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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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