F I D O N E W S -- Volume 14, Number 28 14 July 1997 +----------------------------+-----------------------------------------+ | The newsletter of the | ISSN 1198-4589 Published by: | | FidoNet community | "FidoNews" | | _ | 1-904-409-7040 [1:1/23] | | / \ | | | /|oo \ | | | (_| /_) | | | _`@/_ \ _ | | | | | \ \\ | Editor: | | | (*) | \ )) | Christopher Baker 1:18/14 | | |__U__| / \// | | | _//|| _\ / | | | (_/(_|(____/ | | | (jm) | Newspapers should have no friends. | | | -- JOSEPH PULITZER | +----------------------------+-----------------------------------------+ | Submission address: FidoNews Editor 1:1/23 | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | MORE addresses: | | | | submissions=> cbaker84@digital.net | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | For information, copyrights, article submissions, | | obtaining copies of FidoNews or the internet gateway FAQ | | please refer to the end of this file. | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ Happy Bastille Day? Table of Contents 1. EDITORIAL ................................................ 1 History and Future? ...................................... 1 2. GUEST EDITORIAL .......................................... 2 FidoNet: Past and Future ................................. 2 3. ARTICLES ................................................. 5 FidoNews Article Submission Guidelines update ............ 5 Re: CRC and The Nodelist ................................. 10 Re: Is The End Near? ..................................... 11 4. FIDONET HISTORY .......................................... 13 From out of the past - TJ Interview! ..................... 13 5. COORDINATORS CORNER ...................................... 27 Nodelist-statistics as seen from Zone-2 for day 192 ...... 27 6. ECHOING .................................................. 28 North American Backbone Echo Changes [May-Jun] ........... 28 7. COMIX IN ASCII ........................................... 30 Life from a Cow? ......................................... 30 8. NOTICES .................................................. 32 Future History ........................................... 32 9. FIDONEWS PUBLIC-KEY ...................................... 33 FidoNews PGP public-key listing .......................... 33 10. FIDONET BY INTERNET ..................................... 34 11. FIDONEWS INFORMATION .................................... 36 FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 1 14 Jul 1997 ================================================================= EDITORIAL ================================================================= Past, present and, future are revisited in this Issue. The republication of the updated ARTSPEC.DOC is here. It was hatched out via the FIDONEWS file distribution a couple weeks ago so you should already have but JIC. [grin] As I start my second year of editing FidoNews, I'd like to reassert my undying appreciation for those who make it work and keep it coming. Those of you who write articles, letters to the Editor, columns, updates, Guest Editorials, comix, and those who make the distribution work are the guts of this enterprise. And a special thanks to jim barchuk for maintaining the HTML version on the Internet and to Peter Popovich who compiles the software list. It's a lot of extra work and it IS appreciated! Today's Guest Editorial is anonymous but I'm not sure if that is intentional or an oversight. I didn't get an answer to that question in time for publication. It isn't required, but I suggest all submissions include a byline of some kind. One of our members sent in a reprint of an interview with Tom Jennings from 1994. I don't remember seeing it before and it appears here in the History section. You may find it interesting. I'm putting this Issue to bed early so if you were waiting till the last minute to send me something, it will appear next week. Refer to the submission schedule in the Masthead to avoid missing out. C.B. ----------------------------------------------------------------- FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 2 14 Jul 1997 ================================================================= GUEST EDITORIAL ================================================================= FidoNet: Past and Future I've read many debates about the future of the FidoNet and how it's sliding downhill. The friendly arguments in echomail about when the FidoNet's demise will come about have taken a backseat to only the Windows versus wars in frequency. Having pondered this a bit myself I thought I'd write up my thoughts on the history and future of the FidoNet for whatever it might be worth. I've been involved with the FidoNet since 1985. Yes, that makes me one of the old-timers in the net -- I date back before echomail and fondly remember how cool it was to run the original "toss" and "scan" echomail programs. However, I like to believe (no comments:-) that I'm fairly alert and can realize a sinking ship when I am on one. Right now, that sinking ship is the FidoNet as a whole; it's not sinking terribly fast, but it's still sinking. Let's face it, BBSing is changing and its decline can be linked directly to the rise of the internet. The FidoNet is not the only thing being changed by the rise of the internet. The internet is changing all aspects of computing and some aspects of our entire society. Just look at networking, for example. LANtastic is dead as a small business platform (for all intents and purposes), Novell -- despite its huge installed base -- is on the ropes and undergoing major change. Even IBM's and Microsoft's networking schemes have to acknowledge the new god of networking: the royalty-free TCP/IP. There's a heckuva lot of proprietary networks that get from point to point actually wrapped in IP. Let's face it, commercial computing as a whole is in the midst of a major flux. But that's the commercial realm and the FidoNet is in the hobbyist realm of computing. Let's assume there's always going to be an amateur/hobbyist component of computing. That means there's always going to be a "market" for something like the FidoNet to allow people to communicate. Let's take a look behind this, at what made the FidoNet popular and gave it the popularity that it enjoyed during the late 80s and early 90s. The primary reason for the rise of the FidoNet is that it took common hobbyist-type computing platforms (DOS & CP/M) and used the most cost effective way of networking them/getting mail and files back and forth between them (i.e. phone calls late at night in a routed scheme), and ran with it. In, say, 1987, the FidoNet provided a near-commercial level of connectivity and communication basically for free. FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 3 14 Jul 1997 That combination -- common computers, good connectivity and cost effectiveness -- made the FidoNet a hit on the amateur/hobbyist scene and even caused some ripples in the commercial world. The problem now that I see is that the FidoNet is doing a couple of things "wrong." First, our level of communication/connectivity is not anywhere