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Date: Thu, 3 Feb 1994 23:15:31 -0500 (EST)
From: Nancy Ammerman <emoryu1!phoenix.Princeton.EDU!nancyamm>
To: Jackie Ammerman <emory!emoryu1!awwe!root@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
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Chapter 4: USENET II
4.1 FLAME, BLATHER AND SPEW
Something about online communications seems to make some people
particularly irritable. Perhaps it's the immediacy and semi-anonymity
of it all. Whatever it is, there are whole classes of people you will
soon think seem to exist to make you miserable.
Rather than pausing and reflecting on a message as one might do
with a letter received on paper, it's just so easy to hit your R key
and tell somebody you don't really know what you really think of them.
Even otherwise calm people sometimes find themselves turning into
raving madmen. When this happens, flames erupt.
A flame is a particularly nasty, personal attack on somebody for
something he or she has written.
Periodically, an exchange of flames erupts into a flame war that
begin to take up all the space in a given newsgroup (and sometimes
several; flamers like cross-posting to let the world know how they
feel). These can go on for weeks (sometimes they go on for years, in
which case they become "holy wars," usually on such topics as the
relative merits of Macintoshes and IBMs). Often, just when they're
dying down, somebody new to the flame war reads all the messages, gets
upset and issues an urgent plea that the flame war be taken to e-mail
so everybody else can get back to whatever the newsgroup's business
is.
All this usually does, though, is start a brand new flame war, in
which this poor person comes under attack for daring to question the
First Amendment, prompting others to jump on the attackers for
impugning this poor soul... You get the idea.
Every so often, a discussion gets so out of hand that somebody
predicts that either the government will catch on and shut the whole
thing down or somebody will sue to close down the network, or maybe
even the wrath of God will smote everybody involved. This brings what
has become an inevitable rejoinder from others who realize that the
network is, in fact, a resilient creature that will not die easily:
"Imminent death of Usenet predicted. Film at 11.''
Flame wars can be tremendously fun to watch at first. They
quickly grow boring, though. And wait until the first time you're
attacked!
Flamers are not the only net.characters to watch out for.
Spewers assume that whatever they are particularly concerned about
either really is of universal interest or should be rammed down the
throats of people who don't seem to care -- as frequently as possible.
You can usually tell a spewer's work by the number of articles he
posts in a day on the same subject and the number of newsgroups to which
he then sends these articles -- both can reach well into double digits.
Often, these messages relate to various ethnic conflicts around the
world. Frequently, there is no conceivable connection between the issue at
hand and most of the newsgroups to which he posts. No matter. If you
try to point this out in a response to one of these messages, you will
be inundated with angry messages that either accuse you of being an
insensitive racist/American/whatever or ignore your point entirely to
bring up several hundred more lines of commentary on the perfidy of
whoever it is the spewer thinks is out to destroy his people.
Closely related to these folks are the Holocaust revisionists, who
periodically inundate certain groups (such as soc.history) with long
rants about how the Holocaust never really happened. Some people
attempt to refute these people with facts, but others realize this only
encourages them.
Blatherers tend to be more benign. Their problem is that they
just can't get to the point -- they can wring three or four screenfuls
out of a thought that others might sum up in a sentence or two. A
related condition is excessive quoting. People afflicted with this will
include an entire message in their reply rather than excising the
portions not relevant to whatever point they're trying to make. The
worst quote a long message and then add a single line:
"I agree!"
or some such, often followed by a monster .signature.
There are a number of other Usenet denizens you'll soon come to
recognize. Among them:
Net.weenies. These are the kind of people who enjoy Insulting
others, the kind of people who post nasty messages in a sewing
newsgroup just for the hell of it.
Net.geeks. People to whom the Net is Life, who worry about what
happens when they graduate and they lose their free, 24-hour access.
Net.gods. The old-timers; the true titans of the Net and the
keepers of its collective history. They were around when the Net
consisted of a couple of computers tied together with baling wire.
