Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet - Electronic Frontier Foundation (reading rainbow books .txt) 📗

enter.

In rn, you have to wait until you get to the end of a newsgroup

to hit F, which will bring up a message-composing system.

Alternately, at your host system’s command line, you can type

Pnews

and hit enter. You’ll be prompted somewhat similarly to the nn

system, except that you’ll be given a list of possible distributions.

If you chose “world,” you’ll get this message:

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire

civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of

dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.

Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]

Don’t worry — your message won’t really cost the Net untold

amounts, although, again, it’s a good idea to think for a second

whether your message really should go everywhere.

If you want to respond to a given post through e-mail, instead of

publicly, hit R in nn or r or R in rn. In rn, as with follow-up

articles, the upper-case key includes the original message in yours.

Most newsgroups are unmoderated, which means that every message

you post will eventually wind up on every host system within the

geographic region you specified that carries that newsgroup.

Some newsgroups, however, are moderated, as you saw earlier with

comp.risks. In these groups, messages are shipped to a single

location where a moderator, acting much like a magazine editor,

decides what actually gets posted. In some cases, groups are

moderated like scholarly journals. In other cases, it’s to try to cut

down on the massive number of messages that might otherwise be posted.

You’ll notice that many articles in Usenet end with a fancy

“signature” that often contains some witty saying, a clever drawing

and, almost incidentally, the poster’s name and e-mail address. You

too can have your own “signature” automatically appended to everything

you post. On your own computer, create a signature file. Try to keep

it to four lines or less, lest you annoy others on the Net. Then,

while connected to your host system, type

cat>.signature

and hit enter (note the period before the s). Upload your signature

file into this using your communications software’s ASCII upload

protocol. When done, hit control-D, the Unix command for closing a

file. Now, every time you post a message, this will be appended to it.

There are a few caveats to posting. Usenet is no different from

a Town Meeting or publication: you’re not supposed to break the law,

whether that’s posting copyrighted material or engaging in illegal

activities. It is also not a place to try to sell products (except in

certain biz. and for-sale newsgroups).

3.8 CROSS-POSTING

Sometimes, you’ll have an issue you think should be discussed in

more than one Usenet newsgroup. Rather than posting individual messages

in each group, you can post the same message in several groups at once,

through a process known as cross-posting.

Say you want to start a discussion about the political

ramifications of importing rare tropical fish from Brazil. People who

read rec.aquaria might have something to say. So might people who read

alt.politics.animals and talk.politics.misc.

Cross-posting is easy. It also should mean that people on other

systems who subscribe to several newsgroups will see your message only

once, rather than several times — news-reading software can cancel out

the other copies once a person has read the message. When you get ready

to post a message (whether through Pnews for rn or the :post command in

nn), you’ll be asked in which newsgroups. Type the names of the various

groups, separated by a comma, but no space, for example:

rec.aquaria,alt.politics.animals,talk.politics.misc

and hit enter. After answering the other questions (geographic

distribution, etc.), the message will be posted in the various

groups (unless one of the groups is moderated, in which case the

message goes to the moderator, who decides whether to make it public).

It’s considered bad form to post to an excessive number of

newsgroups, or inappropriate newsgroups. Probably, you don’t really have

to post something in 20 different places. And while you may think your

particular political issue is vitally important to the fate of the world,

chances are the readers of rec.arts.comics will not, or at least not

important enough to impose on them. You’ll get a lot of nasty e-mail

messages demanding you restrict your messages to the “appropriate”

newsgroups.

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 lunatics. 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 (see section 4.5)

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