A round trip through Global Networks, Life in Cyberspace, and Everything...
by Adam Gaffin with Joerg Heitkoetter
This is *Texinfo* edition 1.02 of `bdgtti.texi' as of 27 September 1993.
Created by Joerg Heitkoetter on August 27, 1993.
The *Texinfo* edition originated from plain ASCII text file
`/pub/EFF/papers/big-dummys-guide.txt'
on The Electronic Frontier Foundation's server `ftp.eff.org'.
Copyright (c) 1993 EFF, The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Published by The Electronic Frontier Foundation
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Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this publication
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except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved
by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
* Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet *
*********************************
A round trip through Global Networks, Life in Cyberspace, and Everything...
by Adam Gaffin with Joerg Heitkoetter
Copyright (c) 1993 EFF, The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Published by The Electronic Frontier Foundation
1001 G Street, N.W., Suite 950 East
Washington, DC 20001, USA
Phone: (202) 347-5400. FAX: (202) 393-5509. Internet:
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
**************************
Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Ðreamblå
========
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Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.
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Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19YY NAME OF AUTHOR
Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details
type `show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome
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for details.
The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the
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You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your
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necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:
Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright
interest in the program `Gnomovision'
(which makes passes at compilers) written
by James Hacker.
SIGNATURE OF TY COON, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into
proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may
consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public
License instead of this License.
Welcoìå
*******
*Welcome to the Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet.*
The genesis of the Big Dummy's Guide was a few informal conversations,
which included MITCH KAPOR of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and
STEVE CISLER of Apple Computer, Inc. in June of 1991. With the support of
Apple Computer, EFF hired a writer (ADAM GAFFIN) and actually took on the
project in September of 1991.
The idea was to write a guide to the Internet for folks who had little or
no experience with network communications. We intended to post this Guide to
"the Net" in ASCII and HyperCard formats and to give it away on disk, as well
as have a print edition available for a nominal charge. With the
consolidation of our offices to Washington, DC, we were able to put the Guide
on a fast track. You're looking at the realization of our dreams - version
one of the Guide. At the time I'm writing this, we're still fishing around
for a book publisher, so the hard-copy version has not yet been printed.
We're hoping to update this Guide on a regular basis, so please feel free to
send us your comments and corrections.
EFF would like to thank the folks at Apple, especially Steve Cisler of the
Apple Library, for their support of our efforts to bring this Guide to you.
We hope it helps you open up a whole new world, where new friends and
experiences are sure to be yours.
Enjoy!
Shari Steele
Director of Legal Services and Community Outreach
Electronic Frontier Foundation
July 15, 1993
August 27, 1993
*G'day, folks!*
I came across this guide while reading "EFFector Online Volume 5 No. 15,
8/20/1993" (A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ISSN
1062-9424), that is available via `comp.org.eff.news' and immediately decided
to get my hands on it. After browsing through the raw ASCII text file, I
thought that such a useful thing, should have a more beautiful "face" (and
fewer "bugs").
As Shari points out, the EFF is still "fishing for a publisher." In other
words, it's far from being clear when this guide will be available as hard
copy, unless you want to print out the "buggy" ASCII file. Thus, I started
over to make the bulk a *Texinfo* document, loosely modelled after BRENDAN
KEHOE's "Zen and the Art of the Internet", originally written for Widener
University's, Computer Science Department, and later published as:
Kehoe, B.P. (1992) "Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide
to the Internet." 2nd Edition (July). Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs,
NJ. 112 pages. The 1st Edition, (February, 2nd) is still available via
anonymous ftp from `ftp.cs.widener.edu' and many other Internet archives.
It was the first comprehensive book on the Internet available. (Despite
the "traditional" postings in `news.announce.newusers' originated by
ex-Net.god GENE SPAFFORD of Purdue University and the
`news.answers' archive maintained by Net.demi-god JANATHAN I. KAMES
of MIT).
Situation has changed dramatically, since. More and more books get into
the stores, and hopefully facilitate the life of "newbies" on the Net. Just
to mention two IMHO excellent examples:
Krol, E. (1992) "The Whole Internet: Catalog & User's Guide." O'Reilly &
Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA. 376 pages.
LaQuey, T. and Ryer, J.C. (1992) "The Internet Companion: A Beginner's
Guide to Global Networking." Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, MA.
208 pages.
But, "the Net" in its present form would have never been evolved without
the hundreds of un-paid voluntary efforts (de facto Internet still *is* run
on a voluntary basis), so here are *my* two cents: The output of several
night-shift editing sessions.
"The BIG DUMMY'S GUIDE TO THE INTERNET is now available at your local
laser printer..."
See ya on the Net!
p.s.: Although this guide is almost complete, and I really, really,
honestly, don't have the time to go over it once again, feel free to report
"bugs", or any inconsistencies you find. Drop me "more quotes," further
additions, requests for moral support, or "whatever-you-want"... Just an
e-mail away.
p.p.s.: I'd like to say a BIG "thank you" to SHARI STEELE, for her
immediate excitement on this project. ADAM GAFFIN, who generously accepted my
changes to his initial ASCII version. HOWARD RHEINGOLD, who let me include
his article, now serving as superb afterword of long-year first hand
experience in cyberspace (and yes, I mentioned your new book, Howard `;-)').
And, Last not least, thanks to BRUCE STERLING, who also "gave away" an
article for free.
Again, BERND RAICHLE courtesy of the
University of Stuttgart, provided TeXpertize, when TeXpertize was badly
needed (see file `specials.texi' for your enlightment). BTW: Over the past 2
years, we've been doing some such projects, although we haven't met F2F, yet.
This is one of the effects of the Net. (It thus should be termed
"Net.effect".)
Additional thanks to BRENDAN KEHOE for the *Texinfo*
release of "Zen", from which I borrowed this and that. FYI: Brendan works on
the 3rd editition of his book, and might be able to release the 2nd to the
Net, depending on Prentice-Hall's legal attorneys.
September 22, 1993
*G'day, folks! II*
Some more nights have passed, and "GNU Info" format is fully supported,
now. You can use either Emacs in INFO mode, or just GNU's `info' browser
(also available as `xinfo' for the X window system): type `info -f
bdgtti-1.02.info' and read "Dummy's" online in hypertextual fashion.
But since edition 1.01, "Dummy's" not only features an "Info" version. It
also comes with HTML support, i.e. the HyperText Markup Language format, that
is used by the World-Wide Web project (*note World-Wide Web: Gophers. for
some more ideas on this). The `bdgtti-1.02*.html' files can thus be browsed
using the WWW tools: from within `xmosaic', e.g. load `bdgtti-1.02_toc.html',
and there you go!
Finally, some more folks have helped along the way.
Many, thanks to LIONEL CONS courtesy of CERN, who
immediately updated his `texi2html' to make it work for this project. (Note
that you need `perl' to run this program.)
INGO DRESSLER courtesy of EUnet Deutschland, reserved
a place on `ftp.germany.eu.net' to distribute the European A4 paper edition
of this guide. See under `/pub/books/big-dummys-guide' using traditional
FTP, or use The Web at: `ftp://ftp.
germany.eu.net/pub/books/big-dummys-guide'. This will be the default server
for the European editions.
"The BIG DUMMY'S GUIDE TO THE INTERNET is now available in a variety of
easily convertible formats, *and* at your local laser printer..."
Enjoy the trip!
Joerg Heitkoetter
Systems Analysis Research Group, LSXI
Department of Computer Science
University of Dortmund, Germany
27 September 1993
*"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."*
-- Walt Disney
*"If I have seen farther than others,
it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."*
-- Sir Isaac Newton
*"A work of art is never finished, only abandoned."*
-- Anonymous
Forward
*******
By *Mitchell Kapor*
Co-founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
New communities are being built today. You cannot see them, except on a
computer screen. You cannot visit them, except through your keyboard. Their
highways are wires and optical fibers; their language a series of ones and
zeroes.
Yet these communities of cyberspace are as real and vibrant as any you
could find on a globe or in an atlas. Those are real people on the other
sides of those monitors. And freed from physical limitations, these people
are developing new types of cohesive and effective communities - ones which
are defined more by common interest and purpose than by an accident of
geography, ones on which what really counts is what you say and think and
feel, not how you look or talk or how old you are.
The oldest of these communities is that of the scientists, which actually
predates computers. Scientists have long seen themselves as an international
community, where ideas were more important than national origin. It is not
surprising that the scientists were the first to adopt the new electronic
media as their principal means of day-to-day communication.
I look forward to a day in which everybody, not just scientists, can enjoy
similar benefits of a global community.
But how exactly does community grow out of a computer network? It does so
because the network enables new forms of communication.
The most obvious example of these new digital communications media is
electronic mail, but there are many others. We should begin to think of
mailing lists, newsgroups, file and document archives, etc. as just the first
generation of new forms of information and communications media. The digital
media of computer networks, by virtue of their design and the enabling
technology upon which they ride, are fundamentally different from the now
dominant mass media of television, radio, newspapers and magazines. Digital
communications media are inherently capable of being more interactive, more
participatory, more egalitarian, more decentralized, and less hierarchical.
As such, the types of social relations and communities which can be built
on these media share these characteristics. Computer networks encourage the
active participation of individuals rather than the passive non-participation
induced by television narcosis.
In mass media, the vast majority of participants are passive recipients of
information. In digital communications media, the vast majority of
participants are active creators of information as well as recipients. This
type of symmetry has previously only been found in media like the telephone.
But while the telephone is almost entirely a medium for private one-to-one
communication, computer network applications such as electronic mailing
lists, conferences, and bulletin boards, serve as a medium of group or
"many-to-many" communication.
The new forums atop computer networks are the great levelers and reducers
of organizational hierarchy. Each user has, at least in theory, access to
every other user, and an equal chance to be heard. Some U.S. high-tech
companies, such as Microsoft and Borland, already use this to good advantage:
their CEO's - BILL GATES and PHILIPPE KAHN - are directly accessible to all
employees via electronic mail. This creates a sense that the voice of the
individual employee really matters. More generally, when corporate
communication is facilitated by electronic mail, decision-making processes
can be far more inclusive and participatory.
Computer networks do not require tightly centralized administrative
control. In fact, decentralization is necessary to enable rapid growth of
the network itself. Tight controls strangle growth. This decentralization
promotes inclusiveness, for it lowers barriers to entry for new parties
wishing to join the network.
Given these characteristics, networks hold tremendous potential to enrich
our collective cultural, political, and social lives and enhance democratic
values everywhere.
And the Internet, and the UUCP and related networks connected to it,
represents an outstanding example of a computer network with these qualities.
It is an open network of networks, not a single unitary network, but an
ensemble of interconnected systems which operate on the basis of multiple
implementations of accepted, non-proprietary protocols, standards and
interfaces.
One of its important characteristics is that new networks, host systems,
and users may readily join the network - the network is open to all.
The openness (in all senses) of the Internet reflects, I believe, the
sensibilities and values of its architects. Had the Internet somehow been
developed outside the world of research and education, it's less likely to
have had such an open architecture. Future generations will be indebted to
this community for the wisdom of building these types of open systems.
Still, the fundamental qualities of the Net, such as its decentralization,
also pose problems. How can full connectivity be maintained in the face of
an ever-expanding number of connected networks, for example? What of
software bugs that bring down computers, or human crackers who try to do the
same? But these problems can and will be solved.
Digital media can be the basis of new forms of political discourse, in
which citizens form and express their views on the important public issues of
the day. There is more than one possible vision of such electronic democracy,
however. Let's look at some examples of the potential power, and problems, of
the new digital media.
The idea of something called an "electronic town meeting" received
considerable attention in 1992 with ROSS PEROT's presidential campaign (or,
at least, its first incarnation).
Perot's original vision, from 20 or so years ago, was that viewers would
watch a debate on television and fill out punch cards which would be mailed
in and collated. Now we could do it with 800 telephone numbers.
In the current atmosphere of disaffection, alienation and cynicism,
anything that promotes greater citizen involvement seems a good idea. People
are turned off by politicians in general - witness the original surge of
support for Perot as outsider who would go in and clean up the mess - and the
idea of going right to the people is appealing,
What's wrong with this picture? The individual viewer is a passive
recipient of the views of experts. The only action taken by the citizen is
in expressing a preference for one of three pre-constructed alternatives.
While this might be occasionally useful, it's unsophisticated and falls far
short of the real potential of electronic democracy. We've been reduced to
forming our judgments on the basis of mass media's portrayal of the
personality and character of the candidates.
All this is in contrast to robust political debates already found on
various on-line computer systems, from CompuServe to Usenet. Through these
new media, the issues of the day, ranging from national security in the
post-Cold War era to comparative national health care systems, are fiercely
discussed in a wide variety of bulletin boards, conferences, and newsgroups.
What I see in online debate are multiple active participants, not just
experts, representing every point of view, in discussions that unfold over
extended periods of time. What this shows is that, far from being alienated
and disaffected from the political process, people like to talk and discuss -
and take action - if they have the opportunity to do so. Mass media don't
permit that. But these new media are more akin to a gathering around the
cracker barrel at the general store - only extended over hundreds, thousands
of miles, in cyberspace, rather than in one physical location.
Recent years have shown the potential power of these new media. We have
also seen several examples of where talk translated into action.
In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission proposed changing the way
certain online providers paid for access to local phone service. Online,
this quickly became known as the "modem tax" and generated a storm of
protest. The FCC withdrew the idea, but not quickly enough: the "modem tax"
has penetrated so deeply into the crevices of the Net that it has taken up a
permanent and ghostly residence as a kind of virtual or cognitive virus,
which periodically causes a re-infection of the systems and its users. FCC
commissioners continue to receive substantial mail on this even though the
original issue is long dead; in fact, it has generated more mail than any
other issue in the history of the FCC.
More recently, JIM MANZI, chairman of Lotus Development Corp., received
more than 30,000 e-mail messages when the company was getting ready to sell a
database containing records on tens of millions of Americans. The flood of
electronic complaints about the threat to privacy helped force the company to
abandon the project. Issues of narrow but vital interest to the online
community give a hint of the organizing power of the Net.
In August, 1991, the managers of a Soviet computer network known as Relcom
stayed online during an abortive coup, relaying eyewitness accounts and news
of actions against the coup to the West and to the rest of Russia.
And many public interest non-profit organizations and special interest
groups already use bulletin boards heavily as a means of communicating among
their members and organizing political activity.
But all is not perfect online. The quality of discourse is often very
low. Discussion is often trivial and boring and bereft of persuasive reason.
Discourse often sinks to the level of "flaming," of personal attacks,
instead of substantive discussion. Flaming. Those with the most time to
spend often wind up dominating the debate - a triumph of quantity of time
available over quality of content.
It seems like no place for serious discussion. Information overload is
also a problem. There is simply far too much to read to keep up with. It is
all without organization. How can this be addressed?
Recent innovations in the design of software used to connect people to the
Net and the process of online discussion itself reveal some hope.
Flaming is universal, but different systems handle it in different ways.
Both the technology and cultural norms matter.
On Usenet, for instance, most news reader applications support a feature
known as a "killfile," which allows an individual to screen out postings by a
particular user or on a particular subject. It is also sometimes referred to
as "the bozo filter." This spares the user who is sufficiently sophisticated
from further flamage, but it does nothing to stop the problem at its source.
Censorship would be one solution. But what else can be done without
resorting to unacceptably heavy-handed tactics of censorship? There is a
great tradition of respect for free speech on these systems, and to censor
public postings or even ban a poster for annoying or offensive content is
properly seen as unacceptable, in my opinion.
Some systems use cultural norms, rather than software, to deal with flame
wars. These online communities have developed practices which rely more on a
shared, internalized sense of appropriate behavior than on censorship, for
instance. The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is a relatively small
online conferencing system based in the San Francisco Bay area. On the WELL,
individuals who get into a fight are encouraged to move the discussion out of
the public conference and into e-mail. The encouragement is provided not
only by the host of the conference, but also by the users. It is part of the
culture, not part of the technology.
WELL hosts are volunteers who facilitate the discussion of a particular
subject. While they have the power to censor individual postings, the power
is very rarely used and only as a last resort, as it has been found that
dispute resolution by talking it out among the parties is a superior method
of problem solving in the long run.
It is not an accident that the WELL has a uniquely high quality of
conversation. Nor is it coincidental that it developed as a small and
originally isolated community (now on the Net) which gave it a chance to
develop its own norms or that key management of the system came from "The
Farm," a large, successful commune of the 1960's and 1970's led by STEPHEN
GASKIN.
We still know very little about the facilitation of online conversations.
It is a subject well worth further formal study and experimentation.
Some problems have to do with the unrefined and immature format and
structure of the discussion medium itself. The undifferentiated stream of
new messages marching along in 80 columns of ASCII text creates a kind of
hypnotic trance. Compare this with the typical multiplicity of type fonts,
varied layouts, images, and pictures of the printed page.
New media take time to develop and to be shaped. Reading text on a
terminal reminds me of looking at the Gutenberg Bible. The modern book took a
century to develop after the invention of printing with movable type and the
first Western printed books. ALDUS MANUTIUS and the inventions of modern
typefaces, pagination, the table of contents, the index, all of which gave
the book its modern form, came later, were done by different people, and were
of a different order than the invention of printing with movable type itself.
The new electronic media are undergoing a similar evolution.
Key inventions are occurring slowly, for example, development of software
tools that will allow the dissemination of audio and video across the Net.
This type of software has usually been sone so far by volunteers who have
given away the results. It's a great thing, but it's not sufficient, given
how hard it is to develop robust software. Innovation in the application
space will also be driven by entrepreneurs and independent software vendors
at such point as they perceive a business opportunity to create such products
(it would be nice if creators did it for art's sake but this seems unlikely).
There are some requirements to provide incentives to attract additional
software development. This requires a competitive free market in network
services at all levels to serve the expanding user demand for network
services. It requires a technologically mature network able to support these
services.
And there must be a user population, current or prospective, interested in
paying for better applications - and not just the current base of technically
sophisticated users and students, though they will absolutely benefit.
There are multiple classes of new application opportunities. E-mail is
overloaded because there aren't readily available alternatives yet. New and
different kinds of tools are needed for collaborative work. Computer
conferencing, as it evolves, may be sufficient for discussion and debate.
But by itself, it cannot really support collaborative work, in the sense of
readily enabling a group to make decisions efficiently, represent and track
the status of its work process. Trying to run an organization via e-mail
mailing list is very different than trying to have a discussion.
Computer networks can only fully realize their potential as innovative
communications media in an environment which encourages free and open
expression.
In some countries, legal principles of free speech protect freedom of
expression in traditional media such as the printed word. But once
communication moves to new digital media and across crosses international
borders, such legal protections fall away. As JOHN PERRY BARLOW, the
co-founder of EFF puts it: "In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local
ordinance." There is no international legal authority which protects free
expression on trans-national networks. Article 19 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights calls for the protection of free expression in
all media, but the declaration falls far short of being binding.
And if we're to take seriously the idea of the electronic online forum, we
have to deal with the access issue. if the only people with access to the
medium are well-educated, affluent, techno-literate elite, it won't be
sufficiently inclusive to represent all points of view.
We also need, fundamentally, a better infrastructure (the highway system
for information). As we move from the high-speed Internet to the even more
powerful National Research and Education Network, we need to look at how to
bring the power of these new media into the homes of everybody who might want
it. Addressing this "last mile" problem (phone networks are now largely
digitized, fiber-optic systems, except for the mile between your home and the
nearest switching station) should be a priority.
Computer networks will eventually become ubiquitous around the world. We
should therefore be concerned with the impact on society that they have, the
opportunities to improve society, and the dangers that they pose.
Fundamentally, we are optimists who believe in the potential of networks to
enhance democratic values of openness, diversity, and innovation.
Because the medium is so new, it is important now to develop policies at
the national and international level that help achieve the potential of
computer networks for society as a whole. By the time television was
recognized as a vast wasteland it was already too late to change. There is a
rare opportunity to develop policies in advance of a technologically and
economically mature system which would be hard to change.
*"As a net is made up of a series of ties, so everything in
this world is connected by a series of ties. If anyone thinks
that the mesh of a net is an independent, isolated thing, he is
mistaken. It is called a net because it is made up of a series
of interconnected meshes, and each mesh has its place and
responsibility in relation to other meshes."*
- Buddha
Ðrefañå
*******
By *Adam Gaffin*
Senior Reporter, Middlesex News, Framingham, Mass.
This book will help you join the global village known as Cyberspace or the
Net. Millions of people around the world already spend parts of their lives
in this land without frontiers. With this book, you will be able to use the
Net to:
* Stay in touch with friends, relatives and colleagues around the world,
at a fraction of the cost of phone calls or even air mail.
* Discuss everything from archaeology to zoology with people from around
the world.
* Tap into hundreds of information databases and libraries worldwide.
* Retrieve any of thousands of documents, journals, books and computer
programs.
* Stay up to date with wire-service news and sports, and government
weather reports.
* Play live, "real time" games with dozens of other people at once.
And you will have become the newest member of this ever growing community.
If you stay and contribute, the Net will be richer for it - and so will you.
But it will take a sense of adventure, a willingness to learn and an
ability to take a deep breath every once in awhile.
Visiting the Net today is a lot like journeying to a foreign country. You
know there are many things to see and do, but everything at first will seem
so, well, foreign.
When you first arrive, you won't be able to read the street signs. You'll
get lost. If you're unlucky, you may even run into some natives who'd just
as soon you went back to where you came from. If this weren't enough, the
entire country is constantly under construction; every day, it seems like
there's something new for you to figure out.
Here's where you take a deep breath. Fortunately, most of the natives are
actually friendly. In fact, the Net actually has a rich tradition of helping
out visitors and newcomers. With few written guides for ordinary people, the
Net has grown in large part one person at a time - if somebody helps you
learn your way around, it's almost expected you'll repay the favor some day
by helping somebody else.
So when you connect, don't be afraid to ask for help. You'll be surprised
at how many people will try to direct you around. 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. You are always
in the driver's seat. 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.
First links
===========
In the 1960s, researchers began experimenting with linking computers to
each other and to people through telephone hook-ups, using funds from the U.S
Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
ARPA wanted to see if computers in different locations could be linked
using a new technology known as packet switching, which had the promise of
letting several users share just one communications line. Previous computer
networking efforts had required a line between each computer on the network,
sort of like a train track on which only one train can travel at a time. The
packet system allowed for creation of a data highway, in which large numbers
of vehicles could essentially share the same lane. Each packet was given the
computer equivalent of a map and a time stamp, so that it could be sent to
the right destination, where it would then be reassembled into a message the
computer or a human could use.
This system allowed computers to share data and the researchers to
exchange electronic mail, or e-mail. In itself, e-mail was something of a
revolution, offering the ability to send detailed letters at the speed of a
phone call.
As this system, known as ARPANet, grew, some enterprising college students
(and one in high school) developed a way to use it to conduct online
conferences. These started as science-oriented discussions, but they soon
branched out into virtually every other field, as people realized the power
of being able to "talk" to hundreds, or even thousands, of people around the
country.
In the 1970s, ARPA helped support the development of rules, or protocols,
for transferring data between different types of computer networks. These
"internet" (from "internetworking") protocols made it possible to develop the
worldwide Net we have today.
By the close of the 1970s, links developed between ARPANet and
counterparts in other countries. The world was now tied together in a
computer web.
In the 1980s, this network of networks, which became known collectively as
the Internet, expanded at a phenomenal rate. Hundreds, then thousands, of
colleges, research companies and government agencies began to connect their
computers to this worldwide Net. Some enterprising hobbyists and companies
unwilling to pay the high costs of Internet access (or unable to meet
stringent government regulations for access) learned how to link their own
systems to the Internet, even if "only" for e-mail and conferences. Some of
these systems began offering access to the public. Now anybody with a
computer and modem - and persistence - could tap into the world.
In the 1990s, the Net grows at exponential rates. Some estimates are that
the volume of messages transferred through the Net grows 20 percent a month.
In response, government and other users have tried in recent years to expand
the Net itself. Once, the main Net "backbone" in the U.S. moved data at 1.5
million bits per second. That proved too slow for the ever increasing
amounts of data being sent over it, and in recent years the maximum speed was
increased to 45 million bits per second. Even before the Net was able to
reach that speed, however, Net experts were already figuring out ways to pump
data at speeds of up to 2 billion bits per second - fast enough to send the
entire Encyclopedia Britannica across the country in just one or two seconds.
Íow it works
============
The worldwide Net is actually a complex web of smaller regional networks.
To understand it, picture a modern road network of trans-continental
superhighways connecting large cities. From these large cities come smaller
freeways and parkways to link together small towns, whose residents travel on
slower, narrow residential ways.
The Net superhighway is the high-speed Internet. Connected to this are
computers that user a particular system of transferring data at high speeds.
In the U.S., the major Internet "backbone" theoretically can move data at
rates of 45 million bits per second (compare this to the average home modem,
which has a top speed of roughly 2400 bits per second). This internetworking
"protocol" lets network users connect to computers around the world.
Connected to the backbone computers are smaller networks serving
particular geographic regions, which generally move data at speeds around 1.5
million bits per second.
Feeding off these in turn are even smaller networks or individual
computers.
Nobody really knows how many computers and networks actually make up this
Net. Some estimates say there are now as many as 5,000 networks connecting
nearly 2 million computers and more than 15 million people around the world.
Whatever the actual numbers, however, it is clear they are only increasing.
There is no one central computer or even group of computers running the
Internet - its resources are to be found among thousands of individual
computers. This is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
The approach means it is virtually impossible for the entire Net to crash at
once - even if one computer shuts down, the rest of the network stays up.
But thousands of connected computers can also make it difficult to navigate
the Net and find what you want. It is only recently that Net users have
begun to develop the sorts of navigational tools and "maps" that will let
neophytes get around without getting lost.
The vast number of computers and links between them ensure that the
network as a whole will likely never crash and means that network users have
ready access to vast amounts of information. But because resources are split
among so many different sites, finding that information can prove to be a
difficult task - especially because each computer might have its own unique
set of commands for bringing up that information.
While the Internet was growing, parallel networks developed. Large
commercial services such as CompuServe and GEnie began to offer network
services to individuals. Phone companies developed their own electronic-mail
services. Some universities started their own international network.
Hobbyists began networks such as Fidonet for MS-DOS computers and UUCP for
Unix machines.
Today, almost all of these parallel networks are becoming connected. It
is now possible to send electronic mail from CompuServe to MCIMail, from
Internet to Fidonet, from Bitnet to CompuServe. In some cases, users of one
network can now even participate in some of the public conferences of another.
But the Net is more than just a technological marvel. It is human
communication at its most fundamental level. The pace may be a little
quicker when the messages race around the world in a few seconds, but it's
not much different from a large and interesting party. You'll see things in
cyberspace that will make you laugh; you'll see things that will anger you.
You'll read silly little snippets and new ideas that make you think. You'll
make new friends and meet people you wish would just go away.
Major network providers continue to work on ways to make it easier for
users of one network to communicate with those of another. Work is underway
on a system for providing a universal "white pages" in which you could look
up somebody's electronic-mail address, for example. This connectivity trend
will likely speed up in coming years as users begin to demand seamless
network access, much as telephone users can now dial almost anywhere in the
world without worrying about how many phone companies actually have to
connect their calls.
And as it becomes easier to use, more and more people will join this
worldwide community we call the Net. Being connected to the Net takes more
than just reading conferences and logging messages to your computer; it takes
asking and answering questions, exchanging opinions - getting involved.
If you chose to go forward, to use and contribute, you will become a
"citizen of Cyberspace." If you're reading these words for the first time,
this may seem like an amusing but unlikely notion - that one could "inhaibit"
a place without 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.
Àcknowledgments
===============
The following people, whether they know it or not, helped put this
together. My thanks, especially to Nancy!
Rhonda Chapman, Jim Cocks, Tom Czarnik, Christopher Davis, David DeSimone,
Jeanne deVoto, Phil Eschallier, Nico Garcia, Joe Granrose, Joe Ilacqua,
Jonathan Kamens, Peter Kaminski, Thomas A. Kreeger, Leanne Phillips, Nancy
Reynolds, Helen Trillian Rose, Barry Shein, Jennifer "Moira" Smith, Gerard
van der Leun, Scott Yanoff.
FYI:
====
Steven Levy, "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, "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.
"FYI on Where to Start - A Bibliography of Internetworking Information",
by Tracy LaQuey, Joyce K. Reynolds, Karen Roubicek, Mary Stahl and Aileen
Yuan (August, 1990), is an excellent list of articles, books, newsletters and
other sources of information about the Internet. It's available via ftp from
`nic.ddn.mil' in the `rfc' directory as `rfc1175.txt' (*note FTP::. for
information on getting documents through FTP).
Another Glitch in the Call
------ ----- - -- ---
We don't need no indirection
We don't need no flow control
No data typing or declarations
Did you leave the lists alone?
Hey! Hacker! Leave those lists alone!
Chorus: All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.
All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.
-- Anonymous Lisp Guru
"Sung to the tune of `Another Brick in the Wall' by Pink Floyd"
* Setting up, Getting connected, Jacking in... *
********************************************
Setting èð
==========
Connecting to the Net depends on where you are. If you're a college
student or work at a company with its own Net connections, chances are you
can gain access simply by asking your organization's computing center or
data-processing department - they will then give you instructions on how to
connect your already networked computer to the Internet.
Otherwise, you'll need four things: a computer, telecommunications
software, a modem and a phone line to connect to the modem.
The phone line can be your existing voice line - just remember that if you
have any extensions, you (and everybody else in the house or office) won't be
able to use them for voice calls while connected to the Net.
A modem is a sort of translator between computers and the phone system.
It's needed because computers and the phone system process and transmit data,
or information, in two different, and incompatible ways. Computers "talk"
digitally; that is, they store and process information as a series of
discrete numbers. The phone network relies on analog signals, which on an
oscilloscope would look like a series of waves. When your computer is ready
to transmit data to another computer over a phone line, your modem converts
the computer numbers into these waves (which sound like a lot of screeching)
- it "modulates" them. In turn, when information waves come into your modem,
it converts them into numbers your computer can process, by "demodulating"
them.
Increasingly, computers come with modems already installed. If yours
didn't, you'll have to decide what speed modem to get. Modem speeds are
judged in "baud rate" or bits per second. One baud means the modem can
transfer roughly one bit per second; the greater the baud rate, the more
quickly a modem can send and receive information. A letter or character is
made up of eight bits.
You can now buy a 2400-baud modem for well under $70 - and most now come
with the ability to handle fax messages as well. For $200 and up, you can
buy a modem that can transfer data at 9600 baud (and often even faster, when
using special compression techniques). If you think you might be using the
Net to transfer large numbers of files, a faster modem is always worth the
price. It will dramatically reduce the amount of time your modem or computer
is tied up transferring files and, if you are paying for Net access by the
hour, save you quite a bit in online charges.
Like the computer to which it attaches, a modem is useless without
software to tell it how to work. Most modems today come with easy-to-install
software. Try the program out. If you find it difficult to use or
understand, consider a trip to the local software store to find a better
program. You can spend several hundred dollars on a communications program,
but unless you have very specialized needs, this will be a waste of money, as
there are a host of excellent programs available for around $100 or sometimes
even less. Among the basic features you want to look for are a choice of
different "protocols" (more on them in a bit) for transferring files to and
from the Net and the ability to write "script" or "command" files that let
you automate such steps as logging into a host system.
When you buy a modem and the software, ask the dealer how to install and
use them. Try out the software if you can. If the dealer can't help you,
find another dealer. You'll not only save yourself a lot of frustration,
you'll also have practiced the second Net Commandment: *"Ask. People Know."*
To fully take advantage of the Net, you must spend a few minutes going
over the manuals or documentation that comes with your software. There are a
few things you should pay special attention to: uploading and downloading;
screen capturing (sometimes called "screen dumping"); logging; how to change
protocols; and terminal emulation. It is also essential to know how to
convert a file created with your word processing program into "ASCII" or
"text" format, which will let you share your thoughts with others across the
Net.
Uploading is the process of sending a file from your computer to a system
on the Net. Downloading is retrieving a file from somewhere on the Net to
your computer. In general, things in cyberspace go "up" to the Net and "down"
to you.
Chances are your software will come with a choice of several "protocols"
to use for these transfers. These protocols are systems designed to ensure
that line noise or static does not cause errors that could ruin whatever
information you are trying to transfer. Essentially, when using a protocol,
you are transferring a file in a series of pieces. After each piece is sent
or received, your computer and the Net system compare it. If the two pieces
don't match exactly, they transfer it again, until they agree that the
information they both have is identical. If, after several tries, the
information just doesn't make it across, you'll either get an error message
or your screen will freeze. In that case, try it again. If, after five
tries, you are still stymied, something is wrong with a) the file; b) the
telephone line; c) the system you're connected to; or d) you own computer.
From time to time, you will likely see messages on the Net that you want
to save for later viewing - a recipe, a particularly witty remark, something
you want to write your Congressman about, whatever. This is where screen
capturing and logging come in.
When you tell your communications software to capture a screen, it opens a
file in your computer (usually in the same directory or folder used by the
software) and "dumps" an image of whatever happens to be on your screen at
the time.
Logging works a bit differently. When you issue a logging command, you
tell the software to open a file (again, usually in the same directory or
folder as used by the software) and then give it a name. Then, until you turn
off the logging command, everything that scrolls on your screen is copied
into that file, sort of like recording on video tape. This is useful for
capturing long documents that scroll for several pages - using screen
capture, you would have to repeat the same command for each new screen.
Terminal emulation is a way for your computer to mimic, or emulate, the
way other computers put information on the screen and accept commands from a
keyboard. In general, most systems on the Net use a system called VT100.
Fortunately, almost all communications programs now on the market support
this system as well - make sure yours does.
You'll also have to know about protocols. There are several different
ways for computers to transmit characters. Fortunately, there are only two
protocols that you're likely to run across: 8-1-N (which stands for "8 bits,
1 stop bit, no parity" - yikes!) and 7-1-E (7 bits, 1 stop bit, even parity).
In general, Unix-based systems use 7-1-E, while MS-DOS-based systems use
8-1-N. What if you don't know what kind of system you're connecting to? Try
one of the settings. If you get what looks like gobbledygook when you
connect, you may need the other setting. If so, you can either change the
setting while connected, and then hit enter, or hang up and try again with
the other setting. It's also possible your modem and the modem at the other
end can't agree on the right baud rate. If changing the protocols doesn't
work, try using another baud rate (but no faster than the one listed for your
modem). Again, remember, you can't break anything.! If something looks
wrong, it probably is wrong. Change your settings and try again. Nothing is
learned without trial, error and effort. Those are the basics. Now onto the
Net!
Jacking iï
==========
Once, only people who studied or worked at an institution directly tied to
the Net could connect to the world. Today, though, an ever-growing number of
"public-access" systems provide access for everybody. These systems can now
be found in several states, and there are a couple of sites that can provide
access across the country.
There are two basic kinds of these host systems. The more common one is
known as a UUCP site (UUCP being a common way to transfer information among
computers using the Unix operating system) and offers access to international
electronic mail and conferences.
However, recent years have seen the growth of more powerful sites that let
you tap into the full power of the Net. These Internet sites not only give
you access to electronic mail and conferences but to such services as
databases, libraries and huge file and program collections around the world.
They are also fast - as soon as you finish writing a message, it gets zapped
out to its destination.
Some sites are run by for-profit companies; others by non-profit
organizations. Some of these public-access, or host, systems, are free of
charge. Others charge a monthly or yearly fee for unlimited access. And a
few charge by the hour.
But cost should be only one consideration in choosing a host system. Most
systems let you look around before you sign up. What is the range of their
services? How easy is it to use? What kind of support or help can you get
from the system administrators?
The last two questions are particularly important because some systems
provide no user interface at all; when you connect, you are dumped right into
the Unix operating system. If you're already familiar with Unix, or you want
to learn how to use it, these systems offer phenomenal power - in addition to
Net access, most also let you tap into the power of Unix to do everything
from compiling your own programs to playing online games.