near the commercial level (commercial connectivity now being defined as the internet) anymore. Users like the GUI nature of web browsers but they're willing to take a small hit in terms of prettiness as long as they're getting near- commercial communication for free or for nearly free. The problem is that the FidoNet doesn't have anything like that level of connectivity. We used to have a functioning, FidoNet-wide domain where everyone in the FidoNet (users and Sysops alike) had an internet mail address. That's been dismantled at a time when the internet popularity grew by leaps and bounds -- how stupid!!! There's nothing that drives users up the wall faster than limitations in them sending mail. GUI interfaces and ease-of-use aspects of the FidoNet are important, but not nearly as important as the need to talk to the rest of the networked world -- and right now, that means internet e-mail capabilities. The FidoNet simply *must* develop a working FidoNet- wide FidoNet <--> internet mail gateway/method/system for the entire net if it is to remain viable as a "networked" network. The FidoNet is not presently using the cheapest way to move mail. This is the death knell for an amateur/hobbyist network. When the costs of operation are usually born by individual hobbyists, costs matter! What was true in 1985 or 1988 -- that the best, cheapest way to move mail and files was to make long distance phone calls late at night -- is no longer true. Right now, the cheapest way to move mail and files is via the internet. It only takes one echomail link or a few file-requests to make up $20 worth of long distance in a month. Right now in the US, almost anyone can get an unlimited-usage internet link for $20 a month. The internet is the cheapest way to move mail and files and the FidoNet has to adapt to using that cheap link. This new economic reality changes the way we should be sending mail and files. It used to be that every second counted and so maximum efficiency was needed in file transfers. That is no longer true with unlimited internet access. Now, the only need for efficiency is that we don't want to tie up phone lines for too long -- a very different idea. But if one looks at the state of FidoNet technology, it has not adapted to the new economics or to take advantage of the internet. The internet gateway packages out there are typically massive kludges. The FidoNet isn't adapting. That combined with the high cost factors of using long distance dial-up guarantees the death of the FidoNet. However, this death is totally unnecessary. FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 4 14 Jul 1997 The solution is to adapt and use the internet to our own advantage. We can take the FidoNet's strengths -- mainly free, hobbyist BBSes that are for the most part publicly accessible and which provide quality echomail conferences which are regulated and moderated -- and reverse the FidoNet's decline and quite possibly make the FidoNet grow again. The key to this is development, development in software and in FidoNet standards. If one fantasizes a bit, there's no reason at all why we couldn't have a FidoNet nodelist which combined both direct dial-up systems *and* internet transfers through a node's local ISP. There's no reason at all why a 2-line BBS couldn't have users log onto one line, and if the second line was free, have that second line dial out to the internet to allow the user to ftp files from the internet. This (and this is simply scratching the surface) could be done while maintaining a free or very-low-cost BBS structure for both the user and the Sysop. But the bottom line is that there isn't any software development being done on the basic FidoNet networking technology. The primary development seems to be in reinventing yet more similar-functioning BBS software. I've seen only one place where there is some development to the basic FidoNet mail protocols being done -- in Linux. Linux, an operating system born on the internet, has developers working on a versions of the FidoNet which will use a TCP/IP internet link to do mail transfers and file-requests. This is the direction the FidoNet needs to go. It's simply taking advantage of the cheapest way to send mail and files. What we need is a "FidoNet-IP" -- a standard way to do FidoNet mail and file transfers over the internet. There's no reason why the FidoNet should not flourish -- it only has to go back to the core principles of what made it popular in the first place! Those principles are that it offered a structured, near commercial-level of communication and connectivity at little or no cost to users using the cheapest method of mail/file transfers for its Sysops. Despite my years in the FidoNet I have often thought about pulling the plug on the FidoNet. But instead, I like tinkering with computers as a hobby so I'm hedging my bets. I'm learning Linux and its full suite of TCP/IP tools, I'm tearing my hair out trying to setup "ifmail" (the Linux FidoNet package that makes a BinkleyTerm install look like a walk in the park!), and am working to keep my options open. If the FidoNet somehow survives, great, I'll be covered. Sadly, if the FidoNet does not survive (and this look like the case) then I'll simply offer dial-up web server/mail/ftp functions over TCP/IP via Linux in a new form of BBS. Only one question remains. The question that remains is this: are there enough good people, hackers, developers, visionaries, and interest left in the FidoNet to make this new "FidoNet-IP" a reality? ----------------------------------------------------------------- FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 5 14 Jul 1997 ================================================================= ARTICLES ================================================================= FidoNews Article Submission Guidelines FidoNet address 1:1/23 Updated 1 Jul 1997 by Christopher Baker Updated 29 May 1991 by Tom Jennings Based on the original work by Thom Henderson | denotes a change since the last update |. "Fido" and "FidoNet" are registered trademarks of Tom Jennings, Box 410923, San Francisco CA 94141, USA and are used with permission. -------- SYNOPSIS: FidoNews is the newsletter of the FidoNet computer network, its Sysops and users. It is passed to its readers electronically via the FidoNet and other computer networks and to non-network readers as well. This document intends to tell you how to write and submit articles for publication in FidoNews. Much of it describes the technical specifications which an article must meet in order to be included in the newsletter, as well as broad (very) guidelines on content. (Of course you realize articles can be submitted only electronically.) Please read it carefully. The article you save might be your own. ------------ INTRODUCTION: FidoNews was originally founded in early 1984 to include all parts of the lives of its member Sysops and users, which of course means not just technical matters. We do not have fixed goals of maximum distribution or maximum readership (i.e. lowest common denominator) but only to meet the needs of our individual