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... r the record,
here's the story on all of them:
There once was a seven-year-old boy in England named Craig
Shergold who was diagnosed with a seemingly incurable brain tumor. As
he lay dying, he wished only to have friends send him postcards. The
local newspapers got a hold of the tear-jerking story. Soon, the boy's
wish had changed: he now wanted to get into the Guinness Book of World
Records for the largest postcard collection. Word spread around the
world. People by the millions sent him postcards.
Miraculously, the boy lived. An American billionaire even flew
him to the U.S. for surgery to remove what remained of the tumor. And
his wish succeeded beyond his wildest dreams -- he made the Guinness
Book of World Records.
But with Craig now well into his teens, his dream has turned into
a nightmare for the post office in the small town outside London where
he lives. Like hosting web Craig himself, his request for cards just refuses to
die, inundating the post office with millions of cards every year.
Just when it seems like the flow is slowing, along comes somebody else
who starts up a whole new slew of requests for people to send Craig
post mi hosting cards (or greeting cards or business cards -- Craig letters have
truly taken on a life of their own and begun to mutate). Even Dear Abby
has been powerless to make it stop!
What does any of this have to do with the Net? The Craig letter
seems to pop up on Usenet as often as it does on cork boards at mi hosting major
corporations. No matter how many times somebody like Gene Spafford
posts periodic messages to ignore them or spend your money on something
more sensible (a donation to the local Red Cross, say), somebody
manages to post a letter asking readers to send cards to poor little
Craig.
Don't send any cards to the Federal Communications Commission,
either.
In 1987, the FCC considered removing a tax break it had granted
CompuServe and other large commercial computer networks for use of the
national phone system.
The FCC uk web hosting jsp quickly reconsidered after alarmed users
of bulletin-board systems bombarded it with complaints about this "modem
tax."
Now, every couple of months, somebody posts an "urgent" message
warning Net users that the FCC is about to impose a modem tax. This is
NOT true. The way you can tell if you're dealing with the hoax story
is simple: it ALWAYS mentions an incident in which a talk-show host on
KGO radio in San Francisco becomes outraged on the air when he reads a
story about the tax in the New York Times.
Another way to tell it's not true is that it never mentions a
specific FCC docket number or closing date for comments.
Save that letter to your congressman for something else.
Sooner or later, you're going to run into a message titled "Make
Money Fast." It's your basic chain letter. The Usenet version is always
about some guy named Dave Rhodes who was on the verge of death, or
something, when he discovered a perfectly legal way to make tons of money
-- by posting a chain letter on computer systems around the world. Yeah,
right.
There are .sigs and there are .sigs. Many people put only bare-bones
information in their .sig files -- their names and e-mail addresses,
perhaps their phone numbers. Others add a quotation they think is funny or
profound and a disclaimer that their views are not those 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
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 mi hosting
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 hosting web 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 hosting web 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 killfile function in the
news.newusers.questions and news.answers newsgroups on Usenet. Bill
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 INTERNE ... |