But if you don't want to have to learn Unix, there are other public-access
systems that work through menus (just like the ones in restaurants; you are
shown a list of choices and then you make your selection of what you want),
or which provide a "user interface" that is easier to figure out than the
ever cryptic Unix.
If you don't want or need access to the full range of Internet services, a
UUCP site makes good financial sense. They tend to charge less than
commercial Internet providers, although their messages may not go out as
quickly.
Some systems also have their own unique local services, which can range
from extensive conferences to large file libraries.
Fortunately, almost all public-access systems let you look around for
awhile before you have to decide whether to sign up. Systems that charge for
access will usually let you sign up online with a credit card. Some also let
you set up a billing system. *Note Telnet:: for a list of public-access
Internet sites.
Dialing iï
==========
When you have your communications program dial one of these host systems,
one of two things will happen when you connect. You'll either see a lot of
gibberish on your screen, or you'll be asked to log in. If you see
gibberish, chances are you have to change your software's parameters (to
7-1-E or 8-1-N as the case may be). Hang up, make the change and then dial
in again.
When you've connected, chances are you'll see something like this:
Welcome to THE WORLD
Public Access UNIX for the '90s
Login as 'new' if you do not have an account
login:
That last line is a prompt asking you to do something. Since this is your
first call, type
new
and hit enter. Often, when you're asked to type something by a host
system, you'll be told what to type in quotation marks (for example, the
`new' above). Don't include the quotation marks. Repeat: Don't include the
quotation marks.
What you see next depends on the system, but will generally consist of
information about its costs and services (you might want to turn on your
communication software's logging function, to save this information). You'll
likely be asked if you want to establish an account now or just look around
the system.
You'll also likely be asked for your "user name." This is not your full
name, but a one-word name you want to use while online. It can be any
combination of letters or numbers, all in lower case. Many people use their
first initial and last name (for example, "jdoe"); their first name and the
first letter of their last name (for example, "johnd"); or their initials
("jxd"). Others use a nickname. You might want to think about this for a
second, because this user name will become part of your electronic-mail
address (see chapter 3 for more on that). The one exception are the various
Free-Net systems, all of which assign you a user name consisting of an
arbitrary sequence of letters and numbers.
You are now on the Net. Look around the system. See if there are any
help files for you to read. If it's a menu-based host system, chose
different options just to see what happens. Remember: you can't break
anything. The more you play, the more comfortable you'll be.
Ðublic-Access Internet Sites
============================
What follows is a list of public-access Internet sites, which are computer
systems that offer access to the Net. All offer international e-mail and
Usenet (international conferences). In addition, they offer:
FTP
File-transfer protocol - access to scores of file libraries (everything
from computer software to historical documents to song lyrics). You'll
be able to transfer these files from the Net to your own computer.
Telnet
Access to databases, computerized library card catalogs, weather reports
and other information services, as well as live, online games that let
you compete with players from around the world.
Additional services that may be offered include:
WAIS
Wide-area Information Server; a program that can search dozens of
databases in one search.
Gopher
A program that gives you easy access to dozens of other online databases
and services by making selections on a menu. You'll also be able to use
these to copy text files and some programs to your mailbox.
IRC
Internet Relay Chat, a CB simulator that lets you have live keyboard
chats with people around the world.
Clarinet
News, sports, feature stories and columns from Universal Press
International; Newsbytes computer news.
However, even on systems that do not provide these services directly, you
will be able to use a number of them through telnet (*note Telnet::. for more
information on telnet). Systems marked "Unix" dump you right into Unix
(a.k.a. "DOS with a college degree"). In most cases, this means you can also
use the host system's various Unix functions. The other systems use menus,
which are generally much easier for beginners to navigate - they are just
like menus in restaurants, in which you decide what you want from a list of
options. Any unique features of a given system are noted. Some of these
systems require you to use parameters of 7-1-E, so if you get gibberish when
you connect, try that. Most let you look around for awhile before you have to
sign up.
Several of these sites are available nationwide through national data
networks such as the CompuServe Packet Network and PC-Pursuit.
Please note that all listed charges are subject to change.
Alberta
-------
Edmonton. PUCNet Computer Connections, (403) 484-5640. Unix. Log on as:
guest. Charges: $20 a month for 20 hours of connect time, plus $5 an hour
for access to ftp and telnet; $10 sign-up fee. Voice help: (403) 448-1901.
California
----------
Berkeley. Holonet. For free trial, modem number is (510) 704-1058.
Boardwatch online news, USA Today. For information or local numbers, call
number below. Charges: $60 a year for local access, $2 an hour during offpeak
hours. Voice help: (510) 704-0160.
Cupertino. Portal. Both Unix and menus. (408) 725-0561, 725-1724 or
(408) 973-8091. Charges: $19.95 set-up fee, $19.95 a month. Voice help:
(408) 973-9111.
Encinitas. Cyber Station, (619) 634-1376. Unix. Log on as: guest.
Charges: $20 a month for one hour a day; $10 setup fee.
Irvine. Dial N' CERF. See under San Diego.
Los Angeles. Dial N' CERF. See under San Diego.
Oakland. Dial N' CERF. See under San Diego.
San Diego. Dial N' CERF USA, run by the California Education and Research
Federation. Provides local dial-up numbers in San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland
and Irvine. For more information, call voice (800) 876-CERF or (619)
534-5087. Charges: $20 a month plus $10 an hour, with a one-time
installation fee of $50.
San Jose. Netcom, (510) 865-9004 or 426-6860; (408) 241-9760; (415)
424-0131, up to 9600 baud. Unix. Maintains archives of Usenet postings. Log
on as: guest. New users get a written guide to using Netcom and the Net in
general. However, access to Net services beyond Usenet requires signature on
a written "Network Agreement Form." Charges: $15 start-up fee and then $17.50
a month for unlimited use if you agree to automatic billing of your
credit-card account (otherwise $19.50 a month for a monthly invoice). Voice
help: (408) 554-UNIX.
San Jose. A2i, (408) 293-9010. Unix. Log on as: guest. Charges: $20 a
month; $45 for three months; $72 for six months.
Sausalito. The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), (415) 332-6106, up to
2400 baud. Uses moderately difficult Picospan software, which is sort of a
cross between Unix and a menu system. New users get a written manual. More
than 200 WELL-only conferences. Log on as: newuser. Charges: $15 a month
plus $2 an hour. Access through the nationwide CompuServe Packet Network
available for another $4.50 an hour. Voice help: (415) 332-4335. Recorded
message about the system's current status: (800) 326-8354 (continental U.S.
only).
Colorado
--------
Colorado Springs. CNS, (719) 570-1700. Local calendar listings and ski
and stock reports. USA Today. Users can chose between menus or Unix. Log on
as: new. Charges: $1 an hour (minimum fee of $10 a month); one-time $35
set-up fee. Voice help: (719) 579-9120.
Golden. Colorado SuperNet. Unix. E-mail to fax service. Available only
to Colorado residents. Local dial-in numbers currently available in Ft.
Collins, Denver/Boulder and Colorado Springs. For dial-in numbers, call the
number below. Charges: $2 an hour ($1 an hour between midnight and 6 a.m.);
one-time $20 sign-up fee. Voice help: 303-273-3471.
Illinois
--------
Chicago. MCSNet, (312) 248-0900. Unix. Charges: $25/month or $65 for
three months of unlimited access; $30 for three months of access at 15 hours
a month. Voice help: (312) 248-UNIX.
Peoria. Peoria Free-Net, (309) 674-1100. Similar to Cleveland Free-Net
(see Ohio, below). Users can "link" to the larger Cleveland system for
access to Usenet and other services. There are also Peoria Free-Net
public-access terminals in numerous area libraries, other government
buildings and senior-citizen centers. Contact the number below for specific
locations. Full access (including access to e-mail) requires completion of a
written application. Charges: None. Voice help: (309) 677-2544.
Maryland
--------
Baltimore. Express Access, (410) 220-0462 or (301) 220-0462. Unix. Log
on as: new. Charges: $15 a month or $150 a year for e-mail and Usenet; $25 a
month or $250 a year for complete Internet services (FTP, telnet, IRC, etc.).
This allows unlimited use between 3 a.m. and 3 p.m. and one hour between 3
p.m. and 3 a.m. Access to Usenet, e-mail and Unix shell only is $15 a
month/$150 a year. Voice help: (301) 220-2020.
Massachusetts
-------------
Brookline. The World, (617) 739-9753. Unix, but with a large number of
understandable online help files. Huge collection of MS-DOS files, "Online
Book Initiative" collection of electronic books, poetry and other text files.
Charges: $5 a month plus $2 an hour or $20 for 20 hours a month. Available
nationwide through the CompuServe Packet Network for another $5.60 an hour.
Voice help: (617) 739-0202.
Lynn. North Shore Access, (617) 593-5774. Unix. Log on as: guest.
Charges: $10 for a month for 10 hours; $1 an hour after that. Voice help:
(617) 593-3110.
Worcester. NovaLink, (508) 754-4009. Unix. Log on as: info. Charges:
$12.95 sign-up (includes first two hours); $9.95 a month (includes five
daytime hours), $1.80 an hour after that. Voice help: (800) 274-2814.
Michigan
--------
Ann Arbor. MSEN. Contact number below for dial-in number. Unix.
Charges: $5 a month and $2 an hour, or $20 a month for 20 hours. Voice help:
(313) 741-1120.
Ann Arbor. Michnet. Unix. Has local dial-in numbers in several Michigan
numbers. For local numbers, call voice number below. Charges: $35 a month
plus one-time $40 sign-up fee. Additional network fees for access through
non-Michnet numbers. Voice help: (313) 764-9430.
New Hampshire
-------------
MV Communications, Inc. For local dial-up numbers call voice line below.
Unix. Charges: $5 a month mininum plus variable hourly rates depending on
services used. Voice help: (603) 429-2223.
New York
--------
New York. Echo, (212) 989-8411. Unix and conferencing. Log on as:
newuser. Local conferences. Charges: $19.95 ($13.75 students and seniors).
Voice help: (212) 255-3839.
New York. MindVox, (212) 988-5030. Log on as: guest. Local conferences.
Charges: $15 a month; $10 set-up fee for non-credit card accounts. Voice
help: (212) 988-5987.
New York. Panix, (212) 787-3100. Unix or menus. Log on as: newuser.
Charges: $10 a month or $100 a year; one-time $40 fee. Voice help: (212)
877-4854.
North Carolina
--------------
Charlotte. Vnet Internet Access, (704) 347-8839. Unix. Log on as: new.
Charges: $25 a month or $259 a year. Voice help: (704) 374-0779.
Triangle Research Park. Rock Concert Net. Call number below for modem
number. Unix. Charges: $30 a month; one-time $50 sign-up fee. Voice help:
(919) 248-1999.
Ohio
----
Cleveland. Cleveland Free-Net, (216) 368-3888. IRC. USA Today, Ohio and
US Supreme Court decisions, historical documents, many local conferences.
Full access (including access to e-mail) requires completion of a written
application. Charges: None. Voice help: (216) 368-8737.
Cincinnati. Tri-State Free-Net, (513) 579-1990. Similar to Cleveland
Free-Net. Full access (including access to e-mail) requires completion of a
written application. Charges: None.
Cleveland. Wariat, (216) 481-9436 (2400 baud); (216) 481-9425 (higher
speeds). Unix, menus. Charges: $35 a month or $200 for six months; $20
sign-up fee. Voice help: (216) 481-9428.
Lorain. Lorain County Free-Net, (216) 277-2359 or 366-9753. Similar to
Cleveland Free-Net. Users can "link" to the larger Cleveland system for
additional services. Full access (including access to e-mail) requires
completion of a written application. Charges: None. Voice help: (216)
366-4200.
Medina. Medina Free-Net, (216) 723-6732, 225-6732 or 335-6732. Users can
"link" to the larger Cleveland Free-Net for additional services. Full access
(including access to e-mail) requires completion of a written application.
Charges: None.
Youngstown. Youngstown Free-Net, (216) 742-3072. Users can "link" to the
Cleveland system for services not found locally. Full access (including
access to e-mail) requires completion of a written application. Charges:
None.
Ontario
-------
Toronto. UUNorth. Call voice number below for local dial-in numbers.
Unix. Charges: $25 for 20 hours a month of offpeak use. Voice help: (416)
225-8649.
Oregon
------
Beaverton. Techbook, (503) 220-0636 (2400 baud); (503) 220-1016 (higher
speeds). Unix. Charges: $10 a month for 30 hours of "basic" Internet access
or $90 a year; $15 a month for 30 hours of "deluxe" access or $150 a year.
$10 sign-up fee for monthly accounts.
Portland. Agora, (503) 293-1772 (2400 baud), (503) 293-2059 (9600 baud).
Unix. Log on as: apply Charges: $6 a month for one hour per day.
Beaverton. Techbook, (503) 220-0636. Charges: $90 a year.
Pennsylvania
------------
Pittsburgh. Telerama, (412) 481-5302. Unix. Charges: $6 for 10 hours a
month, 60 cents for each additional hour.
Quebec
------
Montreal. Communications Accessibles Montreal, (514) 281-5601. Unix.
Charges: $25 a month. Voice help: (514) 923-2102.
Rhode Island
------------
East Greenwich. IDS World Network, (401) 884-9002. In addition to
Usenet, has conferences from the Fidonet and RIME networks. Supports QMAIL
offline reader, which lets you read and respond to messages while not online.
Charges: $10 a month; $50 for six months; $100 for a year.
Virginia
--------
Norfolk. Wyvern Technologies, (804) 627-1828 (Norfolk); (804-0662
(Peninsula). Unix. Charges: $15 a month or $144 a year; $10 sign-up fee.
Voice help: (804) 622-4289.
Washington, DC
--------------
The Meta Network. Call voice number below for local dial-in numbers.
Caucus conferencing, menus. Charges: $20 a month plus $15 sign-up fee.
Voice help: (703) 243-6622.
See also: listing under Baltimore, MD for Express Access.
Washington State
----------------
Seattle. Eskimo North, (206) 367-3837 (2400 baud), (206) 362-6731
(9600/14.4K baud). Charges: $10 a month or $96 a year. Voice help: (206)
367-7457.
Seattle. Halcyon, (206) 382-6245. Users can choose between menus and
Unix. Log on as: bbs. Charges: $10 a month for Usenet and e-mail; $15 a
month or $150 a year for these and other Internet services (FTP, IRC, telnet,
etc.). Voice help: (206) 426-9298
Àny Alternatives?
=================
If you don't live in a city with a public-access site, you'll still be
able to connect to the Net. Several of these services offer access through
national data networks such as the CompuServe Packet Network and PC-Pursuit,
which have dozens, even hundreds of local dial-in numbers across the country.
These include Holonet in Berkeley, Calf., Portal in Cupertino, Calf., the
WELL in Sausalito, Calf., Dial 'N CERF in San Diego, Calf., the World in
Brookline, Mass., and Michnet in Ann Arbor, Mich. Dial 'N CERF offers access
through an 800 number. Expect to pay from $2 to $12 an hour to use these
networks, above each provider's basic charges. The exact amount depends on
the network, time of day and type of modem you use. For more information,
contact the above services.
Two other providers deliver Net access to users across the country:
Delphi, based in Cambridge, Mass., is a consumer-oriented network much
like CompuServe or America On-Line - only it now offers subscribers access to
Internet services.
Charges: $3 a month for Internet access, in addition to standard charges.
These are $10 a month for four hours of off-peak (non-working hours) access a
month and $4 an hour for each additional hour or $20 for 20 hours of access a
month and $1.80 an hour for each additional hour. For more information, call
(800) 695-4005.
PSI, based in Reston, Va., provides nationwide access to Internet services
through scores of local dial-in numbers to owners of IBM and compatible
computers. PSILink. which includes access to e-mail, Usenet and ftp, costs
$29 a month, plus a one-time $19 registration fee. Special software is
required, but is available free from PSI. PSI's Global Dialup Service
provides access to telnet for $39 a month plus a one-time $39 set-up fee.
For more information, call (800) 82PSI82 or (703) 620-6651.
Òhings that can 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 do 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.
FYI:
====
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, *note Global Watering Hole::.).
*"Ah! Dear Watson, now we enter the mystic room of wizardry,
where even the most brilliant of all logic minds might fail."*
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
*"Welcome to the Pleasure Dome!"*
-- Frankie goes to Hollywood
* Electronic Mail *
***************
Electronic mail, or e-mail, is your personal connection to the world of
the Net.
Every one of the millions of people around the world who use the Net have
their own e-mail address. 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-mailbox address. You can subscribe to the electronic equivalent of
magazines and newspapers. There is even 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 or even minutes (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 recipient responds at his 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: 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 this:
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.
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 Sun Mar 22 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. This is your "home directory." It's a good name to
remember. Later, when you start transferring files across the Net, this is
where they will usually wind up, or from where you'll send them. 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 Mar 22 20:04:55 1992
Received: by eff.org id AA28949
(5.65c/IDA-1.4.4/pen-ident for adamg); Sun, 22 Mar 1992 20:04:55 -0400
(ident-sender: [email protected])
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 1992 21:34:55 -0400
From: Adam Gaffin
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
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 service puts its marks on every piece of mail it handles,
so do Net postal systems. Only it's called a "header" instead of a postmark.
Each system that handles or routes your mail puts its stamp on it. Since
many messages go through a number of systems on their way to you, you will
often get messages with headers that seem to go on forever. Among other
things, a header will tell you exactly when a message was sent and received
(even the difference between your local time and GMT - as at the end of line 4
above).
If this had been a long message, it would just keep scrolling across and
down your screen - unless the people who run your public-access site have set
it up to pause every 24 lines. One way to deal with a message that doesn't
stop is to use your telecommunication software's logging or text-buffer
function. Start it before you hit the number of the message you want to see.
Your computer will ask you what you want to call the file you're about to
create. After you name the file and hit enter, type the number of the message
you want to see and hit enter. When the message finishes scrolling, turn off
the text-buffer function, and the message is now saved in your computer.
This way, you can read the message while not connected to the Net (which can
save you money if you're paying by the hour) and write a reply offline.
But in the meantime, now what? You can respond to the message, delete it
or save it. To respond, type a lower-case "r" and hit enter. You'll get
something like this:
To: adamg
Subject: Re: test
Note that this time, you don't have to enter a username. The computer
takes it from the message you're replying to and automatically addresses your
message to its sender. The computer also automatically inserts a subject
line, by adding "Re:" to the original subject. From here, it's just like
writing a new message. But say you change your mind and decide not to reply
after all. How do you get out of the message? Hit control-C once. You'll get
this:
(Interrupt -- one more to kill letter)
If you hit control-C once more, the message will disappear and you'll get
back to your mail's command line.
Now, if you type a lower-case "d" and then hit enter, you'll delete the
original message. Type a lower-case "q" to exit your mailbox.
If you type a "q" without first hitting "d", your message is transferred
to a file called mbox. This file is where all read, but un-deleted messages
go. If you want to leave it in your mailbox for now, type a lower-case "x"
and hit enter. This gets you out of mail without making any changes.
The mbox file works a lot like your mailbox. To access it, type
mail -f mbox
at your host system's command line and hit enter.
You'll get a menu identical to the one in your mailbox from which you can
read these old messages, delete them or respond to them. It's probably a
good idea to clear out your mailbox and mbox file from time to time, if only
to keep them uncluttered.
Are there any drawbacks to e-mail? There are a few. One is that people
seem more willing to fly off the handle electronically than in person, or
over the phone. Maybe it's because it's so easy to hit R and reply to a
message without pausing and reflecting a moment. That's why we have smileys!
There's no online equivalent yet of a return receipt: chances are your
message got to where it's going, but there's no absolute way for you to know
for sure unless you get a reply from the other person. Also, because
computers are quite literal, you have to be very careful when addressing a
message. Misplace a period or a single letter in the address, and your
message could come back to you, undelivered.
So now you're ready to send e-mail to other people on the Net. Of course,
you need somebody's address to send them mail. How do you get it?
Alas, the simplest answer is not what you'd call the most elegant: you
call them up on the phone or write them a letter on paper and ask them.
Residents of the electronic frontier are only beginning to develop the
equivalent of phone books, and the ones that exist today are far from
complete (still, later on, we'll show you how to use some of these
directories).
Eventually, you'll start corresponding with people, which means you'll
want to know how to address mail to them. It's vital to know how to do this,
because the smallest mistake - using a comma when you should have used a
period, for instance, can bounce the message back to you, undelivered. In
this sense, Net addresses are like phone numbers: one wrong digit and you get
the wrong person. Fortunately, most net addresses now adhere to a relatively
easy-to-understand system.
Earlier, you sent yourself a mail message using just your user-name. This
was sort of like making a local phone call - you didn't have to dial a 1 or
an area code. This also works for mail to anybody else who has an account on
the same system as you.
Sending mail outside of your system, though, will require the use of the
Net equivalent of area codes, called "domains." A basic Net address will look
something like this:
[email protected]
Tomg is somebody's user ID, and he is at (hence the @ sign) a site or
"domain" known as std.com. Large organizations often have more than one
computer linked to the Internet; in this case, the name of the particular
machine is world (you will quickly notice that, like boat owners, Internet
computer owners always name their machines).
Domains tell you the name of the organization that runs a given e-mail
site and what kind of site it is or, if it's not in the U.S., what country
it's located in. Large organizations may have more than one computer or
gateway tied to the Internet, so you'll often see a two-part domain name; and
sometimes even three- or four-part domain names.
In general, American addresses end in an organizational suffix, such as
".edu," which means the site is at a college or university. Other American
suffixes include:
`.com'
for businesses
`.org'
for non-profit organizations
`.gov'
`.mil'
for government and military agencies
`.net'
for companies or organizations that run large networks.
Sites in the rest of the world tend to use a two-letter code that
represents their country. Most make sense, such as `.ca' for Canadian sites,
but there are a couple of seemingly odd ones, at least if you don't know the
ISO 3166 standard international abbreviations. (*note Country Codes::. for a
list of the rest of the world.) E.g., swiss sites end in `.ch' (Confederatio
Helvetica), German sites end in `.de' (DEutschland), while South African ones
end in `.za' (ZuidAfricaans is the language spoken in this country, derived
from Dutch). Some smaller U.S. sites are beginning to follow this
international convention (such as `unixland.natick.ma.us').
You'll notice that the above addresses are all in lower-case. Unlike
almost everything else having anything at all to do with Unix, Most Net
mailing systems don't care about case, so you can capitalize names if you
want, but you generally don't have to. Alas, there are a few exceptions -
some public-access sites do allow for capital letters in user names. When in
doubt, ask the person you want to write to, or let her send you a message
first (recall how a person's e-mail address is usually found on the top of
her message).
The domain name, the part of the address after the @ sign, never has to be
capitalized.
It's all a fairly simple system that works very well, except, again, it's
vital to get the address exactly right - just as you have to dial a phone
number exactly right. Send a message to `[email protected]' (which is the
University of New Mexico) when you meant to send it to `[email protected]' (the
University of Minnesota), and your letter will either bounce back to you
undelivered, or go to the wrong person.
If your message is bounced back to you as undeliverable, you'll get an
ominous looking-message from MAILER-DAEMON (actually a rather benign Unix
program that exists to handle mail), with an evil-looking header followed by
the text of your message. Sometimes, you can tell what went wrong by looking
at the first few lines of the bounced message. Besides an incorrect address,
it's possible your host system does not have the other site in the "map" it
maintains of other host systems. Or you could be trying to send mail to
another network, such as Bitnet or CompuServe, that has special addressing
requirements.
Sometimes, figuring all this out can prove highly frustrating. But
remember the prime Net commandment: Ask. Send a message to your system
administrator. He or she might be able to help decipher the problem.
There is one kind of address that may give your host system particular
problems. There are two main ways that Unix systems exchange mail. One is
known as UUCP and started out with a different addressing system than the
rest of the Net. Most UUCP systems have since switched over to the standard
Net addressing system, but a few traditional sites still cling to their
original type, which tends to have lots of exclamation points in it, like
this:
uunet!somesite!othersite!mybuddy
The problem for many host sites is that exclamation points (also known as
"bangs") now mean something special in the more common systems or "shells"
used to operate many Unix computers. This means that addressing mail to such
a site (or even responding to a message you received from one) could confuse
the poor computer to no end and your message never gets sent out. If that
happens, try putting "forward" backslashes in front of each exclamation
point, so that you get an address that looks like this:
uunet\!somesite\!othersite\!mybuddy
Note that this means you may not be able to respond to such a message by
typing a lower-case `r' - you may get an error message and you'll have to
create a brand-new message.
If you want to get a taste of what's possible through e-mail, start an
e-mail message to
[email protected]
Leave the "subject:" line blank. As a message, write this:
send quote
Or, if you're feeling a little down, write this instead:
send moral-support
In either case, you will get back a message within a few seconds to a few
hours (depending on the state of your host system's Internet connection). If
you simply asked for a quote, you'll get back a fortune-cookie-like saying.
If you asked for moral support, you'll also get back a fortune-cookie-like
saying, only supposedly more uplifting.
This particular "mail server" is run by Oregon State University. Its main
purpose is actually to provide a way to distribute agricultural information
via e-mail. If you'd like to find out how to use the server's full range of
services, send a message to the above address with this line in it:
send help
You'll quickly get back a lengthy document detailing just what's available
and how to get it.
The "mail" program is actually a very powerful one and a Netwide standard,
at least on Unix computers. But it can be hard to figure out - you can type
a question mark to get a list of commands, but these may be of limited use
unless you're already familiar with Unix. Fortunately, there are a couple of
other mail programs that are easier to use.
ÅLÌ
===
Elm is a combination mailbox and letter-writing system that uses menus to
help you navigate through mail. Most Unix-based host systems now have it
online. To use it, type
elm
and hit enter. You'll get a menu of your waiting mail, along with a list
of commands you can execute, that will look something like this:
Mailbox is '/usr/spool/mail/adamg' with 38 messages [ELM 2.3 PL11]
1 Sep 1 Christopher Davis (13) here's another message.
2 Sep 1 Christopher Davis (91) This is a message from Eudora
3 Aug 31 Rita Marie Rouvali (161) First Internet Hunt !!! (fwd)
4 Aug 31 Peter Scott/Manage (69) New File University of Londo
5 Aug 30 Peter Scott/Manage (64) New File X.500 service at A
6 Aug 30 Peter Scott/Manage (39) New File DATAPAC Informatio
7 Aug 28 Peter Scott/Manage (67) Proposed Usenet group for HYTELNET n
8 Aug 28 Peter Scott/Manage (56) New File JANET Public Acces
9 Aug 26 Helen Trillian Ros (15) Tuesday
10 Aug 26 Peter Scott/Manage (151) Update Oxford University OU
You can use any of the following commands by pressing the first character;
d)elete or u)ndelete mail, m)ail a message, r)eply or f)orward mail, q)uit
To read a message, press . j = move down, k = move up, ? = help
Each line shows the date you received the message, who sent it, how many
lines long the message is, and the message's subject.
If you are using VT100 emulation, you can move up and down the menu with
your up and down arrow keys. Otherwise, type the line number of the message
you want to read or delete and hit enter.
When you read a message, it pauses every 24 lines, instead of scrolling
until it's done. Hit the space bar to read the next page. You can type a
lower-case "r" to reply or a lower-case "q" or "i" to get back to the menu
(the I stands for "index").
At the main menu, hitting a lower-case "m" followed by enter will let you
start a message. To delete a message, type a lower-case "d". You can do
this while reading the message. Or, if you are in the menu, move the cursor
to the message's line and then hit D.
When you're done with Elm, type a lower-case "q". The program will ask if
you really want to delete the messages you marked. Then, it will ask you if
you want to move any messages you've read but haven't marked for deletion to
a "received" file. For now, hit your n key.
Elm has a major disadvantage for the beginner. The default text editor it
generally calls up when you hit your "r" or "m" key is often a program called
emacs. Unixoids swear by emacs, but everybody else almost always finds it
impossible. Unfortunately, you can't always get away from it (or vi, another
text editor often found on Unix systems), so later on we'll talk about some
basic commands that will keep you from going totally nuts.
ÐINÅ
====
Pine is based on elm but includes a number of improvements that make it an
ideal mail system for beginners. Like elm, pine starts you with a menu. It
also has an "address book" feature that is handy for people with long or
complex e-mail addresses. Hitting A at the main menu puts you in the address
book, where you can type in the person's first name (or nickname) followed by
her address. Then, when you want to send that person a message, you only have
to type in her first name or nickname, and pine automatically inserts her
actual address. The address book also lets you set up a mailing list. This
feature allows you to send the same message to a number of people at once.
What really sets pine apart is its built-in text editor, which looks and
feels a lot more like word-processing programs available for MS-DOS and
Macintosh users. Not only does it have word wrap (a revolutionary concept if
ever there was one, it also has a rwspell-checker and a search command. Best
of all, all of the commands you need are listed in a two-line mini-menu at
the bottom of each screen. The commands look like this:
^W Where is
The little caret is a synonym for the key marked "control" on your
keyboard. To find where a particular word is in your document, you'd hit
your control key and your W key at the same time, which would bring up a
prompt asking you for the word to look for.
Some of pine's commands are a tad peculiar (control-V for "page down" for
example), which comes from being based on a variant of emacs (which is
utterly peculiar). But again, all of the commands you need are listed on
that two-line mini-menu, so it shouldn't take you more than a couple of
seconds to find the right one.
To use pine, type
pine
at the command line and hit enter. It's a relatively new program, so many
systems do not yet have it online. But it's so easy to use, you should
probably send e-mail to your system administrator urging him to get it!
Smileys
=======
When you're involved in an online discussion, you can't see the smiles or
shrugs that the other person might make in a live conversation to show he's
only kidding. But online, there's no body language. So what you might think
is funny, somebody else might take as an insult. To try to keep such
misunderstandings from erupting into bitter disputes, we have smileys. Tilt
your head to the left and look at the following sideways. `:-)'. Or simply
`:)'. This is your basic "smiley." Use it to indicate people should not take
that comment you just made as seriously as they might otherwise. You make a
smiley by typing a colon, a hyphen and a right parenthetical bracket. Some
people prefer using the word "grin," usually in this form:
Sometimes, though, you'll see it as *grin* or even just for short.
Some other smileys include:
`;-)'
Wink;
`:-('
Frown;
`:-O'
Surprise;
`8-)'
Wearing glasses;
`=|:-)='
Abe Lincoln.
OK, so maybe the last two are a little bogus `:-)'.
Seven UNIX Commands you can't live without:
===========================================
If you connect to the Net through a Unix system, eventually you'll have to
come to terms with Unix. For better or worse, most Unix systems do NOT
shield you from their inner workings - if you want to copy a Usenet posting
to a file, for example, you'll have to use some Unix commands if you ever
want to do anything with that file.
Like MS-DOS, Unix is an operating system - it tells the computer how to do
things. Now while Unix may have a reputation as being even more complex than
MS-DOS, in most cases, a few basic, and simple, commands should be all you'll
ever need.
If your own computer uses MS-DOS or PC-DOS, the basic concepts will seem
very familiar - but watch out for the cd command, which works differently
enough from the similarly named DOS command that it will drive you crazy.
Also, unlike MS-DOS, Unix is case sensitive - if you type commands or
directory names in the wrong case, you'll get an error message.
If you're used to working on a Mac, you'll have to remember that Unix
stores files in "directories" rather than "folders." Unix directories are
organized like branches on a tree. At the bottom is the "root" directory,
with sub-directories branching off that (and sub-directories in turn can have
sub-directories). The Mac equivalent of a Unix sub-directory is a folder
within another folder.
`cat'
Equivalent to the MS-DOS "type" command. To pause a file every screen,
type `cat file |more', better: `more file', where "file" is the name of
the file you want to see. Hitting control-C will stop the display. You
can also use `cat' for writing or uploading text files to your name or
home directory (similar to the MS-DOS `copy con:' command). If you type
`cat >test' you start a file called "test." You can either write
something simple (no editing once you've finished a line and you have to
hit return at the end of each line) or upload something into that file
using your communications software's ASCII protocol). To close the
file, hit control-D.
`cd'
The "change directory" command. To change from your present directory
to another, type `cd directory' and hit enter. Unlike MS-DOS, which uses
a \ to denote sub-directories (for example: procomm\text), Unix uses a /
(for example: procomm/text). So to change from your present directory
to the procomm/text sub-directory, you would type `cd procomm/text' and
then hit enter. As in MS-DOS, you do not need the first backslash if the
subdirectory comes off the directory you're already in. To move back up
a directory tree, you would type `cd ..' followed by enter. Note the
space between the `cd' and the two periods - this is where MS-DOS users
will really go nuts.
`cp'
Copies a file. The syntax is `cp file1 file2' which would copy file1 to
file2 (or overwrite file2 with file1).
`ls'
This command, when followed by enter, tells you what's in the directory,
similar to the DOS `dir' command, except in alphabetical order.
`ls |more'
will stop the listing every 24 lines - handy if there are a lot of
things in the directory. The basic ls command does not list "hidden"
files, such as the `.login' file that controls how your system interacts
with Unix. To see these files, type `ls -a' or `ls -a |more'
`ls -l' will tell you the size of each file in bytes and tell you when
each was created or modified.
`mv'
Similar to the MS-DOS rename command. In fact, `mv file1 file2' will
rename file1 as file2, The command can also be used to move files
between directories.
`mv file1 News' would move file1 to your News directory.
`rm'
Deletes a file. Type `rm filename' and hit enter (but beware: when you
hit enter, it's gone for good).
Wildcards
---------
When searching for, copying or deleting files, you can use "wildcards" if
you are not sure of the file's exact name.
ls man*
would find the following files:
manual, manual.txt, man-o-man.
Use a question mark when you're sure about all but one or two characters.
For example,
ls man?
would find a file called mane, but not one called manual.
Å-Mail to other Networks
========================
There are a number of computer networks that are not directly tied to the
Net, but to which you can still send e-mail messages. Here's a list of some
of the larger networks, how to send mail to them and how their users can send
mail to you:
America Online
--------------
Remove any spaces from a user's name and append `@aol.com', to get
[email protected]
America Online users who want to send mail to you need only put your Net
address in the "to:" field before composing a message.
ATTMail
-------
Address your message to . From ATTMail, a user would
send mail to you in this form:
internet!domain!user
So if your address were , your correspondent would
send a message to you at
internet!world.std.com!adamg
Bitnet
------
Users of Bitnet (and NetNorth in Canada and EARN in Europe) often have
addresses in this form: . If you're lucky, all you'll have to
do to mail to that address is add "bitnet" at the end, to get
. Sometimes, however, mail to such an address will
bounce back to you, because Bitnet addresses do not always translate well
into an Internet form. If this happens, you can send mail through one of two
Internet/Bitnet gateways. First, change the `@' in the address to a `%', so
that you get . Then add either `@vm.marist.edu' or
`@cunyvm.cuny.edu', so that, with the above example, you would get
or
Bitnet users have it a little easier: They can usually send mail directly
to your e-mail address without fooling around with it at all. So send them
your address and they should be OK.
CompuServe
----------
CompuServe users have numerical addresses in this form: `73727,545'. To
send mail to a CompuServe user, change the comma to a period and add
`@compuserve.com'; for example: <[email protected]>.
If you know CompuServe users who want to send you mail, tell them to GO
MAIL and create a mail message. In the address area, instead of typing in a
CompuServe number, have them type your address in this form:
>INTERNET:YourID@YourAddress.
For example, `>INTERNET:[email protected]'. Note that both the `>' and
the `:' are required.
Delphi
------
To send mail to a Delphi user, the form is .
