Aihnss.995
net.news
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:mhtsa!ihnss!warren
Wed Dec 23 11:27:26 1981
Misconceptions about Bell Labs, Netnews Content
(Long Message)
First, I think a lot of people think that telephone bills are of no
concern to bell labs. THIS IS NOT TRUE! We pay for phone bills
like everyone else out of our budget, and they are monitored. Our
department's UUCP phone bill is very large, and does attract
attention. Thus the volume of netnews that could not be justfied as
being worthwhile to management is of great concern.
Now for some flaming about the recent use of netnews. Much of the
netnews distribution within bell labs is done without any explicit
approval. I would be surprised to learn that many of other of the
corporate participants in usenet had explicit approval for
management. This makes us all very vulnerable.
There is a lot of effort going on now to try to convince management
in Bell Labs to improve the software work environment. Good
electronic mail and bulletin board are an important part of that
environment. There is a lot of interest in netnews here, with lots
of people from management, and even form the legal department
looking at it.
This is why so much concern is being expressed over the contents.
Please don't accuse me of being against free speech. Just realize
that you give up some freedome when somebody else is paying the
bill. This is the real world, and like it or not people do make
arbitrary and harsh decisions when confronted with something they
don't like. You can fight the organization directly if you like,
but personally I would rather spend my time reading all of the
non-controversial stuff in netnews than trying to defend it in
court. I set up the original distribution of netnews to this
Location (~4K employees!) and wouldn't want to see it wiped out
because somebody read something they didn't like.
I doin't think that just shutting off net.jokes.q in the .sys file
is a viable solution at this point. First, it is impossible to
prevent people from submitting questionable material to other
categories. Any good hacker can figure out how to invoke rnews on a
remote machine with a bogus news file and distribute anything
anonomously.
More important, the random interconnection of machines
makes it difficult or impossible to determine whether you are
cutting off the network by selectively accepting only certain
newsgroups. What is probably needed is a more organized network
with primary sites, that are responsible for overall distribution
and must accept and forward everything, and secondary sites that are
at the edges of the network and either not responsible for
forwarding or responsible only for forwarding within their own
organization. Until this kind of arrangement can be set up, I
suggest that we not cut up the network. (I do support trying to set
up a less chaotic organization for usenet.)
Third, the way that the A version is implemented (and I think that
this applies to the B version as well) As long as someone
distributes a category to you in their .sys file, you will receive
copies of all articles in that category and then throw them away.
This can be a huge drain on your resources, since unix is
notoriously poor at receiving lots of characters through a tty port.
While it is in theory possible to coordinate .sys files of ajoining
sites to avoid this, for any site with a large number of
interconnections, this is awkward. (I have no idea how many sites
send to ihnss, for example.)
Sorry for this rather long flame, but I really don't want to see
netnews killed because it got out of hand.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <
[email protected]>
of
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/
This Usenet Oldnews Archive
article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:
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The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
