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

physical space. But put a mark beside

these words. Join the Net and actively participate for a year. Then

re-read this passage. It will no longer seem so strange to be a

“citizen of Cyberspace.” It will seem like the most natural thing in

the world.

And that leads to another fundamental thing to remember:

You can’t break the Net!

As you travel the Net, your computer may freeze, your screen may

erupt into a mass of gibberish. You may think you’ve just disabled a

million-dollar computer somewhere — or even your own personal

computer. Sooner or later, this feeling happens to everyone — and

likely more than once. But the Net and your computer are hardier than

you think, so relax. You can no more break the Net than you can the

phone system. If something goes wrong, try again. If nothing at all

happens, you can always disconnect. If worse comes to worse, you can

turn off your computer. Then take a deep breath. And dial right back

in. Leave a note for the person who runs the computer to which you’ve

connected to ask for advice. Try it again. Persistence pays.

Stay and contribute. The Net will be richer for it — and so will

you.

1.7 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

Your computer connects with a public-access site and get gibberish

on your screen.

If you are using parameters of 8-1-N, try 7-1-e (or vice-versa). If

that doesn’t work, try another modem speed.

You have your computer dial a public-access site, but nothing

happens.

Check the phone number you typed in. If correct, turn on your modem’s

speaker (on Hayes-compatible modems, you can usually do this by typing ATM1

in your communications software’s “terminal mode”). If the phone just

rings and rings, the public-access site could be down for maintenance or

due to a crash or some other problem. If you get a “connect” message, but

nothing else, try hitting enter or escape a couple of times.

You try to log in, but after you type your password, nothing

happens, or you get a “timed out” message followed by a disconnect.

Re-dial the number and try it again.

Always remember, if you have a problem that just doesn’t go away,

ask! Ask your system administrator, ask a friend, but ask. Somebody will

know what to do.

1.8 FYI

The Net grows so fast that even the best guide to its resources

would be somewhat outdated the day it was printed. At the end of each

chapter, however, you’ll find FYI pointers to places on the Net where you

can go for more information or to keep updated on new resources and

services.

Peter Kaminski maintains a list of systems that provide public

access to Internet services. It’s availble on the network itself, which

obviously does you little good if you currently have no access, but which

can prove invaluable should you move or want to find a new system. Look

for his “PDIAL” file in the alt.bbs.lists or news.answers newsgroups in

Usenet (for information on accessing Usenet, see Chapter 3).

Steven Levy’s book, “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,”

(Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984). describes the early culture and ethos

that ultimately resulted in the Internet and Usenet.

John Quarterman’s “The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing

Systems Worldwide” (Digital Press, 1990) is an exhaustive look at

computer networks and how they connect with each other.

You’ll find numerous documents about the Internet, its history and

its resources in the pub/Net_underscore_info directory on the Electronic Frontier

Foundation’s FTP server (see chapter 7 to decipher this).

Chapter 2: E-MAIL

2.1 THE BASICS

Electronic mail, or e-mail, is your personal connection to the

world of the Net.

All of the millions of people around the world who use the

Net have their own e-mail addresses. A growing number of “gateways” tie

more and more people to the Net every day. When you logged onto the host

system you are now using, it automatically generated an address for you,

as well.

The basic concepts behind e-mail parallel those of regular mail.

You send mail to people at their particular addresses. In turn, they

write to you at your e-mail address. You can subscribe to the

electronic equivalent of magazines and newspapers. You might even get

electronic junk mail.

E-mail has two distinct advantages over regular mail. The most

obvious is speed. Instead of several days, your message can reach the

other side of the world in hours, minutes or even seconds (depending on

where you drop off your mail and the state of the connections between

there and your recipient). The other advantage is that once you master

the basics, you’ll be able to use e-mail to access databases and file

libraries. You’ll see how to do this later, along with learning how to

transfer program and data files through e-mail.

E-mail also has advantages over the telephone. You send your

message when it’s convenient for you. Your recipients respond at their

convenience. No more telephone tag. And while a phone call across

the country or around the world can quickly result in huge phone

bills, e-mail lets you exchange vast amounts of mail for only a few

pennies — even if the other person is in New Zealand.