network members. The success of this venture has always been contentious at best (ahem). In any case the grand experiment continues. Twelve years later (at this writing) and over 30,000 Nodes in the network, the editorial policy, or lack of one, of FidoNews has shown to best fit our ever-changing and unpredictable needs. -------------- SUBJECT MATTER: Articles on any subject of interest to FidoNet members and users FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 6 14 Jul 1997 are welcome and encouraged, not necessarily of a technical nature, though priority may be, but not necessarily, given to articles of importance to the FidoNet, its technology and its uses; other networks such as uucp and the Internet; social aspects of communications; ethical issues; other related matters. -------------- ARTICLE LENGTH: Try to keep articles short. The longer it is, the less likely people are to read it. Consider splitting long articles (more than five pages) into smaller articles to be run serially. Exceptions will be made at the whim of the editors. For practical reasons, we will attempt to keep FidoNews to a "reasonable size", which is of course a highly subjective and variable thing. As of May 1991, the goal is under 100,000 bytes. Decisions regarding content may be made based upon this, though in general it shouldn't be an issue. ------------------ WRITING GUIDELINES: We are not all professional writers, nor is that even a goal for the FidoNews -- we want real communication to and from real people; even at the expense of so-called "good writing", which is frequently a tool to exclude. There are a few minimum requirements though for any successful writing, even for the lowly FidoNews: * The subject discussed must be clear to people other than the author! Don't assume that people will pick up the context from your writing. Tell them explicitly. * Why are you writing this? It may seem obvious -- "Review of the new Acme 75-baud Modem" -- but it's not. Are you the manufacturer? An irate customer? Let us know your point of view. * Who are you? A good question! Anonymity is acceptable, though most people want to take credit for their work. Include full contact information including electronic mail addresses. * Articles submitted via Netmail or email must contain all the technically required lines and delimiters in the BODY of the message. This includes the *[title] line and the 70 character width requirement. To indicate the filename type for one of these message submissions, place the FILENAME.TYP in the Subj: line of your email, Netmail, or Echomail. Those that require extra editing may be delayed from appearing in FidoNews. * Articles will appear when space becomes available, not necessarily the "next" issue. If your article is of a time- critical nature, please say so when you submit it; the editor FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 7 14 Jul 1997 still has final say. * The editor reserves the right to request changes from an author to meet these "standards", which you have to admit are pretty loose. It is not the intent for this to be a mechanism to refuse articles the editor does not like, but simply to keep the contents intelligible. * If we have a backlog of articles, we may get fussier about things. Historically, this has not been a serious problem. --------------------- SUBMITTING AN ARTICLE TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS: If all that hasn't scared you away, the next step is to create a text file which contains the text of your article. The resulting file should be sent or uploaded to "Editor", FidoNet address 1:1/23. The "physical" location (and phone number) of FidoNews varies, and hence must be found elsewhere, such as within a recent copy of FidoNews itself. Filenames must follow the MSDOS standard: FILENAME.TYP a 1 to 8 character file name (A - Z, 0 - 9) a period, a 0 to 3 character file type (A - Z, 0 - 9) File types are used to distinguish types of submissions, as follows: .LET Letters to the Editor. .ART An article, commentary, open letter, or general news item. .GUE Want to write a Guest Editorial? [*Name & Node on line 1] .RTX Need to make a Retraction of a previous article or notice? .COL Want to become a regular contributor with your own column? .ANS Answers to the Question of the Week. .BIO FidoNet biographies - tell us your | personal | story. | .TRU True stories of FidoNet. | .HIS FidoNet history - got an anecdote to share? .REV Reviews of related product, services, or programs. .JOK Net humor in print. | .FIC FidoNet (computer related) short fiction. | .CMX Comics in ASCII. [watch those lines at 70 columns!] | [.CMX that are political will be renamed to .GUE] | .PRF Want to Proofread? Get a cookie for spotting errors. .AD Advertising FREE services or events. .SAL "For Sale" .WAN "Wanted" FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 8 14 Jul 1997 .NOT A notice for the back of the issue. Keep them short. .INT Internet addresses for FidoNet webpages of general interest. If your file doesn't have one of the above extensions, then it will lay around taking up disk space until someone takes a look at it and realizes what it is. Maybe. The name of the file is up to you, though you should use a name which is not likely to be "stepped on" by someone else -- the system will not guarantee file names are unique. For example, FNEWS.ART is probably not a good name for an article. -------------- CHARACTER SETS: The character by character contents of the file itself must meet the following standards or it cannot be published in FidoNews. The FidoNews staff WILL NOT be responsible for making file contents conform to these standards. * FLUSH LEFT MARGIN: Please do not put a "left margin" on your articles. Have the text start at the very first column. * RIGHT MARGIN AT COLUMN 70 OR LESS: Less is tolerable, more is definitely not. If your cursor is resting at column 71 when your line is ended, you're okay. One character past that even with trailing spaces and MAKENEWS will barf on your submission. If your submission is physically rejected, the Editor will have to fix it manually or send it back for reformatting. * RAGGED-RIGHT TEXT: Word-Star style "justification" (inserting spaces into sentences so that a paragraph is perfectly rec- tangular) is extremely hard to read, and consumes needless space. Please don't use it! * NO FUNNY CHARACTERS: This includes formfeeds, returns without linefeeds, linefeeds without returns, tabs and other oddities. The only control codes (character codes 0 through 31 decimal) allowed are carriage return (CR) and linefeed (LF). The only exception is: Control-Z "end of file" terminator characters are tolerated. Not required. * NO GRAPHICS CHARACTERS: Believe it or not, not everyone in the world has an IBM PC. Please restrict yourself to printable ASCII characters in the range 20 hex to 7E hex (space to tilde). * LINES TERMINATED: Each line in the article should be terminated with a 'newline' -- either the MSDOS standard (CR/LF) or the unix standard (LF only). ----------------- SUBMISSION FORMAT: FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 