Fidonet
-------
To send mail to somebody who uses a Fidonet BBS, you need the name they
use to log onto that system and its "node number." Fidonet node numbers or
addresses consist of three numbers, in this form: `1:322/190'. The first
number tells which of three broad geographic zones the BBS is in (1
represents the U.S. and Canada, 2 Europe and Israel, 3 Pacific Asia, 4 South
America). The second number represents the BBS's network, while the final
number is the BBS's "FidoNode" number in that network. If your correspondent
only gives you two numbers (for example, `322/190'), it means the system is
in zone 1.
Now comes the tricky part. You have to reverse the numbers and add to them
the letters `f', `n' and `z' (which stand for "FidoNode," "network," and
"zone'). For example, the address above would become
f190.n322.
Now add `fidonet.org' at the end, to get `f190.n322. z1.fidonet.org'. Then
add `First Name.LastName@', to get
[email protected].
Note the period between the first and last names. Whew!
The reverse process is totally different. First, the person has to have
access to his or her BBS's "net mail" area and know the Fidonet address of
his or her local Fidonet/UUCP gateway (often their system operator will know
it). Your Fidonet correspondent should address a net-mail message to UUCP
(not your name) in the "to:" field. In the node-number field, they should
type in the node number of the Fidonet/UUCP gateway (if the gateway system is
in the same regional network as their system, they need only type the last
number, for example, `390' instead of `322/390'). Then, the first line of
the message has to be your Internet address, followed by a blank line. After
that, the person can write the message and send it.
Because of the way Fidonet moves mail, it could take a day or two for a
message to be delivered in either direction. Also, because many Fidonet
systems are run as hobbies, it is considered good form to ask the gateway
sysop's permission if you intend to pass large amounts of mail back and
forth. Messages of a commercial nature are strictly forbidden (even if it's
something the other person asked for). Also, consider it very likely that
somebody other than the recipient will read your messages.
GEnie
-----
To send mail to a GEnie user, add `@genie.geis.com' to the end of their
GEnie user name, for example: . Unlike users of other
networks, however, GEnie users can receive mail from Internet only if they
pay an extra monthly charge.
MCIMail
-------
To send mail to somebody with an MCIMail account, add `@mcimail.com' to
the end of their name or numerical address. For example:
[email protected]
or
[email protected]
Note that if there is more than one MCIMail subscriber with that name, you
will get a mail message back from MCI giving you their names and numerical
addresses. You'll then have to figure out which one you want and re-send the
message.
From MCI, a user would type: *Your Name* `(EMS)' at the "To:" prompt. At
the EMS prompt, he or she would type `internet' followed by your Net address
at the "Mbx:" prompt.
Peacenet
--------
To send mail to a Peacenet user, use this form:
[email protected]
Peacenet subscribers can use your regular address to send you mail.
Prodigy
-------
. Note that Prodigy users must pay extra for Internet
e-mail.
When things go wrong:
=====================
* You send a message but get back an ominous looking message from
MAILER-DAEMON containing up to several dozen lines of computerese
followed by your message. Somewhere in those lines you can often find a
clue to what went wrong. You might have made a mistake in spelling the
e-mail address. The site to which you're sending mail might have been
down for maintenance or a problem. You may have used the wrong
"translation" for mail to a non-Internet network.
* You call up your host system's text editor to write a message or reply
to one and can't seem to get out. If it's emacs, try control-X,
control-C (in other words, hit your control key and your X key at the
same time, followed by control and C). If worse comes to worse, you can
hang up.
* In Elm, you accidentally hit the D key for a message you want to save.
Type the number of the message, hit enter and then U, which will
"un-delete" the message. This works only before you exit Elm; once you
quit, the message is gone.
* You try to upload an ASCII message you've written on your own computer
into a message you're preparing in Elm or Pine and you get a lot of left
brackets, capital Ms, Ks and Ls and some funny-looking characters.
Believe it or not, your message will actually wind up looking fine; all
that garbage is temporary and reflects the problems some Unix text
processors have with ASCII uploads. But it will take much longer for
your upload to finish. One way to deal with this is to call up the
simple mail program, which will not produce any weird characters when you
upload a text file into a message. Another way (which is better if your
prepared message is a response to somebody's mail), is to create a text
file on your host system with cat, for example,
cat >file
and then upload your text into that. Then, in Elm or Pine, you can
insert the message with a simple command (control-r in Pine, for
example); only this time you won't see all that extraneous stuff.
FYI:
====
SCOTT YANOFF posts a very long list of existing cross-connections of
almost any sub-nets to "newsgroups" (*note Global Watering Hole::. for an
explanation of this term) `comp.mail', `comp.answers', and `news.answers'.
Just to mention a few: AppleLink, BIX, GreeNet, MausNet, SprintMail, etc.
Get your hands on the `inter-network-guide', that's kept on `rtfm.mit.edu' in
directory `pub/usenet/comp.mail'. *Note Advanced E-mail:: or *Note FTP:: to
find out how to access this Internet treasure chest.
*"...and the first lesson is:
Never lose the alternative way out of sight."*
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
*"If all else fails, read the manual."*
-- PC Wizard
*"If all else fails, read the manual page."*
-- Unix Wizard
* Usenet: the Global Watering Hole *
********************************
Imagine a conversation carried out over a period of hours and days, as if
people were leaving messages and responses on a bulletin board. Or imagine
the electronic equivalent of a radio talk show where everybody can put their
two cents in and no one is ever on hold.
Unlike e-mail, which is "one-to-one," Usenet is "many-to-many."
Usenet is the international meeting place, where people gather to meet
their friends, discuss the day's events, keep up with computer trends or talk
about whatever's on their mind. Jumping into a Usenet discussion can be a
liberating experience. Nobody knows what you look or sound like, how old you
are, what your background is. You're judged solely on your words, your
ability to make a point.
To many people, Usenet IS the Net. In fact, it is often confused with
Internet. But it is a totally separate system. All Internet sites CAN carry
Usenet, but so do many non-Internet sites, from sophisticated Unix machines
to old XTs and Apple IIs.
Technically, Usenet messages are shipped around the world, from host
system to host system, using one of several specific Net protocols. Your
host system stores all of its Usenet messages in one place, which everybody
with an account on the system can access. That way, no matter how many people
actually read a given message, each host system has to store only one copy of
it. Many host systems "talk" with several others regularly in case one or
another of their links goes down for some reason. When two host systems
connect, they basically compare notes on which Usenet messages they already
have. Any that one is missing the other then transmits, and vice-versa.
Because they are computers, they don't mind running through thousands, even
millions, of these comparisons every day.
Yes, millions. For Usenet is huge. Every day, Usenet users pump upwards
of 25 million characters a day into the system - roughly the equivalent of
volumes A-E of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Obviously, nobody could possibly keep up with this immense flow of
messages. Let's look at how to find messages of interest to you.
Newsgroup Hierarchies
=====================
The basic building block of Usenet is the newsgroup, which is a collection
of messages with a related theme (on other networks, these would be called
conferences, forums, bboards or special-interest groups).
There are now more than 4,500 of these newsgroups. With so many
newsgroups, it can be hard finding ones of interest to you. We'll start off
by showing you how to get into some of the more interesting or useful
newsgroups so you can get a feel for how it all works.
Some public-access systems try to make it easier by dividing Usenet into
several broad categories. Choose one of those and you're given a list of
newsgroups in that category. Then select the newsgroup you're interested in
and start reading.
Other systems let you compile your own "reading list" so that you only see
messages in conferences you want. In both cases, conferences are arranged in
a particular hierarchy devised in the early 1980s. Newsgroup names start
with one of a series of broad topic names. For example, newsgroups beginning
with "comp." are about particular computer-related topics. These broad
topics are followed by a series of more focused topics (so that `comp.unix'
groups are limited to discussion about Unix). The main hierarchies are:
`bionet'
Research biology
`bit.listserv'
Conferences originating as Bitnet mailing lists
`biz'
Business
`comp'
Computers and related subjects
`misc'
Discussions that don't fit anywhere else
`news'
News about Usenet itself
`rec'
Hobbies, games and recreation
`sci'
Science other than research biology
`soc'
"Social" groups, often ethnically related
`talk'
Politics and related topics
`alt'
Controversial or unusual topics; not carried by all sites
In addition, many host systems carry newsgroups for a particular city,
state or region. For example, `ne.housing' is a newsgroup where New
Englanders look for apartments. A growing number also carry K12 newsgroups,
which are aimed at elementary and secondary teachers and students. And a
number of sites carry clari newsgroups, which is actually a commercial
service consisting of wire-service stories and a unique online computer news
service (*note News of the World::.).
How do you dive right in? On the Free-Net and some other systems, it's
all done through menus - you just keep choosing from a list of choices until
you get to the newsgroup you want and then hit the "read" command. On Unix
systems, however, you will have to use a "newsreader" program. Two of the
more common ones are known as rn (for "read news") and nn (for "no news" -
because it's supposed to be simpler to use).
For beginners, nn may be the better choice because it works with
rudimentary menus - you get a list of articles in a given newsgroup and then
you choose which ones you want to see. To try it out, connect to your host
system and, at the command line, type
nn news.announce.newusers
and hit enter. After a few seconds, you should see something like this:
Newsgroup: news.announce.newusers Articles: 22 of 22/1 NEW
a Gene Spafford 776 Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
b Gene Spafford 362 A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community
c Gene Spafford 387 Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette
d Gene Spafford 101 Hints on writing style for Usenet
e Gene Spafford 74 Introduction to news.announce
f Gene Spafford 367 USENET Software: History and Sources
g Gene Spafford 353 What is Usenet?
h taylor 241 A Guide to Social Newsgroups and Mailing Lists
i Gene Spafford 585 Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part I
j Gene Spafford 455 Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part II
k David C Lawrenc 151 How to Create a New Newsgroup
l Gene Spafford 106 How to Get Information about Networks
m Gene Spafford 888 List of Active Newsgroups
n Gene Spafford 504 List of Moderators
o Gene Spafford 1051 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part I
p Gene Spafford 1123 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part II
q Gene Spafford 1193 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part III
r Jonathan Kamens 644 How to become a USENET site
s Jonathan Kamen 1344 List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part I
-- 15:52 -- SELECT -- help:? -----Top 85%-----
Explanatory postings for new users. (Moderated)
Obviously, this is a good newsgroup to begin your exploration of Usenet!
Here's what all this means: The first letter on each line is the letter you
type to read that particular "article" (it makes sense that a "newsgroup"
would have "articles"). Next comes the name of the person who wrote that
article, followed by its length, in lines, and what the article is about. At
the bottom, you see the local time at your access site, what you're doing
right now (i.e., SELECTing articles), which key to hit for some help (the ?
key) and how many of the articles in the newsgroup you can see on this
screen. The "(moderated)" means the newsgroup has a "moderator" who is the
only one who can directly post messages to it. This is generally limited to
groups such as this, which contain articles of basic information or for
digests, which are basically online magazines (more on them in a bit).
Say you're particularly interested in what "Emily Postnews" (*note Dear
Emily::.) has to say about proper etiquette on Usenet. Hit your c key (lower
case!), and the line will light up. If you want to read something else, hit
the key that corresponds to it. And if you want to see what's on the next
page of articles, hit return or your space bar.
But you're impatient to get going, and you want to read that article now.
The command for that in nn is a capital Z. Hit it and you'll see something
like this:
Gene Spafford: Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette
Original-author: [email protected] (Brad Templeton)
Archive-name: emily-postnews/part1
Last-change: 30 Nov 91 by [email protected] (Brad Templeton)
**NOTE: this is intended to be satirical. If you do not recognize
it as such, consult a doctor or professional comedian. The
recommendations in this article should recognized for what
they are -- admonitions about what NOT to do.
``Dear Emily Postnews''
Emily Postnews, foremost authority on proper net behaviour,
gives her advice on how to act on the net.
=========================================================================
Dear Miss Postnews: How long should my signature be? -- verbose@noisy
A: Dear Verbose: Please try and make your signature as long as you
-- 09:57 --.announce.newusers-- LAST --help:?--Top 4%--
The first few lines are the message's header, similar to the header you
get in e-mail messages. Then comes the beginning of the message. The last
line tells you the time again, the newsgroup name (or part of it, anyway),
the position in your message stack that this message occupies, how to get
help, and how much of the message is on screen. If you want to keep reading
this message, just hit your space bar (not your enter key!) for the next
screen and so on until done. When done, you'll be returned to the newsgroup
menu. For now hit Q (upper case this time), which quits you out of nn and
returns you to your host system's command line.
To get a look at another interesting newsgroup, type
nn comp.risks
and hit enter. This newsgroup is another moderated group, this time a
digest of all the funny and frightening ways computers and the people who run
and use them can go wrong. Again, you read articles by selecting their
letters. If you're in the middle of an article and decide you want to go
onto the next one, hit your n key.
Now it's time to look for some newsgroups that might be of particular
interest to you. Unix host systems that have nn use a program called nngrep
(ever get the feeling Unix was not entirely written in English?) that lets
you scan newsgroups. Exit nn and at your host system's command line, type
nngrep word
where word is the subject you're interested in. If you use a Macintosh
computer, you might try
nngrep mac
You'll get something that looks like this:
alt.music.machines.of.loving.grace
alt.religion.emacs
comp.binaries.mac
comp.emacs
comp.lang.forth.mac
comp.os.mach
comp.sources.mac
comp.sys.mac.announce
comp.sys.mac.apps
comp.sys.mac.comm
comp.sys.mac.databases
comp.sys.mac.digest
comp.sys.mac.games
comp.sys.mac.hardware
comp.sys.mac.hypercard
comp.sys.mac.misc
comp.sys.mac.programmer
comp.sys.mac.system
comp.sys.mac.wanted
gnu.emacs.announce
gnu.emacs.bug
gnu.emacs.gnews
gnu.emacs.gnus
gnu.emacs.help
gnu.emacs.lisp.manual
gnu.emacs.sources
gnu.emacs.vm.bug
gnu.emacs.vm.info
gnu.emacs.vms
Note that some of these obviously have something to do with Macintoshes
while some obviously do not; nngrep is not a perfect system. If you want to
get a list of ALL the newsgroups available on your host system, type
nngrep -a |more
or
nngrep -a |pg
and hit enter (which one to use depends on the Unix used on your host
system; if one doesn't do anything, try the other). You don't absolutely need
the |more or |pg, but if you don't include it, the list will keep scrolling,
rather than pausing every 24 lines. If you are in nn, hitting a capital Y
will bring up a similar list.
Typing `nn newsgroup' for every newsgroup can get awfully tiring after
awhile. When you use nn, your host system looks in a file called `.newsrc'.
This is basically a list of every newsgroup on the host system along with
notations on which groups and articles you have read (all maintained by the
computer). You can also use this file to create a "reading list" that brings
up each newsgroup to which you want to "subscribe." To try it out, type
nn
without any newsgroup name, and hit enter.
Unfortunately, you will start out with a `.newsrc' file that has you
"subscribed" to every single newsgroup on your host system! To delete a
newsgroup from your reading list, type a capital U while its menu is on the
screen. The computer will ask you if you're sure you want to "unsubscribe."
If you then hit a Y, you'll be unsubscribed and put in the next group.
With many host systems carrying 4,000 or more newsgroups, this will take
you forever.
Fortunately, there are a couple of easier ways to do this. Both involve
calling up your `.newsrc' file in a word or text processor. In a `.newsrc'
file, each newsgroup takes up one line, consisting of the group's name, an
exclamation point or a colon and a range of numbers.
Newsgroups with a colon are ones to which you are subscribed; those
followed by an exclamation point are "un-subscribed." To start with a clean
slate, then, you have to change all those colons to exclamation points. If
you know some UNIX, it's a one-liner, just type:
tr ':' '!' < .newsrc > temprc
and you're done. Without the `tr' command you must use a text editor.
If you know how to use emacs or vi, call up the `.newsrc' file (you might
want to make a copy of `.newsrc' first, just in case), and use the
search-and-replace function to make the change.
If you're not comfortable with these text processors, you can download the
`.newsrc' file, make the changes on your own computer and then upload the
revised file. Before you download the file, however, you should do a couple
of things. One is to type
cp .newsrc temprc
and hit enter. You will actually download this temprc file (note the name
does not start with a period - some computers, such as those using MS-DOS, do
not allow file names starting with periods). After you download the file,
open it in your favorite word processor and use its search-and-replace
function to change the exclamation points to colons. Be careful not to
change anything else! Save the document in ASCII or text format. Dial back
into your host system. At the command line, type
cp temprc temprc1
and hit enter. This new file will serve as your backup `.newsrc' file
just in case something goes wrong. Upload the temprc file from your computer.
This will overwrite the Unix system's old temprc file. Now type
cp temprc .newsrc
and hit enter. You now have a clean slate to start creating a reading
list.
It's a little easier to do this in rn, so let's try that out, and as long
as where there, see how it works.
If you type
rn news.announce.newusers
at your host system's command line, you'll see something like this:
******** 21 unread articles in news.announce.newusers--read now? [ynq]
If you hit your Y key, the first article will appear on your screen. If
you want to see what articles are available first, though, hit your
computer's `=' key and you'll get something like this:
152 Introduction to news.announce
153 A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community
154 What is Usenet?
155 Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
156 Hints on writing style for Usenet
158 Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part I
159 Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part II
160 Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette
161 USENET Software: History and Sources
162 A Guide to Social Newsgroups and Mailing Lists
163 How to Get Information about Networks
164 How to Create a New Newsgroup
169 List of Active Newsgroups
170 List of Moderators
171 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part I
172 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part II
173 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part III
174 How to become a USENET site
175 List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part I
176 List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part II
177 List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part III
End of article 158 (of 178)--what next? [npq]
Notice how the messages are in numerical order this time, and don't tell
you who sent them. Article 154 looks interesting. To read it, type in 154
and hit enter. You'll see something like this:
Article 154 (20 more) in news.announce.newusers (moderated):
From: [email protected] (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: news.announce.newusers,news.admin,news.answers
Subject: What is Usenet?
Date: 20 Sep 92 04:17:26 GMT
Followup-To: news.newusers.questions
Organization: Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue Univ.
Lines: 353
Supersedes:
Archive-name: what-is-usenet/part1
Original from: [email protected] (Chip Salzenberg)
Last-change: 19 July 1992 by [email protected] (Gene Spafford)
The first thing to understand about Usenet is that it is widely
misunderstood. Every day on Usenet, the ``blind men and the elephant''
phenomenon is evident, in spades. In my opinion, more flame wars
arise because of a lack of understanding of the nature of Usenet than
from any other source. And consider that such flame wars arise, of
necessity, among people who are on Usenet. Imagine, then, how poorly
understood Usenet must be by those outside!
--MORE--(7%)
This time, the header looks much more like the gobbledygook you get in
e-mail messages. To keep reading, hit your space bar. If you hit your N key
(in lower case), you'll go to the next message in the numerical order.
To escape rn, just keep hitting your q key (in lower case), until you get
back to the command line. Now let's set up your reading list. Because rn
uses the same `.newsrc' file as nn, you can use one of the search-and-replace
methods described above. Or you can do this: Type
rn
and hit enter. When the first newsgroup comes up on your screen, hit your
u key (in lower case). Hit it again, and again, and again. Or just keep it
pressed down (if your computer starts beeping, let up for a couple of
seconds). Unsubscribing from every single group this way could take five or
ten minutes. Eventually, you'll be told you're at the end of the newsgroups,
and asked what you want to do next.
Here's where you begin entering newsgroups. Type
g newsgroup
(for example, `g comp.sys.mac.announce') and hit enter. You'll be asked
if you want to "subscribe." Hit your y key. Then type
g next newsgroup
(for example, `g comp.announce.newusers') and hit enter. Repeat until
done. This process will also set up your reading list for nn, if you prefer
that newsreader. But how do you know which newsgroups to subscribe? Typing a
lower-case l and then hitting enter will show you a list of all available
newsgroups. Again, since there could be more than 2,000 newsgroups on your
system, this might not be something you want to do. Fortunately, you can
search for groups with particular words in their names, using the l command.
Typing
l mac
followed by enter, will bring up a list of newsgroups with those letters
in them (and as in nn, you will also see groups dealing with emacs and the
like, in addition to groups related to Macintosh computers).
Because of the vast amount of messages transmitted over Usenet, most
systems carry messages for only a few days or weeks. So if there's a message
you want to keep, you should either turn on your computer's screen capture or
save it to a file which you can later download). To save a message as a file
in rn, type
s filename
where filename is what you want to call the file. Hit enter. You'll be
asked if you want to save it in "mailbox format." In most cases, you can
answer with an n (which will strip off the header). The message will now be
saved to a file in your News directory (which you can access by typing `cd
News' and then hitting enter).
Also, some newsgroups fill up particularly quickly - go away for a couple
of days and you'll come back to find hundreds of articles! One way to deal
with that is to mark them as "read" so that they no longer appear on your
screen. In nn, hit a capital J; in rn, a small c.
Where to get Answers?
=====================
There are some newsgroups you might want to include in your reading list.
The `news. newusers.questions' newsgroup is where newcomers can ask questions
about how Usenet works. The newsgroup `news.announce.newsgroups' carries
information about new or proposed newsgroups.
The `news.answers' newsgroup is a fascinating one and can help you find
interesting newsgroups. Many newsgroups have regularly compiled lists of
"frequently asked questions" or FAQs related to the newsgroup's particular
discussions. The people who write these lists post them in `news.answers'.
You'll learn how to fight jet lag in an FAQ from the `rec.travel.air'
newsgroup; read more than you probably wanted to know about bloodhounds in an
FAQ from `rec.pet.dogs'; find answers to common questions about Windows in
`comp.os.ms-windows'. There's even a newsgroup set up just for these FAQs:
`news.answers'. This can be an interesting newsgroup to browse through,
because you'll find everything from tips on saving money on airline tickets
to facts about U.S. space missions.
Now to put your two cents in.
"Threads" are an integral part of Usenet. When somebody posts a message,
often somebody else will respond. Soon, a thread of conversation begins.
Following these threads is relatively easy. In nn, related messages are
grouped together. In rn, when you're done with a message, you can hit
control-N to read the next related message, or followup. As you explore
Usenet, it's probably a good idea to read discussions for a while before you
jump in. This way, you can get a feel for the particular newsgroup - each of
which has its own rhythms.
Eventually, though, you'll want to speak up. There are two main ways to
do this. You join an existing conversation, or you can start a whole new
thread.
If you want to join a discussion, you have to decide if you want to
include portions of the message you are responding to in your message. The
reason to do this is so people can see what you're responding to, just in
case the original message has disappeared from their system (remember that
most Usenet messages have a short life span on the average host system) or
they can't find it.
If you're using a Unix host system, joining an existing conversation is
similar in both nn and rn: hit your F key when done with a given article in
the thread. In rn, type a small f if you don't want to include portions of
the message you're responding to; an upper-case F if you do. In nn, type a
capital F. You'll then be asked if you want to include portions of the
original message.
And here's where you hit another Unix wall. When you hit your F key, your
host system calls up its basic Unix text editor. If you're lucky, that'll be
Pico, a very easy system. More likely, however, you'll get dumped into emacs
(or possibly vi), which you've already met in the chapter on e-mail.
The single most important emacs command is
control-x control-c
This means, depress your control key and hit x. Then depress the control
key and hit c. Memorize this. In fact, it's so important, it bears
repeating:
control-x control-c
These keystrokes are how you get out of emacs. If it works well, you'll
be asked if you want to send, edit, abort or list the message you were
working on. If it doesn't work well (say you accidentally hit some other
weird key combination that means something special to emacs) and nothing
seems to happen, or you just get more weird-looking emacs prompts on the
bottom of your screen, try hitting control-g. This should stop whatever emacs
was trying to do (you should see the word "quit" on the bottom of your
screen), after which you can hit control-x control-c. But if this still
doesn't work, remember that you can always disconnect and dial back in!
If you have told your newsreader you do want to include portions of the
original message in yours, it will automatically put the entire thing at the
top of your message. Use the arrow keys to move down to the lines you want
to delete and hit control-K, which will delete one line at a time.
You can then write your message. Remember that you have to hit enter
before your cursor gets to the end of the line, because emacs does not have
word wrapping.
When done, hit control-x control-c. You'll be asked the question about
sending, editing, aborting, etc. Chose one. If you hit Y, your host system
will start the process to sending your message across the Net.
The nn and rn programs work differently when it comes to posting entirely
new messages. In nn, type
:post
and hit enter in any newsgroup. You'll be asked which newsgroup to post a
message to. Type in its name and hit enter. Then you'll be asked for
"keywords." These are words you'd use to attract somebody scanning a
newsgroup. Say you're selling your car. You might type the type of car
here. Next comes a "summary" line, which is somewhat similar. Finally,
you'll be asked for the message's "distribution." This is where you put how
widely you want your message disseminated. Think about this one for a
second. If you are selling your car, it makes little sense to send a message
about it all over the world. But if you want to talk about the environment,
it might make a lot of sense. Each host system has its own set of
distribution classifications, but there's generally a local one (just for
users of that system), one for the city, state or region it's in, another for
the country (for example, usa), one for the continent (for Americans and
Canadians, na) and finally, one for the entire world (usually: world).
Which one to use? Generally, a couple of seconds' thought will help you
decide. If you're selling your car, use your city or regional distribution -
people in Australia won't much care and may even get annoyed. If you want to
discuss presidential politics, using a USA distribution makes more sense. If
you want to talk about events in the Middle East, sending your message to the
entire world is perfectly acceptable.
Then you can type your message. If you've composed your message offline
(generally a good idea if you and emacs don't get along), you can upload it
now. You may see a lot of weird looking characters as it uploads into emacs,
but those will disappear when you hit control-X and then control-C.
Alternately: "save" the message (for example, by hitting m in rn), log out,
compose your message offline, log back on and upload your message into a file
on your host system. Then call up Usenet, find the article you "saved."
Start a reply, and you'll be asked if you want to include a prepared message.
Type in the name of the file you just created and hit 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 explicit
for-sale newsgroups).
--
___________________ * _-_
\==============_=_/ ____.---'---`---.____ *
\_ \ \----._________.----/
* \ \ / / `-_-' *
* __,--`.`-'..'-_
/____ || *
`--.____,-' ...to boldly go where no man has gone before!
--
Disclaimer - These opiini^H^H damn! ^H^H ^Q ^[ .... :w :q :wq :wq! ^d X ^?
exit X Q ^C ^? :quitbye CtrlAltDel ~~q :~q logout save/quit :!QUIT
^[zz ^[ZZZZZZ ^H man vi ^ ^L ^[c ^# ^E ^X ^I ^T ? help helpquit ^D ^d
man help ^C ^c help exit ?Quit ?q CtrlShftDel"Hey, what does this button d..."
-- .signature(s)
* Usenet: from Flame Wars to Killfiles *
************************************
Flame, Blather and Spew, and the First Amendment
================================================
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'.
Òhe First Amendment as Local Ordinaïñå
======================================
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.
rn Commands
===========
Different commands are available to you in rn depending on whether you are
already in a newsgroup or reading a specific article. At any point, typing a
lower-case `h' will bring up a list of available commands and some terse
instructions for using them. Here are some of them:
After you've just called up rn, or within a newsgroup:
`c'
Marks every article in a newsgroup as read (or "caught up") so that you
don't have to see them again. The system will ask you if you are sure.
Can be done either when asked if you want to read a particular newsgroup
or once in the newsgroup.
`g'
Goes to a newsgroup, in this form:
`g news.group'
Use this both for going to groups to which you're already subscribed and
subscribing to new groups.
`h'
Provides a list of available commands with terse instructions.
`l'
Gives a list of all available newsgroups.
`p'
Goes to the first previous subscribed newsgroup with un-read articles.
`q'
Quits, or exits, rn if you have not yet gone into a newsgroup. If you
are in a newsgroup, it quits that one and brings you to the next
subscribed newsgroup.
Only within a newsgroup:
`='
Gives a list of all available articles in the newsgroup.
`m'
Marks a specific article or series of articles as "un-read" again so
that you can come back to them later. Typing `1700m' and hitting enter
would mark just that article as un-read. Typing `1700-1800m' and
hitting enter would mark all of those articles as un-read.
`s file'
Copies the current article to a file in your News directory, where
"file" is the name of the file you want to save it to. You'll be asked
if you want to use "mailbox" format when saving. If you answer by
hitting your `N' key, most of the header will not be saved.
`space'
Brings up the next page of article listings. If already on the last
page, displays the first article in the newsgroup.
`u'
Un-subscribe from the newsgroup.
`/text/'
Searches through the newsgroup for articles with a specific word or
phrase in the "subject:" line, from the current article to the end of
the newsgroup. For example,
`/EFF/'
would bring you to the first article with "EFF" in the "subject:" line.
`?text?'
The same as above except it searches in reverse order from the current
article.
Only within a specific article:
`C'
If you post an article and then decide it was a mistake, call it up on
your host system and hit this. The message will soon begin disappearing
on systems around the world.
`F'
Post a public response in the newsgroup to the current article.
Includes a copy of her posting, which you can then edit down using your
host system's text editor.
`f'
The same as above except it does not include a copy of the original
message in yours.
`m'
Marks the current article as "un-read" so that you can come back to it
later. You do not have to type the article number.
`Control-N'
Brings up the first response to the article. If there is no follow-up
article, this returns you to the first unread article in the newsgroup).
`Control-P'
Goes to the message to which the current article is a reply.
`n'
Goes to the next unread article in the newsgroup.
`N'
Takes you to the next article in the newsgroup even if you've already
read it.
`q'
Quits, or exits, the current article. Leaves you in the current
newsgroup.
`R'
Reply, via e-mail only, to the author of the current article. Includes
a copy of his message in yours.
`r'
The same as above, except it does not include a copy of his article.
`s |mail'
user Mails a copy of the article to somebody. For "user" substitute
her e-mail address. Does not let you add comments to the message first,
however.
`space'
Hitting the space bar shows the next page of the article, or, if at the
end, goes to the next un-read article.
ïn Commands
===========
To mark a specific article for reading, type the letter next to it (in
lower case). To mark a specific article and all of its responses, type the
letter and an asterisk, for example:
a*
To un-select an article, type the letter next to it (again, in lower case).
`C'
Cancels an article (around the world) that you wrote. Every article
posted on Usenet has a unique ID number. Hitting a capital `C' sends
out a new message that tells host systems that receive it to find
earlier message and delete it.
`F'
To post a public response, or follow-up. If selected while still on a
newsgroup "page", asks you which article to follow up. If selected
while in a specific article, will follow up that article. In either
case, you'll be asked if you want to include the original article in
yours. Caution: puts you in whatever text editor is your default.
`N'
Goes to the next subscribed newsgroup with unread articles.
`P'
Goes to the previous subscribed newsgroup with unread articles.
`G news.group'
Goes to a specific newsgroup. Can be used to subscribe to new
newsgroups. Hitting `G' brings up a sub-menu:
`u'
Goes to the group and shows only un-read articles.
`a'
Goes to the group and shows all articles, even ones you've already
read.
`s'
Will show you only articles with a specific subject.
`n'
Will show you only articles from a specific person.
`M'
Mails a copy of the current article to somebody. You'll be asked for
the recipient's e-mail address and whether you want to add any comments
to the article before sending it off. As with `F', puts you in the
default editor.
`:post'
Post an article. You'll be asked for the name of the group.
`Q'
Quit, or exit, nn.
`U'
Un-subscribe from the current newsgroup.
`R'
Responds to an article via e-mail.
`space'
Hitting the space bar brings up the next page of articles.
`X'
If you have selected articles, this will show them to you and then take
you to the next subscribed newsgroup with unread articles. If you don't
have any selected articles, it marks all articles as read and takes you
to the next unread subscribed newsgroup.
`=word'
Finds and marks all articles in the newsgroup with a specific word in
the "subject:" line, for example: `=modem'
`Z'
Shows you selected articles immediately and then returns you to the
current newsgroup.
`?'
Brings up a help screen.
`<'
Goes to the previous page in the newsgroup.
`>'
Goes to the next page in the newsgroup.
`$'
Goes to the last page in an article.
`^'
Goes to the first page in an article.
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.
Ñross-posting
=============
Sometimes, you'll have an issue you think should be discussed in more than
one 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. 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. Chances are, 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.
Òhe Brain-tumor Boy and the Modem Taõ
=====================================
Net users sometimes like to think they are smarter or somehow better than
everybody else. They're not. If they were, nobody on the Net would ever
have heard of Craig Shergold, the Brain-Tumor Boy, or the evil FCC's plan to
tax your modem. Alas, both of these online urban legends are here to stay.
Just when they seem to have died off, somebody posts a message about one or
the other, starting a whole new round of flame wars on the subject.
For the record, here are the stories on both of them:
Craig Shergold
--------------
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 asked people to 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.
The Modem Tax
-------------
In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission 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.
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: [email protected] |#|
|#| 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: |#|
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|#| The |\ /| / |#|
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|#| | | / |#|
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|#| | | 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!
Êillfiles
=========
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
Usenet Historó
==============
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.
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.
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.
*"Welcome, to the watering hole,
to the death of objectivity, and
the killing fields of the wide boys,
where are we now..."*
-- Marillion, "The Thieving Magpie (La Gazza Ladra)"
Used in concerts as spoken intro by Fish to the 2nd part of "Misplaced Childhood"
* Mailing Lists and Bitnet *
************************
Usenet is not the only forum on the Net. Scores of "mailing lists"
represent another way to interact with other Net users. Unlike Usenet
messages, which are stored in one central location on your host system's
computer, mailing-list messages are delivered right to your e-mail box,
unlike Usenet messages.
You have to ask for permission to join a mailing list. Unlike Usenet,
where your message is distributed to the world, on a mailing list, you send
your messages to a central moderator, who either re-mails it to the other
people on the list or uses it to compile a periodic "digest" mailed to
subscribers.
Given the number of newsgroups, why would anybody bother with a mailing
list?
Even on Usenet, there are some topics that just might not generate enough
interest for a newsgroup; for example, the Queen list, which is all about the
late FREDDIE MERCURY's band; or the Marillion & Fish list called "Freaks."
And because a moderator decides who can participate, a mailing list can
offer a degree of freedom to speak one's mind (or not worry about
net.weenies) that is not necessarily possible on Usenet. Several groups
offer anonymous postings - only the moderator knows the real names of people
who contribute. Examples include 12Step, where people enrolled in such
programs as Alcoholics Anonymous can discuss their experiences, and sappho, a
list limited to gay and bisexual women.
You can find mailing addresses and descriptions of these lists in the
`news.announce.newusers' newsgroup with the subject of "Publicly Accessible
Mailing Lists." Mailing lists now number in the hundreds, so this posting is
divided into three parts.
If you find a list to which you want to subscribe, send an e-mail message
to
list-request@address
where "list" is the name of the mailing list and "address" is the
moderator's e-mail address, asking to be added to the list. Include your
full e-mail address just in case something happens to your message's header
along the way, and ask, if you're accepted, for the address to mail messages
to the list.
Âitnet
======
As if Usenet and mailing lists were not enough, there are Bitnet
"discussion groups" or "lists."
Bitnet is an international network linking colleges and universities, but
it uses a different set of technical protocols for distributing information
than the Internet or Usenet.
It offers hundreds of discussion groups, comparable in scope to Usenet
newsgroups.
One of the major differences is the way messages are distributed. Bitnet
messages are sent to your mailbox, just as with a mailing list. However,
where mailing lists are often maintained by a person, all Bitnet discussion
groups are automated - you subscribe to them through messages to a
"listserver" computer. This is a kind of robot moderator that controls
distribution of messages on the list. In many cases, it also maintains
indexes and archives of past postings in a given discussion group, which can
be handy if you want to get up to speed with a discussion or just search for
some information related to it.
Many Bitnet discussion groups are now "translated" into Usenet form and
carried through Usenet in the `bit.listserv.*' hierarchy. In general, it's
probably better to read messages through Usenet if you can. It saves some
storage space on your host system's hard drives.
