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

up with the news a different way

over the Net. USA Today has been something of an online newspaper

pioneer, selling its stories to bulletin-board and online systems across

the country for several years. Cleveland Free-Net provides the online

version of USA Today (along with all its other services) for free.

Currently, the paper only publishes five days a week, so you’ll have to

get your weekend news fix elsewhere.

Telnet: freenet-in-a.cwru.edu or

freenet-in-b.cwru.edu

After you connect and log in, look for this menu entry: NPTN/USA

TODAY HEADLINE NEWS. Type the number next to it and hit enter. You’ll

then get a menu listing a series of broad categories, such as sports and

telecommunications. Choose one, and you’ll get a yet another menu,

listing the ten most recent dates of publication. Each of these

contains one-paragraph summaries of the day’s news in that particular

subject.

10.4 THE WORLD TODAY, FROM BELARUS TO BRAZIL

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty are American radio stations

that broadcast to the former Communist countries of eastern Europe.

Every day, their news departments prepare a summary of news in those

countries, which is then disseminated via the Net, through a Bitnet

mailing list and a Usenet newsgroup.

To have the daily digests sent directly to your e-mailbox, send a

message to

listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu

Leave the subject line blank, and as a message, write:

subscribe rferl-l Your Name

Alternately, look for the bulletins in the Usenet newsgroup misc.news-

east-europe.rferl.

Daily Brazilian news updates are available (in Portuguese) from the

University of Sao Paulo. Use anonymous ftp to connect to

uspif.if.usp.br

Use cd to switch to the whois directory. The news summaries are stored

in files with this form: NEWS.23OCT92;1. But to get them, leave off the

semicolon and the 1, and don’t capitalize anything, for example:

get news.23oct92

Daily summaries of news reports from France (in French) are availble

on the National Capital FreeNet in Ottawa, Ont. Telnet to

freenet.carleton.ca

and log on as: guest. At the main menu, select the number for “The

Newsstand” and then “La presse de France.”

10.5 E-MAILING NEWS ORGANIZATIONS

A number of newspapers, television stations and networks and other

news organizations now encourage readers and viewers to communicate with

them electronically, via Internet e-mail addresses. They include:

The Middlesex News, Framingham, Mass. sysop@news.ci.net

The Boston Globe voxbox@globe.com

WCVB-TV, Boston, Mass. wcvb@aol.com

NBC News, New York, N.Y. nightly@nbc.com

The Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa, Ont. ottawa-citizen@freenet.carleton.ca

CJOH-TV, Ottawa, Ont. ab363@freenet.carleton.ca

St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times 73174.3344@compuserve.com

Illinois Issues, Springfield, Ill. gherardi@sangamon.edu

WTVF-TV, Nashville, Tenn. craig.ownsby@nashville.com

10.6 FYI

The clari.net.newusers newsgroup on Usenet provides a number of

articles about Clarinet and ways of finding news stories of interest

to you.

To discuss the future of newspapers and newsrooms in the new

electronic medium, subscribe to the Computer Assisted Reporting and

Research mailing list on Bitnet. Send a mail message of

Subscribe carr-l Your Name

to listserv@ulkyvm.bitnet.

Chapter 9: ADVANCED E-MAIL

9.1 THE FILE’S IN THE MAIL

E-mail by itself is a powerful tool, and by now you may be

sending e-mail messages all over the place. You might even be on a

mailing list or two. But there is a lot more to e-mail than just

sending messages. If your host system does not have access to ftp,

or it doesn’t have access to every ftp site on the Net, you can have

programs and files sent right to your mailbox. And using some simple

techniques, you can use e-mail to send data files such as spreadsheets,

or even whole programs, to friends and colleagues around the world.

A key to both is a set of programs known as encoders and

decoders. For all its basic power, Net e-mail has a big problem: it

can’t handle graphics characters or the control codes found in even

the simplest of computer programs. Encoders however, can translate

these into forms usable in e-mail, while decoders turn them back into

a form that you can actually use. If you are using a Unix-based host

system, chances are it already has an encoder and decoder online that

you can use. These programs will also let you use programs posted in

several Usenet newsgroups, such as comp.binaries.ibm.pc.

If both you and the person with whom you want to exchange files use

Unix host systems, you’re in luck because virtually all Unix

host systems have encoder/decoder programs online. For now, let’s

assume that’s the case. First, upload the file you want to send to your

friend to your host site (ask your system administrator how to upload a

file to your name or “home” directory if you don’t already know how).