9 14 Jul 1997 Below is a sample article properly formatted. Features of it are discussed further below. --article file example begins below this line-- *A Sample Article [this is in LINE 1 starting at COLUMN 1] This is My Title by Joe Schmoe, [Netmail/email address] And here is my article. Note that it is flush left (zero indent). Also note that the right margin is at column seventy so that it won't overflow "most" text windows. Each line has a newline. Note the *'ed first line. My article will be listed in the table of contents exactly as it appears after the * above. Figure 1. Table 1. +-------+ ======== | A Box | Alpha +-------+ Bravo Note that we am not using any funny-o characters. This ensures that the final article will look the same to every user, no matter what sort of hardware he has. This is the last sentence of our article. --article file example ends above this line-- The FIRST line of text is the Table of Contents line. It MUST begin with an asterisk * as shown above. NO BLANK lines above title line are permitted. If you do not follow this instruction exactly, the article will not be listed in the Table of Contents. This Table of Contents listing method works for all submission file types. * Everything that follows the *'ed line will appear in the body of the newsletter. The *'ed line will be stripped out of your article text so if you want it repeated as your title in the article BE SURE to | REPEAT | it on a second line without the *. * Next should be the title or name of your article, your name, and contact information (network address(es), Postal Service address, etc) Try to keep it to one or two lines each. * Put a blank line between paragraphs. Paragraphs that all run together are very difficult to read, and may be rejected. * If you want to put in a table or a figure, go right ahead. We do not rearrange text, so your table or figure will remain exactly as you entered it. Try to limit them to ones that make the communication CLEARER. * Don't put a lot of blank space at the top or bottom. The FidoNews-generator programs will visually separate articles automatically. FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 10 14 Jul 1997 * Please check for basic errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. We're not publishing a textbook, but you don't want it to embarrass yourself do you? * Don't use FidoNews to grind your personal axes against other FidoNet members. An article presenting a side of an internal dispute is one thing. An article defaming or perseverating over several Issues is another. Articles that merely quote endlessly from other sources to no particular effect are also not a good idea. * Don't republish copyrighted material from other sources WITHOUT the permission of those sources. Include the permission in such articles. * Remember that FidoNews is no better or worse than the articles submitted to it. If you want FidoNews to be a useful newsletter, get involved and submit useful articles. It's up to YOU to make it work. -------------------- SUBMISSION DEADLINES: FidoNews is published on Monday of every week. Deadline for file submissions to the FidoNews Editor via file-attach is 2300 ET [0300 UTC/GMT] the previous Saturday. Deadline for submissions via Netmail, email, or in the FIDONEWS Echo is 2300 ET [0300 UTC/GMT] the previous Friday. Submissions which miss the deadlines will be processed the following week. Submission by deadline is not a guarantee of appearance in that week's FidoNews but it is likely depending on volume of submissions. -30- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: CRC and The Nodelist by Gregg Jennings, 1:331/109 [Submitted: 06-Jul-1997] Brainwave, 1:362/903, writes in 1425: Has anybody else had problems keeping current? If it's not a missing DIFF now and then, it's CRC trouble... What is this CRC thing anyway? I've been trying to find out for over a year now, it's been one of those things that just keeps coming up now and then. Right now my NODELIST.164 has an improper CRC. The utility I use to merge the diffs told me so, and actually added a line at the bottom: ;S This Nodelist file has an improper CRC! The problem you, or rather your software, encountered was some bytes FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 11 14 Jul 1997 in the NodeList that had the 8th bit set high (if you don't know what that means don't worry unless you are a programmer), which were masked off, converted to 7 bit. The merging program was at fault, not the NodeList. The entry for Uruguay On Line, San Carlos, Susana Baratta, had some strange characters in the Flags entry. The program you used to merge the NodeDiff made a mistake (some may say that the mistake was in the NodeDiff but programmers should know better). Your NodeList is fine, it just has some useless Flags in an entry. This is an example of a programming error. Now it could be not the writer of the Merger program, but the C (or Pascal, or whatever) compiler. This is a prime example of part of what's "wrong" with FidoNet (not to deride FidoNet or its programmers, all computer systems have these problems). I'll bet that is you look in the document which came with your Merger that it will say something like "correct the problem". Really good huh? Getting a newer or different Merger is your only answer to avoid the error message. Otherwise it is for all purposes harmless unless your process, batch files for instance, stops processing with a fatal error and messes up your BBS operation. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: Is The End Near? by Gregg Jennings, 1:331/109 [Submitted: 06-Jul-1997] This is some comments about Clay's article in 1426. Perhaps he (or others) can tell us all more about the SSTARS; I for am interested, and listening. Who are these SSTARS? for one. Were they elected? Are they elected? What conference was removed? Who is this "self appointed" individual? He mentions a lack of "testosterone to engage in battle those who would bring down this brotherhood." How can any battle those that they are not aware of? The reason for FidoNews' failure to get to Zone 2 should be found. Perhaps it is just a technological one? All Sysops know how much of a pain in the ass it is to configure most of the software upon which FidoNet relies. FIDONEWS an outlet for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)? Clay obviously is missing something. Mike Bilow forwards messages from the ACLU mailing-list from time to time to FidoNews. FidoNews has the FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 12 14 Jul 1997 grandest of all policies: will print anything submitted. Pro or con ACLU he should be happy that at least someone is trying to inform people, the readers of FidoNews, of electronic communications legislation in the U.S. ACLU opponents respond please! Why don't we have articles published by Sysops in FidoNet? Because SYSOPS IN FIDONET ARE NOT SUBMITTING ARTICLES TO FIDONEWS! That's a no brainer! Perhaps one of the reasons Users (and Sysops) are leaving FidoNet is the constant barrage of insults and whining we have been seeing so often here in the Snooze and in the echos. The insulters and the whiners are killing FidoNet! The insulters and the whiners are causing Users to leave! The insulters and the whiners offer no solutions! To appear at least as a non-insulting whining person I submit this: 1. Developers should think of the reasons why they do not want to provide the source code to programs they develop, so proudly, for FidoNetters. Just think about it. 2. Developers should look at their proposals objectively and had better realize that there is never one best answer to a problem. Woe to the person who shouts at us for years only to realize that his was not the optimal solution. 