If 50 people subscribe to the same Bitnet list, that means 50 copies of
each message get stored on the system; whereas if 50 people read a Usenet
message, that's still only one message that needs storage on the system. It
can also save your sanity if the discussion group generates large numbers of
messages. Think of opening your e-mailbox one day to find 200 messages in it
- 199 of them from a discussion group and one of them a "real" e-mail message
that's important to you.
Subscribing and canceling subscriptions is done through an e-mail message
to the listserver computer. For addressing, all listservers are known as
"listserv" (yep) at some Bitnet address. This means you will have to add
`.bitnet' to the end of the address, if it's in a form like this:
`listserv@miamiu'. For example, if you have an interest in environmental
issues, you might want to subscribe to the Econet discussion group. To
subscribe, send an e-mail message to
[email protected]
Some Bitnet listservers are also connected to the Internet, so if you see
a listserver address ending in `.edu', you can e-mail the listserver without
adding `.bitnet' to the end.
Always leave the "subject:" line blank in a message to a listserver.
Inside the message, you tell the listserver what you want, with a series of
simple commands:
`subscribe group *Your Name*'
To subscribe to a list, where group is the list name and *Your Name* is
your full name, for example: `subscribe econet Henry Fielding'
`unsubscribe group *Your Name*'
To discontinue a group, for example: `unsubscribe econet Henry Fielding'
`list global'
This sends you a list of all available Bitnet discussion groups. But be
careful - the list is VERY long!
`get refcard'
Sends you a list of other commands you can use with a listserver, such as
commands for retrieving past postings from a discussion group.
Each of these commands goes on a separate line in your message (and you
can use one or all of them). If you want to get a list of all Bitnet
discussion groups, send e-mail to
[email protected]
Leave the "subject:" line blank and use the list global command.
When you subscribe to a Bitnet group, there are two important differences
from Usenet.
First, when you want to post a message for others to read in the
discussion group, you send a message to the group name at its Bitnet address.
Using Econet as an example, you would mail the message to:
[email protected]
Note that this is different from the listserv address you used to
subscribe to the group to begin with. Use the listserv address ONLY to
subscribe to or unsubscribe from a discussion group. If you use the
discussion-group address, your message will go out to every other subscriber,
many of whom will think unkind thoughts, which they may share with you in an
e-mail message).
The second difference relates to sending an e-mail message to the author
of a particular posting. Usenet newsreaders such as rn and nn let you do
this with one key. But if you hit your `R' key to respond to a
discussion-group message, your message will go to the listserver, and from
there to everybody else on the list! This can prove embarrassing to you and
annoying to others. To make sure your message goes just to the person who
wrote the posting, take down his e-mail address from the posting and then
compose a brand-new message to him. Remember, also, that if you see an
e-mail address like , it's a Bitnet address.
Two Bitnet lists will prove helpful for delving further into the network.
NEW-LIST tells you the names of new discussion groups. To subscribe, send a
message to :
sub NEW-LIST Your Name
INFONETS is the place to go when you have questions about Bitnet. It is
also first rate for help on questions about all major computer networks and
how to reach them. To subscribe, send e-mail to
:
sub INFONETS Your Name
Both of these lists are also available on Usenet, the former as
`bit.listserv.new-list'; the latter as `bit.listserv.infonets' (sometimes
`bit.listserv.info-nets').
*"It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an
ARPANET broadcasting technique in which an identical message could
be sent automatically to large number of network subscribers.
Interestingly, one of the first really big mailing-list was "SF-LOVERS",
for Science Fiction fans. Disscussing science fiction on the network
was not work-related and was frowned upon by many ARPANET computer
administrators, but this didn't stop it from happening."*
-- Bruce Sterling, F&SF Science Column #5 "Internet"
* Telnet (Mining the Net, part I) *
*******************************
Like any large community, cyberspace has its libraries, places you can go
to look up information or take out a good book. Telnet is one of your keys
to these libraries.
*Telnet* is a program that lets you use the power of the Internet to
connect you to databases, library catalogs, and other information resources
around the world. Want to see what the weather's like in Vermont? Check on
crop conditions in Azerbaijan? Get more information about somebody whose name
you've seen online? Telnet lets you do this, and more.
Alas, there's a big "but!" Unlike the phone system, Internet is not yet
universal; not everybody can use all of its services. Almost all colleges
and universities on the Internet provide telnet access. So do the WELL,
Netcom and the World. But the Free-Net systems do not give you access to
every telnet system. And if you are using a public-access UUCP or Usenet
site, you will not have access to telnet.
The main reason for this is cost. Connecting to the Internet can easily
cost $1,000 or more for a leased, high-speed phone line.
Some databases and file libraries can be queried by e-mail, however; we'll
show you how to do that later on. In the meantime, the rest of this chapter
assumes you are connected to a site with at least partial Internet access.
Most telnet sites are fairly easy to use and have online help systems.
Most also work best (and in some cases, only) with VT100 emulation. Let's
dive right in and try one.
At your host system's command line, type
telnet access.usask.ca
and hit enter. That's all you have to do to connect to a telnet site! In
this case, you'll be connecting to a service known as Hytelnet, which is a
database of computerized library catalogs and other databases available
through telnet. You should see something like this:
Trying 128.233.3.1 ...
Connected to access.usask.ca.
Escape character is '^]'.
Ultrix UNIX (access.usask.ca)
login:
Every telnet site has two addresses - one composed of words that are
easier for people to remember; the other a numerical address better suited
for computers. The "escape character" is good to remember. When all else
fails, hitting your control key and the `]' key at the same time will
disconnect you and return you to your host system. At the login prompt, type
hytelnet
and hit enter. You'll see something like this:
Welcome to HYTELNET
version 6.2
...................
What is HYTELNET? . Up/Down arrows MOVE
Library catalogs . Left/Right arrows SELECT
Other resources . ? for HELP anytime
Help files for catalogs .
Catalog interfaces . m returns here
Internet Glossary . q quits
Telnet tips .
Telnet/TN3270 escape keys .
Key-stroke commands .
........................
HYTELNET 6.2 was written by Peter Scott,
U of Saskatchewan Libraries, Saskatoon, Sask, Canada. 1992
Unix and VMS software by Earl Fogel, Computing Services, U of S 1992
The first choice, "" will be highlighted. Use your down and up
arrows to move the cursor among the choices. Hit enter when you decide on
one. You'll get another menu, which in turn will bring up text files telling
you how to connect to sites and giving any special commands or instructions
you might need. Hytelnet does have one quirk. To move back to where you
started (for example, from a sub-menu to a main menu), hit the left-arrow key
on your computer.
Play with the system. You might want to turn on your computer's
screen-capture, or at the very least, get out a pen and paper. You're bound
to run across some interesting telnet services that you'll want to try - and
you'll need their telnet "addresses."
As you move around Hytelnet, it may seem as if you haven't left your host
system - telnet can work that quickly. Occasionally, when network loads are
heavy, however, you will notice a delay between the time you type a command
or enter a request and the time the remote service responds.
To disconnect from Hytelnet and return to your system, hit your q key and
enter.
Some telnet computers are set up so that you can only access them through
a specific "port." In those cases, you'll always see a number after their
name, for example: `india.colorado.edu 13'. It's important to include that
number, because otherwise, you may not get in.
In fact, try the above address. Type
telnet india.colorado.edu 13
and hit enter. You should see something like this:
Trying 128.138.140.44 ...
Followed very quickly by this:
telnet india.colorado.edu 13
Escape character is '^]'.
Sun Apr 5 14:11:41 1992
Connection closed by foreign host.
What we want is the middle line, which tells you the exact Mountain
Standard Time, as determined by a government-run atomic clock in Boulder,
Colo.
Library Catalogs
================
More than 200 libraries, from the Snohomish Public Library in Washington
State to the Library of Congress and the libraries of Harvard University, are
now available to you through telnet. You can use Hytelnet to find their
names, telnet addresses and use instructions.
Why would you want to browse a library you can't physically get to? Many
libraries share books, so if yours doesn't have what you're looking for, you
can tell the librarian where he or she can get it. Or if you live in an area
where the libraries are not yet online, you can use telnet to do some basic
bibliographic research before you head down to the local branch.
There are several different database programs in use by online libraries.
Harvard's is one of the easier ones to use, so let's try it.
Telnet to `hollis.harvard.edu'. When you connect, you'll see:
***************** H A R V A R D U N I V E R S I T Y
***************** OFFICE FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
*** *** ***
*** VE *** RI ***
*** *** *** HOLLIS (Harvard OnLine LIbrary System)
***** *****
**** TAS **** HUBS (Harvard University Basic Services)
*** ***
***** IU (Information Utility)
***
CMS (VM/CMS Timesharing Service)
** HOLLIS IS AVAILABLE WITHOUT ACCESS RESTRICTIONS **
Access to other applications is limited to individuals who have been
granted specific permission by an authorized person.
To select one of the applications above, type its name on the command
line followed by your user ID, and press RETURN.
** HOLLIS DOES NOT REQUIRE A USERID **
EXAMPLES: HOLLIS (press RETURN) or HUBS userid (press RETURN)
===>
Type
hollis
and hit enter. You'll see several screens flash by quickly until finally
the system stops and you'll get this:
WELCOME TO HOLLIS
(Harvard OnLine Library Information System)
To begin, type one of the 2-character database codes listed below:
HU Union Catalog of the Harvard libraries
OW Catalog of Older Widener materials
LG Guide to Harvard Libraries and Computing Resources
AI Expanded Academic Index (selective 1987-1988, full 1989- )
LR Legal Resource Index (1980- )
PA PAIS International (1985- )
To change databases from any place in HOLLIS, type CHOOSE followed by a
2-character database code, as in: CHOOSE HU
For general help in using HOLLIS, type HELP. For HOLLIS news, type
HELP NEWS. For HOLLIS hours of operation, type HELP HOURS.
ALWAYS PRESS THE ENTER OR RETURN KEY AFTER TYPING YOUR COMMAND
The first thing to notice is the name of the system: Hollis. Librarians
around the world seem to be inordinately found of cutesy, anthropomorphized
acronyms for their machines (not far from Harvard, the librarians at Brandeis
University came up with Library On-Line User Information Service, or Louis;
MIT has Barton).
If you want to do some general browsing, probably the best bet on the
Harvard system is to chose HU, which gets you access to their main holdings,
including those of its medical libraries. Chose that, and you'll see this:
THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNION CATALOG
To begin a search, select a search option from the list below and type its
code on the command line. Use either upper or lower case.
AU Author search
TI Title search
SU Subject search
ME Medical subject search
KEYWORD Keyword search options
CALL Call number search options
OTHER Other search options
For information on the contents of the Union Catalog, type HELP.
To exit the Union Catalog, type QUIT.
A search can be entered on the COMMAND line of any screen.
ALWAYS PRESS THE ENTER OR RETURN KEY AFTER TYPING YOUR COMMAND.
Say you want to see if Harvard has shed the starchy legacy of the
Puritans, who founded the school. Why not see if they have "The Joy of Sex"
somewhere in their stacks? Type
TI Joy of Sex
and hit enter. This comes up:
HU: YOUR SEARCH RETRIEVED NO ITEMS. Enter new command or HELP. You typed:
TI JOY OF SEX
***************************************************************************
ALWAYS PRESS THE ENTER OR RETURN KEY AFTER TYPING YOUR COMMAND.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
OPTIONS: FIND START - search options HELP
QUIT - exit database
COMMAND?
Oh, well! Do they have anything that mentions "sex" in the title? Try
another TI search, but this time just: `TI sex'. You get:
HU GUIDE: SUMMARY OF SEARCH RESULTS 2086 items retrieved by your search:
FIND TI SEX
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 SEX
2 SEX A
823 SEXA
827 SEXBO
831 SEXCE
833 SEXDR
834 SEXE
879 SEXIE
928 SEXJA
929 SEXLE
930 SEXO
965 SEXPI
968 SEXT
1280 SEXUA
2084 SEXWA
2085 SEXY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
OPTIONS: INDEX (or I 5 etc) to see list of items HELP
START - search options
REDO - edit search QUIT - exit database
COMMAND?
If you want to get more information on the first line, type 1 and hit
enter:
HU INDEX: LIST OF ITEMS RETRIEVED 2086 items retrieved by your search:
FIND TI SEX
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
SEX
1 geddes patrick sir 1854 1932/ 1914 bks
SEX A Z
2 goldenson robert m/ 1987 bks
SEX ABUSE HYSTERIA SALEM WITCH TRIALS REVISITED
3 gardner richard a/ 1991 bks
SEX AETATES MUNDI ENGLISH AND IRISH
4 irish sex aetates mundi/ 1983 bks
SEX AFTER SIXTY A GUIDE FOR MEN AND WOMEN FOR THEIR LATER YEARS
5 butler robert n 1927/ 1976 bks
------------------------------------------------------ (CONTINUES) --------
OPTIONS: DISPLAY 1 (or D 5 etc) to see a record HELP
GUIDE MORE - next page START - search options
REDO - edit search QUIT - exit database
COMMAND?
Most library systems give you a way to log off and return to your host
system. On Hollis, hit escape followed by
xx
One particularly interesting system is the one run by the Colorado
Alliance of Research Libraries, which maintains databases for libraries
throughout Colorado, the West and even in Boston.
Telnet `pac.carl.org'
Follow the simple log-in instructions. When you get a menu, type `72'
(even though that is not listed), which takes you to the Pikes Peak Library
District, which serves the city of Colorado Springs.
Several years ago, its librarians realized they could use their database
program not just for books but for cataloging city records and community
information, as well. Today, if you want to look up municipal ordinances or
city records, you only have to type in the word you're looking for and you'll
get back cites of the relevant laws or decisions.
Carl will also connect you to the University of Hawaii library, which,
like the one in Colorado Springs, has more than just bibliographic material
online. One of its features is an online Hawaiian almanac that can tell you
everything you ever wanted to know about Hawaiians, including the number
injured in boogie-board accidents each year (seven).
Òelnet Sites
============
Agriculture
-----------
PENPages, run by Pennsylvania State University's College of Agricultural
Sciences, provides weekly world weather and crop reports from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture. These reports detail everything from the effect of
the weather on palm trees in Malaysia to the state of the Ukrainian wheat
crop. Reports from Pennsylvania country extension officers offer tips for
improving farm life. One database lists Pennsylvania hay distributors by
county - and rates the quality of their hay!
The service lets you search for information two different ways. A menu
system gives you quick access to reports that change frequently, such as the
weekly crop/weather reports. An index system lets you search through several
thousand online documents by keyword. At the main menu, you can either browse
through an online manual or chose "PENPages," which puts you into the
agriculture system.
Telnet: `psupen.psu.edu'
User name: PNOTPA
California State University's Advanced Technology Information Network
provides similar information as PENPages, only focusing on California crops.
It also maintains lists of upcoming California trade shows and carries
updates on biotechnology.
Telnet: `caticsuf.cati.csufresno.edu'
Log in: public
You will then be asked to register and will be given a user name and
password. Hit `a' at the main menu for agricultural information. Hit `d' to
call up a menu that includes a biweekly biotechnology report.
AIDS
----
The University of Miami maintains a database of AIDS health providers in
southern Florida.
Telnet: `callcat.med.miami.edu'
Log in: library
At the main menu, select `P' (for "AIDS providers" and you'll be able to
search for doctors, hospitals and other providers that care for patients with
AIDS. You can also search by speciality.
See also under Health *Note Health:: and Conversation *Note Conversation::.
Amateur Radio
-------------
The National Ham Radio Call-Sign Callbook lets you search for American
amateur operators by callsign, city, last name or Zip code. A successful
search will give you the ham's name, address, callsign, age, type of license
and when they got it. Telnet: `callsign.buffalo.edu 2000' or `ham.njit.edu
2000'. When you connect, you tell the system how you want to search and what
you're looking for. For example, if you want to search for hams by city, you
would type
city city-name
and hit enter (for example: `city Kankakee').
Other search choices are "call" (after which you would type a ham's name),
"name," and "zip" (which you would follow with a Zip code). Be careful when
searching for hams in a large city; there doesn't seem to be anyway to shut
off the list once it starts except by using control-]. Otherwise, when done,
type
quit
and hit enter to disconnect.
Animals
-------
See under Health *Note Health::.
Art
---
The National Gallery of Art in Washington maintains a database of its
holdings, which you can search by artist (Van Gogh, for example) or medium
(watercolor, say). You can see when specific paintings were completed, what
medium they are in, how large they are and who donated it to the gallery.
Telnet: `ursus.maine.edu'
Login: ursus
At the main menu, hit your `b' key and then `4' to connect to the gallery
database.
Calculators
-----------
Hewlett-Packard maintains a free service on which you can seek advice
about their line of calculators.
Telnet: `hpcvbbs.cv.hp.com'
No log-in is needed.
Congress
--------
The Library of Congress Information Service lets you search current and
past legislation (dating to 1982).
Telnet: `locis.loc.gov'
Password: none needed.
When you connect, you'll get a main menu that lets you select from several
databases, including the Library of Congress card catalog (with book entries
dating to 1978) and a database of information on copyright laws.
For the congressional database, select the number next to its entry and
hit enter. You'll then be asked to choose which legislative year to search.
After that, a menu similar to this will come up:
***C103- THE LEGISLATIVE INFORMATION FILE FOR THE 103RD CONGRESS,
which was updated on 05/10/93 and contains 4,044 records,
is now available for your search.
CURRENCY: All information is NOT current through the above date, which is
machine generated when ANY information is added to the file.
Bill numbers, official titles, sponsors, and status (STEP) added
within 48 hours. Indexing terms and digests added later, in
some cases several weeks after the bill is added to the file.
TO START RETRIEVE to find: EXAMPLES:
SEARCH: member name --------------> retrieve rep gingrich
retrieve sen kennedy
bill number --------------> retrieve h.r. 1
subject keywords ---------> retrieve day care
FOR HELP: Type the word HELP and press the ENTER key.
READY FOR NEW COMMAND:
Conversation
------------
Communications Canada, a Canadian government agency is developing
Conversational Hypertext Access Technology (CHAT) is a system being developed
by Communications Canada to provide easy database access to people with
little or no computer experience, using what are known as hypertext links.
Instead of cryptic computer commands, users type questions in English.
Telnet: `debra.doc.ca'
Log in: chat
You chose one of the three databases now online, one on AIDS, and then ask
questions in English.
Ask the AIDS database, "When was AIDS first discovered?" and it answers:
"The first case of AIDS in North America was diagnosed in 1979. Before
that, it existed in Africa, probably beginning in the 1950's. AIDS was
discovered in North America when a number of young men with a history of
homosexuality developed a rare type of cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma."
Sometimes, you do have to rephrase your question. For example, when asked
"What is the link between AIDS and drug use?" the computer responds:
"I know two things about drugs: the drugs that are used to treat people
with AIDS, and the risks that drug users have in getting AIDS. Please ask
about treatments or drug users."
Copyright Law
-------------
See under Congress *Note Congress::.
Current Events
--------------
Every year, the CIA publishes a Fact Book that is essentially an almanac
of all the world's countries and international organizations, including such
information as major products, type of government and names of its leaders.
It's available for searching through the University of Maryland Info Database.
Telnet: `info.umd.edu'
User name: info
Chose a terminal type and hit enter (or just hit enter if you are using
VT100). At the main menu, choose the number next to "Government" and hit
enter. One of your options will then be for "Factbook." Chose that one, and
you can then search by country or agency.
Dictionary
----------
Rutgers University's Campus-Wide Information Service has an online
dictionary, thesaurus and database of familiar quotations, as well as online
copies of the Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon and the U.S.
Constitution.
Telnet: `info.rutgers.edu'
No log-in name is needed.
At the main menu, type
reference
and hit enter. You'll see a menu like this:
Online reference material
Menu Commands...
Command Purpose
------- -------
Dictionary Concise Oxford Dictionary, 8th Ed.
Thesaurus Oxford Thesaurus
Familiar Oxford Dictionary of Familiar Quotations (and Modern Q.)
World CIA World Factbook
US US government: Constitution, etc.
Religion Bible, Book of Mormon, Koran
For more information you may look under Libraries in the main menu
Previous Return to previous menu
Find Search for information
Source Age and provider of information. Where to go for more.
Quit Go back to main menu
Online reference material
Menu>
To access any of them, type its name (dictionary, for example) and hit
enter. You'll then be asked for the word to look for. If, instead, you type
religion
and hit enter, you'll be able to search for a word or passage from the
Bible, the Koran or the Book of Mormon.
Environment
-----------
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency maintains online databases of
materials related to hazardous waste, the Clean Lakes program and cleanup
efforts in New England. The agency plans to eventually include cleanup work
in other regions, as well. The database is actually a computerized card
catalog of EPA documents - you can look the documents up, but you'll still
have to visit your regional EPA office to see them.
Telnet: `epaibm.rtpnc.epa.gov'
No password or user name is needed.
At the main menu, type
public
and hit enter (there are other listed choices, but they are only for use
by EPA employees). You'll then see a one-line menu. Type
ols
and hit enter, and you'll see something like this:
NET-106 Logon to TSO04 in progress.
DATABASES:
N NATIONAL CATALOG CH CHEMICAL COLL. SYSTEM
H HAZARDOUS WASTE 1 REGION I
L CLEAN LAKES
OTHER OPTIONS:
? HELP
Q QUIT
ENTER SELECTION -->
Choose one and you'll get a menu that lets you search by document title,
keyword, year of publication or corporation. After you enter the search word
and hit enter, you'll be told how many matches were found. Hit 1 and then
enter to see a list of the entries. To view the bibliographic record for a
specific entry, hit V and enter and then type the number of the record.
The University of Michigan maintains a database of newspaper and magazine
articles related to the environment, with the emphasis on Michigan, dating
back to 1980.
Telnet: `hermes.merit.edu'
Host: mirlyn
Log in: meem
Geography
---------
The University of Michigan Geographic Name Server can provide basic
information, such as population, latitude and longitude of U.S. cities and
many mountains, rivers and other geographic features. Telnet:
`martini.eecs.umich.edu 3000'
No password or user name is needed. Type in the name of a city, a Zip code
or a geographic feature (Mt. McKinley, for example) and hit enter.
By typing in a town's name or zip code, you can find out a community's
county, Zip code and longitude and latitude. Not all geographic features are
yet included in the database.
Government
----------
See under Dictionary *Note Dictionary:: and Current Events *Note Current
Events::.
Health
------
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration runs a database of
health-information.
Telnet: `fdabbs.fda.gov'
Log in: bbs
You'll then be asked for your name and a password you want to use in the
future. After that, type
topics
and hit enter. You'll see this:
TOPICS DESCRIPTION
* NEWS News releases
* ENFORCE Enforcement Report
* APPROVALS Drug and Device Product Approvals list
* CDRH Centers for Devices and Radiological Health Bulletins
* BULLETIN Text from Drug Bulletin
* AIDS Current Information on AIDS
* CONSUMER FDA Consumer magazine index and selected articles
* SUBJ-REG FDA Federal Register Summaries by Subject
* ANSWERS Summaries of FDA information
* INDEX Index of News Releases and Answers
* DATE-REG FDA Federal Register Summaries by Publication Date
* CONGRESS Text of Testimony at FDA Congressional Hearings
* SPEECH Speeches Given by FDA Commissioner and Deputy
* VETNEWS Veterinary Medicine News
* MEETINGS Upcoming FDA Meetings
* IMPORT Import Alerts
* MANUAL On-Line User's Manual
You'll be able to search these topics by key word or chronologically. It's
probably a good idea, however, to capture a copy of the manual, first,
because the way searching works on the system is a little odd. To capture a
copy, type
manual
and hit enter. Then type
scan
and hit enter. You'll see this:
FOR LIST OF AVAILABLE TOPICS TYPE TOPICS
OR ENTER THE TOPIC YOU DESIRE ==>
MANUAL
BBSUSER
08-OCT-91
1 BBS User Manual
At this point, turn on your own computer's screen-capture or logging
function and hit your 1 key and then enter. The manual will begin to scroll
on your screen, pausing every 24 lines.
Hiring and College Program Information
--------------------------------------
The Federal Information Exchange in Gaithersburg, MD, runs two systems at
the same address: FEDIX and MOLIS. FEDIX offers research, scholarship and
service information for several federal agencies, including NASA, the
Department of Energy and the Federal Aviation Administration. Several more
federal agencies provide minority hiring and scholarship information. MOLIS
provides information about minority colleges, their programs and professors.
Telnet: `fedix.fie.com'
User name: fedix
(for the federal hiring database) or "molis" (for the minority-college
system). Both use easy menus to get you to information.
History
-------
Stanford University maintains a database of documents related to Martin
Luthor King.
Telnet: `forsythetn.stanford.edu'
Account: socrates
At the main menu, type `select mlk' and hit enter.
Quotations
----------
See under Dictionary.
Religion
--------
See under Dictionary *Note Dictionary::.
Ski Reports
-----------
See under Weather *Note Weather::.
Space
-----
NASA Spacelink in Huntsville, Ala., provides all sorts of reports and
data about NASA, its history and its various missions, past and present.
You'll find detailed reports on every single probe, satellite and mission
NASA has ever launched along with daily updates and lesson plans for teachers.
The system maintains a large file library of GIF-format space graphics,
but you can't download these through telnet. If you want them, you have to
dial the system directly, at (205) 895-0028.
Telnet: `spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov'
When you connect, you'll be given an overview of the system and asked to
register and chose a password.
The NED-NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database lists data on more than 100,000
galaxies, quasars and other objects outside the Milky Way.
Telnet: `ipac.caltech.edu'
Log in: ned
You can learn more than you ever wanted to about quasars, novae and
related objects on a system run by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
in Cambridge, Mass.
Telnet: `cfa204.harvard.edu'
Log in: einline
The physics department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst runs
a bulletin-board system that provides extensive conferences and document
libraries related to space.
Telnet: `spacemet.phast.umass.edu'
Log on with your name and a password.
Supreme Court Decisions
-----------------------
The University of Maryland Info Database maintains U.S. Supreme Court
decisions from 1991 on in its Government area.
Telnet: `info.umd.edu'
User name: info
Chose a terminal type and hit enter (or just hit enter if you are using
VT100). At the main menu, choose the number next to "Government" and hit
enter. One of your options will then be for "US." Select that number and
then, at the next menu, choose the one next to "Supreme Court."
Telnet Addresses
----------------
Hytelnet, at the University of Saskatchewan, is an online guide to
hundreds of telnet sites around the world.
Telnet: `access.usask.ca'
Log in: hytelnet
Thesaurus
---------
See under Dictionary *Note Dictionary::.
Time
----
To find out the exact time:
Telnet: `india.colorado.edu 13'
You'll see something like this:
Escape character is '^]'.
Sun Apr 5 14:11:41 1992
Connection closed by foreign host.
The middle line tells you the date and exact Mountain Standard Time, as
determined by a federal atomic clock.
If you want a more philosophical approach to your time, the U.S. Naval
Observatory's Automated Data Service has copies of detailed papers on such
things as "the nature of time." It also carries information on how to buy a
clock, along with arcana on such things as "leap seconds."
Telnet: `tycho.usno.navy.mil'
Log on: ads
After you log in and register, you'll get the following menu:
MAIN OPTIONS: info, note, ptti, exp, internet, nav, aust, tco, gps,
loran, omega, series, transit, astro, tv, soft, vlf, goes, gpsftp,
PAGE(/), HELP(?), COMMENT, EXIT(Bye)
Type
info
and hit enter for many of the text files.
Weather
-------
The University of Michigan's Department of Atmospheric, Oceanographic and
Space Sciences supplies weather forecasts for U.S. and foreign cities, along
with skiing and hurricane reports.
Telnet: `madlab.sprl.umich.edu 3000' (note the 3000)
No log-in name is needed.
*Note Weather (FTP):: in the FTP list for information on downloading
satellite and radar weather images.
Òelnet BBSs
===========
You might think that Usenet, with its hundreds of newsgroups, would be
enough to satisfy the most dedicated of online communicators.
But there are a number of "bulletin-board" and other systems that provide
even more conferences or other services, many not found directly on the Net.
Some are free; others charge for access. They include:
Cimarron
--------
Run by the Instituto Technical in Monterey, Mexico, this system has
Spanish conferences, but English commands, as you can see from this menu of
available conferences:
List of Boards
Name Title
General Board general
Dudas Dudas de Cimarron
Comentarios Comentarios al SYSOP
Musica Para los afinados........
Libros El sano arte de leer.....
Sistemas Sistemas Operativos en General.
Virus Su peor enemigo......
Cultural Espacio Cultural de Cimarron
NeXT El Mundo de NeXT
Ciencias Solo apto para Nerds.
Inspiracion Para los Romanticos e Inspirados.
Deportes Discusiones Deportivas
To be able to write messages and gain access to files, you have to leave a
note to SYSOP with your name, address, occupation and phone number. To do
this, at any prompt, hit your M key and then enter, which will bring up the
mail system. Hitting H brings up a list of commands and how to use them.
Telnet: `bugs.mty.itesm.mx' (8 p.m. to 10 a.m., Eastern time, only).
At the "login:" prompt, type `bbs' and hit enter.
Cleveland Free-Net
------------------
The first of a series of Freenets, this represents an ambitious attempt to
bring the Net to the public. Originally an in-hospital help network, it is
now sponsored by Case Western Reserve University, the city of Cleveland, the
state of Ohio and IBM. It uses simple menus, similar to those found on
CompuServe, but organized like a city:
<<< CLEVELAND FREE-NET DIRECTORY >>>
1 The Administration Building
2 The Post Office
3 Public Square
4 The Courthouse & Government Center
5 The Arts Building
6 Science and Technology Center
7 The Medical Arts Building
8 The Schoolhouse (Academy One)
9 The Community Center & Recreation Area
10 The Business and Industrial Park
11 The Library
12 University Circle
13 The Teleport
14 The Communications Center
15 NPTN/USA TODAY HEADLINE NEWS
------------------------------------------------
h=Help, x=Exit Free-Net, "go help"=extended help
Your Choice ==>
The system has a vast and growing collection of public documents, from
copies of U.S. and Ohio Supreme Court decisions to the Magna Carta and the
U.S. Constitution. It links residents to various government agencies and has
daily stories from USA Today. Beyond Usenet (found in the Teleport area), it
has a large collection of local conferences on everything from pets to
politics. And yes, it's free!
Telnet: `freenet-in-a.cwru.edu' or `freenet-in-b.cwru.edu'
When you connect to Free-Net, you can look around the system. However, if
you want to be able to post messages in its conferences or use e-mail, you
will have to apply in writing for an account. Information on this is
available when you connect.
Dialog
------
This commercial service offers access to a large variety of databases -
for a fairly sizable fee. You need a Dialog account to use the system
through the Net.
Telnet: `dialog.com'
DUBBS
-----
This is a bulletin-board system in Delft in the Netherlands. The
conferences and files are mostly in Dutch, but the help files and the system
commands themselves are in English.
Telnet: `tudrwa.tudelft.nl'
ISCA BBS
--------
Run by the Iowa Student Computer Association, it has more than 100
conferences, including several in foreign languages. After you register, hit
`K' for a list of available conferences and then `J' to join a particular
conference (you have to type in the name of the conference, not the number
next to it). Hitting H brings up information about commands.
Telnet `bbs.isca.uiowa.edu'
At the "login:" prompt, type `bbs' and hit enter.
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL)
----------------------------------
Itself a major Net access point in the San Francisco area, the WELL is
also a unique online community that maintains dozens of conferences on every
imaginable topic (seven devoted just to the Grateful Dead). WELL users are
intelligent and opinionated; discussions are often fast and furious. The
Electronic Frontier Foundation was basically started in a series of online
conversations on the WELL. Although it has a serious San Francisco flavor, it
has users from across the country (enough to support both East Coast and
Midwest conferences).
For its conferences, the WELL uses PicoSpan software, which presents
messages differently than rn or nn. When you enter a conference, you can
call up a list of "topics." Enter a topic number, and all of the messages
start scrolling down the screen, sort of like the music on an old-fashioned
player-piano. There is some online help, but new users are sent a written
manual. *Note Electronic Mail:: for information on access charges (one
advantage to connecting to the WELL through telnet is that unless you live in
the Bay Area, it is likely to be much cheaper than other access methods).
Telnet: `well.sf.ca.us'
*Note The Well:: if you're interested in an intimate look on The WELL.
Youngstown Free-Net
-------------------
The people who created Cleveland Free-Net sell their software for $1 to
anybody willing to set up a similar system. A number of cities now have their
own Free-Nets, including Youngstown, Ohio.
Telnet: `yfn.ysu.edu'
At the "login:" prompt, type `visitor' and hit enter.
Finger
======
This is a handy little program which lets you tell others more about you -
and which you can sometimes use to find out more about people whose names you
see on the Net. It uses the same concept as telnet or ftp. But it works with
only one file, called `.plan' (yes, with a period in front). This is a text
file you create with a text editor in your home directory. You can put your
phone number in there, or your address, or anything at all. To finger
somebody else's `.plan' file, type this at the command line:
finger email-address
where email-address is the person's e-mail address. You'll get back a
display that shows the last time the person was online, whether they've
gotten any new mail since that time and what, if anything, is in their
`.plan' file. Some people and institutions have come up with creative uses
for these `.plan' files, letting you do everything from checking the weather
in Massachusetts to getting the latest baseball standings. Try fingering
these e-mail addresses:
Latest National Weather Service weather forecasts for regions in
Massachusetts.
Locations and magnitudes of recent earthquakes around the world.
Current major-league baseball standings and results of the previous
day's games.
The day's events at NASA.
Finding Someone on the Net
==========================
So you have a friend and you want to find out if he has an Internet
account to which you can write? The quickest way may be to just pick up the
phone, call him and ask him. Although there are a variety of "white pages"
services available on the Internet, they are far from complete - college
students, users of commercial services such as CompuServe and many Internet
public-access sites, and many others simply won't be listed. Major e-mail
providers are working on a universal directory system, but that could be some
time away.
In the meantime, a couple of "white pages" services might give you some
leads, or even just entertain you as you look up famous people or long-lost
acquaintances.
The whois directory provides names, e-mail and postal mail address and
often phone numbers for people listed in it. To use it, telnet to
`internic.net'. No log-on is needed. The quickest way to use it is to type
whois name
at the prompt, where "name" is the last name or organization name you're
looking for.
Another service worth trying is the "knowbot" system reachable by telnet
to `nri.reston.va.us 185'. Again, no log-on is needed. This service
actually searches through a variety of other "white pages" systems, including
the user directory for MCIMail. To look for somebody, type
query name
`name' is the last name of the person you're looking for. You can get
details of other commands by hitting a question mark at the prompt.
Apart from the previously mentioned methods, there exist a periodical
posting on Usenet entitled "How to find people's E-mail addresses" that is
edited and maintained by JONATHAN I. KAMENS. It lists several alternatives
in order of success probability, to enable everybody to find everyone.
Just get `/pub/usenet/news.answers/finding-addresses' from `rtfm.mit.edu'.
*Note FTP:: to find out how to access this server. It's cross-posted each
month to `comp.mail.misc', `soc.net-people', `news.newusers.questions', and
the respective `*.answers' newsgroups.
When things go wrong:
=====================
* Nothing happens when you try to connect to a telnet site. The site
could be down for maintenance or problems.
* You get a "host unavailable" message. The telnet site is down for some
reason. Try again later.
* You get a "host unknown" message. Check your spelling of the site name.
* You type in a password on a telnet site that requires one, and you get a
"login incorrect" message. Try logging in again. If you get the
message again, hit your control and `]' keys at the same time to
disengage and return to your host system.
* You can't seem to disconnect from a telnet site. Use control-] to
disengage and return to your host system.