E-mail is your connection to help — your Net lifeline. The

Net can sometimes seem a frustrating place! No matter how hard you

try, no matter where you look, you just might not be able to find the

answer to whatever is causing you problems. But when you know how to

use e-mail, help is often just a few keystrokes away: you can ask your

system administrator or a friend for help in an e-mail message.

The quickest way to start learning e-mail is to send yourself a

message. Most public-access sites actually have several different types

of mail systems, all of which let you both send and receive mail. We’ll

start with the simplest one, known, appropriately enough, as “mail,” and

then look at a couple of other interfaces. At your host system’s command

prompt, type:

mail username

where username is the name you gave yourself when you first logged on.

Hit enter. The computer might respond with

subject:

Type

test

or, actually, anything at all (but you’ll have to hit enter before

you get to the end of the screen). Hit enter.

The cursor will drop down a line. You can now begin writing the

actual message. Type a sentence, again, anything at all. And here’s

where you hit your first Unix frustration, one that will bug you

repeatedly: you have to hit enter before you get to the very end of the

line. Just like typewriters, many Unix programs have no word-wrapping

(although there are ways to get some Unix text processors, such as emacs,

to word-wrap).

When done with your message, hit return. Now hit control-D (the

control and the D keys at the same time). This is a Unix command that

tells the computer you’re done writing and that it should close your

“envelope” and mail it off (you could also hit enter once and then, on

a blank line, type a period at the beginning of the line and hit enter

again).

You’ve just sent your first e-mail message. And because you’re

sending mail to yourself, rather than to someone somewhere else on the

Net, your message has already arrived, as we’ll see in a moment.

If you had wanted, you could have even written your message on

your own computer and then uploaded it into this electronic

“envelope.” There are a couple of good reasons to do this with long

or involved messages. One is that once you hit enter at the end of a

line in “mail” you can’t readily fix any mistakes on that line (unless

you use some special commands to call up a Unix text processor). Also,

if you are paying for access by the hour, uploading a prepared

message can save you money. Remember to save the document in ASCII or

text format. Uploading a document you’ve created in a word processor

that uses special formatting commands (which these days means many

programs) will cause strange effects.

When you get that blank line after the subject line, upload the

message using the ASCII protocol. Or you can copy and paste the text,

if your software allows that. When done, hit control-D as above.

Now you have mail waiting for you. Normally, when you log on,

your public-access site will tell you whether you have new mail

waiting. To open your mailbox and see your waiting mail, type

mail

and hit enter.

When the host system sees “mail” without a name after it, it

knows you want to look in your mailbox rather than send a message.

Your screen, on a plain-vanilla Unix system will display:

Mail version SMI 4.0 Mon Apr 24 18:34:15 PDT 1989 Type ? for help.

“/usr/spool/mail/adamg”: 1 message 1 new 1 unread

>N 1 adamg Sat Jan 15 20:04 12/290 test

Ignore the first line; it’s just computerese of value only to the

people who run your system. You can type a question mark and hit

return, but unless you’re familiar with Unix, most of what you’ll see

won’t make much sense at this point.

The second line tells you the directory on the host system where

your mail messages are put, which again, is not something you’ll likely

need to know. The second line also tells you how many messages are in your

mailbox, how many have come in since the last time you looked and how

many messages you haven’t read yet.

It’s the third line that is of real interest — it tells you who

the message is from, when it arrived, how many lines and characters

it takes up, and what the subject is. The “N” means it is a new

message — it arrived after the last time you looked in your mailbox.

Hit enter. And there’s your message — only now it’s a lot

longer than what you wrote!

Message 1:

From adamg Jan 15 20:04:55 1994

Received: by eff.org id AA28949

(5.65c/IDA-1.4.4/pen-ident for adamg); Sat, 15 Jan 1994 20:04:55 -0400

(ident-sender: adamg@eff.org)

Date: Sat, 15 Jan 1994 21:34:55 -0400

From: Adam Gaffin

Message-Id: <199204270134.AA28949@eff.org>

To: adamg

Subject: test

Status: R

This is only a test!

Whoa! What is all that stuff? It’s your message with a postmark

gone mad. Just as the postal