3. The people who are our representatives should let us know where they stand. Write to us here! Tell us that you exist at least! We may not agree with you but that is okay. That is how things work. 4. Sysops, do not be afraid to speak up! Do not consider the SIZE of FidoNews as a deterrent to writing! We, I (at least), WANT to hear from you. 5. Users and readers, write us! Do not care about what others may think of you or your ideas, your grammar, your expertise. Not all that is gold glitters. This is OUR newsletter. This is OUR voice. Use it. It is for OUR benefit. ----------------------------------------------------------------- FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 13 14 Jul 1997 ================================================================= FIDONET HISTORY ================================================================= [One of our readers sent this in and the History section is just the place for it. Permission to reprint was received from Fringe Ware Review at http://www.fringeware.com/fwr/fwr01/ with email to: email@fringeware.com] Ed. From: steve@gen.lcrnet.org Date: 03 Jul 97 21:14:37 -0700 Subject: Tom Jennings Interview (for fidonews) To: cbaker84@digital.net Organization: Don't Mistake Lack Of Talent For Genius >From Steve Steffler, 1:342/52.3/1:342/1022 An Interview With Tom Jennings I was perusing a local BBS's file areas, and I came across this old (circa 1994) interview with Tom Jennings. It sheds an interesting light on his views on Fidonet, and perhaps shows us things from an interesting perspective. Maybe his comments on how Fidonet was supposed to be so "decentralized" will affect the views of some of the people at the previously nonexistent "top" of things in the Fido hierarchy. =====Cut===== >From alt.bbs Fri Apr 1 10:03:40 1994 From: riddle (Prentiss Riddle) Date: Fri, 1 Apr 1994 15:36:01 GMT Newsgroups: austin.eff,houston.efh.talk,alt.bbs Subject: Interview with Tom Jennings from Fringe Ware Review [In honor of Tom Jennings' upcoming appearances in Austin (4/16, info from eff-austin@tic.com) and Houston (4/17, info from efh@blkbox.com), Jon Lebkowsky has kindly granted permission to reproduce the following interview. Enjoy.] Interview with Tom Jennings by Jon Lebkowsky, jonl@io.com reprinted with permission Originally published in Fringe Ware Review #1, ISSN 1069-5656. Copyright (c)1993 by the author. All rights reserved. For more details, contact: email@fringeware.com Our FWI prez recently had a chance to chat with Tom Jennings, who commented afterwards: "Think you can mention somewhere that I'm a fag anarcho nerd troublemaker/activist? It is important, and to me as well. It always gets buried. Lots of people like to know, especially scared people with no images of people who are gay and reasonably FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 14 14 Jul 1997 functional in some way." Tis our pleasure to honor Tom, whose work has been so brilliant and so far out on the Fringe, that when the US gov't precluded computer technology exports during the Cold War, they basically forgot/ignored a certain fag anarcho nerd from the Bay Area... As a result, Tom's FidoNet now provides the basis for computer networking in Eastern Europe, former USSR and most of the Third World, as well as a extraordinary conduit throughout the rest of the world. Tom: This people tracking stuff... what little I know of it sounds very creepy. I don't want a box that reports where the hell I am all the time, when I walk in the room, it can tell some local machine I'm there. It's none of anyone's goddamn business. It's the corporate culture invasion on real life, like the top 1% who make all the money, and think everyone's gonna live like them. Jon: Well, if you're living in an ivory tower, after you live there for a while, you start to think, not that it's YOUR environment, but it's THE environment. T: Yeah, it is reality, but it's a local one. Everyone they know is like that... well, they don't know everybody. J: In a conversation I had the other day with Allucquere Rosanne Stone, she talked about ubiquitous computing, that computers or computing will be invisible, it will be so omnipresent... T: That's what Alan Kay pointed out years ago, that when technology gets done right, you don't even see it. When you walk in a room, your hand flicks a switch... how much thought do you give to that stupid light switch? Hopefully very little. The light comes on, and... Telephones are getting close to that. J: Even better, there's some rooms you walk into and the light switches on automatically, because there's motion detectors. T: Yeah. Anarchy In The A-C-K J: Tell me about FidoNet. As I said, I'm sorta ignorant on the subject... T: I have a weird point of view on it, of course, having designed it... February or March of '94 will be it's tenth year. It is a network, a collection of bulletin boards. It is a loose confederation, and it is completely and thoroughly and utterly decentralized. There is literally no top. Most of it's members have a narrow view of it because they have this particular reality filter on all the time from living amongst hierarchy addicts. But FidoNet's most basic element is a bulletin board. What FidoNet is, is a set of protocols that lets the bulletin boards communicate. FidoNet started as a bunch of bulletin boards, running my Fido software. FidoNet was added later, to allow point-to-point email between Fido boards. J: Did you start with just a single BBS? FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 15 14 Jul 1997 T: It started with my system. I was writing software for Phoenix Software, which is now Phoenix Technologies. I was their first employee. I did all their portable MS-DOS stuff prior to the ROM BIOS they did, which was partly based on my previous work with "portable" MS-DOS... we were doing MS-DOS installations in three days, and charging exorbitant sums... and delivering really good stuff, people got their money's worth, and got it damn fast! We had it down to an art of just totally portable stuff. So I had this portable attitude toward hardware, and wrote a bulletin board sort of based on it. FidoNet is more importantly a social mechanism. It was pretty obvious from the start that it was going to be a social monster, almost more so than a technical thing. And it had to do with the original environment of bulletin boards, which were around for quite a while by the time I got