FYI:
====
The Usenet newsgroups `alt.internet.services' and `alt.bbs.internet' can
provide pointers to new telnet systems. Scott Yanoff periodically posts his
"Updated Internet Services List" in the former; Thomas Kreeger periodically
posts "Zamfield's Wonderfully Incomplete, Complete Internet BBS List" in the
latter newsgroup. The `alt.bbs.internet' newsgroup is also where you'll
find Aydin Edguer's compendium of Internet-BBS-related FAQs. Peter Scott,
who maintains the Hytelnet database, runs a mailing list about new telnet
services and changes in existing ones. To get on the list, send him a note
at .
*"Good literature is about Love and War.
Trash fiction is about Sex and Violence."*
-- Author Unknown
*"The world's as ugly as sin, and almost as delightful."*
-- Frederick Locker-Lampson
* FTP (Mining the Net, part II) *
*****************************
Hundreds of systems connected to Internet have file libraries, or
archives, accessible to the public. Much of this consists of free or low-cost
shareware programs for virtually every make of computer. If you want a
different communications program for your IBM, or feel like playing a new
game on your Amiga, you'll be able to get it from the Net.
But there are also libraries of documents as well. If you want a copy of
a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, you can find it on the Net. Copies of
historical documents, from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence
are also yours for the asking, along with a translation of a telegram from
Lenin ordering the execution of rebellious peasants. You can also find song
lyrics, poems, even summaries of every "Lost in Space" episode ever made.
You can also find extensive files detailing everything you could ever
possibly want to know about the Net itself. First you'll see how to get
these files; then we'll show you where they're kept.
The commonest way to get these files is through the file transfer
protocol, or ftp. As with telnet, not all systems that connect to the Net
have access to ftp. However, if your system is one of these, you'll be able
to get many of these files through e-mail (*note Advanced E-mail::.).
Starting ftp is as easy as using telnet. At your host system's command
line, type
ftp site.name
and hit enter, where "site.name" is the address of the ftp site you want
to reach. One major difference between telnet and ftp is that it is
considered bad form to connect to most ftp sites during their business hours
(generally 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. local time). This is because transferring files
across the network takes up considerable computing power, which during the
day is likely to be needed for whatever the computer's main function is.
There are some ftp sites that are accessible to the public 24 hours a day,
though. You'll find these noted in the list of ftp sites.
How do you find a file you want, though?
Until a few years ago, this could be quite the pain - there was no master
directory to tell you where a given file might be stored on the Net. Who'd
want to slog through hundreds of file libraries looking for something?
ALAN EMTAGE, BILL HEELAN and PETER DEUTSCH, students at McGill University
in Montreal, asked the same question. Unlike the weather, though, they did
something about it.
They created a database system, called archie, that would periodically
call up file libraries and basically find out what they had available.
In turn, anybody could dial into archie, type in a file name, and see
where on the Net it was available. Archie currently catalogs close to 1,000
file libraries around the world.
Today, there are three ways to ask archie to find a file for you: through
telnet, "client" Archie program on your own host system or e-mail. All three
methods let you type in a full or partial file name and will tell you where
on the Net it's stored. If you have access to telnet, you can telnet to one
of the following addresses: `archie.mcgill.ca'; `archie.sura.net';
`archie.unl.edu'; `archie.ans.net'; or `archie.rutgers.edu'. If asked for a
log-in name, type
archie
and hit enter.
When you connect, the key command is prog, which you use in this form:
prog filename
followed by enter, where "filename" is the program or file you're looking
for. If you're unsure of a file's complete name, try typing in part of the
name. For example, `PKZIP' will work as well as `PKZIP201.EXE'. The system
does not support DOS or Unix wildcards. If you ask archie to look for
`PKZIP*', it will tell you it couldn't find anything by that name. One thing
to keep in mind is that a file is not necessarily the same as a program - it
could also be a document. This means you can use archie to search for, say,
everything online related to the Beetles, as well as computer programs and
graphics files.
A number of Net sites now have their own archie programs that take your
request for information and pass it onto the nearest archie database - ask
your system administrator if s/he has it online. These "client" programs seem
to provide information a lot more quickly than the actual archie itself! If
it is available, at your host system's command line, type
archie -s filename
where filename is the program or document you're looking for, and hit
enter. The `-s' tells the program to ignore case in a file name and lets you
search for partial matches. You might actually want to type it this way:
archie -s filename |more
which will stop the output every screen (handy if there are many sites
that carry the file you want). Or you could open a file on your computer
with your text-logging function.
The third way, for people without access to either of the above, is e-mail.
Send a message to . You can leave the subject
line blank. Inside the message, type
prog filename
where filename is the file you're looking for. You can ask archie to look
up several programs by putting their names on the same "prog" line, like this:
prog file1 file2 file3
Within a few hours, archie will write back with a list of the appropriate
sites.
In all three cases, if there is a system that has your file, you'll get a
response that looks something like this:
Host sumex-aim.stanford.edu
Location: /info-mac/comm
FILE -rw-r--r-- 258256 Feb 15 17:07 zterm-09.hqx
Location: /info-mac/misc
FILE -rw-r--r-- 7490 Sep 12 1991 zterm-sys7-color-icons.hqx
Chances are, you will get a number of similar looking responses for each
program. The "host" is the system that has the file. The "Location" tells
you which directory to look in when you connect to that system. Ignore the
funny-looking collections of r's and hyphens for now. After them, come the
size of the file or directory listing in bytes, the date it was uploaded, and
the name of the file.
Now you want to get that file.
Assuming your host site does have ftp, you connect in a similar fashion to
telnet, by typing:
ftp sumex-aim.stanford.edu
(or the name of whichever site you want to reach). Hit enter. If the
connection works, you'll see this:
Connected to sumex-aim.stanford.edu.
220 SUMEX-AIM FTP server (Version 4.196 Mon Jan 13 13:52:23 PST 1992) ready.
Name (sumex-aim.stanford.edu:adamg):
If nothing happens after a minute or so, hit control-C to return to your
host system's command line. But if it has worked, type
anonymous
and hit enter. You'll see a lot of references on the Net to "anonymous
ftp." This is how it gets its name - you don't really have to tell the
library site what your name is. The reason is that these sites are set up so
that anybody can gain access to certain public files, while letting people
with accounts on the sites to log on and access their own personal files.
Next, you'll be asked for your tpassword. As a password, use your e-mail
address. This will then come up:
230 Guest connection accepted. Restrictions apply.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp>
Now type
ls
and hit enter. You'll see something awful like this:
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
total 2636
-rw-rw-r-- 1 0 31 4444 Mar 3 11:34 README.POSTING
dr-xr-xr-x 2 0 1 512 Nov 8 11:06 bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 11030960 Apr 2 14:06 core
dr--r--r-- 2 0 1 512 Nov 8 11:06 etc
drwxrwsr-x 5 13 22 512 Mar 19 12:27 imap
drwxr-xr-x 25 1016 31 512 Apr 4 02:15 info-mac
drwxr-x--- 2 0 31 1024 Apr 5 15:38 pid
drwxrwsr-x 13 0 20 1024 Mar 27 14:03 pub
drwxr-xr-x 2 1077 20 512 Feb 6 1989 tmycin
226 Transfer complete.
ftp>
Ack! Let's decipher this Rosetta Stone.
First, ls is the ftp command for displaying a directory (you can actually
use dir as well, but if you're used to MS-DOS, this could lead to confusion
when you try to use dir on your host system, where it won't work, so it's
probably better to just remember to always use ls for a directory while
online).
The very first letter on each line tells you whether the listing is for a
directory or a file. If the first letter is a `d', or an `l', it's a
directory. Otherwise, it's a file.
The rest of that weird set of letters and dashes consist of "flags" that
tell the ftp site who can look at, change or delete the file. You can safely
ignore it. You can also ignore the rest of the line until you get to the
second number, the one just before the date. This tells you how large the
file is, in bytes. If the line is for a directory, the number gives you a
rough indication of how many items are in that directory - a directory
listing of 512 bytes is relatively small. Next comes the date the file or
directory was uploaded, followed (finally!) by its name.
Notice the `README.POSTING' file up at the top of the directory. Most
archive sites have a "read me" document, which usually contains some basic
information about the site, its resources and how to use them. Let's get
this file, both for the information in it and to see how to transfer files
from there to here. At the ftp> prompt, type
get README
and hit enter. Note that ftp sites are no different from Unix sites in
general: they are case-sensitive. You'll see something like this:
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for README (4444 bytes).
226 Transfer complete. 4444 bytes received in 1.177seconds (3.8 Kbytes/s)
And that's it! The file is now located in your home directory on your host
system, from which you can now download it to your own computer. The simple
`get' command is the key to transferring a file from an archive site to your
host system.
If the first letter on the line starts with a `d', then that is a
directory you can enter to look for more files. If it starts with an `r',
then it's a file you can get. The next item of interest is the fifth column,
which tells you how large the item is in bytes. That's followed by the date
and time it was loaded to the archive, followed, finally, by its name. Many
sites provide a `README' file that lists simple instructions and available
files. Some sites use files named `Index' or `INDEX' or something similar.
If you want to download more than one file at a time (say a series of
documents, use mget instead of get; for example:
mget *.txt
This will transfer copies of every file ending with .txt in the given
directory. Before each file is copied, you'll be asked if you're sure you
want it. Despite this, mget could still save you considerable time - you
won't have to type in every single file name.
There is one other command to keep in mind. If you want to get a copy of
a computer program, type
bin
and hit enter. This tells the ftp site and your host site that you are
sending a binary file, i.e., a program. Most ftp sites now use binary format
as a default, but it's a good idea to do this in case you've connected to one
of the few that doesn't.
To switch to a directory, type
cd directory-name
(substituting the name of the directory you want to access) and hit enter.
Type
ls
and hit enter to get the file listing for that particular directory. To
move back up the directory tree, type
cd ..
(note the space between the d and the first period) and hit enter. Or you
could type
cdup
and hit enter. Keep doing this until you get to the directory of
interest. Alternately, if you already know the directory path of the file
you want (from our friend archie), after you connect, you could simply type
get directory/subdirectory/filename
On many sites, files meant for public consumption are in the pub or public
directory; sometimes you'll see an info directory.
Almost every site has a bin directory, which at first glance sounds like a
bin in which interesting stuff might be dumped. But it actually stands for
"binary" and is simply a place for the system administrator to store the
programs that run the ftp system. Lost+found is another directory that looks
interesting but actually never has anything of public interest in them.
Before, you saw how to use archie. From our example, you can see that
some system administrators go a little berserk when naming files.
Fortunately, there's a way for you to rename the file as it's being
transferred. Using our archie example, you'd type
get zterm-sys7-color-icons.hqx zterm.hqx
and hit enter. Instead of having to deal constantly with a file called
`zterm-sys7-color-icons. hqx', you'll now have one called, simply,
`zterm.hqx'.
Those last three letters bring up something else: Many program files are
compressed to save on space and transmission time. In order to actually use
them, you'll have to use an un-compress program on them first.
There are a wide variety of compression methods in use. You can tell
which method was used by the last one to three letters at the end of a file.
Here are some of the more common ones and what you'll need to un-compress the
files they create (and these decompression programs can all be located
through archie).
`.txt'
`.TXT'
By itself, this means the file is a document, rather than a program.
`.ps'
`.PS'
A PostScript document (in Adobe's page description language). You can
print this file on any PostScript capable printer, or use a previewer,
like GNU project's GhostScript.
`.doc'
`.DOC'
Is another common suffix for documents. No de-compression is needed,
unless it is followed by
`.Z'
This is a Unix compression method. To uncompress the file, type
`uncompress filename.Z' and hit enter at your host system's command
prompt. If it's a text file, you can read it online by typing `zcat
file.txt.Z |more' at your host system's command line. There is a
Macintosh program called "MacCompress" that you can use on your machine
if you want to download the file (use archie to find where you can get
it!). There's an MS-DOS equivalent, often found as `u16.ZIP', which
means it is itself compressed in the ZIP format.
`.zip'
`.ZIP'
An MS-DOS format. Use the PKZIP package (usually found as `PKZ201.exe'
or something similar).
`.gz'
The GNU project's compression format. A variant of the PKZIP format. Use
`gunzip filename.gz' to uncompress.
`.zoo'
`.ZOO'
A Unix and MS-DOS format. Requires the use of a program called zoo.
`.Hqx'
`.hqx'
A Macintosh format that needs BinHex for de-compression.
`.shar'
`.Shar'
A Unix format. Use unshar.
`.tar'
Another Unix format, often used to compress several related files into
one big file. Use tar. Often, a "tarred" file will also be compressed
with the `.Z' method, so you first have to use uncompress and then tar.
`.TAZ'
Sometimes used for compressed tar archives `.tar.Z', that are stored on
"3 letter suffix only systems" (aka MS-DOS).
`.sit'
`.Sit'
A Macintosh format, requires StuffIt.
`.ARC'
A DOS format that requires the use of ARC or ARCE.
`.LHZ'
Another DOS compression format; requires the use of LHARC.
A few last words of caution: Check the size of a file before you get it.
The Net moves data at phenomenal rates of speed. But that 500,000-byte file
that gets transferred to your host system in a few seconds could take more
than an hour or two to download to your computer if you're using a 2400-baud
modem. Your host system may also have limits on the amount of bytes you can
store online at any one time. Also, although it is really extremely unlikely
you will ever get a file infected with a virus, if you plan to do much
downloading over the Net, you'd be wise to invest in a good anti-viral
program, just in case.
Òhe Keyboard Cabal
==================
System administrators are like everybody else - they try to make things
easier for themselves. And when you sit in front of a keyboard all day, that
can mean trying everything possible to reduce the number of keys you actually
have to hit each day.
Unfortunately, that can make it difficult for the rest of us.
Connect to many ftp sites, and one of the entries you'll often see is a
directory named `bin'.
You might think this is a bin where interesting things get thrown. It's
not. "Bin" is short for "binary," i.e., the programs that make the ftp site
work, to which you won't have access anyway.
Etc is another seemingly interesting directory that turns out to be
another place to store files used by the ftp site itself. `lost+found'
directories are used by Unix systems for some routine housekeeping - again,
nothing of any real interest.
Then, once you get into the actual file libraries, you'll find that in
many cases, files will have such non-descriptive names as `V1.1-AK.TXT'. The
best known example is probably a set of several hundred files known as RFCs,
which provide the basic technical and organizational information on which
much of the Internet is built. These files can be found on many ftp sites,
but always in a form such as `RFC101.TXT', `RFC102.TXT' and so on, with no
clue whatsoever as to what information they contain.
Fortunately, almost all ftp sites have a "Rosetta Stone" to help you
decipher these names. Most will have a file named `README' (or some variant)
that gives basic information about the system. Then, most directories will
either have a similar `README' file or will have an index that does give
brief descriptions of each file. These are usually the first file in a
directory and often are in the form `00INDEX.TXT'. Use the ftp command to
get this file. You can then scan it online or download it to see which files
you might be interested in.
Another file you will frequently see is called `ls-lgR.Z'. This contains
a listing of every file on the system, but without any descriptions (the name
comes from the Unix command `ls -lgR', which gives you a listing of all the
files in all your directories). The `.Z' at the end means the file has been
compressed, which means you will have to use a Unix un-compress command
before you can read the file.
And finally, we have those system administrators who almost seem to
delight in making things difficult - the ones who take full advantage of
Unix's ability to create absurdly long file names. On some FTP sites, you
will see file names as long as 80 characters or so, full of capital letters,
underscores and every other orthographic device that will make it almost
impossible for you to type the file name correctly when you try to get it.
Your secret weapon here is the mget command. Just type mget, a space, and
the first five or six letters of the file name, followed by an asterisk, for
example:
mget This_F*
The FTP site will ask you if you want to get the file that begins with that
name. If there are several files that start that way, you might have to
answer `n' a few times, but it's still easier than trying to recreate a
ludicrously long file name.
FTP Sites
=========
What follows is a list of some interesting ftp sites, arranged by
category. With hundreds of ftp sites now on the Net, however, this list
barely scratches the surface of what is available. Liberal use of archie
will help you find specific files.
The times listed for each site are in Eastern time and represent the
periods during which it is considered acceptable to connect.
Amiga
-----
`ftp.uu.net' Has Amiga programs in the `systems/amiga' directory.
Available 24 hours.
Atari
-----
`atari.archive.umich.edu' Find almost all the Atari files you'll ever
need, in the `atari' directory. 7 p.m. - 7 a.m.
Books
-----
`pit-manager.mit.edu' (aka `rtfm.mit.edu') The `pub/usenet/rec.arts.books'
directory has reading lists for various authors as well as lists of
recommended bookstores in different cities. Unfortunately, this site uses
incredibly long file names - so long they may scroll off the end of your
screen if you are using an MS-DOS or certain other computers. Even if you
want just one of the files, it probably makes more sense to use mget than get.
This way, you will be asked on each file whether you want to get it;
otherwise you may wind up frustrated because the system will keep telling you
the file you want doesn't exist (since you may miss the end of its name due
to the scrolling problem). 6 p.m. - 6 a.m.
Computer Ethics
---------------
`ftp.eff.org' The home of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Use cd to
get to the pub directory and then look in the EFF, SJG and CPSR directories
for documents on the EFF itself and various issues related to the Net, ethics
and the law. Available 24 hours.
Consumer
--------
`pit-manager.mit.edu' The `pub/usenet/misc.consumers' directory has
documents related to credit. The `pub/usenet/rec.travel.air' directory will
tell you how to deal with airline reservation clerks, find the best prices on
seats, etc. See under Books for a caveat in using this ftp site. 6 p.m. - 6
a.m.
Cooking
-------
`wuarchive.wustl.edu' Look for recipes and recipe directories in the
`usenet/rec.food.cooking/ recipes' directory.
`gatekeeper.dec.com' Recipes are in the `pub/recipes' directory.
Esperanto
---------
`ftp.stack.urc.tue.nl' You'll find text files about the Esperanto
artificial language in the `pub/ esperanto' directory. 6 p.m. - 6 a.m.
Evolutionary Computation
------------------------
`lumpi.informatik.uni-dortmund.de' If you're interested in one possible
future of computation, and also are interested in global optimization
problems, evolutionary biology and genetics, you might want to take a look at
this server. For an overview on the field, you should get the file
`pub/EA/docs/hhgtec.ps.Z', aka "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Evolutionary
Computation". Available 24 hours.
FTP Addresses
-------------
`iraun1.ira.uka.de' Run by the computer-science department of the
University of Karlsruhe in Germany, this site offers lists of anonymous-FTP
sites both internationally (in the `anon.ftp.sites' directory) and in Germany
(in `anon.ftp.sites.de'). 12 p.m. to 2 a.m.
`ftp.netcom.com' The `pub/profiles' directory has lists of ftp sites.
Government
----------
`ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu' The `SENATE' directory contains bibliographic records
of U.S. Senate hearings and documents for the past several Congresses. Get
the file `README.DOS9111', which will explain the cryptic file names. 6 p.m.
- 6 a.m.
`nptn.org' The General Accounting Office (GAO) is the investigative wing of
Congress. The `pub/e.texts/gao.reports' directory represents an experiment
by the agency to use ftp to distribute its reports. Available 24 hours.
History
-------
`nptn.org' This site has a large, growing collecting of text files. In
the `pub/e.texts/freedom. shrine' directory, you'll find copies of important
historical documents, from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence
and the Emancipation Proclamation. Available 24 hours.
`ra.msstate.edu' Mississippi State maintains an eclectic database of
historical documents, detailing everything from Attilla's battle strategy to
songs of soldiers in Vietnam, in the `docs/history' directory. 6 p.m. - 6
a.m.
`seq1.loc.gov' The Library of Congress has acquired numerous documents
from the former Soviet government and has translated many of them into
English. In the `pub/soviet.archive/text. english' directory, you'll find
everything from telegrams from Lenin ordering the death of peasants to
Khrushhchev's response to Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. The
`README' file in the `pub/soviet.archive' directory provides an index to the
documents. 6 p.m. - 6 a.m.
Hong Kong
---------
`nok.lcs.mit.edu' GIF pictures of Hong Kong pop stars, buildings and
vistas are available in the `pub/hongkong/HKPA' directory. 6 p.m. - 6 a.m.
Internet
--------
`ftp.eff.org' The `pub/internet-info' directory has a number of documents
explaining the Internet and Usenet. Available 24 hours.
`nic.ddn.mil' The `internet-drafts' directory contains information about
Internet, while the `scc' directory holds network security bulletins. 6 p.m.
- 6 a.m.
Law
---
`info.umd.edu' U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 1989 to the present are
stored in the `info/Government/US/SupremeCt' directory. Each term has a
separate directory (for example, `term1992'). Get the `README' and `Index'
files to help decipher the case numbers. 6 p.m. - 6 a.m.
`ftp.uu.net' Supreme Court decisions are in the court-opinions directory.
You'll want to get the index file, which tells you which file numbers go with
which file names. The decisions come in Word Perfect and Atex format only.
Available 24 hours a day.
Libraries
---------
`ftp.unt.edu' The library directory contains numerous lists of libraries
with computerized card catalogs accessible through the Net.
Literature
----------
`nptn.org' In the `pub/e.texts/gutenberg/etext91' and `etext92'
directories, you can get copies of Aesop's Fables, works by Lewis Carroll and
other works of literature, as well as the Book of Mormon. Available 24 hours.
`world.std.com' The `obi' directory has everything from online fables to
accounts of Hiroshima survivors. 6 p.m. - 6 a.m.
Macintosh
---------
`sumex-aim.stanford.edu' This is the premier site for Macintosh software.
After you log in, switch to the info-mac directory, which will bring up a
long series of sub-directories of virtually every free and shareware Mac
program you could ever want. 9 p.m. - 9 a.m.
`ftp.uu.net' Carries copies, or "mirrors" of Macintosh programs from the
Simtel20 collection in the `systems/mac/simtel20' directory. Available 24
hours a day.
Movie Reviews
-------------
`lcs.mit.edu' Look in the movie-reviews directory. 6 p.m. - 6 a.m.
MS-DOS
------
`wuarchive.wustl.edu' This carries one of the world's largest collections
of MS-DOS software. The files are actually copied, or "mirrored" from a
computer at the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range (which uses ftp
software that is totally incomprehensible). It also carries large
collections of Macintosh, Windows, Atari, Amiga, Unix, OS9, CP/M and Apple II
software. Look in the mirrors and systems directories. The `gif' directory
contains a large number of GIF graphics images. Accessible 24 hours.
`ftp.uu.net' Carries copies, or "mirrors" of MS-DOS programs from the
Simtel20 collection in the `systems/msdos/simtel20' directory. Available 24
hours a day.
Music
-----
`cs.uwp.edu' The `pub/music' directory has everything from lyrics of
contemporary songs to recommended CDs of baroque music. It's a little
different - and easier to navigate - than other ftp sites. File and
directory names are on the left, while on the right, you'll find a brief
description of the file or directory, like this:
SITES 1528 Other music-related FTP archive sites
classical/ - (dir) Classical Buying Guide
database/ - (dir) Music Database program
discog/ = (dir) Discographies
faqs/ = (dir) Music Frequently Asked questions files
folk/ - (dir) Folk Music Files and pointers
guitar/ = (dir) Guitar TAB files from ftp.nevada.edu
info/ = (dir) rec.music.info archives
interviews/ - (dir) Interviews with musicians/groups
lists/ = (dir) Mailing lists archives
lyrics/ = (dir) Lyrics Archives
misc/ - (dir) Misc files that don't fit anywhere else
pictures/ = (dir) GIFS, JPEGs, PBMs and more.
press/ - (dir) Press Releases and misc articles
programs/ - (dir) Misc music-related programs for various machines
releases/ = (dir) Upcoming USA release listings
sounds/ = (dir) Short sound samples
226 Transfer complete.
ftp>
When you switch to a directory, don't include the `/'. 7 p.m. - 7 a.m.
`potemkin.cs.pdx.edu' The Bob Dylan archive. Interviews, notes,
year-by-year accounts of his life and more, in the `pub/dylan' directory. 9
p.m. - 9 a.m.
`ftp.nevada.edu' Guitar chords for contemporary songs are in the
`pub/guitar' directory, in subdirectories organized by group or artist.
Pets
----
`pit-manager.mit.edu' The `pub/usenet/rec.pets.dogs' and
`pub/usenet.rec.pets.cats' directories have documents on the respective
animals. See under Books *Note Books:: for a caveat in using this ftp site.
6 p.m. - 6 a.m.
Pictures
--------
`wuarchiv.wustl.edu' The `graphics/gif' directory contains hundreds of GIF
photographic and drawing images, from cartoons to cars, space images to pop
stars. These are arranged in a long series of subdirectories.
Photography
-----------
`ftp.nevada.edu' Photolog is an online digest of photography news, in the
`pub/photo' directory.
Religion
--------
`nptn.org' In the `pub/e.texts/religion' directory, you'll find
subdirectories for chapters and books of both the Bible and the Koran.
Available 24 hours.
Sex
---
`pit-manager.mit.edu' Look in the `pub/usenet/alt.sex' and
`pub/usenet/alt.sex.wizards' directories for documents related to all facets
of sex. See under Books *Note Books:: for a caveat in using this ftp site. 6
p.m. - 6 a.m.
Science Fiction
---------------
`elbereth.rutgers.edu' In the pub/sfl directory, you'll find plot
summaries for various science-fiction TV shows, including Star Trek (not only
the original and Next Generation shows, but the cartoon version as well),
Lost in Space, Battlestar Galactica, the Twilight Zone, the Prisoner and
Doctor Who. There are also lists of various things related to science
fiction and an online science-fiction fanzine. 6 p.m. - 6 a.m.
Shakespeare
-----------
`atari.archive.umich.edu' The shakespeare directory contains most of the
Bard's works. A number of other sites have his works as well, but generally
as one huge mega-file. This site breaks them down into various categories
(comedies, poetry, histories, etc.) so that you can download individual plays
or sonnets.
Space
-----
`ames.arc.nasa.gov' Stores text files about space and the history of the
NASA space program in the `pub/SPACE' subdirectory. In the `pub/GIF' and
`pub/SPACE/GIF' directories, you'll find astronomy- and NASA-related GIF
files, including pictures of planets, satellites and other celestial objects.
9 p.m. - 9 a.m.
Spain
-----
`goya.dit.upm.es' This Spanish site carries an updated list of
bulletin-board systems in Spain, as well as information about European
computer networks, in the `info/doc/net' subdirectory, mostly in Spanish.
The BBS list is `bbs.Z', which means you will have to uncompress it to read
it. Available 24 hours.
TeX
---
`ftp.tex.ac.uk' in `pub/archive', `ftp.uni-stuttgart.de' in `tex-archive',
and `ftp.shsu.edu' in `soft/tex' form the CTAN (comprehensive TeX archive
network), that always has the latest TeX version (and everything that comes
with it) available. They are continuously updated, i.e. they are "mirrors"
of the primary TeX archive at Stanford University.
TV
--
`coe.montana.edu' The `pub/TV/Guides' directory has histories and other
information about dozens of TV shows. Only two anonymous-ftp log-ins are
allowed at a time, so you might have to try more than once to get in. 8 p.m.
- 8 a.m.
`ftp.cs.widener.edu' The `pub/simpsons' directory has more files than
anybody could possibly need about Bart and family. The `pub/strek' directory
has files about the original and Next Generation shows as well as the movies.
See also under Science Fiction *Note Science Fiction::.
Travel
------
`nic.stolaf.edu' Before you take that next overseas trip, you might want
to see whether the State Department has issued any kind of advisory for the
countries on your itinerary. The advisories, which cover everything from
hurricane damage to civil war, are in the `pub/travel-advisories/ advisories'
directory, arranged by country. 7 p.m. - 7 a.m.
Usenet
------
`ftp.uu.net' In the usenet directory, you'll find "frequently asked
questions" files, copied from `pit-manager.mit.edu'. The communications
directory holds programs that let MS-DOS users connect directly with UUCP
sites. In the info directory, you'll find information about ftp and ftp
sites. The inet directory contains information about Internet. Available 24
hours.
`pit-manager.mit.edu' This site contains all available FAQs "frequently
asked questions" files for Usenet newsgroups in the `pub/usenet' directory.
For easy access, get the `index' file. See under Books *Note Books:: for a
caveat in using this ftp site. 6 p.m. - 6 a.m.
Viruses
-------
`ftp.unt.edu' The antivirus directory has anti-virus programs for MS-DOS
and Macintosh computers. 7 p.m. - 7 a.m.
Weather
-------
`vmd.cso.uiuc.edu' No password needed. The wx directory contains GIF
weather images of North America. Files are updated hourly and take this
general form: `CV100222'. The first two letters tell the type of file: CV
means it is a visible-light photo taken by a weather satellite. CI images
are similar, but use infrared light. Both these are in black and white.
Files that begin with SA are color radar maps of the U.S. that show severe
weather patterns but also fronts and temperatures in major cities. The
numbers indicate the date and time (in GMT - five hours ahead of EST) of the
image: the first two numbers represent the month, the next two the date, the
last two the hour. The file `WXKEY.GIF' explains the various symbols in SA
files.
X Windows
---------
`ftp.x.org' The default server for MIT's X Window System. See under `/pub'.
`ftp.germany.eu.net' Germany's backbone site located at the University of
Dortmund, in the European part of the Internet; the so-called EUnet. It's
also Germany's default server for X window system releases, and also
"mirrors" several important sites; e.g. in `pub/packages/gnu' the GNU
project's default server. Furthermore you'll find "mirrors" of `386BSD',
`NetBSD', and `Linux'. Available 24 hours.
When things go wrong:
=====================
* You get a "host unavailable" message. The ftp site is down for some
reason. Try again later.
* You get a "host unknown" message. Check your spelling of the site name.
* You misspell "anonymous" when logging in and get a message telling you a
password is required for whatever you typed in. Type something in, hit
enter, type bye, hit enter, and try again.
FYI:
====
Liberal use of archie will help you find specific files or documents. For
information on new or interesting ftp sites, try the `comp.archives'
newsgroup on Usenet. You can also look in the `comp.misc',
`comp.sources.wanted' or `news.answers' newsgroups on Usenet for lists of ftp
sites posted every month by TOM CZARNIK and JON GRANROSE.
The `comp.archives' newsgroup carries news of new ftp sites and
interesting new files on existing sites.
In the `comp.virus' newsgroup on Usenet, look for postings that list ftp
sites carrying anti-viral software for Amiga, MS-DOS, Macintosh, Atari and
other computers.
The `comp.sys.ibm.pc.digest' and `comp.sys.mac.digest' newsgroups provide
information about new MS-DOS and Macintosh programs as well as answers to
questions from users of those computers.
*"Welch ein Ort zum Pluendern!"
(What a place to plunder!)*
-- General Gebhard Leberecht von Bluecher
* Gophers, WAISs and the World-Wide Web *
*************************************
Even with tools like Hytelnet and archie, telnet and ftp can still be
frustrating. There are all those telnet and ftp addresses to remember.
Telnet services often have their own unique commands. And, oh, those weird
directory and file names!
But now that the Net has become a rich repository of information, people
are looking at ways to make it far easier to find all that data. Gophers and
Wide-Area Information Servers (WAISs) are two programs that could ultimately
make the Internet as easy to navigate as commercial networks like CompuServe
or Prodigy.
Both programs essentially take a request for information and then scan the
Net for it, so you don't have to. Both also work through menus - instead of
typing in some long sequence of characters, you just move a cursor to your
choice and hit enter. Newer gophers even let you select files and programs
from ftp sites this way.
Let's look at gophers first.
Many public-access sites now have gophers online. To use one, type
gopher
at the command line and hit enter. If you know your site does not have a
gopher, or if nothing happens when you type that, telnet to
consultant.micro.umn.edu
At the log-in prompt, type
gopher
and hit enter. You'll be asked what type of terminal emulation you're
using, after which you'll see something like this:
Internet Gopher Information Client v1.03
Root gopher server: gopher.micro.umn.edu
--> 1. Information About Gopher/
2. Computer Information/
3. Discussion Groups/
4. Fun & Games/
5. Internet file server (ftp) sites/
6. Libraries/
7. News/
8. Other Gopher and Information Servers/
9. Phone Books/
10. Search lots of places at the U of M
11. University of Minnesota Campus Information/
Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 1/1
Gophers are great for exploring. Just keep making choices to see what
pops up. Play with it; see where it takes you. Some choices will be
documents. When you read one of these and either come to the end or hit a
lower-case `q' to quit reading it, you'll be given the choice of saving a
copy to your home directory or e-mailing it to yourself. Other choices are
simple databases that let you enter a word to look for in a particular
database.
Notice that one of your choices is "Internet file server (ftp) sites."
Choose this, and you'll be connected to a modified archie program - an archie
with a difference. When you search for a file through a gopher archie,
you'll get a menu of sites that have the file you're looking for, just as
with the old archie. Only now, instead of having to write down or remember
an ftp address and directory, all you have to do is position the cursor next
to one of the numbers in the menu and hit enter. You'll be connected to the
ftp site, from which you can then choose the file you want, again just by
making a choice in a menu.
You'll be asked for a name in your home directory to use for the file,
after which the file will be copied to your home system. Unfortunately, this
file-transfer process does not yet work with all public-access sites for
computer programs and compressed files. If it doesn't work with yours, you'll
have to get the file the old-fashioned way, via ftp.
The letter u is an important one to remember while navigating a gopher -
it moves you back up a gopher directory tree, much like cd .. on an ftp site.
In addition to ftp sites, there are now scores of databases and libraries
around the world accessible through gophers. There is not yet a common
gopher interface for library catalogs, so be prepared to follow the online
directions more closely when you use gopher to connect to one.
Some gopher menu choices will end with a . This means that if you
select it, you'll be starting up a simple database that can search through the
given service by keyword.
So many services are now available through gophers, that finding what you
want has become difficult. Fortunately, you can use veronica, a laboriously
constructed acronym that does for "gopherspace" what archie (there is no
betty, yet) did for files. You'll usually find veronicas (there are now
several) under "Other gopher and information services." When you call up a
veronica, tell her (it?) the keyword or words you're interested in, and she/it
will search all available databases for it. For example, say you want to
impress company tonight and make cherries flambe. If you were to type in
"flambe" after calling up veronica, you would soon get a menu listing several
flambe recipes, including one called "dessert flambe." Put your cursor on
that line of the menu and hit enter, and you'll find it's a menu for cherries
flambe. Then hit your q key to quit, and gopher will ask you if you want to
save the file in your home directory on your public-access site or whether you
want to e-mail it somewhere.
Veroniñà
========
Veronica is a "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized
Archives." Veronica's name is a play on the concepts of both gopher and
archie. (Remember the comic book couple Archie and Veronica? Veronica does
for gopher what archie does for anonymous FTP.) Veronica searches through
hundreds of gopher holes looking for anything that matches a keyword supplied
by the user, and assembles a list of gopher servers that contain items of
interest. Note: veronica checks *titles* of gopher items only, not their
contents.
At present, there are no veronica clients; veronica is a gopher tool. An
informal veronica FAQ is posted regularly in `comp.infosystems.gopher' and
archived on `veronica.scs.unr.edu' as `veronica/veronica-faq'.
Wide-Area Information Servers
=============================
Now you know there are hundreds of databases and library catalogs you can
search through. But as you look, you begin to realize that each seems to
have its own unique method for searching. If you connect to several, this
can become a pain. Gophers reduce this problem somewhat.
Wide-area information servers promise another way to zero in on
information hidden on the Net. In a WAIS, the user sees only one interface -
the program worries about how to access information on dozens, even hundreds,
of different databases. You tell give a WAIS a word and it scours the net
looking for places where it's mentioned. You get a menu of documents, each
ranked according to how relevant to your search the WAIS thinks it is.