Lurkers. Actually, you can't tell these people are there, but
they are. They're the folks who read a newsgroup but never post or
respond.
Wizards. People who know a particular Net-related topic inside
and out. Unix wizards can perform amazing tricks with that operating
system, for example.
Net.saints. Always willing to help a newcomer, eager to share
their knowledge with those not born with an innate ability to navigate
the Net, they are not as rare as you might think. Post a question
about something and you'll often be surprised how many responses you
get.
The last group brings us back to the Net's oral tradition. With
few written guides, people have traditionally learned their way around
the Net by asking somebody, whether at the terminal next to them or on
the Net itself. That tradition continues: if you have a question, ask.
Today, one of the places you can look for help is in the
news.newusers.questions newsgroup, which, as its name suggests, is a
place to learn more about Usenet. But be careful what you post. Some
of the Usenet wizards there get cranky sometimes when they have to
answer the same question over and over again. Oh, they'll eventually
answer your question, but not before they tell you should have
asked your host system administrator first or looked at the postings in
news.announce.newusers.
4.2 KILLFILES, THE CURE FOR WHAT AILS YOU
As you keep reading Usenet, you are going to run across things or
people that really drive you nuts -- or that you just get tired of
seeing.
Killfiles are just the thing for you. When you start your
newsreader, it checks to see if you have any lists of words, phrases
or names you don't want to see. If you do, then it blanks out any
messages containing those words.
Such as cascades.
As you saw earlier, when you post a reply to a message and
include parts of that message, the original lines show up with a > in
front of them. Well, what if you reply to a reply? Then you get a >>
in front of the line. And if you reply to that reply? You get >>>.
Keep this up, and soon you get a triangle of >'s building up in your
message.
There are people who like building up these triangles, or
cascades. They'll "respond" to your message by deleting everything
you've said, leaving only the "In message 123435, you said:" part and
the last line of your message, to which they add a nonsensical
retort. On and on they go until the triangle has reached the right
end of the page. Then they try to expand the triangle by deleting one
> with each new line. Whoever gets to finish this mega-triangle wins.
There is even a newsgroup just for such folks: alt.cascade.
Unfortunately, cascaders would generally rather cascade in other
newsgroups. Because it takes a lot of messages to build up a completed
cascade, the targeted newsgroup soon fills up with these messages. Of
course, if you complain, you'll be bombarded with messages about the
First Amendment and artistic expression -- or worse, with another
cascade. The only thing you can do is ignore them, by setting up a
killfile.
There are also certain newsgroups where killfiles will come in
handy because of the way they are organized. For example, readers of
rec.arts.tv.soaps always use an acronym in their subject: line for
the show they're writing about (AMC, for example, for "All My
Children"). This way, people who only want to read about "One Life to
Live" can blank out all the messages about "The Young and the
Restless" and all the others (to keep people from accidentally
screening out messages that might contain the letters "gh" in them,
"General Hospital" viewers always use "gh:" in their subject lines).
Both nn and rn let you create killfiles, but in different ways.
To create a killfile in nn, go into the newsgroup with the
offending messages and type a capital K. You'll see this at the
bottom of your screen:
AUTO (k)ill or (s)elect (CR => Kill subject 30 days)
If you hit return, nn will ask you which article's subject you're
tired of. Chose one and the article and any follow-ups will disappear,
and you won't see them again for 30 days.
If you type a lower-case k instead, you'll get this:
AUTO KILL on (s)ubject or (n)ame (s)
If you hit your S key or just enter, you'll see this:
KILL Subject: (=/)
Type in the name of the offending word or phrase and hit enter.
You'll then be prompted:
KILL in (g)roup 'eff.test' or in (a)ll groups (g)
except that the name of the group you see will be the one you're
actually in at the moment. Because cascaders and other annoying
people often cross-post their messages to a wide range of newsgroups,
you might consider hitting a instead of g. Next comes:
Lifetime of entry in days (p)ermanent (30)
The P key will screen out the offending articles forever, while
hitting enter will do it for 30 days. You can also type in a number
of days for the blocking.