around to doing Fido. Every bulletin board was completely different, run by some cantankerous person who ran their board the way that they saw fit, period. So FidoNet had to fit in that environment. J: A very anarchic environment. T: Yes, explicitly anarchic. Most people just ran them for their own reasons, and they were just separated by large distances of time and space, so they remained locally oriented. I just ran across old interviews and old documentation from '83 - '84, and we were saying it then. It was just... people didn't hear it, it just went in one ear and out the other. They think 'Oh, anarchism, that means throwing rocks at the cops!' Well sometimes, I suppose, but that's mostly a cop's definition of it. The Revolution Will Be Packetized J: The sense of the bomb throwing anarchist, I guess, is sort of in the sense of political disorder... T: ...which was a specific event in the 20's in San Francisco having to do with union labor busts. And blackmail... this guy Tom Mooney, a bomb was planted and blame arranged to fall on Tom Mooney, tossing his ass in jail, putting the blame squarely on the anarchists. J: Anarchy has this sorta bad connotation, but anarchy itself is not unlike what so many seem to want to embrace now. I think the libertarian philosophy is fairly anarchic, and you find it widespread throughout the net. It's basically a hands-off philosophy. T: I think people often take it too seriously, like various anarchist camps that have more rules than not. I consider it a personal philosophy, not a political thing at all. It has nothing to do with party-type politics. J: If it becomes overtly political, it ceases to be anarchy... T: Yeah, more or less, and I don't really care about what's considered politics per se, it's personal interaction, how I treat other people and how they treat me, and my relations to other people, it's FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 16 14 Jul 1997 anarchism... I always call it Paul Goodman style, which is the principle that people work together better if they're cooperating than if they're coerced. Very simple, nothing to do with goddamn party politics. It has to do with how you treat people that you have to work with. And that's what FidoNet was based on, very explicitly. It was sort of laid over the top of a lot of Fido bulletin boards, and let them talk to each other in a straightforward point-to-point manner. Just How Big Is It? J: Was it just Fido boards? T: Just Fido at the time, because it required a fairly low-level of restructuring of the innards, message bases and stuff. And Fido is a pretty good bulletin board, has been for years, though now it's definitely old fashioned. I haven't done a revision to Fido for over two years. J: Are you thinking about doing that? T: No, I'm thinking about dropping it. I've thought about it, and it's over. So FidoNet started up in spring of '84 with two systems, me and my friend John Madill and within four months there were twenty or fifty... by the end of the year, it was approaching 100 by the next February, in nine months. It started growing really fast. And every single one was run by somebody for their own reasons in their own manner for their own purposes, so FidoNet had to accommodate this. And this is nothing unusual, in one sense. All computer networks are essentially run this way. The Internet is. There's no central Internet authority where you go to get a system in Internet, you just put it online, and find people to help you, register with the NIC [Network Information Center] which is just a convention for handling names. J: Sort of ideally cooperative. T: Yeah, it's quite cooperative, and you don't really get kicked out unless you technically screw up, or do something massively illegal or glaringly obvious. Most likely technical, like don't answer mail for a long time. Most electronic things are like that. It didn't start to take off until Echomail came by, which was done by this guy named Jeff Rush in Dallas as a way to talk among Dallas sysops about organizing pizza parties. It's a fully distributed, redundant database using FidoNet netmail to transport the records in the distributed database. It's functionally equivalent to Usenet, they gate back and forth very easily. J: Can you link FidoNet very easily to Internet or UUCP Mail? T: There's gateways between [FidoNet and UUCP] operating. You can just set up the UFGate package... [FidoNet and the Internet] they have totally different paradigms. IP, the Internet stuff, is fully connected all the time. When you want to connect to a system in Finland, you just rub packets with them and they come back in generally under a second. FidoNet is all store and forward, offline FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 17 14 Jul 1997 processing... J: How big is it now? T: Just short of 20,000 systems. J: Wow, that's a lot... T: It's doubled in a year... I think more than doubled in a year. It's been doubling every year for a long time . QQBEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCKQQ J: There's a lot of discussion today of encryption schemes, are you involved in that? T: Actually, yeah, I use it routinely. J: Using PGP? T: Yeah. FidoNet was pretty intentionally involved in getting PGP ubiquitous the first time around... an intentional, conscious quick- dump of about 10,000 copies in a week, starting on a Monday, just to be sure that it was unstoppable, and it spread very quickly. Now there's all kinds of arguments over whether it's legal, or whether it's going to incriminate me to use PGP, and the traffic into the network itself... J: It wouldn't be a criminal issue... T: People believe all kinds of crazy nonsense. J: Somebody has a patent on the algorithm, is that it? T: Yeah, and some people are afraid that if they send or pass encrypted data, that the police will bust into the house and steal the computer, all this kind of stuff... FidoNet sprung up fully-formed out of seeming nowhere into the rest of the computer world. Most people on the Internet have access to it through schools or industry. They went to school, then they got a job, and they grew up with maintained Internet connectivity... they were brought up into the sort of Internet-hood. J: I think that's changing a bit... T: Oh, it is changing, it will continue to change, and someday it will be incomprehensible that it was this way, but as of today, it's sort of how it is. FidoNet did not come from that direction at all. It came from... the usual white guys who could afford a computer :-), but in the best tradition of radio and astronomy, they were at least amateurs, it's truly an amateur network. It is not professional, as in "profession"... "professional" is frequently used to mean legitimate, as opposed to amateur... J: You mean "hobbyist?" FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 18 14 Jul 1997 T: Yeah, amateur as a word became disparaging, but we mean it actually in the older sense, like the radio amateur sense. We don't do it for money, it's done for the sake of itself. So for the most part, FidoNet members never had that traditional