Like gophers, WAIS "client" programs can already be found on many
public-access Internet sites. If it does, type
swais
at the command line and hit enter (the "s" stands for "simple"). If it
doesn't, telnet to bbs.oit.unc.edu, which is run by the University of North
Carolina At the "login:" prompt, type
bbs
and hit enter. You'll be asked to register and will then get a list of
"bulletins," which are various files explaining how the system works. When
done with those, hit your Q key and you'll get another menu. Hit 4 for the
"simple WAIS client," and you'll see something like this:
SWAIS Source Selection Sources: 23#
Server Source Cost
001: [ archie.au] aarnet-resource-guide Free
002: [ archive.orst.edu] aeronautics Free
003: [nostromo.oes.orst.ed] agricultural-market-news Free
004: [sun-wais.oit.unc.edu] alt-sys-sun Free
005: [ archive.orst.edu] alt.drugs Free
006: [ wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.gopher Free
007: [sun-wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.sys.sun Free
008: [ wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.wais Free
009: [ archive.orst.edu] archie-orst.edu Free
010: [ archie.au] archie.au-amiga-readmes Free
011: [ archie.au] archie.au-ls-lRt Free
012: [ archie.au] archie.au-mac-readmes Free
013: [ archie.au] archie.au-pc-readmes Free
014: [ pc2.pc.maricopa.edu] ascd-education Free
015: [ archie.au] au-directory-of-servers Free
016: [ cirm2.univ-mrs.fr] bib-cirm Free
017: [ cmns-sun.think.com] bible Free
018: [ zenon.inria.fr] bibs-zenon-inria-fr Free
Keywords:
selects, w for keywords, arrows move, searches, q quits, ?
Each line represents a different database (the .au at the end of some of
them means they are in Australia; the .fr on the last line represents a
database in France). And this is just the first page! If you type a capital
K, you'll go to the next page (there are several pages). Hitting a capital J
will move you back a page.
The first thing you want to do is tell the WAIS program which databases
you want searched. To select a database, move the cursor bar over the line
you want (using your down and up arrow keys) and hit your space bar. An
asterisk will appear next to the line number. Repeat this until you've
selected all of the databases you want searched. Then hit your W key, after
which you'll be prompted for the key words you're looking for. You can type
in an entire line of these words - separate each with a space, not a comma.
Hit return, and the search begins.
Let's say you're utterly fascinated with wheat. So you might select
agricultural-market-news to find its current world price. But you also want
to see if it has any religious implications, so you choose the Bible and the
Book of Mormon. What do you do with the stuff? Select recipes and
usenet-cookbook. Are there any recent Supreme Court decisions involving the
plant? Chose supreme-court. How about synonyms? Try roget-thesaurus and
just plain thesaurus.
Now hit w and type in wheat. Hit enter, and the WAIS program begins its
search. As it looks, it tells you whether any of the databases are offline,
and if so, when they might be ready for a search. In about a minute, the
program tells you how many hits it's found. Then you get a new menu, that
looks something like this:
Keywords:
# Score SourceTitleLines
001: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #465. [results of comparison. 1] Di 19
002: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #609. Choice. -- N. choice, option; 36
003: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #465. [results of comparison. 1] Di 19
004: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #609. Choice. -- N. choice, option; 36
005: [1000] (recipes) aem@mthvax Re: MONTHLY: Rec.Food.Recipes 425
006: [1000] ( Book_of_Mormon) Mosiah 9:96
007: [1000] ( Book_of_Mormon) 3 Nephi 18:185
008: [1000] (agricultural-ma) Re: JO GR115, WEEKLY GRAIN82
009: [ 822] (agricultural-ma) Re: WA CB351 PROSPECTIVE PLANTINGS 552
010: [ 800] ( recipes) [email protected] Re: REQUEST: Wheat-free, Suga 35
011: [ 750] (agricultural-ma) Re: WA CB101 CROP PRODUCTION258
012: [ 643] (agricultural-ma) Re: SJ GR850 DAILY NAT GRN SUM72
013: [ 400] ( recipes) pat@jaamer Re: VEGAN: Honey Granola63
014: [ 400] ( recipes) jrtrint@pa Re: OVO-LACTO: Sourdough/Trit 142
Each of these represents an article or citing that contains the word wheat,
or some related word. Move the cursor bar (with the down and up arrow keys)
to the one you want to see, hit enter, and it will begin to appear on your
screen. The "score" is a WAIS attempt to gauge how closely the citing
matches your request. Doesn't look like the Supreme Court has had anything
to say about the plant of late!
Now think of how much time you would have spent logging onto various
databases just to find these relatively trivial examples. But as more
databases are added to WAIS programs, a problem arises that is similar to the
one WAISs were supposed to solve: how do you find the specific databases you
want? Scrolling through page after page of database listings becomes rather
tedious rather quickly and you could wind up missing the one database you
really need. That's the next step in WAIS research.
World-Wide Web
==============
Developed by researchers at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory
in Geneva, the World-Wide Web project is somewhat similar to a WAIS. But
it's designed on a system known as hypertext. Words in one document are
"linked" to other documents. It's sort of like sitting with an encyclopedia
- you're reading one article, see a reference that intrigues you and so you
flip the pages to look up that reference.
To take a walk on The Web try the WWW's (or W3 in the project's own
jargon), default telnet site:
info.cern.ch
No log in is needed. When you connect, you'll see:
Overview of the Web
GENERAL OVERVIEW
There is no "top" to the World-Wide Web. You can look at it from many points
of view. If you have no other bias, here are some places to start:
by Subject[1] A classification by subject of interest. Incomplete
but easiest to use.
by Type[2] Looking by type of service (access protocol, etc) may
allow to find things if you know what you are looking
for.
About WWW[3] About the World-Wide Web global information sharing
project
Starting somewhere else
To use a different default page, perhaps one representing your field of
interest, see "customizing your home page"[4].
What happened to CERN?
1-6, Up, for more, Quit, or Help:
Ok. Now type `3', and get the following screen:
The World Wide Web project
WORLD WIDE WEB
The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia[1] information retrieval
initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.
Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this
document, including an executive summary[2] of the project, an illustrated
talk[3] , Mailing lists[4] , Policy[5] and Conditions[6] , May's W3 news[7]
, Frequently Asked Questions[8] .
What's out there?[9] Pointers to the world's online information,
subjects[10] , W3 servers[11] , etc.
WWW Software Products[12]
What there is and how to get it: clients, servers and
tools.
Technical[13] Details of protocols, formats, program internals etc
Bibliography[14] Paper documentation on W3 and references. Also:
manuals[15] .
1-20, Back, Up, for more, Quit, or Help:
You navigate the web by typing the number next to a given reference. So
if you want to know more about the web, hit 2. This is another system that
bears playing with.
Ñlients
=======
If you are used to plain-vanilla Unix or MS-DOS, then the way these
gophers and WAISs work seems quite straightforward. But if you're used to a
computer with a graphical interface, such as a Macintosh, an IBM compatible
with Windows or a Next, you'll probably regard their interfaces as somewhat
primitive.
There are, however, ways to integrate these services into your graphical
user interface. In fact, there are now ways to tie into the Internet
directly, rather than relying on whatever interface your public-access system
uses.
There is now a growing number of these "client" programs for everything
from ftp to gopher. PSI of Reston, Va., which offers nationwide Internet
access, in fact, requires its customers to use these programs.
Using protocols known as SLIP and PPP, these programs communicate with the
Net using the same basic data packets as much larger computers online.
Beyond integration with your own computer's "desktop," client programs let
you do more than one thing at once on the net - while your downloading a
large file in one window, you can be chatting with a friend through an
Internet chat program in another.
These client programs have a couple of disadvantages. One is that you'll
need a 9600-baud modem - while it is possible to connect to the Net with them
at lower speeds, you will likely find them painfully slow. Not all
public-access sites are set up to allow such connections. And those that are
usually charge far more for them.
Your system administrator can give you more information on setting up one
of these connections.
FYI:
====
See the Usenet newsgroups `comp.infosystems.*':
`comp.infosystems.gopher', `comp.infosystems.wais', and
`comp.infosystems.www' are places to go for technical discussions about
Gopher, WAISs, and the World-Wide Web project respectively. Moreover there
are `comp.infosystems' for more general discussion of related issues. The
group `comp.infosystems.gis' relates to Geographic Information Systems, and
thus is more specialized on this subject.
There even exists a Gopher service to read Usenet news: `gopher
gopher.msu.edu 4320'. But, the lines behind this service are few, and thus
it's likely that you get the following message, when trying to enter:
We are sorry, but our Usenet News gateway limits the number of
simultaneous connections. If you were attempting to read news and were
instead directed to this file, all of those connections are in use. We
offer this gateway as a "last resort" for people who have no other
access for reading Usenet. We do not have the capacity to serve as the
Usenet gateway for large numbers of users around the Internet.
Individuals who like this style of access should ask their Internet
service providers to offer the same sort of gateway on their local
Gopher server. Individuals and campuses should consider installing
local news feeds and local news readers (such as RN, NN, TIN, or
Trumpet) so that users can read and post to Usenet newsgroups
conveniently.
For system administrators: the software we use to implement this gateway
is the go4gw Gopher gateway software from Roland Schemers of Stanford
University. This software should be available by anonymous ftp from
boombox.micro.umn.edu, somewhere under /pub/gopher.
-- The Michigan State University Gopher Team
*"Reliable information is the basis of successful planning."*
-- Christoph Columbus
* Advanced E-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'.
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:
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.
Information about the Electronic Frontier Foundation; documents about
legal issues on the Net.
Back copies of the Computer Underground Digest and every possible fact
you could want to know about "The Simpsons."
Programs for many types of personal computers; archives of past postings
from many Usenet newsgroups.
Space-related text and graphics (GIF-format) files.
Detailed information about Internet.
Most mail servers work pretty much the same - you send an e-mail message
that tells them what file you want and how you want it sent to you. The most
important command is "send," which tells the computer you want it to send you
a particular file.
First, though, you'll need to know where the mail server stores that file,
because you have to tell it which directory or sub-directory it's in. There
are a couple of ways to do this. You can send an e-mail message to the
archive-server that consists of one line:
index
The server will then send you a directory listing of its main, or root
directory. You'll then have to send a second message to the archive server
with one line:
index directory/subdirectory
where that is the directory or directory path for which you want a
listing. An alternative is to send an e-mail message to our old friend
archie, which should send you back the file's exact location on the
archive-server (along with similar listings for all the other sites that may
have the file, however)
Once you have the file name and its directory path, compose a message to
the archive server like this:
send directory/subdirectory/file
Send off the message and, anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days
later, you'll find a new message in your mailbox: a copy of the file you
requested. The exact time it will take a file to get to you depends on a
variety of factors, including how many requests are in line before yours
(mail servers can only process so many requests at a time) and the state of
the connections between the server and you.
Seems simple enough. It gets a little more complicated when you request a
program rather than a document. Programs or other files that contain unusual
characters or lines longer than 130 characters (graphics files, for example)
require special processing by both the mail server to ensure they are
transmitted via e-mail. Then you'll have to run them through at least one
converter program to put them in a form you can actually use. To ensure that
a program or other "non-mailable" file actually gets to you, include another
line in your e-mail message to the server:
encoder
This converts the file into an encoded form. To decode it, you'll first
have to transfer the file message into a file in your home directory. 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). Exit mail 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 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.
One further complication comes when you request a particularly long file.
Many Net sites can only handle so much mail at a time. To make sure you get
the entire file, tell the mail server to break it up into smaller pieces,
with another line in your e-mail request like this:
size 100000
This gives the mail server the maximum size, in bytes, of each file
segment. This particular size is good for UUCP sites. Internet and Bitnet
sites can generally go up to 300000. When you get all of these files in
mail, transfer them to your home directory. Exit mail and call up each file
in your host system's text processor and delete each one's entire header and
footer (or "signature" at the end). When done with this, at your host
system's command line, type
cat file1 file2 >bigfile
where file1 is the first file, file2 the second file, and so on. The >
tells your host system to combine them into a new megafile called bigfile (or
whatever you want to call it). You can then run uudecode, tar, etc. One word
of caution, though: if the file you want is long enough that it has to be
broken into pieces, think of how much time it's going to take you to download
the whole thing - especially if you're using a 2400-baud modem!
There are a number of other mail servers. To get a list, send an e-mail
message to:
send usenet/comp.sources.wanted/How_to_find_sources_(READ_THIS_BEFORE_POSTING)
You'll have to spell it exactly as listed above. Some mail servers use
different software, which will require slightly different commands than the
ones listed here. In general, if you send a message to a mail server that
says only
help
you should get back a file detailing all of its commands.
But what if the file you want is not on one of these mail servers? That's
where ftpmail comes in. Run by Digital Equipment Corp. in California, this
service can connect to almost any ftp site in the world, get the file you
want and then mail it to you. Using it is fairly simple - you send an e-mail
message to ftpmail that includes a series of commands telling the system
where to find the file you want and how to format it to mail to you.
Compose an e-mail message to
[email protected]
Leave the "subject:" line blank. Inside the message, there are several
commands you can give. The first line should be
reply address
where "address" is your e-mail address. The next line should be
connect host
where "host" is the system that has the file you want (for example:
wuarchive.wustl.edu). Other commands you should consider using are "binary"
(required for program files); "compress" (reduces the file size for quicker
transmission) and "uuencode" (which encodes the file so you can do something
with it when it arrives). The last line of your message should be the word
"quit".
Let's say you want a copy of the U.S. constitution. Using archie, you've
found a file called, surprise!, `constitution', at the ftp site
`archive.cis.ohio-state.edu', in the `/pub/firearms/politics/ rkba'
directory. You'd send a message to that looks like
this:
reply [email protected]
connect archive.cis.ohio-state.edu
binary
compress
uuencode
get pub/firearms/politics/rkba/constitution
quit
When you get the file in your mailbox, use the above procedure for copying
it to a file. Run it through uudecode. Then type
uncompress file.name
to make it usable.
Since this was a text file, you could have changed the "binary" to "ascii"
and then eliminated the "uuencode" file. For programs, though, you'll want
to keep these lines.
Sending your own files through the mail
=======================================
The uuencode and uudecode programs will also come in handy if you ever
want to send your own files to somebody else.
If both you and your intended recipient communicate via Unix-based host
systems, then it's pretty easy, because almost all Unix host systems will
have encoder/decoder programs online.
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. 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, tell her
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 his mailbox, she should
transfer it to her home directory. Then your friend 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.
But 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 them via e-mail (how would they un-encode
it?), you'll have to mail or give them a diskette with the program on it
first. Then, they can get their message, run it through a text editor to
delete the header, and finally decode the file. If they want to send you
files in return, they'll also want an encoder
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'.
Once again, be careful with large files. 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.
One other thing you can do through e-mail is consult with the Usenet
Oracle. You can ask the Oracle anything at all and get back an answer
(whether you like the answer is another question).
First, you'll want to get instructions on how to address the Oracle (he,
or she, or it, is very particular about such things and likes being addressed
in august, solemn and particularly sycophantic tones). Start an e-mail
message to
[email protected]
In the "subject:" line, type
help
and hit enter. You don't actually have to say anything in the message
itself - at least not yet. Hit control-D to send off your request for help.
Within a few hours, the Oracle will mail you back detailed instructions.
It's a fairly long file, so before you start reading it, turn on your
communications software's logging function, to save it to your computer (or
save the message to a file on your host system's home directory and then
download the file). After you've digested it, you can compose your question
to the Oracle. Mail it to the above address, only this time with a subject
line that describes your question. Expect an answer within a couple of days.
And don't be surprised if you also find a question in your mailbox - the
Oracle extracts payment by making seekers of knowledge answer questions as
well!
*"If just one piece of mail gets lost, well, they'll just think they
forgot to send it. But if *two* pieces of mail get lost, hell, they'll
just think the other guy hasn't gotten around to answering his mail.
And if *fifty* pieces of mail get lost, can you imagine it, if *fifty*
pieces of mail get lost, why they'll think someone *else* is broken!
And if 1GB of mail gets lost, they'll just *know* that Arpa is down and
think it's a conspiracy to keep them from their God given right to receive Net Mail ..."*
-- Leith `Casey' Leedom
* News of the World *
*****************
Usenet "newsgroups" can be something of a misnomer. They may be
interesting, informative and educational, but they are often not news, at
least, not what you'd think of as news. But there are several sources of
news, sports and weather on the Net.
One of the largest is *Clarinet*, a company in Cupertino, Calf., that
distributes wire-service news and columns, along with a news service devoted
to computers, in Usenet form.
*USA Today* also has a presence on the Net, through the Cleveland Free-Net
system, and we'll show you how to get news of eastern Europe and Brazil as
well.
Distributed in Usenet form, Clarinet stories and columns are organized
into more than 100 newsgroups (in this case, a truly appropriate name), some
of them with an extremely narrow focus, for example, `clari.news.gov.taxes'.
The general news and sports come from United Press International; the
computer news from the NewsBytes service; the features from several
syndicates.
Because Clarinet charges for its service, not all host systems carry its
dispatches. Those that do carry them as Usenet groups starting with
`clari.*' As with other Usenet hierarchies, these are named starting with
broad area and ending with more specific categories. Some of these include
business news (`clari.biz'); general national and foreign news, politics and
the like (`clari.news'), sports (`clari.sports'); columns by MIKE ROYKO, MISS
MANNERS, DAVE BARRY and others (`clari.feature'); and NewsBytes computer and
telecommunications reports (`clari.nb'). Because Clarinet started in Canada,
there is a separate set of `clari.canada' newsgroups.
The clari.nb newsgroups are divided into specific computer types
(`clari.nb.apple', for example).
Clari news groups feature stories updated around the clock. There are
even a couple of "bulletin" newsgroups for breaking stories:
`clari.news.bulletin' and `clari.news.urgent'. Clarinet also sets up new
newsgroups for breaking stories that become ongoing ones (such as major
natural disasters, coups in large countries and the like).
Occasionally, you will see stories in clari newsgroups that just don't
seem to belong there. Stories about former Washington, D.C. mayor MARION
BARRY, for example, often wind interspersed among columns by DAVE BARRY.
This happens because of the way wire services work. UPI uses three-letter
codes to route its stories to the newspapers and radio stations that make up
most of its clientele, and harried editors on deadline sometimes punch in the
wrong code.
USA Todaó
=========
If your host system doesn't carry the clari newsgroups, you might be able
to keep 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. 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.
Òhe World Todaó
===============
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. To subscribe, send an e-mail message to
[email protected]
Leave the subject line blank, and as a message, write:
subscribe rferl-l Your Name
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 one, and don't capitalize anything, for example:
get news.23oct92
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.
*"Be it true or false, so it be news."*
-- Ben Johnson, "News from the World"
*"In a medium in which a News piece takes a minute
and an `In-Depth' piece takes two minutes,
the Simple will drive out the Complex."*
-- Frank Mankiewicz
* IRC, MUDs and other things that are more fun than they sound *
************************************************************
Many Net systems provide access to a series of interactive services that
let you hold live "chats" or play online games with people around the world.
To find out if your host system offers these, you can ask your system
administrator or just try them - if nothing happens, then your system does
not provide them. In general, if you can use telnet and ftp, chances are
good you can use these services as well.
Òalk
====
This is the Net equivalent of a telephone conversation and requires that
both you and the person you want to talk to have access to this function and
are online at the same time. To use it, type
talk [email protected]
where that is the e-mail address of the other person. She will see
something like this on her screen:
talk: connection requested by [email protected]
talk: respond with: talk [email protected]
To start the conversation, she should then type (at her host system's
command line):
talk [email protected]
where that is your e-mail address. Both of you will then get a top and
bottom window on your screen. She will see everything you type in one
window; you'll see everything she types in the other. To disconnect, hit
control-C.
One note: Public-access sites that use Sun computers sometimes have
trouble with the talk program. If talk does not work, try typing `otalk' ot
`ntalk' instead. However, the party at the other end will have to have the
same program online for the connection to work.
Internet Relay Chat
===================
IRC is a program that lets you hold live keyboard conversations with
people around the world. It's a lot like an international CB radio - it
even uses "channels." Type something on your computer and it's instantly
echoed around the world to whoever happens to be on the same channel with
you. You can join in existing public group chats or set up your own. You
can even create a private channel for yourself and as few as one or two other
people. And just like on a CB radio, you can give yourself a unique "handle"
or nickname.
IRC currently links host systems in 20 different countries, from Australia
to Hong Kong to Israel.
Unfortunately, it's like telnet - either your site has it or it doesn't.
If your host system does have it, Just type
irc
and hit enter. You'll get something like this:
*** Connecting to port 6667 of server world.std.com
*** Welcome to the Internet Relay Network, adamg
*** Your host is world.std.com, running version 2.7.1e+4
*** You have new mail.
*** If you have not already done so, please read the new user
information with +/HELP NEWUSER
*** This server was created Sat Apr 18 1992 at 16:27:02 EDT
*** There are 364 users on 140 servers
*** 45 users have connection to the twilight zone
*** There are 124 channels.
*** I have 1 clients and 3 servers
MOTD - world.std.com Message of the Day -
MOTD - Be careful out there...
MOTD -
MOTD - ->Spike
* End of /MOTD command.
23:13 [1] adamg [Mail: 32] * type /help for help
You are now in channel 0, the "null" channel, in which you can look up
various help files, but not much else. As you can see, IRC takes over your
entire screen. The top of the screen is where messages will appear. The
last line is where you type IRC commands and messages. All IRC commands
begin with a `/'. The slash tells the computer you are about to enter a
command, rather than a message. To see what channels are available, type
/list
and hit enter. You'll get something like this:
*** Channel Users Topic
*** #Money 1 School CA$H (/msg SOS_AID help)
*** #Gone 1 ----->> Gone with the wind!!! ------>>>>>
*** #mee 1
*** #eclipse 1
*** #hiya 2
*** #saigon 4
*** #screwed 3
*** #z 2
*** #comix 1 LET'S TALK 'BOUT COMIX!!!!!
*** #Drama 1
*** #RayTrace 1 Rendering to Reality and Back
*** #NeXT 1
*** #wicca 4 Mr. Potato Head, R. I. P.
*** #dde^mhe` 1 no'ng chay? mo*? ...ba` con o*iiii
*** #jgm 1
*** #ucd 1
*** #Maine 2
*** #Snuffland 1
*** #p/g! 4
*** #DragonSrv 1
Because IRC allows for a large number of channels, the list might scroll
off your screen, so you might want to turn on your computer's screen capture
to capture the entire list. Note that the channels always have names,
instead of numbers. Each line in the listing tells you the channel name, the
number of people currently in it, and whether there's a specific topic for
it. To switch to a particular channel, type
/join #channel
where `#channel' is the channel name and hit enter. Some "public"
channels actually require an invitation from somebody already on it. To
request an invitation, type
/who #channel-name
where `channel-name' is the name of the channel, and hit enter. Then ask
someone with an @ next to their name if you can join in. Note that whenever
you enter a channel, you have to include the `#'. Choose one with a number
of users, so you can see IRC in action.
If it's a busy channel, as soon as you join it, the top of your screen
will quickly be filled with messages. Each will start with a person's IRC
nickname, followed by his message.
It may seem awfully confusing at first. There could be two or three
conversations going on at the same time and sometimes the messages will come
in so fast you'll wonder how you can read them all.
Eventually, though, you'll get into the rhythm of the channel and things
will begin to make more sense. You might even want to add your two cents (in
fact, don't be surprised if a message to you shows up on your screen right
away; on some channels, newcomers are welcomed immediately). To enter a
public message, simply type it on that bottom line (the computer knows it's a
message because you haven't started the line with a slash) and hit enter.
Public messages have a user's nickname in brackets, like this:
If you receive a private message from somebody, his name will be between
asterisks, like this:
*tomg*
For more information on using IRC, see the IRC command box. You can find
discussions about IRC in the `alt.irc' newsgroup.
IRC Commands
============
Note: Hit enter after each command.
`/away'
When you're called away to put out a grease fire in the kitchen, issue
this command to let others know you're still connected but just away
from your terminal or computer for awhile.
`/help'
Brings up a list of commands for which there is a help file. You will
get a "topic:" prompt. Type in the subject for which you want
information and hit enter. Hit enter by itself to exit help.
`/invite'
Asks another IRC to join you in a conversation.
`/invite fleepo #hottub'
would send a message to fleepo asking him to join you on the #hottub
channel. The channel name is optional.
`/join'
Use this to switch to or create a particular channel, like this: `/join
#hottub'
If one of these channels exists and is not a private one, you will enter
it. Otherwise, you have just created it. Note you have to use a `#' as
the first character.
`/list'
This will give you a list of all available public channels, their topics
(if any) and the number of users currently on them. Hidden and private
channels are not shown.
`/m name'
Send a private message to that user.
`/mode'
This lets you determine who can join a channel you've created.
`/mode #channel +s'
creates a secret channel.
`/mode #channel +p'
makes the channel private
`/nick'
This lets you change the name by which others see you.
`/nick fleepo' would change your name for the present session to fleepo.
People can still use /whois to find your e-mail address. If you try to
enter a channel where somebody else is already using that nickname, IRC
will ask you to select another name.
`/query'
This sets up a private conversation between you and another IRC user.
To do this, type `/query nickname'
Every message you type after that will go only to that person. If she
then types `/query nickname' where nickname is yours, then you have
established a private conversation. To exit this mode, type `/query' by
itself. While in query mode, you and the other person can continue to
"listen" to the discussion on whatever public channels you were on,
although neither of you will be able to respond to any of the messages
there.
`/quit'
Exit IRC.
`/signoff'
Exit IRC.
`/summon'
Asks somebody connected to a host system with IRC to join you on IRC.
You must use the person's entire e-mail address.
`/summon [email protected]' would send a message to fleepo asking him
to start IRC. Usually not a good idea to just summon people unless you
know they're already amenable to the idea; otherwise you may wind up
annoying them no end. This command does not work on all sites.
`/topic'
When you've started a new channel, use this command to let others know
what it's about.
`/topic #Amiga' would tell people who use /list that your channel is
meant for discussing Amiga computers.
`/who '
Shows you the e-mail address of people on a particular channel.
`/who #foo' would show you the addresses of everybody on channel foo.
`/who' by itself shows you every e-mail address for every person on IRC
at the time, although be careful: on a busy night you might get a list
of 500 names!
`/whois'
Use this to get some information about a specific IRC user or to see who
is online.
`/whois nickname' will give you the e-mail address for the person using
that nickname.
`/whois *' will list everybody on every channel.
`/whowas'
Similar to `/whois'; gives information for people who recently signed
off IRC.
MUDs
====
Multiple-User Dimensions or Dungeons (MUDs) take IRC into the DUM realm of
fantasy. MUDs are live, role-playing games in which you enter assume a new
identity and enter an alternate reality through your keyboard. As you
explore this other world, through a series of simple commands (such as
"look," "go" and "take"), you'll run across other users, who may engage you
in a friendly discussion, enlist your aid in some quest or try to kill you
for no apparent reason.
Each MUD has its own personality and creator (or God) who was willing to
put in the long hours required to establish the particular MUD's rules, laws
of nature and information databases. Some MUDs stress the social aspects of
online communications - users frequently gather online to chat and join
together to build new structures or even entire realms. Others are closer to
"Dungeons and Dragons" and are filled with sorcerers, dragons and evil people
out to keep you from completing your quest - through murder if necessary.
Many MUDs (there are also related games known as MUCKs and MUSEs) require
you to apply in advance, through e-mail, for a character name and password.
One that lets you look around first, though, is HoloMuck at McGill University
in Montreal. The premise of this game is that you arrive in the middle of
Tanstaafl, a city on the planet Holo. You have to find a place to live (else
you get thrown into the homeless shelter) and then you can begin exploring.
Magic is allowed on this world, but only outside the city limits. Get bored
with the city and you can roam the rest of the world or even take a trip into
orbit (of course, all this takes money; you can either wait for your weekly
salary or take a trip to the city casino). Once you become familiar with the
city and get your own character, you can even begin erecting your own
building (or subway line, or almost anything else).
To connect, telnet to `hobbes.cs.mcgill.ca 5757'
When you connect, type
connect guest guest
and hit enter. This connects you to the "guest" account, which has a
password of "guest." You'll see this:
Your pager beeps twice, indicating no messages.
The Homeless Shelter(#22Rna)
You wake up in the town's Homeless Shelter, where vagrants are put for
protective holding.
Please don't sleep in public places-- there are plenty of
open apartments in Tanstaafl Towers, to the southwest of center.
There is a small sign on the wall here, with helpful information.
Type 'look sign' to read it.
The door is standing open for your return to respectable society.
Simply walk 'out' to the center.
Of course, you want to join respectable society, but first you want to see
what that sign says. So you type
look sign
and hit enter, which brings up a list of some basic commands. Then you
type
out
followed by enter, which brings up this:
You slip out the door, and head southeast...
Tanstaafl Center
This is the center of the beautiful town of Tanstaafl.
High Street runs north and south into residential areas, while
Main Street runs east and west into business districts.
SW: is Tanstaafl Towers.
Please claim an apartment... no sleeping in public!
SE: the Public Library offers both information and entertainment.
NW: is the Homeless Shelter, formerly the Town Jail.
NE: is Town Hall, site of several important services, including: Public
Message Board, Bureau of Land Management (with maps and regulations), and
other governmental/ bureaucratic help.
Down: Below a sign marked with both red and blue large letter 'U's, a
staircase leads into an underground subway passage.
(Feel free to 'look' in any direction for more information.)
[Obvious exits: launch, d, nw, se, w, e, n, s, ne, sw]
Contents:
Instructions for newcomers
Directional signpost
Founders' statue
To see "Instructions for newcomers", type
look Instructions for newcomers
and hit enter. You could do the same for "Directional signpost" and
"Founders' statue." Then type
SW
and enter to get to Tanstaafl Towers, the city housing complex, where you
have to claim an apartment (you may have to look around; many will already)
be occupied. And now it's off to explore Holo! One command you'll want to
keep in mind is "take." Periodically, you'll come across items that, when you
take them will confer certain abilities or powers on you. If you type
help
and enter, you'll get a list of files you can read to learn more about the
MUD's commands.
The "say" command lets you talk to other players publicly. For example,
say Hey, I'm here!
would be broadcast to everybody else in the room with you. If you want to
talk to just one particular person, use "whisper" instead of "say."
whisper agora Hey, I'm here!
would be heard only by agora. Another way to communicate with somebody
regardless of where on the world they are is through your pager. If you
suddenly see yours go off while visiting, chances are it's a wizard checking
to see if you need any help. To read his message, type
pager
To send him a message, type
page name message
where name is the wizard's name (it'll be in the original message).
Other MUDs and MUCKs may have different commands, but generally use the
same basic idea of letting you navigate through relatively simple English
commands. Every Friday, SCOTT GOEHRING posts a new list of MUDs and related
games and their telnet addresses in the newsgroup `rec.games.mud.announce'.
There are several other mud newsgroups related to specific types of MUDs,
including `rec.games.mud.social', `rec.games.mud.adventure',
`rec.games.mud.tiny', `rec.games.mud.diku' and `rec.games.mud.lp'.
When you connect to a MUD, choose your password as carefully as you would
one for your host system; alas, there are MUD crackers who enjoy trying to
break into other people's MUD accounts. And never, never use the same
password as the one you use on your host system!
MUDs can prove highly addicting. "The jury is still out on whether
MUDding is 'just a game' or 'an extension of real life with gamelike
qualities'," says JENNIFER SMITH, an active MUD player who wrote an FAQ on
the subject.
She adds one caution: "You shouldn't do anything that you wouldn't do in
real life, even if the world is a fantasy world. The important thing to
remember is that it's the fantasy world of possibly hundreds of people, and
not just yours in particular. There's a human being on the other side of
each and every wire! Always remember that you may meet these other people
some day, and they may break your nose. People who treat others badly
gradually build up bad reputations and eventually receive the NO FUN Stamp of
Disapproval."
Òhe other Side of the Coiï
==========================
All is not fun and games on the Net. Like any community, the Net has its
share of obnoxious characters who seem to exist only to make your life
miserable (you've already met some of them in the chapter on Usenet). There
are people who seem to spend a bit more time on the Net than many would find
healthy. It also has its criminals. CLIFFORD STOLL writes in "The Cuckoo's
Egg" how he tracked a team of German hackers who were breaking into U.S.
computers and selling the information they found to the Soviets. ROBERT
MORRIS, a Cornell University student, was convicted of unleashing a "worm"
program that effectively disabled several thousand computers connected to the
Internet.
Of more immediate concern to the average Net user are crackers who seek to
find other's passwords to break into Net systems and people who infect
programs on ftp sites with viruses.
There is a widely available program known as "Crack" that can decipher
user passwords composed of words that might be found in a dictionary (this is
why you shouldn't use such passwords). Short of that, there are the annoying
types who, as mentioned above, take a special thrill in trying to make you
miserable. The best advice in dealing with them is to count to 10 and then
ignore them - like juveniles everywhere, most of their fun comes in seeing
how upset you can get.
Meanwhile, two Cornell University students pled guilty in 1992 to
uploading virus-infected Macintosh programs to ftp sites. If you plan to try
out large amounts of software from ftp sites, it might be wise to download or
buy a good anti-viral program.
But can law enforcement go too far in seeking out the criminals? The
Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in large part in response to a
series of government raids against an alleged gang of hackers. The raids
resulted in the near bankruptcy of one game company never alleged to have had
anything to do with the hackers, when the government seized its computers and
refused to give them back. The case against another alleged participant
collapsed in court when his attorney showed the "proprietary" and supposedly
hacked information he printed in an electronic newsletter was actually
available via an 800 number for about $13 - from the phone company from which
that data was taken.
FYI:
====
You can find discussions about IRC in the `alt.irc' newsgroup. "A
Discussion on Computer Network Conferencing", by Darren Reed (May, 1992),
provides a theoretical background on why conferencing systems such as IRC are
a Good Thing. It's available through ftp at `nic.ddn.mil' as file
`rfc/rfc1324.txt'.
For a good overview of the impact on the Internet of the Morris Worm, read
"Virus Highlights Need for Improved Internet Management", by the U.S. General
Accounting Office (June, 1989). You can get a copy via ftp from
`cert.sei.cmu.edu' in the `pub/virus-l/docs' directory. It's listed as
`gao_rpt'.
Clifford Stoll describes how the Internet works and how he tracked a group
of KGB-paid German hackers through it, in "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy
through the Maze of Computer Espionage", Doubleday (1989).
See also Bruce Sterling's essay (*Note Statement of Principle::).
*"F: When into a room I plunge, I
Sometimes find some VIOLET FUNGI.
Then I linger, darkly brooding
On the poison they're exuding.
H: If a 'GOBLIN (HOB) waylays you,
Slice him up before he slays you.
Nothing makes you look a slob
Like running from a HOB'LIN (GOB).
K: Cobalt's metal, hard and shining;
Cobol's wordy and confining;
KOBOLDS topple when you strike them;
Don't feel bad, it's hard to like them.
T: One big monster, he called TROLL.
He don't rock, and he don't roll;
Drink no wine, and smoke no stogies.
He just Love To Eat Them Roguies.
U: There's a U - a Unicorn!
Run right up and rub its horn.
Look at all those points you're losing!
UMBER HULKS are so confusing."*
-- The Roguelet's ABC
* Education and the Net *
*********************
If you're a teacher, you've probably already begun to see the potential
the Net has for use in the class. Usenet, ftp and telnet have tremendous
educational potential, from keeping up with world events to arranging
international science experiments.
Because the Net now reaches so many countries and often stays online even
when the phones go down, you and your students can "tune in" to first-hand
accounts during international conflicts. Look at your system's list of
Usenet `soc.culture.*' groups to see if there is one about the country or
region you're interested in. Even in peacetime, these newsgroups can be
great places to find people from countries you might be studying.
The biggest problem may be getting accounts for your students, if you're
not lucky enough to live within the local calling area of a Free-Net system.
Many colleges and universities, however, are willing to discuss providing
accounts for secondary students at little or no cost. Several states,
including California and Texas, have Internet-linked networks for teachers
and students.
