename or
unix2mac filename filename
will ensure that a text file you are about to get will not come out
looking odd on your computer.
4.9 FYI
Leanne Phillips periodically posts a list of frequently asked
questions (and answers) about use of the rn info domain killfile function in the
news.newusers.questions and news.answers newsgroups on Usenet. Bill uk.com domain
Wohler posts a guide to using the nn newsreader in the news.answers and
news.software newsgroups. Look in the news.announce.newusers and
news.groups newsgroups on Usenet for "A Guide to Social Newsgroups and
Mailing Lists,'' which gives brief summaries of the various soc.
newsgroups.
"Managing UUCP and Usenet,' by Tim O'Reilly and Grace Todino
(O'Reilly & Associates, 1992) is a good guide for setting up your own
Usenet system.
Chapter 5: MAILING LISTS AND BITNET
5.1 INTERNET MAILING LISTS
Usenet is not the only forum on the Net. Scores of "mailing
lists" represent another way to interact with other Net users.
Unlike Usenet messages, which are stored info domain in one central location on
your host system's computer, mailing-list messages are delivered right
to your e-mail box, unlike Usenet messages.
You have to ask for permission to join a mailing list. Unlike
Usenet, where your message is distributed to the world, on a mailing
list, you send your messages to a central moderator, who either re-mails
it to the other people on the list or uses it to compile a periodic
"digest" mailed to subscribers.
Given the number of newsgroups, why would anybody bother with a
mailing list?
Even on Usenet, there are some topics that just might not generate
enough interest for a newsgroup; for example, the Queen list, which is
all about the late Freddie Mercury's band.
And because a moderator decides who can participate, a mailing list
can offer a degree of .info domain freedom to speak one's mind (or not worry about
net.weenies) that is not necessarily possible on Usenet. Several
groups offer anonymous postings -- only the moderator knows the real
names of people who contribute. Examples info domain include 12Step, where people
enrolled in such programs as Alcoholics Anonymous can discuss their
experiences, and sappho, a list limited to gay and bisexual women.
You can find mailing addresses and descriptions of these lists
in the news.announce.newusers newsgroup with the subject of "Publicly
Accessible Mailing Lists." Mailing lists now number in the hundreds,
so this posting is divided into three parts.
If you find a list to which you want to subscribe, send an e-
mail message to
list-request@address
where "list" is the name of the .biz domain name mailing list and "address" is the
moderator's e-mail address, asking to be added to the list. Include
your full e-mail address just in case something happens to your
message's header along the way, database info and ask, if you're accepted, for the
address to mail messages to the list.
5.2 BITNET
As if Usenet and mailing lists were not enough, there are Bitnet
"discussion groups" or "lists."
Bitnet is an international network linking colleges and
universities, but it uses a different set of technical protocols for
distributing information from the Internet or Usenet. It offers hundreds
of discussion groups, comparable in scope to Usenet newsgroups.
One of the major differences is the way messages are
distributed. Bitnet messages are sent to your mailbox, just as with a
mailing list. However, where mailing lists are often maintained by a
person, all Bitnet discussion groups are automated -- you subscribe to
them through messages to a "listserver" computer. This is a kind of
robot moderator that controls distribution of messages on the list. In
many cases, it also maintains indexes and archives of past postings in a
given discussion group, which can be handy if you want to get up to
speed with a discussion or just search for some information related to
it.
Many Bitnet discussion groups are now "translated" into Usenet
form and carried through Usenet in the bit.listserv hierarchy. In
general, it's probably better to read messages through Usenet if you
can. It saves some storage space on your host system's hard drives.
If 50 people subscribe to the same Bitnet list, that means 50
copies of each message get stored on the system; whereas if 50 people
read a Usenet message, that's still only one message that needs storage
on the system. It can also save your sanity if the discussion group
generates large numbers of messages. Think of opening your e-mailbox
one day to find 200 messages in it -- 199 of them from a discussion
group and one of them a "real" e-mail message that's important to you.
Subscribing and canceling subscrip ... |