kind of connectivity, and also didn't have the corporate culture, and didn't have the computer network culture, so it basically formed in the dark, on its own. 550 Flavors of Culture J: Speaking of the word "culture," do you find that within the FidoNet universe, there's a particular set of cultural predilections? Does there tend to be a general kind of group or community that uses FidoNet? T: Well, it's like any of those things, it's really subjective. But, yeah, there do seem to be, in my travels on Internet and FidoNet, distinct flavors. One is not better than the other, I can tell you that, culturally speaking. The Internet people say, "Oh, but the flame level on FidoNet is so awful." Bullshit. The flame level on the Internet is just as high. It's in loftier language, five line signatures, and all that kind of crap... but I'm sorry, it's not any better, it's just different. What it is, is less alien to them, more comfortable... and vice-versa from the FidoNet side. It's more comfortable, it's more familiar, the language used and the acronyms and the smiley faces, all of that junk. There is a FidoNet flavor, through the usual sociological things. The people who originally populated it defined this vague common set, and people who come onto it self-select ("Oh, I like that!") and join it, and then enhance it, or they're sort of neutral and they come in and they just absorb it because... you know, you start hanging out with people, and you pick up their manner of speaking. And there are people, of course, who are utterly opposed to this, and want to make it professional and some just don't care, and live in a corner of it. But yeah, there are things in common, and I have a hard time putting my finger on what they are. It is fiercely independent, utterly, fiercely independent. It is viciously anti-commercialization. It has a long history of some nasty politics, some really enlightened politics, and I think in a lot of ways they have more pragmatic view, and a better view Q better meaning more functional in today's world Q than people who haven't had to pay their own phone bills. J: Some people argue that you can't have strictly online community, and others believe that you can. Some feel that there has to be some kind of face-to-face interaction. In the Internet there has not been as much of that until it began to become more broadly accessible to regular people... T: The Internet is still completely and thoroughly inaccessible... I'm sorry, it is simply not accessible. You have to have a large amount of hardware or an intimate relationship with someone who does, like you have to go to school or something. Otherwise you're paying money... and there are people who fall through the cracks... FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 19 14 Jul 1997 J: How about public access Internet? T: Yeah, but if there's more than 100 terminals in the U.S. that any average person could walk up to and figure out how to use in less than a week, I would be surprised. It still takes huge amounts of specialized knowledge. J: But the technical side is fairly dense... T: Oh, yeah... I've been an SWTP, CP/M, DOS hacker and hardware hacker for fifteen fucking years, twenty years, and UNIX is so intimidating, arbitrarily difficult to use... a lot of the users have this macho attitude that "Well, you should have to plow through it, I did." The whole priesthood nonsense. It's stupid. And the argument whether online culture is possible or not, that ain't where it's gonna get decided. It either gets made or it doesn't. I think there are online communities. The people who are doing it aren't asking themselves, "Are we an online community?" They're just going about their business. They're not tangible enough to really get documented except in hindsight, you look back and say "Oh, yeah, those people are" or "No, they really weren't, when push came to shove, they didn't stay together." J: At EFF-Austin we've been a little more self-conscious about it, we've actually been trying to do some community-building, to try to structure an online community in Austin where we'd have some force to get things done, various projects. One of the things we're doing that other EFF-related groups haven't been doing is arts projects, and in doing those things, in talking to some of the people who are interested in doing that, I realized that there are a lot of writers and artists who are hungry to get online. They know it's there, they'd like to be using it, but they can't get access to it because they can't, unless they stumble into it, find a system that'll give them an account. It's kind of like what you were saying about barriers... but I wonder if, in the FidoNet world, you find writers and artists using FidoNet to share information and to form arts communities? T: Well, there's a lot more less-technical people involved, because you can put a $300 system together, line cord to phone jack. That just means that the entry level is a lot lower. And it's functional as hell! I mean, So what if it's slow? 5 seconds or 100 milliseconds, what's the difference to most people? All Look Completely Different J: The link, the network, is strictly for email? Or do you have some other stuff, file transfer... ? T: Oh, there's lots of file transfer stuff. In some ways it's a lot more sophisticated than the FTP stuff from the user's point of view. There's this thing called the SDN, the Software Distribution Network, which looks like a conference for files, where the objects are not messages, but files. And they're stored in a redundant manner, some locally concentrated, some far away and scattered. It's kind of FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 20 14 Jul 1997 nebulous, like most network things are. They do monthly announcements of new files, and most of it's shareware, or free. You can do things like file attach (send with a message), and file requests (file fetch via message). FidoNet doesn't have the problem that a lot of older networks have, with seven bit channels and all that crap. We have eight bit channels with 32 bit CRCs. We do run into the alien system problems... ASCII character sets vs. the Cyrillic alphabets and all that kinda stuff. Those problems are about as chaotic as they are anywhere else. J: How about remote login? T: No... the systems in FidoNet are radically different. There's Radio Shack color computers, there's CP/M machines, Apple IIs, giant DOS machines, giant LANs of UNIX boxes, all running common protocols in a far broader hardware base than most, even UNIX boxes. There's no unified operating system, there's a set of protocols, there's 40 or 50 different mailers, and FidoNet interfaces in bulletin boards, and they all look completely different. So it's at a much higher level of abstraction than the FidoNet gets defined at. I bet a lot of the Internet, some huge proportion, is UNIX... J: You certainly need some kind of standard to be interoperable to the extent that the Internet is, don't you? T: No, where the real compatibility is is the TCP/IP layer, and that's rock solid, and that's the thing in common. All