In addition, there are a number of resources on the Internet aimed
specifically at elementary and secondary students and teachers. You can use
these to set up science experiments with classes in another country, learn
how to use computers in the classroom or keep up with the latest advances in
teaching everything from physics to physical education.
Some of these resources are listed in the follwoing.
Ê12Net
======
Begun on the Fidonet hobbyist network, K12Net is now also carried on many
Usenet systems and provides a host of interesting and valuable services.
These include international chat for students, foreign-language discussions
(for example, there are French and German-only conference where American
students can practice those languages with students from Quebec and German).
There are also conferences aimed at teachers of specific subjects, from
physical education to physics. The K12 network still has limited
distribution, so ask your system administrator if your system carries it.
SpaceMet
========
If your system doesn't carry K12, but has access to telnet, you can reach
it through SpaceMet Forum, a bulletin-board system aimed at teachers and
students that is run by the physics and astronomy department at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The address is
`spacemet.phast.umass.edu'. When you connect, hit escape once. Like K12,
SpaceMet Forum began as a Fidonet system, but has since grown much larger.
Mort and Helen Sternheim, professors at the university, started SpaceMet as a
one-line bulletin-board system several years ago to help bolster
middle-school science education in nearby towns.
Today, there is a whole series of satellite SpaceMet BBSs in western
Massachusetts and SpaceMet itself is now linked to Fidonet and Internet.
In addition to the K12 conferences, SpaceMet carries numerous
educationally oriented conferences. It also has a large file library of
interest to educators and students, but be aware that getting files to your
site could be difficult and maybe even impossible. Unlike most other
Internet sites, Spacemet does not use an ftp interface. The Sternheims say
ZMODEM sometimes works over the network, but don't count on it.
Êidspherå
=========
Kidsphere is a mailing list for elementary and secondary teachers, who use
it to arrange joint projects and discuss educational telecommunications. You
will find news of new software, lists of sites from which you can get
computer-graphics pictures from various NASA satellites and probes and other
news of interest to modem-using teachers.
To subscribe, send a request by e-mail to
or try and
you will start receiving messages within a couple of days. To contribute to
the discussion, send messages to .
KIDS is a spin-off of KIDSPHERE just for students who want to contact
students. To subscribe, send a request to , as
above. To contribute, send messages to .
Íealth-Ed:
==========
A mailing list for health educators. Send a request to
.
Íemingwaó
=========
PAPA is a mailing list about Hemingway and his work. To get on the list,
send a request to .
NASA Spacelink
==============
This system, run by NASA in Huntsville, Ala., provides all sorts of
reports and data about NASA, its history and its various missions, past and
present. Telnet `spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov' or 128.158.13.250.
When you connect, you'll be given an overview of the system and asked to
register. The system maintains a large file library of GIF-format space
graphics, but note that you can't download these through telnet. If you want
to, you have to dial the system directly, at (205) 895-0028. Many can be
obtained through ftp from `ames.arc.nasa.gov', however.
Newtoï
======
This is another BBS-like system, run by the Argonne National Laboratory.
It offers conferences for teachers and students, including one called "Ask a
Scientist." Telnet: `newton.dep.anl.gov'. Log in as: cocotext
You'll be asked to provide your name and address. When you get the main
menu, hit `4' for the various conferences. The "Ask a Scientist" category
lets you ask questions of scientists in fields from biology to earth science.
Other categories let you discuss teaching, sports and computer networks.
Åducational FTP sites
=====================
To get a list of ftp sites that carry astronomical images in the GIF
graphics format, use ftp to connect to `nic.funet.fi'. Switch to the
`/pub/astro/general' directory and get the file `astroftp.txt'. Among the
sites listed is `ames.arc.nasa.gov', which carries images taken by the
Voyager and Galileo probes, among other pictures.
Ìore Educational Resources on the Net
=====================================
There are numerous Usenet newsgroups of potential interest to teachers and
students.
As you might expect, many are of a scientific bent. You can find these by
typing `l sci.' in rn or using `nngrep sci.' for nn. There are now close to
40, with subjects ranging from archaeology to economics (the "dismal
science," remember?) to astronomy to nanotechnology (the construction of
microscopically small machines).
One thing students will quickly learn from many of these groups: science
is not just dull, boring facts. Science is argument and standing your ground
and making your case. The Usenet `sci.*' groups encourage critical thinking.
Beyond science, social-studies and history classes can keep busy learning
about other countries, through the `soc.culture.*' newsgroups.
Most of these newsgroups originated as ways for expatriates of a given
country to keep in touch with their homeland and its culture. In times of
crisis, however, these groups often become places to disseminate information
from or into the country and to discuss what is happening. From Afghanistan
to Yugoslavia, close to 50 countries are now represented on Usenet.
To see which groups are available, use `l soc.culture.' in rn or `nngrep
soc.culture.' for nn.
Several "talk" newsgroups provide additional topical discussions, but
teachers should screen them first before recommending them to students. They
range from `talk.abortion', via `talk.politics. guns' to
`talk.politics.space', and `talk.environment'.
There are also a number of Bitnet discussion groups of potential interest
to students and teachers. *Note Mailing Lists:: for information on finding
and subscribing to Bitnet discussion groups. Some with an educational
orientation include:
biopi-l ksuvm.bitnet Secondary biology education
chemed-l uwf.bitnet Chemistry education
dts-l iubvm.bitnet The Dead Teacher's Society list
phys-l uwf.bitnet Discussions for physics teachers
physhare psuvm.bitnet Where physics teachers share resources
scimathl psuvm.bitnet Science and math education
FYI:
====
Carl Erickson has written an interesting
paper, entitled "USENET as a Teaching Tool", published in the Proceedings of
24th, ACM Conference on Science and Education (CSE-2/93-IN).
*"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into
superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."*
-- George Bernhard Shaw
*"Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine."*
-- Irsin Edman
*"It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts,
devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?"*
-- Alan Perlis
* "Conclusion: the End?" by Adam Gaffin *
*************************************
*The revolution is just beginning.*
New communications systems and digital technologies have already meant
dramatic changes in the way we live. Think of what is already routine that
would have been considered impossible just ten years ago. You can browse
through the holdings of your local library - or of libraries halfway around
the world - do your banking and see if your neighbor has gone bankrupt, all
through a computer and modem.
Imploding costs coupled with exploding power are bringing ever more
powerful computer and digital systems to ever growing numbers of people. The
Net, with its rapidly expanding collection of databases and other information
sources, is no longer limited to the industrialized nations of the West;
today the web extends into once remote areas from Siberia to Zimbabwe. The
cost of computers and modems used to plug into the Net, meanwhile, continue
to plummet, making them ever more affordable.
Cyberspace has become a vital part of millions of people's daily lives.
People form relationships online, they fall in love, they get married, all
because of initial contacts in cyberspace, that ephemeral "place" that
transcends national and state boundaries. Business deals are transacted
entirely in ASCII. Political and social movements begin online, coordinated
by people who could be thousands of miles apart.
*Yet this is only the beginning.*
We live in an age of communication, yet, the various media we use to talk
to one another remain largely separate systems. One day, however, your
telephone, TV, fax machine and personal computer will be replaced by a single
"information processor" linked to the worldwide Net by strands of optical
fiber.
Beyond databases and file libraries, power will be at your fingertips.
Linked to thousands, even millions of like-minded people, you'll be able to
participate in social and political movements across the country and around
the world.
How does this happen? In part, it will come about through new
technologies. High-definition television will require the development of
inexpensive computers that can process as much information as today's work
stations. Telephone and cable companies will compete to see who can bring
those fiber-optic cables into your home first. High- speed data networks,
such as the Internet, will be replaced by even more powerful systems.
Vice President ALBERT GORE, who successfully fought for a landmark funding
bill for a new high-speed national computer network in 1990, talks of
creating "information superhighways."
Right now, we are in the network equivalent of the early 1950s, just
before the creation of the Interstate highway system. Sure, there are plenty
of interesting things out there, but you have to meander along two-lane
roads, and have a good map, to get to them.
Creation of this new Net will also require a new communications paradigm:
the Net as information utility. The Net remains a somewhat complicated and
mysterious place. To get something out of the Net today, you have to spend a
fair amount of time with a Net veteran or a manual like this. You have to
learn such arcana as the vagaries of the Unix cd command.
Contrast this with the telephone, which now also provides access to large
amounts of information through push buttons, or a computer network such as
Prodigy, which one navigates through simple commands and mouse clicks.
Internet system administrators have begun to realize that not all people
want to learn the intricacies of Unix, and that that fact does not make them
bad people. Coming years will see the development of simpler interfaces that
will put the Net's power to use by millions of people, just as the number of
host systems offering public access to the Net will skyrocket.
Gophers and Wide-Area Information Servers have become two of the fastest
growing applications on the Net. They are relatively simple to use and yet
offer access to vast amounts of information. Mail programs and text editors
such as Pico and Pine promise much of the power of older programs such as
emacs at a fraction of the complexity.
Some software engineers are looking at taking this even further, by
creating graphical interfaces that will let somebody navigate the Internet
just by clicking on the screen with a mouse or by calling up an easy text
editor, sort of the way one can now navigate a Macintosh computer - or a
commercial online service such as Prodigy.
*Then there are the Internet services themselves.*
For every database now available through the Internet, there are probably
three or four that are not. Government agencies are only slowing beginning
to connect their storehouses of information to the Net. Several commercial
vendors, from database services to booksellers, have made their services
available through the Net.
Few people now use one of the Net's more interesting applications. A
standard known as MIME lets one send audio and graphics files in a message.
Imagine opening your e-mail one day to hear your granddaughter's first words,
or a "photo" of your friend's new house. Eventually, this standard could
allow for distribution of even small video displays over the Net.
All of this will require vast new amounts of Net power, to handle both the
millions of new people who will jump onto the Net and the new applications
they want. Replicating a moving image on a computer screen alone takes a
phenomenal amount of computer bits, and computing power to arrange them.
The legislation pushed by Gore in 1991 will eventually replace the
existing Internet in the U.S. with the National Research and Education
Network.
At the center of NREN will be a "backbone" that, in one second, will be
able to move as much as 3 billion bits of information from coast to coast -
the equivalent of shipping the contents of a large encyclopedia from New York
to Los Angeles electronically. That seems like a silly thing to do. But that
kind of speed allows for widespread distribution of complex files, such as
video loops, without bogging down the entire Net. Its capacity will let
millions more people onto the Net.
As these "superhighways" grow, so will the "on ramps," for a high- speed
road does you little good if you can't get to it. The costs of modems seem
to fall as fast as those of computers. High-speed modems (9600 baud and up)
are becoming increasingly affordable. At 9600 baud, you can download a
satellite weather image of North America in less than two minutes, a file
that, with a slower modem could take up to 20 minutes to download.
Eventually, homes could be connected directly to a national digital network.
Most long-distance phone traffic is already carried in digital form, through
high-volume optical fibers. Phone companies are ever so slowly working to
extend these fibers the "final mile" to the home. The Electronic Frontier
Foundation is working to ensure these links are affordable.
Beyond the technical questions are increasingly thorny social, political
and economic issues. Who is to have access to these services, and at what
cost? If we live in an information age, are we laying the seeds for a new
information under class, unable to compete with those fortunate enough to
have the money and skills needed to manipulate new communications channels?
Who, in fact, decides who has access to what? As more companies realize the
potential profits to be made in the new information infrastructure, what
happens to such systems as Usenet, possibly the world's first successful
anarchistic system, where everybody can say whatever they want?
What are the laws of the electronic frontier? When national and state
boundaries lose their meaning in cyberspace, the question might even be: WHO
is the law? What if a practice that is legal in one country is "committed"
in another country where it is illegal, over a computer network that crosses
through a third country? Who goes after computer crackers?
*What role will you play in the revolution?*
*"The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it."*
-- Abbie Hoffman
*"The only act of revolution left
in a collective world, is thinking for yourself."*
-- Bob Geldof, "Is that it?"
*"And all else is silence."*
-- Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
* "A Slice of Life in my Virtual Community" by Howard Rheingold *
*************************************************************
By *Howard Rheingold* (1)
Editor, "The Whole Earth Review", 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, CA 94965.
NOTE: In 1988, "Whole Earth Review" published my article, "Virtual
Communities." Four years later, I reread it and realized that I had
learned a few things, and that the world I was observing had changed.
So I rewrote it. The original version is available on the WELL as
`/uh/72/hlr/virtual_communities88'.
Portions of this will appear in "Globalizing Networks: Computers and
International Communication", edited by *Linda Harasim* and *Jan Walls*
for MIT press. Portions of this will appear in "Virtual Communities," by
Howard Rheingold, Addison-Wesley. Portions of this may find their way
into Whole Earth Review.
This is a world-readable file, and I think these are important issues;
encourage distribution, but I do ask for fair use: Don't remove my name
from my words when you quote or reproduce them, don't change them, and
don't impair my ability to make a living with them.
I'm a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone in a room with my words and
my thoughts. On occasion, I venture outside to interview people or to find
information. After work, I reenter the human community, via my family, my
neighborhood, my circle of acquaintances. But that regime left me feeling
isolated and lonely during the working day, with few opportunities to expand
my circle of friends. For the past seven years, however, I have participated
in a wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, professionally rewarding,
sometimes painful, and often intensely emotional ongoing interchange with
dozens of new friends, hundreds of colleagues, thousands of acquaintances.
And I still spend many of my days in a room, physically isolated. My mind,
however, is linked with a worldwide collection of like-minded (and not so
like-minded) souls: My virtual community.
Virtual communities emerged from a surprising intersection of humanity and
technology. When the ubiquity of the world telecommunications network is
combined with the information-structuring and storing capabilities of
computers, a new communication medium becomes possible. As we've learned from
the history of the telephone, radio, television, people can adopt new
communication media and redesign their way of life with surprising rapidity.
Computers, modems, and communication networks furnish the technological
infrastructure of computer-mediated communication (CMC); cyberspace is the
conceptual space where words and human relationships, data and wealth and
power are manifested by people using CMC technology; virtual communities are
cultural aggregations that emerge when enough people bump into each other
often enough in cyberspace.
A virtual community as they exist today is a group of people who may or
may not meet one another face to face, and who exchange words and ideas
through the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks. In
cyberspace, we chat and argue, engage in intellectual intercourse, perform
acts of commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans,
brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play
games and metagames, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk.
We do everything people do when people get together, but we do it with words
on computer screens, leaving our bodies behind. Millions of us have already
built communities where our identities commingle and interact electronically,
independent of local time or location. The way a few of us live now might be
the way a larger population will live, decades hence.
The pioneers are still out there exploring the frontier, the borders of
the domain have yet to be determined, or even the shape of it, or the best
way to find one's way in it. But people are using the technology of
computer-mediated communications CMC technology to do things with each other
that weren't possible before. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we can observe
it and participate in it today, is going to be a crucially important factor.
The ways in which people use CMC always will be rooted in human needs, not
hardware or software.
If the use of virtual communities turns out to answer a deep and
compelling need in people, and not just snag onto a human foible like pinball
or pac-man, today's small online enclaves may grow into much larger networks
over the next twenty years. The potential for social change is a side-effect
of the trajectory of telecommunications and computer industries, as it can be
forecast for the next ten years. This odd social revolution - communities of
people who may never or rarely meet face to face - might piggyback on the
technologies that the biggest telecommunication companies already are
planning to install over the next ten years.
It is possible that the hardware and software of a new global
telecommunications infrastructure, orders of magnitude more powerful than
today's state of the art, now moving from the laboratories to the market,
will expand the reach of this spaceless place throughout the 1990s to a much
wider population than today's hackers, technologists, scholars, students, and
enthusiasts. The age of the online pioneers will end soon, and the cyberspace
settlers will come en-masse. Telecommuters who might have thought they were
just working from home and avoiding one day of gridlock on the freeway will
find themselves drawn into a whole new society. Students and scientists are
already there, artists have made significant inroads, librarians and
educators have their own pioneers as well, and political activists of all
stripes have just begun to discover the power of plugging a computer into a
telephone. When today's millions become tens and hundreds of millions,
perhaps billions, what kind of place, and what kind of model for human
behavior will they find?
Today's bedroom electronic bulletin boards, regional computer conferencing
systems, global computer networks offer clues to what might happen when more
powerful enabling technology comes along. The hardware for amplifying the
computing and communication capacity of every home on the world-grid is in
the pipeline, although the ultimate applications are not yet clear. We'll be
able to transfer the Library of Congress from any point on the globe to any
another point in seconds, upload and download full-motion digital video at
will. But is that really what people are likely to do with all that bandwidth
and computing power? Some of the answers have to come from the behavioral
rather than the technological part of the system. How will people actually
use the desktop supercomputers and multimedia telephones that the engineers
tell us we'll have in the near future.
One possibility is that people are going to do what people always do with
a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by
its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds of
communities possible. CMC will change us, and change our culture, the way
telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras changed us - by altering
the way we perceive and communicate. Virtual communities transformed my life
profoundly, years ago, and continue to do so.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) Copyright (C) 1992 by Howard Rheingold. All rights reserved.
À Cybernaut's Eye View
======================
The most important clues to the shape of the future at this point might
not be found in looking more closely at the properties of silicon, but in
paying attention to the ways people need to, fail to, and try to communicate
with one another. Right now, some people are convinced that spending hours a
day in front of a screen, typing on a keyboard, fulfills in some way our need
for a community of peers. Whether we have discovered something wonderful or
stumbled into something insidiously unwonderful, or both, the fact that
people want to use CMC to meet other people and experiment with identity are
valuable signposts to possible futures. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we
can observe it today on the nets and in the BBSs, gives rise to important
questions about the effects of communication technology on human values. What
kinds of humans are we becoming in an increasingly computer-mediated world,
and do we have any control over that transformation? How have our definitions
of "human" and "community" been under pressure to change to fit the
specifications of a technology-guided civilization?
Fortunately, questions about the nature of virtual communities are not
purely theoretical, for there is a readily accessible example of the
phenomenon at hand to study. Millions of people now inhabit the social spaces
that have grown up on the world's computer networks, and this previously
invisible global subculture has been growing at a monstrous rate recently
(e.g., the Internet growing by 25% per month).
I've lived here myself for seven years; the WELL and the net have been a
regular part of my routine, like gardening on Sunday, for one sixth of my
life thus far. My wife and daughter long ago grew accustomed to the fact that
I sit in front of my computer early in the morning and late at night,
chuckling and cursing, sometimes crying, about something I am reading on the
computer screen. The questions I raise here are not those of a scientist, or
of a polemicist who has found an answer to something, but as a user - a
nearly obsessive user - of CMC and a deep mucker-about in virtual
communities. What kind of people are my friends and I becoming? What does
that portend for others?
If CMC has a potential, it is in the way people in so many parts of the
net fiercely defend the use of the term "community" to describe the
relationships we have built online. But fierceness of belief is not
sufficient evidence that the belief is sound. Is the aura of community an
illusion? The question has not been answered, and is worth asking. I've seen
people hurt by interactions in virtual communities. Is telecommunication
culture capable of becoming something more than what Scott Peck calls a
"pseudo-community," where people lack the genuine personal commitments to one
another that form the bedrock of genuine community? Or is our notion of
"genuine" changing in an age where more people every day live their lives in
increasingly artificial environments? New technologies tend to change old
ways of doing things. Is the human need for community going to be the next
technology commodity?
I can attest that I and thousands of other cybernauts know that what we
are looking for, and finding in some surprising ways, is not just
information, but instant access to ongoing relationships with a large number
of other people. Individuals find friends and groups find shared identities
online, through the aggregated networks of relationships and commitments that
make any community possible. But are relationships and commitments as we know
them even possible in a place where identities are fluid? The physical world,
known variously as "IRL" ("In Real Life"), or "offline," is a place where the
identity and position of the people you communicate with are well known,
fixed, and highly visual. In cyberspace, everybody is in the dark. We can
only exchange words with each other - no glances or shrugs or ironic smiles.
Even the nuances of voice and intonation are stripped away. On top of the
technology-imposed constraints, we who populate cyberspace deliberately
experiment with fracturing traditional notions of identity by living as
multiple simultaneous personae in different virtual neighborhoods.
We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode and
unpack the identities of others. The way we use these words, the stories
(true and false) we tell about ourselves (or about the identity we want
people to believe us to be) is what determines our identities in cyberspace.
The aggregation of personae, interacting with each other, determines the
nature of the collective culture. Our personae, constructed from our stories
of who we are, use the overt topics of discussion in a BBS or network for a
more fundamental purpose, as means of interacting with each other. And all
this takes place on both public and private levels, in many-to-many open
discussions and one-to-one private electronic mail, front stage role-playing
and backstage behavior.
When I'm online, I cruise through my conferences, reading and replying in
topics that I've been following, starting my own topics when the inspiration
or need strikes me. Every few minutes, I get a notice on my screen that I
have incoming mail. I might decide to wait to read the mail until I'm
finished doing something else, or drop from the conference into the mailer,
to see who it is from. At the same time that I am participating in open
discussion in conferences and private discourse in electronic mail, people I
know well use "sends" - a means of sending one or two quick sentences to my
screen without the intervention of an electronic mail message. This can be
irritating before you get used to it, since you are either reading or writing
something else when it happens, but eventually it becomes a kind of rhythm:
different degrees of thoughtfulness and formality happen simultaneously,
along with the simultaneous multiple personae. Then there are public and
private conferences that have partially overlapping memberships. CMC offers
tools for facilitating all the various ways people have discovered to divide
and communicate, group and subgroup and regroup, include and exclude, select
and elect.
When a group of people remain in communication with one another for
extended periods of time, the question of whether it is a community arises.
Virtual communities might be real communities, they might be
pseudocommunities, or they might be something entirely new in the realm of
social contracts, but I believe they are in part a response to the hunger for
community that has followed the disintegration of traditional communities
around the world.
Social norms and shared mental models have not emerged yet, so everyone's
sense of what kind of place cyberspace is can vary widely, which makes it
hard to tell whether the person you are communicating with shares the same
model of the system within which you are communicating. Indeed, the online
acronym YMMV ("Your Mileage May Vary") has become shorthand for this kind of
indeterminacy of shared context. For example, I know people who use vicious
online verbal combat as a way of blowing off steam from the pressures of
their real life - "sport hassling" - and others who use it voyeuristically,
as a text-based form of real-life soap-opera. To some people, it's a game.
And I know people who feel as passionately committed to our virtual community
and the people in it (or at least some of the people in it) as our nation,
occupation, or neighborhood. Whether we like it or not, the communitarians
and the venters, the builders and the vandals, the egalitarians and the
passive-aggressives, are all in this place together. The diversity of the
communicating population is one of the defining characteristics of the new
medium, one of its chief attractions, the source of many of its most vexing
problems.
Is the prospect of moving en-masse into cyberspace in the near future,
when the world's communication network undergoes explosive expansion of
bandwidth, a beneficial thing for entire populations to do? In which ways
might the growth of virtual communities promote alienation? How might virtual
communities facilitate conviviality? Which social structures will dissolve,
which political forces will arise, and which will lose power? These are
questions worth asking now, while there is still time to shape the future of
the medium. In the sense that we are traveling blind into a technology-shaped
future that might be very different from today's culture, direct reports from
life in different corners of the world's online cultures today might furnish
valuable signposts to the territory ahead.
Since the summer of 1985, I've spent an average of two hours a day, seven
days a week, often when I travel, plugged into the WELL (Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link) via a computer and a telephone line, exchanging information
and playing with attention, becoming entangled In Real Life, with a growing
network of similarly wired-in strangers I met in cyberspace. I remember the
first time I walked into a room full of people (IRL) whose faces were
completely unknown to me, but who knew many intimate details of my history,
and whose own stories I knew very well. I had contended with these people,
shot the breeze around the electronic water cooler, shared alliances and
formed bonds, fallen off my chair laughing with them, become livid with anger
at these people, but I had not before seen their faces.
I found this digital watering hole for information-age hunters and
gatherers the same way most people find such places - I was lonely, hungry
for intellectual and emotional companionship, although I didn't know it.
While many commuters dream of working at home, telecommuting, I happen to
know what it's like to work that way. I never could stand to commute or even
get out of my pajamas if I didn't want to, so I've always worked at home. It
has its advantages and its disadvantages. Others like myself also have been
drawn into the online world because they shared with me the occupational
hazard of the self-employed, home-based symbolic analyst of the 1990s -
isolation. The kind of people that Robert Reich, call "symbolic analysts" are
natural matches for online communities: programmers, writers, freelance
artists and designers, independent radio and television producers, editors,
researchers, librarians. People who know what to do with symbols,
abstractions, and representations, but who sometimes find themselves spending
more time with keyboards and screens than human companions.
I've learned that virtual communities are very much like other communities
in some ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people who communicate
via words on a screen are in some way aberrant in their communication skills
and human needs. And I've learned that virtual communities are very much not
like communities in some other ways, deceptively so to those who assume that
people who communicate via words on a screen necessarily share the same level
of commitment to each other in real life as more traditional communities.
Communities can emerge from and exist within computer-linked groups, but that
technical linkage of electronic personae is not sufficient to create a
community.
Social Contracts, Reciprocity, and Gift Economies in Cyberspañå
===============================================================
The network of communications that constitutes a virtual community can
include the exchange of information as a kind of commodity, and the economic
implications of this phenomenon are significant; the ultimate social
potential of the network, however, lies not solely in its utility as an
information market, but in the individual and group relationships that can
happen over time. When such a group accumulates a sufficient number of
friendships and rivalries, and witnesses the births, marriages, and deaths
that bond any other kind of community, it takes on a definite and profound
sense of place in people's minds. Virtual communities usually have a
geographically local focus, and often have a connection to a much wider
domain. The local focus of my virtual community, the WELL, is the San
Francisco Bay Area; the wider locus consists of hundreds of thousands of
other sites around the world, and millions of other communitarians, linked
via exchanges of messages into a meta-community known as "the net."
The existence of computer-linked communities was predicted twenty years
ago by J.C.R. LICKLIDER and ROBERT TAYLOR, who as research directors for the
Department of Defense, set in motion the research that resulted in the
creation of the first such community, the ARPAnet: "What will on-line
interactive communities be like?" Licklider and Taylor wrote, in 1968: "In
most fields they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes
grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be
communities not of common location, but of common interest..."
My friends and I sometimes believe we are part of the future that
Licklider dreamed about, and we often can attest to the truth of his
prediction that "life will be happier for the on-line individual because the
people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by
commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity." I still
believe that, but I also know that life also has turned out to be unhappy at
times, intensely so in some circumstances, because of words on a screen.
Events in cyberspace can have concrete effects in real life, of both the
pleasant and less pleasant varieties. Participating in a virtual community
has not solved all of life's problems for me, but it has served as an aid, a
comfort and an inspiration at times; at other times, it has been like an
endless, ugly, long-simmering family brawl.
I've changed my mind about a lot of aspects of the WELL over the years,
but the "sense of place" is still as strong as ever. As Ray Oldenburg
revealed in "The Great Good Place," there are three essential places in every
person's life: the place they live, the place they work, and the place they
gather for conviviality. Although the casual conversation that takes place in
cafes, beauty shops, pubs, town squares is universally considered to be
trivial, "idle talk," Oldenburg makes the case that such places are where
communities can arise and hold together. When the automobile-centric,
suburban, high-rise, fast food, shopping mall way of life eliminated many of
these "third places," the social fabric of existing communities shredded. It
might not be the same kind of place that Oldenburg had in mind, but so many
of his descriptions of "third places" could also describe the WELL.
The feeling of logging into the WELL for just a minute or two, dozens of
times a day is very similar to the feeling of peeking into the cafe, the pub,
the common room, to see who's there, and whether you want to stay around for
a chat. Indeed, in all the hundreds of thousands of computer systems around
the world that use the UNIX operating system, as does the WELL, the most
widely used command is the one that shows you who is online. Another widely
used command is the one that shows you a particular user's biography.
I visit the WELL both for the sheer pleasure of communicating with my
newfound friends, and for its value as a practical instrument forgathering
information on subjects that are of momentary or enduring importance, from
child care to neuroscience, technical questions on telecommunications to
arguments on philosophical, political, or spiritual subjects. It's a bit like
a neighborhood pub or coffee shop. It's a little like a salon, where I can
participate in a hundred ongoing conversations with people who don't care
what I look like or sound like, but who do care how I think and communicate.
There are seminars and word fights in different corners. And it's all a
little like a groupmind, where questions are answered, support is given,
inspiration is provided, by people I may have never heard from before, and
whom I may never meet face to face.
Because we cannot see one another, we are unable to form prejudices about
others before we read what they have to say: Race, gender, age, national
origin and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make
such characteristics public. People who are thoughtful but who are not quick
to formulate a reply often do better in CMC than face to face or over the
telephone. People whose physical handicaps make it difficult to form new
friendships find that virtual communities treat them as they always wanted to
be treated - as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not
carnal vessels with a certain appearance and way of walking and talking (or
not walking and not talking). Don't mistake this filtration of appearances for
dehumanization: Words on a screen are quite capable of moving one to laughter
or tears, of evoking anger or compassion, of creating a community from a
collection of strangers.
From my informal research into virtual communities around the world, I
have found that enthusiastic members of virtual communities in Japan,
England, and the US agree that "increasing the diversity of their circle of
friends" was one of the most important advantages of computer conferencing.
CMC is a way to meet people, whether or not you feel the need to affiliate
with them on a community level, but the way you meet them has an interesting
twist: In traditional kinds of communities, we are accustomed to meeting
people, then getting to know them; in virtual communities, you can get to
know people and then choose to meet them. In some cases, you can get to know
people who you might never meet on the physical plane.
How does anybody find friends? In the traditional community, we search
through our pool of neighbors and professional colleagues, of acquaintances
and acquaintances of acquaintances, in order to find people who share our
values and interests. We then exchange information about one another,
disclose and discuss our mutual interests, and sometimes we become friends.
In a virtual community we can go directly to the place where our favorite
subjects are being discussed, then get acquainted with those who share our
passions, or who use words in a way we find attractive. In this sense, the
topic is the address: You can't simply pick up a phone and ask to be
connected with someone who wants to talk about Islamic art or California
wine, or someone with a three year old daughter or a 30 year old Hudson; you
can, however, join a computer conference on any of those topics, then open a
public or private correspondence with the previously-unknown people you find
in that conference. You will find that your chances of making friends are
magnified by orders of magnitude over the old methods of finding a peer group.
You can be fooled about people in cyberspace, behind the cloak of words.
But that can be said about telephones or face to face communications, as
well; computer-mediated communications provide new ways to fool people, and
the most obvious identity-swindles will die out only when enough people learn
to use the medium critically. Sara Kiesler noted that the word "phony" is an
artifact of the early years of the telephone, when media-naive people were
conned by slick talkers in ways that wouldn't deceive an eight-year old with
a cellular phone today.
There is both an intellectual and an emotional component to CMC. Since so
many members of virtual communities are the kind of knowledge-based
professionals whose professional standing can be enhanced by what they know,
virtual communities can be practical, cold-blooded instruments. Virtual
communities can help their members cope with information overload. The
problem with the information age, especially for students and knowledge
workers who spend their time immersed in the info-flow, is that there is too
much information available and no effective filters for sifting the key data
that are useful and interesting to us as individuals. Programmers are trying
to design better and better "software agents" that can seek and sift, filter
and find, and save us from the awful feeling one gets when it turns out that
the specific knowledge one needs is buried in 15,000 pages of related
information.
The first software agents are now becoming available (e.g., WAIS,
Rosebud), but we already have far more sophisticated, if informal, social
contracts among groups of people that allow us to act as software agents for
one another. If, in my wanderings through information space, I come across
items that don't interest me but which I know one of my worldwide loose-knit
affinity group of online friends would appreciate, I send the appropriate
friend a pointer, or simply forward the entire text (one of the new powers of
CMC is the ability to publish and converse with the same medium). In some
cases, I can put the information in exactly the right place for 10,000 people
I don't know, but who are intensely interested in that specific topic, to
find it when they need it. And sometimes, 10,000 people I don't know do the
same thing for me.
This unwritten, unspoken social contract, a blend of strong-tie and
weak-tie relationships among people who have a mixture of motives, requires
one to give something, and enables one to receive something. I have to keep
my friends in mind and send them pointers instead of throwing my
informational discards into the virtual scrap-heap. It doesn't take a great
deal of energy to do that, since I have to sift that information anyway in
order to find the knowledge I seek for my own purposes; it takes two
keystrokes to delete the information, three keystrokes to forward it to
someone else. And with scores of other people who have an eye out for my
interests while they explore sectors of the information space that I normally
wouldn't frequent, I find that the help I receive far outweighs the energy I
expend helping others: A marriage of altruism and self-interest.
The first time I learned about that particular cyberspace power was early
in the history of the WELL, when I was invited to join a panel of experts who
advise the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). The subject
of the assessment was "Communication Systems for an Information Age." I'm not
an expert in telecommunication technology or policy, but I do know where to
find a group of such experts, and how to get them to tell me what they know.
Before I went to Washington for my first panel meeting, I opened a conference
in the WELL and invited assorted information-freaks, technophiles, and
communication experts to help me come up with something to say. An amazing
collection of minds flocked to that topic, and some of them created whole new
communities when they collided.
By the time I sat down with the captains of industry, government advisers,
and academic experts at the panel table, I had over 200 pages of expert
advice from my own panel. I wouldn't have been able to integrate that much
knowledge of my subject in an entire academic or industrial career, and it
only took me (and my virtual community) a few minutes a day for six weeks. I
have found the WELL to be an outright magical resource, professionally. An
editor or producer or client can call and ask me if I know much about the
Constitution, or fiber optics, or intellectual property. "Let me get back to
you in twenty minutes," I say, reaching for the modem. In terms of the way I
learned to use the WELL to get the right piece of information at the right
time, I'd say that the hours I've spent putting information into the WELL
turned out to be the most lucrative professional investments I've ever made.
The same strategy of nurturing and making use of loose information-sharing
affiliations across the net can be applied to an infinite domain of problem
areas, from literary criticism to software evaluation. It's a neat way for a
sufficiently large, sufficiently diverse group of people to multiply their
individual degree of expertise, and I think it could be done even if the
people aren't involved in a community other than their company or their
research specialty. I think it works better when the community's conceptual
model of itself is more like barn-raising than horse-trading, though.
Reciprocity is a key element of any market-based culture, but the arrangement
I'm describing feels to me more like a kind of gift economy where people do
things for one another out of a spirit of building something between them,
rather than a spreadsheet-calculated quid pro quo. When that spirit exists,
everybody gets a little extra something, a little sparkle, from their more
practical transactions; different kinds of things become possible when this
mindset pervades. Conversely, people who have valuable things to add to the
mix tend to keep their heads down and their ideas to themselves when a
mercenary or hostile zeitgeist dominates an online community.
I think one key difference between straightforward workaday reciprocity is
that in the virtual community I know best, one valuable currency is
knowledge, elegantly presented. Wit and use of language are rewarded in this
medium, which is biased toward those who learn how to manipulate attention
and emotion with the written word. Sometimes, you give one person more
information than you would give another person in response to the same query,
simply because you recognize one of them to be more generous or funny or
to-the-point or agreeable to your political convictions than the other one.
If you give useful information freely, without demanding tightly-coupled
reciprocity, your requests for information are met more swiftly, in greater
detail, than they would have been otherwise. The person you help might never
be in a position to help you, but someone else might be. That's why it is
hard to distinguish idle talk from serious context-setting. In a virtual
community, idle talk is context-setting. Idle talk is where people learn what
kind of person you are, why you should be trusted or mistrusted, what
interests you. An agora is more than the site of transactions; it is also a
place where people meet and size up one another.