Creating killfiles in rn works differently -- its default
killfile generator only works for messages in specific groups, rather
than globally for your entire newsgroup list. To create a global
killfile, you'll have to write one yourself.
To create a killfile in rn, go into the newsgroup where the
offending messages are and type in its number so you get it on your
screen. Type a capital K. From now on, any message with that subject
line will disappear before you read the group. You should probably
choose a reply, rather than the original message, so that you will get
all of the followups (the original message won't have a "Re: " in its
subject line). The next time you call up that newsgroup, rn will tell
you it's killing messages. When it's done, hit the space bar to go
back into reading mode.
To create a "global" kill file that will automatically wipe out
articles in all groups you read, start rn and type control-K. This
will start your whatever text editor you have as your default on your
host system and create a file (called KILL, in your News
subdirectory).
On the first line, you'll type in the word, phrase or name you
don't want to see, followed by commands that tell rn whether to search
an entire message for the word or name and then what to do when it
finds it.
Each line must be in this form
/pattern/modifier:j
"Pattern" is the word or phrase you want rn to look for. It's
case-insensitive: both "test" and "Test" will be knocked out. The
modifier tells rn whether to limit its search to message headers
(which can be useful when the object is to never see messages from a
particular person):
a: Looks through an entire message
h: Looks just at the header
You can leave out the modifier command, in which case rn will
only look at the subject line of messages. The "j" at the end tells rn
to screen out all articles with the offending word.
So if you never want to see the word "foo" in any header, ever again,
type this:
/foo/h:j
This is particularly useful for getting rid of articles from
people who post in more than one newsgroup, such as cascaders, since
an article's newsgroup name is always in the header.
If you just want to block messages with a subject line about
cascades, you could try:
/foo/:j
To kill anything that is a followup to any article, use this
pattern:
/Subject: *Re:/:j
When done writing lines for each phrase to screen, exit the text
editor as you normally would, and you'll be put back in rn.
One word of caution: go easy on the global killfile. An
extensive global killfile, or one that makes frequent use of the a:
modifier can dramatically slow down rn, since the system will now have
to look at every single word in every single message in all the
newsgroups you want to read.
If there's a particular person whose posts you never want to see
again, first find his or address (which will be in the "from:" line of
his postings) and then write a line in your killfile like this:
/From: *name@address\.all/h:j
4.3 SOME USENET HINTS
Case counts in Unix -- most of the time. Many Unix commands,
including many of those used for reading Usenet articles, are case
sensitive. Hit a d when you meant a D and either nothing will happen,
or something completely different from what you expected will happen.
So watch that case!
In nn, you can get help most of the time by typing a question mark
(the exception is when you are writing your own message, because then
you are inside the text-processing program). In rn, type a lower-case h
at any prompt to get some online help.
When you're searching for a particular newsgroup, whether through
the l command in rn or with nngrep for nn, you sometimes may have to
try several keywords. For example, there is a newsgroup dedicated to
the Grateful Dead, but you'd never find it if you tried, say, l grateful
dead, because the name is rec.music.gdead. In general, try the smallest
possible part of the word or discussion you're looking for, for example,
use "trek" to find newsgroups about "Star Trek." If one word doesn't
produce anything, try another.
4.4 THE BRAIN-TUMOR BOY, THE MODEM TAX AND THE CHAIN LETTER
Like the rest of the world, Usenet has its share of urban legends
and questionable activities. There are three in particular that plague
the network. Spend more than, oh, 15 minutes within Usenet and you're
sure to run into the Brain Tumor Boy, the plot by the evil FCC to tax
your modem and Dave Rhode's miracle cure for poverty. For 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 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 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 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 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.