the rlogin, telnet, and ftp stuff partly user paradigm, rather than just a set of protocols. It's well, and fine, and wonderful, and I love it, but it does put a real crimp on style. [Ed Cavazos, almost-attorney and vice-prez of EFF-Austin, shows up and settles in to listen. The conversation continues.] The Color Of Money T: A lot of FidoNet is so radically different, you can't get people to either hear it or understand what's going on, because it's NOT like any of the others, and it was intentionally not made like the others, and some of the really basic principles that seem random are intentional... they're in writing, and have been in writing for seven years. The strictly American anarchist principles that it's based on are written into the policy documents. We actually had in '85, '86, '87 an attempted takeover by a corporation that was formed from within, it was like a cancer that became a giant boil on the surface, called IFNA, the International FidoNet Association, that was sort of a good idea, or a potentially good idea, when we started it at the 200 node level. By the time it got around to being implemented, at 500 nodes, the world had utterly changed. With 200 people, you can run it like a club. It was 90% U.S., 90% white guys with computers, and at the 500 node level, it was about 20% European and definitely, obviously growing. It hopped the puddle, with systems appearing in South America, scattered, but you know how FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 21 14 Jul 1997 that goes... when you get one, then you get two, and then four, and they start to grow. We were very naive, and I was right in the middle of it. Some of us learned quickly, this isn't going to work! But this corporation grew, and became a 501(c)(3), and like all of those things, they get power- hungry, and they get grabby of territory, and we had to fight it off, and it was fought off by the constituents of the network... and it was killed off. They had gained control of the copyright and the trademarks, and they were fought off. The network, instead of dying, like everyone predicted, thrived. J: So how did this fight go? T: It was fought by lawyers and proxy votes and all the usual crap, in a goddamn hotel in San Jose, was the final straw... J: Were you a part of this corporation at all? T: Well, a bunch of us started it... at first, we were brainstorming what we could do... deals on modems, some obvious stuff. And we'd have a spokesperson from FidoNet who'd attend the EMA meetings once a year and represent bulletin board operators and FidoNet members in electronic privacy things and the technical trade stuff and the obvious things. And those are still lacking, we still need them. But it was established really early that everyone not only retains control of their system, but they're expected to do their part to run it, because there is no one else to run it. And as simple as it sounds, it's a really radical act to get that across, so that people don't just sit on their butts. And of course, the usual 10% does the work, and 90% sits on their butts, but that's fine, too. Double Plus Plus Good T: FidoNet's a little odd, unlike the Internet, which has a domain name system... you say "Connect to toad.com," it says, ".com, okay, over there, toad... here's the address," and you go after it. FidoNet has what appears to be a centralized database that every system in the net has, a copy of this at the moment 2 megabyte long ASCII database, with 20,000 records in it. And it's updated every week, it contains the full physical and logical information about the entire network... phone number, system name, restrictions on use, protocols supported, some ASCII text, like system name, and city, all that kind of junk. It contains the hierarchical addressing scheme of the network, and it contains a lot of redundancy. J: Given that there's no central authority, who maintains this database? T: A local autonomous unit in FidoNet... First... the terminology in FidoNet is point-node-net-zone. Points aren't really part of FidoNet, they're a peculiar thing... a node is the basic unit, it is a bulletin board or a mail-only site, generally a phone number with a modem on it. A net is a cluster of Fidos, a cluster of nodes, like San Francisco has Net 125, SFBay Net, 75-80 systems. A node in a net is FIDONEWS 14-28 Page 22 14 Jul 1997 the basic social organizational unit. It was designed to be small enough to comprehend in regular old terms, like we all know and love, clubs and that kind of group... when they get too big they tend to fragment into pieces, which become autonomous units, then nets are collected into the real-life geography of continents. The North American phone system is alien to the Western European ones, and they have lots of mutually-alien phone systems. The North Americans tend to be a lot less political... Zone 1 encompasses Mexico, U.S., and Canada, and nobody ever batted an eye over it. It's like, "Oh, okay, that makes sense." In Europe, they're fiercely defensive of the political boundaries, and it's really silly. Local autonomy was the critical thing to make it work, because who's going to allow somebody in New Jersey to dictate how they're going to run their system? There'd be no way to exert any kind of control, and once you start getting into control wars, you spend all your time doing that. So the way the node list is made is that every net fragment makes its own chunk of the node list, which is a very straightforward task, even though it ends up being work. They're passed up through regional coordinators who take these fragments, and everybody gets a copy of everybody else's weekly list, and each of them compiles a giant list, then they do a difference, this week from last week, and mail out that difference back down the tree. So if you chopped off half the network and smashed it flat, it would regenerate itself. It's a balance of terror, that's what it is. It's a genuine balance of terror in responsibility and power. What you get for that redundancy is that no one can cut you out of the network, no one can declare that you can't communicate. In the UUCP world none of this happens because the social environment is much more substantial... universities, Hewlett Packard... Your neighbors, in theory, can cut you off, and you disappear, no one knows about you, if you're eliminated from the bang path, no one can talk to you, and that's it, you don't exist, it's as simple as that. In FidoNet, and this has happened recently in England... a bunch of religious fundamentalists by just hammering away gained control of large chunks of the FidoNet in the U.K., and they started having fits... "Why, there's perverts on this board, and we're not gonna have 'em in FidoNet!" And they clipped them out of the goddamn list, they removed the entries from the U.K. list. You sort of noticed they disappeared, but those people can still communicate, they can mail you their fragment, hand-generated if necessary, and all the node list processors let you incorporate private lists, and you can reply back, just like that. No one can be cut out