Then type

uuencode file file > file.uu

and hit enter. “File” is the name of the file you want to prepare for

mailing, and yes, you have to type the name twice! The > is a Unix

command that tells the system to call the “encoded” file “file.uu”

(you could actually call it anything you want).

Now to get it into a mail message. The quick and dirty way is to

type

mail friend

where “friend” is your friend’s address. At the subject line, type

the name of the enclosed file. When you get the blank line, type

~r file.uu

or whatever you called the file, and hit enter. (on some systems, the ~

may not work; if so, ask your system administrator what to use). This

inserts the file into your mail message. Hit control-D, and your file

is on its way!

On the other end, when your friend goes into her mailbox, she

should transfer it to her home directory. Then she should type

uudecode file.name

and hit enter. This creates a new file in her name directory with

whatever name you originally gave it. She can then download it to her

own computer. Before she can actually use it, though, she’ll have to

open it up with a text processor and delete the mail header that has

been “stamped” on it. If you use a mailer program that automatically

appends a “signature,” tell her about that so she can delete that as

well.

9.2 RECEIVING FILES

If somebody sends you a file through the mail, you’ll have to go

through a couple of steps to get it into a form you can actually use. If

you are using the simple mail program, go into mail and type

w # file.name

where # is the number of the message you want to transfer and

file.name is what you want to call the resulting file. In pine, call

up the message and hit your O key and then E. You’ll then be asked

for a file name. In elm, call up the message and hit your S key.

You’ll get something that looks like this:

=file.request

Type a new file name and hit enter (if you hit enter without

typing a file name, the message will be saved to another mail folder,

not your home directory).

In all three cases, exit the mail program to return to your host

system’s command line. Because the file has been encoded for mail

delivery, you now have to run a decoder. At the command line, type

uudecode file.name

where file.name is the file you created while in mail. Uudecode will

create a new, uncompressed binary file. In some cases, you may have to

run it through some other programs (for example, if it is in “tar” form),

but generally it should now be ready for you to download to your own

computer (on which you might then have to run a de-compressor program

such as PKXZIP).

9.3 SENDING FILES TO NON-INTERNET SITES

What if your friend only connects with a non-Unix system, such as

CompuServe or MCIMail? There are programs available for MS-DOS, Apple

and Amiga computers that will encode and decode files. Of course, since

you can’t send one of these programs to your friend via e-mail (how would

she un-encode it?), you’ll have to mail (the old-fashioned way) or give

her a diskette with the program on it first. Then, she can get the file

by e-mail and go through the above process (only on her own computer) to

get a usable file. Remember to give her an encoder program as well, if

she wants to send you files in return.

For MS-DOS machines, you’ll want to get uunecode.com and

uudecode.com. Both can be found through anonymous ftp at

wuarchive.wustl.edu in the /mirrors/msdos/starter directory. The MS-

DOS version is as easy to use as the Unix one: Just type

uudecode filename.ext

and hit enter.

Mac users should get a program called uutool, which can be found

in the info-mac/util directory on sumex-aim.stanford.edu.

Think twice before sending somebody a giant file. Although large

sites connected directly to the Internet can probably handle mega-files,

many smaller systems cannot. Some commercial systems, such as CompuServe

and MCIMail, limit the size of mail messages their users can receive.

Fidonet doesn’t even allow encoded messages. In general, a file size of

30,000 or so bytes is a safe upper limit for non-Internet systems.

9.4 GETTING FTP FILES VIA E-MAIL

To help people without ftp access, a number of ftp sites have set up

mail servers (also known as archive servers) that allow you to get files

via e-mail. You send a request to one of these machines and they send

back the file you want. As with ftp, you’ll be able to find everything

from historical documents to software (but please note that if you do

have access to ftp, that method is always quicker and ties up fewer

resources than using e-mail).

Some interesting or useful mail servers include:

mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu Files of “frequently asked questions”

related to Usenet; state-by-state lists of U.S. representatives and

Senators and their addresses and office phone numbers.

archive-server@eff.org Information about the Electronic Frontier

Foundation; documents about legal issues on the Net.

archive-server@cs.widener.edu Back copies of the Computer

Underground Digest and every possible fact you could want to know about

“The Simpsons.”

netlib@uunet.uu.net Programs for many types of personal computers;

archives of past postings from many Usenet newsgroups.

archive-server@ames.arc.nasa.gov Space-related text and graphics

(GIF-format) files.

service@nic.ddn.mil Detailed information about Internet.

Most mail servers work pretty much the same — you send an