4.5 BIG SIG
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. You can see the best of the worst in the alt.fan.warlord
newsgroup, which exists solely to critique .sigs that go too far, such as:
___________________________________________________________________________
|#########################################################################|
|#| |#|
|#| ***** * * ***** * * ***** ***** ***** |#|
|#| * * * * ** ** * * * * |#|
|#| * ****** *** * * * *** * ** ***** ***** |#|
|#| * * * * * * * * * * * |#|
|#| * * * ***** * * ***** ***** * * |#|
|#| |#|
|#| **** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** |#|
|#| * ** * * * * * * * * |#|
|#| **** * * ** ***** * * ** * * * |#|
|#| * ** * * * ** * * * * * * * |#|
|#| **** ***** ***** ** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** |#|
|#| |#|
|#| T-H-E M-E-G-A B-I-G .S-I-G C-O-M-P-A-N-Y |#|
|#| ~-----------------------------~ |#|
|#| "Annoying people with huge net.signatures for over 20 years..." |#|
|#| |#|
|#|---------------------------------------------------------------------|#|
|#| "The difference between a net.idiot and a bucket of shit is that at |#|
|#| least a bucket can be emptied. Let me further illustrate my point |#|
|#| by comparing these charts here. (pulls out charts) Here we have a |#|
|#| user who not only flames people who don't agree with his narrow- |#|
|#| minded drivel, but he has this huge signature that takes up many |#|
|#| pages with useless quotes. This also makes reading his frequented |#|
|#| newsgroups a torture akin to having at 300 baud modem on a VAX. I |#|
|#| might also add that his contribution to society rivals only toxic |#|
|#| dump sites." |#|
|#| -- Robert A. Dumpstik, Jr |#|
|#| President of The Mega Big Sig Company |#|
|#| September 13th, 1990 at 4:15pm |#|
|#| During his speech at the "Net.abusers |#|
|#| Society Luncheon" during the |#|
|#| "1990 Net.idiots Annual Convention" |#|
|#|_____________________________________________________________________|#|
|#| |#|
|#| Thomas Babbit, III: 5th Assistant to the Vice President of Sales |#|
|#| __ |#|
|#| ========== ______ Digital Widget Manufacturing Co. |#|
|#| \\ / 1147 Complex Incorporated Drive |#|
|#| )-======= Suite 215 |#|
|#| Nostromo, VA 22550-1147 |#|
|#| #NC-17 Enterpoop Ship :) Phone # 804-844-2525 |#|
|#| ---------------- Fax # 804-411-1115 |#|
|#| "Shut up, Wesley!" Online Service # 804-411-1100 |#|
|#| -- Me at 300-2400, and now 9600 baud! |#|
|#| PUNet: tbabb!digwig!nostromo |#|
|#| Home address: InterNet: dvader@imperial.emp.com |#|
|#| Thomas Babbit, III Prodigy: Still awaiting author- |#|
|#| 104 Luzyer Way ization |#|
|#| Sulaco, VA 22545 "Manufacturing educational widget |#|
|#| Phone # 804-555-1524 design for over 3 years..." |#|
|#|=====================================================================|#|
|#| |#|
|#| Introducing: |#|
|#| ______ |#|
|#| The |\ /| / |#|
|#| | \/ | / |#|
|#| | | / |#|
|#| | | / |#|
|#| | | ETELHED /_____ ONE |#|
|#|'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'|#|
|#| 50Megs Online! The k00l BBS for rad teens! Lots of games and many |#|
|#| bases for kul topix! Call now and be validated to the Metelhed Zone|#|
|#| -- 804-555-8500 -- |#|
|#|\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\V/////////////////////////////////////|#|
|#| "This is the end, my friend..." -- The Doors |#|
|#########################################################################|
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hit "b" to continue
Hahahha... fooled u!
4.6 THE FIRST AMENDMENT AS LOCAL ORDINANCE
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
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.
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.
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