A market depends on the quality of knowledge held by the participants, the
buyers and sellers, about price and availability and a thousand other things
that influence business; a market that has a forum for informal and
back-channel communications is a better-informed market. The London Stock
Exchange grew out of the informal transactions in a coffee-house; when it
became the London International Stock Exchange a few years ago, and abolished
the trading-room floor, the enterprise lost something vital in the transition
from an old room where all the old boys met and cut their deals to the
screens of thousands of workstations scattered around the world.
The context of the informal community of knowledge sharers grew to include
years of both professional and personal relationships. It is not news that
the right network of people can serve as an inquiry research system: You
throw out the question, and somebody on the net knows the answer. You can
make a game out of it, where you gain symbolic prestige among your virtual
peers by knowing the answer. And you can make a game out of it among a group
of people who have dropped out of their orthodox professional lives, where
some of them sell these information services for exorbitant rates, in order
to participate voluntarily in the virtual community game.
When the WELL was young and growing more slowly than it is now, such
knowledge-potlatching had a kind of naively enthusiastic energy. When you
extend the conversation - several dozen different characters, well-known to
one another from four or five years of virtual hanging-out, several hours a
day - it gets richer, but not necessarily "happier."
Virtual communities have several drawbacks in comparison to face-to-face
communication, disadvantages that must be kept in mind if you are to make use
of the power of these computer-mediated discussion groups. The filtration
factor that prevents one from knowing the race or age of another participant
also prevents people from communicating the facial expressions, body
language, and tone of voice that constitute the inaudible but vital component
of most face to face communications. Irony, sarcasm, compassion, and other
subtle but all-important nuances that aren't conveyed in words alone are lost
when all you can see of a person are words on a screen.
It's amazing how the ambiguity of words in the absence of body language
inevitably leads to online misunderstandings. And since the physical absence
of other people also seems to loosen some of the social bonds that prevent
people from insulting one another in person, misunderstandings can grow into
truly nasty stuff before anybody has a chance to untangle the original
miscommunication. Heated diatribes and interpersonal incivility that wouldn't
crop up often in face to face or even telephone discourse seem to appear with
relative frequency in computer conferences. The only presently available
antidote to this flaw of CMC as a human communication medium is widespread
knowledge of this flaw - aka "netiquette."
Online civility and how to deal with breaches of it is a topic unto
itself, and has been much-argued on the WELL. Degrees of outright incivility
constitute entire universes such as alt.flame, the Usenet newsgroup where
people go specifically to spend their days hurling vile imprecations at one
another. I am beginning to suspect that the most powerful and effective
defense an online community has in the face of those who are bent on
disruption might be norms and agreements about withdrawing attention from
those who can't abide by even loose rules of verbal behavior. "If you
continue doing that," I remember someone saying to a particularly persistent
would-be disrupter, "we will stop paying attention to you." This is
technically easy to do on Usenet, where putting the name of a person or topic
header in a "kill file" (aka "bozo filter") means you will never see future
contributions from that person or about that topic. You can simply choose to
not see any postings from Rich Rosen, or that feature the word "abortion" in
the title. A society in which people can remove one another, or even entire
topics of discussion, from visibility. The WELL does not have a bozo filter,
although the need for one is a topic of frequent discussion.
Who Is The WELL?
================
One way to know what the WELL is like is to know something about the kind
of people who use it. It has roots in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in two
separate cultural revolutions that took place there in past decades. The
Whole Earth Catalog originally emerged from the counterculture as Stewart
Brand's way of providing access to tools and ideas to all the communes who
were exploring alternate ways of life in the forests of Mendocino or the high
deserts outside Santa Fe. The Whole Earth Catalogs and the magazines they
spawned, Co-Evolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review, have outlived the
counterculture itself, since they are still alive and raising hell after
nearly 25 years. For many years, the people who have been exploring
alternatives and are open to ideas that you don't find in the mass media have
found themselves in cities instead of rural communes, where their need for
new tools and ideas didn't go away.
The Whole Earth Catalog crew received a large advance in the mid-1980s to
produce an updated version, a project involving many geographically-separated
authors and editors, many of whom were using computers. They bought a
minicomputer and the license to Picospan, a computer conferencing program,
leased an office next to the magazine's office, leased incoming telephone
lines, set up modems, and the WELL was born in 1985. The idea from the
beginning was that the founders weren't sure what the WELL would become, but
they would provide tools for people to build it into something useful. It was
consciously a cultural experiment, and the business was designed to succeed
or fail on the basis of the results of the experiment. The person Stewart
Brand chose to be the WELL's first director - technician, manager, innkeeper,
and bouncer - was Matthew McClure, not-coincidentally a computer-savvy
veteran of The Farm, one of the most successful of the communes that started
in the sixties. Brand and McClure started a low-rules, high-tone discussion,
where savvy networkers, futurists, misfits who had learned how to make our
outsiderness work for us, could take the technology of CMC to its cultural
limits.
The Whole Earth network - the granola-eating utopians, the solar-power
enthusiasts, serious ecologists and the space-station crowd, immortalists,
Biospherians, environmentalists, social activists - was part of the core
population from the beginning. But there were a couple of other key elements.
One was the subculture that happened ten years after the counterculture era -
the personal computer revolution. Personal computers and the PC industry
were created by young iconoclasts who wanted to have whizzy tools and change
the world. Whole Earth had honored them, including the outlaws among them,
with the early Hacker's Conferences. The young computer wizards, and the
grizzled old hands who were still messing with mainframes, showed up early at
the WELL because the guts of the system itself - the UNIX operating system
and "C" language programming code - were available for tinkering by
responsible craftsmen.
A third cultural element that made up the initial mix of the WELL, which
has drifted from its counterculture origins in many ways, were the deadheads.
Books and theses have been written about the subculture that have grown up
around the band, the Grateful Dead. The deadheads have a strong feeling of
community, but they can only manifest it en masse when the band has concerts.
They were a community looking for a place to happen when several
technology-savvy deadheads started a "Grateful Dead Conference" on the WELL.
GD was so phenomenally successful that for the first several years, deadheads
were by far the single largest source of income for the enterprise.
Along with the other elements came the first marathon swimmers in the new
currents of the information streams, the futurists and writers and
journalists. The New York Times, Business Week, the San Francisco Chronicle,
Time, Rolling Stone, Byte, the Wall Street Journal all have journalists that
I know personally who drop into the WELL as a listening post. People in
Silicon Valley lurk to hear loose talk among the pros. Journalists tend to
attract other journalists, and the purpose of journalists is to attract
everybody else: most people have to use an old medium to hear news about the
arrival of a new medium.
Things changed, both rapidly and slowly, in the WELL. There were about 600
members of the WELL when I joined, in the summer of 1985. It seemed that
then, as now, the usual ten percent of the members did 80% of the talking.
Now there are about 6000 people, with a net gain of about a hundred a month.
There do seem to be more women than other parts of cyberspace. Most of the
people I meet seem to be white or Asian; African-Americans aren't missing,
but they aren't conspicuous or even visible. If you can fake it, gender and
age are invisible, too. I'd guess the WELL consists of about 80% men, 20%
women. I don't know whether formal demographics would be the kind of thing
that most WELL users would want to contribute to. It's certainly something
we'd discuss, argue, debate, joke about.
One important social rule was built into Picospan, the software that the
WELL lives inside: Nobody is anonymous. Everybody is required to attach their
real "userid" to their postings. It is possible to use pseudonyms to create
alternate identities, or to carry metamessages, but the pseudonyms are always
linked in every posting to the real userid. So individual personae - whether
or not they correspond closely to the real person who owns the account - are
responsible for the words they post. In fact, the first several years, the
screen that you saw when you reached the WELL said "You own your own words."
Stewart Brand, the WELL's co-founder likes epigrams: "Whole Earth,"
"Information wants to be free." "You own your own words." Like the best
epigrams, "You own your own words" is open to multiple interpretations. The
matter of responsibility and ownership of words is one of the topics
WELLbeings argue about endlessly, so much that the phrase has been
abbreviated to "YOYOW," As in, "Oh no, another YOYOW debate."
Who are the WELL members, and what do they talk about? I can tell you
about the individuals I have come to know over six years, but the WELL has
long since been something larger than the sum of everybody's friends. The
characteristics of the pool of people who tune into this electronic listening
post, whether or not they every post a word in public, is a strong
determinant of the flavor of the "place." There's a cross-sectional feeling
of "who are we?" that transcends the intersecting and non-intersecting rings
of friends and acquaintances each individual develops.
Ìy Neighborhood On The WELL
===========================
Every CMC system gives users tools for creating their own sense of place,
by customizing the way they navigate through the database of conferences,
topics, and responses. A conference or newsgroup is like a place you go. If
you go to several different places in a fixed order, it seems to reinforce
the feeling of place by creating a customized neighborhood that is also
shared by others. You see some of the same users in different parts of the
same neighborhood. Some faces, you see only in one context - the parents
conference, the Grateful Dead tours conference, the politics or sex
conference.
My home neighborhood on the WELL is reflected in my ".cflist," the file
that records my preferences about the order of conferences I visit. It is
always possible to go to any conference with a command, but with a `.cflist'
you structure your online time by going from conference to specified
conference at regular intervals, reading and perhaps responding in several
ongoing threads in several different places. That's the part of the art of
discourse where I have found that the computer adds value to the intellectual
activity of discussing formally distinct subjects asynchronously, from
different parts of the world, over extending periods, by enabling groups to
structure conversations by topic, over time.
My `.cflist' starts, for sentimental reasons, with the Mind conference,
the first one I hosted on the WELL, since 1985. I've changed my `.cflist'
hundreds of times over the years, to add or delete conferences from my
regular neighborhood, but I've always kept Mind in the lede. The entry banner
screen for the Mind conference used to display to each user the exact phase
of the moon in numbers and ASCII graphics every time they logged in to the
conference. But the volunteer programmer who had created the "phoon" program
had decided to withdraw it, years later, in a dispute with WELL management.
There is often a technological fix to a social problem within this particular
universe. Because the WELL seems to be an intersection of many different
cultures, there have been many experiments with software tools to ameliorate
problems that seemed to crop up between people, whether because of the nature
of the medium or the nature of the people. A frighteningly expensive pool of
talent was donated by volunteer programmers to create tools and even weapons
for WELL users to deal with each other. People keep giving things to the
WELL, and taking them away. Offline readers and online tools by volunteer
programmers gave others increased power to communicate.
The News conference is what's next. This is the commons, the place where
the most people visit the most often, where the most outrageous off-topic
proliferation is least pernicious, where the important announcements about
the system or social events or major disputes or new conferences are
announced. When an earthquake or fire happens, News is where you want to go.
Immediately after the 1989 earthquake and during the Oakland fire of 1991,
the WELL was a place to check the damage to the local geographic community,
lend help to those who need it, and get first-hand reports. During Tienamen
square, the Gulf War, the Soviet Coup, the WELL was a media-funnel, with
snippets of email from Tel-Aviv and entire newsgroups fed by fax machines in
China, erupting in News conference topics that grew into fast-moving
conferences of their own. During any major crisis in the real world, the
routine at our house is to turn on CNN and log into the WELL.
After News is Hosts, where the hottest stuff usually happens. The hosts
community is a story in itself. The success of the WELL in its first five
years, all would agree, rested heavily on the efforts of the conference hosts
- online characters who had created the character of the first neighborhoods
and kept the juice flowing between one another all over the WELL, but most
pointedly in the Hosts conference. Some spicy reading in the Archives
conference originated from old hosts' disputes - and substantial arguments
about the implications of CMC for civil rights, intellectual property,
censorship, by a lot of people who know what they are talking about, mixed
liberally with a lot of other people who don't know what they are talking
about, but love to talk anyway, via keyboard and screen, for years on end.
In this virtual place, the pillars of the community and the worst
offenders of public sensibilities are in the same group - the hosts. At their
best and their worst, this ten percent of the online population put out the
words that the other ninety percent keep paying to read. Like good hosts at
any social gathering, they make newcomers welcome, keep the conversation
flowing, mediate disputes, clean up messes, and throw out miscreants, if need
be. A WELL host is part salon keeper, part saloon keeper, part talk-show
host, part publisher. The only power to censor or to ban a user is the hosts'
power. Policy varies from host to host, and that's the only policy. The only
justice for those who misuse that power is the forced participation in weeks
of debilitating and vituperative post-mortem.
The hosts community is part long-running soap opera, part town meeting,
bar-room brawl, anarchic debating society, creative groupmind, bloody arena,
union hall, playpen, encounter group. The Hosts conference is extremely
general, from technical questions to personal attacks. The Policy conference
is supposed to be restricted to matters of what WELL policy is, or ought to
be. The part-delusion, part-accurate perception that the hosts and other
users have strong influence over WELL policy is part of what feeds debate
here, and a strong element in the libertarian reputation of the stereotypical
WELLite. After fighting my way through a day's or hour's worth of the Hot New
Dispute in News, Hosts, and Policy, I check on the conferences I host - Info,
Virtual Communities, Virtual Reality. After that my `.cflist' directs me, at
the press of the return key, to the first new topic or response in the
Parenting, Writers', Grateful Dead tours, Telecommunication, Macintosh,
Weird, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Whole Earth, Books, Media, Men on the
WELL, Miscellaneous, and Unclear conferences.
The social dynamics of the WELL spawn new conferences in response to
different kinds of pressures. Whenever a hot interpersonal or doctrinal issue
breaks out, for example, people want to stage the brawl or make a dramatic
farewell speech or shocking disclosure or serious accusation in the most
heavily-visited area of the WELL, which is usually the place that others want
to be a Commons - a place where people from different sub-communities can
come to find out what is going on around the WELL, outside the WELL, where
they can pose questions to the committee of the whole. When too many
discussions of what the WELL's official policy ought to be, about censorship
or intellectual property or the way people treat each other, break out, they
tended to clutter the place people went to get a quick sense of what is
happening outside their neighborhoods. So the Policy conference was born.
But then the WELL grew larger and it wasn't just policy but governance and
social issues like political correctness or the right of users to determine
the social rules of the system. Several years and six thousand more users
after the fission of the News and Policy conferences, another conference
split off News - "MetaWELL," a conference was created strictly to
discussions about the WELL itself, its nature, its situation (often dire),
its future.
Grabbing attention in the Commons is a powerful act. Some people seem
drawn to performing there; others burst out there in acts of desperation,
after one history of frustration or another. Dealing with people who are so
consistently off-topic or apparently deeply grooved into incoherence,
long-windedness, scatology, is one of the events that challenges a community
to decide what its values really are, or ought to be.
Something is happening here. I'm not sure anybody understands it yet. I
know that the WELL and the net is an important part of my life and I have to
decide for myself whether this is a new way to make genuine commitments to
other human beings, or a silicon-induced illusion of community. I urge others
to help pursue that question in a variety of ways, while we have the time.
The political dimensions of CMC might lead to situations that would pre-empt
questions of other social effects; responses to the need for understanding
the power-relationships inherent in CMC are well represented by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and others. We need to learn a lot more, very
quickly, about what kind of place our minds are homesteading.
The future of virtual communities is connected to the future of everything
else, starting with the most precious thing people have to gain or lose -
political freedom. The part played by communication technologies in the
disintegration of communism, the way broadcast television pre-empted the
American electoral process, the power of fax and CMC networks during times of
political repression like Tienamen Square and the Soviet Coup attempt, the
power of citizen electronic journalism, the power-maneuvering of law
enforcement and intelligence agencies to restrict rights of citizen access
and expression in cyberspace, all point to the future of CMC as a close
correlate of future political scenarios. More important than civilizing
cyberspace is ensuring its freedom as a citizen-to-citizen communication and
publication medium; laws that infringe equity of access to and freedom of
expression in cyberspace could transform today's populist empowerment into
yet another instrument of manipulation. Will "electronic democracy" be an
accurate description of political empowerment that grows out of the screen of
a computer? Or will it become a brilliant piece of disinfotainment, another
means of manipulating emotions and manufacturing public opinion in the
service of power.
Who controls what kinds of information is communicated in the
international networks where virtual communities live? Who censors, and what
is censored? Who safeguards the privacy of individuals in the face of
technologies that make it possible to amass and retrieve detailed personal
information about every member of a large population? The answers to these
political questions might make moot any more abstract questions about
cultures in cyberspace. Democracy itself depends on the relatively free flow
of communications. The following words by James Madison are carved in marble
at the United States Library of Congress: "A popular government without
popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a
farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,
and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the
power which knowledge gives." It is time for people to arm themselves with
power about the future of CMC technology.
Who controls the market for relationships? Will the world's increasingly
interlinked, increasingly powerful, decreasingly costly communications
infrastructure be controlled by a small number of very large companies? Will
cyberspace be privatized and parceled out to those who can afford to buy into
the auction? If political forces do not seize the high ground and end today's
freewheeling exchange of ideas, it is still possible for a more benevolent
form of economic control to stunt the evolution of virtual communities, if a
small number of companies gain the power to put up toll-roads in the
information networks, and smaller companies are not able to compete with them.
Or will there be an open market, in which newcomers like Apple or
Microsoft can become industry leaders? The playing field in the global
telecommunications industry will never be level, but the degree of individual
freedom available through telecommunication technologies in the future may
depend upon whether the market for goods and services in cyberspace remains
open for new companies to create new uses for CMC.
I present these observations as a set of questions, not as answers. I
believe that we need to try to understand the nature of CMC, cyberspace, and
virtual communities in every important context - politically, economically,
socially, culturally, cognitively. Each different perspective reveals
something that the other perspectives do not reveal. Each different
discipline fails to see something that another discipline sees very well. We
need to think as teams here, across boundaries of academic discipline,
industrial affiliation, nation, to understand, and thus perhaps regain
control of, the way human communities are being transformed by communication
technologies. We can't do this solely as dispassionate observers, although
there is certainly a huge need for the detached assessment of social science.
But community is a matter of the heart and the gut as well as the head. Some
of the most important learning will always have to be done by jumping into
one corner or another of cyberspace, living there, and getting up to your
elbows in the problems that virtual communities face.
FYI:
====
Howard Rheingold (1985) "Tools for Thought" New York, NY.
Howard Reingold (1991) "Virtual Reality" New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Howard Rheingold (1993) "The Virtual Community: Homesteading On The
Electronic Frontier" Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
*"Everybody's got somewhere they call home."*
-- Roger Waters
*"All's WELL that ends WELL."*
-- Shakespeare
* A Statement of Principle" by Bruce Sterling *
********************************************
By *Bruce Sterling* (1)
(Reprinted from SCIENCE FICTION EYE #10 with permission of the author.)
I just wrote my first nonfiction book. It's called THE HACKER CRACKDOWN:
LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER. Writing this book has required
me to spend much of the past year and a half in the company of hackers, cops,
and civil libertarians.
I've spent much time listening to arguments over what's legal, what's
illegal, what's right and wrong, what's decent and what's despicable, what's
moral and immoral, in the world of computers and civil liberties. My various
informants were knowledgeable people who cared passionately about these
issues, and most of them seemed well- intentioned. Considered as a whole,
however, their opinions were a baffling mess of contradictions.
When I started this project, my ignorance of the issues involved was
genuine and profound. I'd never knowingly met anyone from the computer
underground. I'd never logged-on to an underground bulletin-board or read a
semi-legal hacker magazine. Although I did care a great deal about the issue
of freedom of expression, I knew sadly little about the history of civil
rights in America or the legal doctrines that surround freedom of the press,
freedom of speech, and freedom of association. My relations with the police
were firmly based on the stratagem of avoiding personal contact with police
to the greatest extent possible.
I didn't go looking for this project. This project came looking for me. I
became inextricably involved when agents of the United States Secret Service,
acting under the guidance of federal attorneys from Chicago, came to my home
town of Austin on March 1, 1990, and confiscated the computers of a local
science fiction gaming publisher. STEVE JACKSON Games, Inc., of Austin, was
about to publish a gaming- book called GURPS Cyberpunk.
When the federal law-enforcement agents discovered the electronic
manuscript of CYBERPUNK on the computers they had seized from Mr. Jackson's
offices, they expressed grave shock and alarm. They declared that CYBERPUNK
was "a manual for computer crime."
It's not my intention to reprise the story of the Jackson case in this
column. I've done that to the best of my ability in THE HACKER CRACKDOWN; and
in any case the ramifications of March 1 are far from over. Mr. Jackson was
never charged with any crime. His civil suit against the raiders is still in
federal court as I write this.
I don't want to repeat here what some cops believe, what some hackers
believe, or what some civil libertarians believe. Instead, I want to discuss
my own moral beliefs as a science fiction writer - such as they are. As an SF
writer, I want to attempt a personal statement of principle.
It has not escaped my attention that there are many people who believe
that anyone called a "cyberpunk" must be, almost by definition, entirely
devoid of principle. I offer as evidence an excerpt from BUCK BLOOMBECKER's
1990 book, SPECTACULAR COMPUTER CRIMES. On page 53, in a chapter titled "Who
Are The Computer Criminals?", Mr. BloomBecker introduces the formal
classification of "cyberpunk" criminality.
"In the last few years, a new genre of science fiction has arisen under
the evocative name of 'cyberpunk.' Introduced in the work of WILLIAM GIBSON,
particularly in his prize-winning novel NEUROMANCER, cyberpunk takes an
apocalyptic view of the technological future. In NEUROMANCER, the protagonist
is a futuristic hacker who must use the most sophisticated computer
strategies to commit crimes for people who offer him enough money to buy the
biological creations he needs to survive. His life is one of cynical
despair, fueled by the desire to avoid death. Though none of the virus cases
actually seen so far have been so devastating, this book certainly represents
an attitude that should be watched for when we find new cases of computer
virus and try to understand the motivations behind them.
"The New York Times's JOHN MARKOFF, one of the more perceptive and
accomplished writers in the field, has written than a number of computer
criminals demonstrate new levels of meanness. He characterizes them, as do I,
as cyberpunks."
Those of us who have read Gibson's NEUROMANCER closely will be aware of
certain factual inaccuracies in Mr. BloomBecker's brief review. NEUROMANCER
is not "apocalyptic." The chief conspirator in NEUROMANCER forces Case's
loyalty, not by buying his services, but by planting poison-sacs in his
brain. Case is "fueled" not by his greed for money or "biological creations,"
or even by the cynical "desire to avoid death," but rather by his burning
desire to hack cyberspace. And so forth.
However, I don't think this misreading of NEUROMANCER is based on
carelessness or malice. The rest of Mr. BloomBecker's book generally is
informative, well-organized, and thoughtful. Instead, I feel that Mr.
BloomBecker manfully absorbed as much of NEUROMANCER as he could without
suffering a mental toxic reaction. This report of his is what he actually
*saw* when reading the novel.
NEUROMANCER has won quite a following in the world of computer crime
investigation. A prominent law enforcement official once told me that police
unfailingly conclude the worst when they find a teenager with a computer and
a copy of NEUROMANCER. When I declared that I too was a "cyberpunk" writer,
she asked me if I would print the recipe for a pipe-bomb in my works. I was
astonished by this question, which struck me as bizarre rhetorical excess at
the time. That was before I had actually examined bulletin-boards in the
computer underground, which I found to be chock-a-block with recipes for
pipe-bombs, and worse. (I didn't have the heart to tell her that my friend
and colleague WALTER JON WILLIAMS had once written and published an SF story
closely describing explosives derived from simple household chemicals.)
Cyberpunk SF (along with SF in general) has, in fact, permeated the
computer underground. I have met young underground hackers who use the
aliases "Neuromancer," "Wintermute" and "Count Zero." The Legion of Doom, the
absolute bete noire of computer law-enforcement, used to congregate on a
bulletin-board called "Black Ice."
In the past, I didn't know much about anyone in the underground, but they
certainly knew about me. Since that time, I've had people express sincere
admiration for my novels, and then, in almost the same breath, brag to me
about breaking into hospital computers to chortle over confidential medical
reports about herpes victims.
The single most stinging example of this syndrome is "PENGO," a member of
the German hacker-group that broke into Internet computers while in the pay
of the KGB. He told German police, and the judge at the trial of his
co-conspirators, that he was inspired by NEUROMANCER and JOHN BRUNNER's
SHOCKWAVE RIDER.
I didn't write NEUROMANCER. I did, however, read it in manuscript and
offered many purportedly helpful comments. I praised the book publicly and
repeatedly and at length. I've done everything I can to get people to read
this book.
I don't recall cautioning Gibson that his novel might lead to anarchist
hackers selling their expertise to the ferocious and repulsive apparat that
gave the world the Lubyanka and the Gulag Archipelago. I don't think I could
have issued any such caution, even if I'd felt the danger of such a
possibility, which I didn't. I still don't know in what fashion Gibson might
have changed his book to avoid inciting evildoers, while still retaining the
integrity of his vision - the very quality about the book that makes it
compelling and worthwhile.
*This leads me to my first statements of moral principle.*
As a "cyberpunk" SF writer, I am not responsible for every act committed
by a Bohemian with a computer. I don't own the word "cyberpunk" and cannot
help where it is bestowed, or who uses it, or to what ends.
As a science fiction writer, it is not my business to make people behave.
It is my business to make people imagine. I cannot control other people's
imaginations - any more than I would allow them to control mine.
I am, however, morally obliged to speak out when acts of evil are
committed that use my ideas or my rhetoric, however distantly, as a
justification.
Pengo and his friends committed a grave crime that was worthy of
condemnation and punishment. They were clever, but treacherously clever.
They were imaginative, but it was imagination in a bad cause. They were
technically accomplished, but they abused their expertise for illicit profit
and to feed their egos. They may be "cyberpunks" - according to many, they
may deserve that title far more than I do - but they're no friends of mine.
What is "crime"? What is a moral offense? What actions are evil and
dishonorable? I find these extraordinarily difficult questions. I have no
special status that should allow me to speak with authority on such subjects.
Quite the contrary. As a writer in a scorned popular literature and a
self-professed eccentric Bohemian, I have next to no authority of any kind.
I'm not a moralist, philosopher, or prophet. I've always considered my
"moral role," such as it is, to be that of a court jester - a person
sometimes allowed to speak the unspeakable, to explore ideas and issues in a
format where they can be treated as games, thought-experiments, or metaphors,
not as prescriptions, laws, or sermons.
I have no religion, no sacred scripture to guide my actions and provide an
infallible moral bedrock. I'm not seeking political responsibilities or the
power of public office. I habitually question any pronouncement of authority,
and entertain the liveliest skepticism about the processes of law and
justice. I feel no urge to conform to the behavior of the majority of my
fellow citizens. I'm a pain in the neck.
My behavior is far from flawless. I lived and thrived in Austin, Texas in
the 1970s and 1980s, in a festering milieu of arty crypto-intellectual
hippies. I've committed countless "crimes," like millions of other people in
my generation. These crimes were of the glamorous "victimless" variety, but
they would surely have served to put me in prison had I done them, say, in
front of the State Legislature.
Had I lived a hundred years ago as I live today, I would probably have
been lynched by outraged fellow Texans as a moral abomination. If I lived in
Iran today and wrote and thought as I do, I would probably be tried and
executed.
As far as I can tell, moral relativism is a fact of life. I think it might
be possible to outwardly conform to every jot and tittle of the taboos of
one's society, while feeling no emotional or intellectual commitment to them.
I understand that certain philosophers have argued that this is morally
proper behavior for a good citizen. But I can't live that life. I feel,
sincerely, that my society is engaged in many actions which are foolish and
shortsighted and likely to lead to our destruction. I feel that our society
must change, and change radically, in a process that will cause great damage
to our present system of values. This doesn't excuse my own failings, which I
regret, but it does explain, I hope, why my lifestyle and my actions are not
likely to make authority feel entirely comfortable.
Knowledge is power. The rise of computer networking, of the Information
Society, is doing strange and disruptive things to the processes by which
power and knowledge are currently distributed. Knowledge and information,
supplied through these new conduits, are highly corrosive to the status quo.
People living in the midst of technological revolution are living outside the
law: not necessarily because they mean to break laws, but because the laws
are vague, obsolete, overbroad, draconian, or unenforceable. Hackers break
laws as a matter of course, and some have been punished unduly for relatively
minor infractions not motivated by malice. Even computer police, seeking
earnestly to apprehend and punish wrongdoers, have been accused of abuse of
their offices, and of violation of the Constitution and the civil statutes.
These police may indeed have committed these "crimes." Some officials have
already suffered grave damage to their reputations and careers - all the time
convinced that they were morally in the right; and, like the hackers they
pursued, never feeling any genuine sense of shame, remorse, or guilt.
I have lived, and still live, in a counterculture, with its own system of
values. Counterculture - Bohemia - is never far from criminality. "To live
outside the law you must be honest" was Bob Dylan's classic hippie motto. A
Bohemian finds romance in the notion that "his clothes are dirty but his
hands are clean." But there's danger in setting aside the strictures of the
law to linchpin one's honor on one's personal integrity. If you throw away
the rulebook to rely on your individual conscience you will be put in the way
of temptation.
And temptation is a burden. It hurts. It is grotesquely easy to justify,
to rationalize, an action of which one should properly be ashamed. In
investigating the milieu of computer-crime I have come into contact with a
world of temptation formerly closed to me. Nowadays, it would take no great
effort on my part to break into computers, to steal long-distance telephone
service, to ingratiate myself with people who would merrily supply me with
huge amounts of illicitly copied software. I could even build pipe-bombs. I
haven't done these things, and disapprove of them; in fact, having come to
know these practices better than I cared to, I feel sincere revulsion for
them now. But this knowledge is a kind of power, and power is tempting.
Journalistic objectivity, or the urge to play with ideas, cannot entirely
protect you. Temptation clings to the mind like a series of small but nagging
weights. Carrying these weights may make you stronger. Or they may drag you
down.
"His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean." It's a fine ideal, when
you can live up to it. Like a lot of Bohemians, I've gazed with a fine
disdain on certain people in power whose clothes were clean but their hands
conspicuously dirty. But I've also met a few people eager to pat me on the
back, whose clothes were dirty and their hands as well. They're not pleasant
company.
Somehow one must draw a line. I'm not very good at drawing lines. When
other people have drawn me a line, I've generally been quite anxious to have
a good long contemplative look at the other side. I don't feel much
confidence in my ability to draw these lines. But I feel that I should. The
world won't wait. It only took a few guys with pool cues and switchblades to
turn Woodstock Nation into Altamont. Haight-Ashbury was once full of people
who could trust anyone they'd smoked grass with and love anyone they'd
dropped acid with - for about six months. Soon the place was aswarm with
speed-freaks and junkies, and heaven help us if they didn't look just like
the love-bead dudes from the League of Spiritual Discovery. Corruption
exists, temptation exists. Some people fall. And the temptation is there for
all of us, all the time.
I've come to draw a line at money. It's not a good line, but it's
something. There are certain activities that are unorthodox, dubious, illegal
or quasi-legal, but they might perhaps be justified by an honest person with
unconventional standards. But in my opinion, when you're making a commercial
living from breaking the law, you're beyond the pale. I find it hard to
accept your countercultural sincerity when you're grinning and pocketing the
cash, compadre.
I can understand a kid swiping phone service when he's broke, powerless,
and dying to explore the new world of the networks. I don't approve of this,
but I can understand it. I scorn to do this myself, and I never have; but I
don't find it so heinous that it deserves pitiless repression. But if you're
stealing phone service and selling it - if you've made yourself a miniature
phone company and you're pimping off the energy of others just to line your
own pockets - you're a thief. When the heat comes to put you away, don't
come crying "brother" to me.
If you're creating software and giving it away, you're a fine human being.
If you're writing software and letting other people copy it and try it out as
shareware, I appreciate your sense of trust, and if I like your work, I'll
pay you. If you're copying other people's software and giving it away, you're
damaging other people's interests, and should be ashamed, even if you're
posing as a glamorous info-liberating subversive. But if you're copying other
people's software and selling it, you're a crook and I despise you.
Writing and spreading viruses is a vile, hurtful, and shameful activity
that I unreservedly condemn.
There's something wrong with the Information Society. There's something
wrong with the idea that "information" is a commodity like a desk or a chair.
There's something wrong with patenting software algorithms. There's
something direly mean spirited and ungenerous about inventing a language and
then renting it out to other people to speak. There's something unprecedented
and sinister in this process of creeping commodification of data and
knowledge. A computer is something too close to the human brain for me to
rest entirely content with someone patenting or copyrighting the process of
its thought. There's something sick and unworkable about an economic system
which has already spewed forth such a vast black market. I don't think
democracy will thrive in a milieu where vast empires of data are encrypted,
restricted, proprietary, confidential, top secret, and sensitive. I fear for
the stability of a society that builds sand castles out of databits and tries
to stop a real-world tide with royal commands.
Whole societies can fall. In Eastern Europe we have seen whole nations
collapse in a slough of corruption. In pursuit of their unworkable economic
doctrine, the Marxists doubled and redoubled their efforts at social control,
while losing all sight of the values that make life worth living. At last the
entire power structure was so discredited that the last remaining shred of
moral integrity could only be found in Bohemia: in dissidents and dramatists
and their illegal samizdat underground fanzines. Their clothes were dirty but
their hands were clean. The only agitprop poster Vaclav Havel needed was a
sign saying *Vaclav Havel Guarantees Free Elections.* He'd never held power,
but people believed him, and they believed his Velvet Revolution friends.
I wish there were people in the Computer Revolution who could inspire, and
deserved to inspire, that level of trust. I wish there were people in the
Electronic Frontier whose moral integrity unquestionably matched the
unleashed power of those digital machines. A society is in dire straits when
it puts its Bohemia in power. I tremble for my country when I contemplate
this prospect. And yet it's possible. If dire straits come, it can even be
the last best hope.
The issues that enmeshed me in 1990 are not going to go away. I became
involved as a writer and journalist, because I felt it was right. Having
made that decision, I intend to stand by my commitment. I expect to stay
involved in these issues, in this debate, for the rest of my life. These are
timeless issues: civil rights, knowledge, power, freedom and privacy, the
necessary steps that a civilized society must take to protect itself from
criminals. There is no finality in politics; it creates itself anew, it must
be dealt with every day.
The future is a dark road and our speed is headlong. I didn't ask for
power or responsibility. I'm a science fiction writer, I only wanted to play
with Big Ideas in my cheerfully lunatic sandbox. What little benefit I myself
can contribute to society would likely be best employed in writing better SF
novels. I intend to write those better novels, if I can. But in the meantime
I seem to have accumulated a few odd shreds of influence. It's a very minor
kind of power, and doubtless more than I deserve; but power without
responsibility is a monstrous thing.
In writing HACKER CRACKDOWN, I tried to describe the truth as other people
saw it. I see it too, with my own eyes, but I can't yet pretend to understand
what I'm seeing. The best I can do, it seems to me, is to try to approach the
situation as an open-minded person of goodwill. I therefore offer the
following final set of principles, which I hope will guide me in the days to
come.
* I'll listen to anybody, and I'll try to imagine myself in their
situation.
* I'll assume goodwill on the part of others until they fully earn my
distrust.
* I won't cherish grudges. I'll forgive those who change their minds and
actions, just as I reserve the right to change my own mind and actions.
* I'll look hard for the disadvantages to others, in the things that give
me advantage. I won't assume that the way I live today is the natural
order of the universe, just because I happen to be benefiting from it at
the moment.
And while I don't plan to give up making money from my ethically dubious
cyberpunk activities, I hope to temper my impropriety by giving more work
away for no money at all.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) Copyright (C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling. All rights reserved.
FYI:
====
Bruce Sterling (1992) "Free as Air, Free as Water, Free as Knowledge"
Speech to the Library Information Technology Association, June 1992. San
Francisco, CA.
Bruce Sterling (1992) "The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder at the
Electronic Frontier", Viking, London, England.
Bruce Sterling & William Gibson (1993) "Literary Freeware -- Not for
Commercial Use" Speeches to National Academy of Sciences Convocation on
Technology and Education, May 10, 1993, Washington, D.C.: Computer
Underground Digest #5.54.
Bruce Sterling (1992-1993) "Agitprop disk: Literary Freeware -- Not for
Commercial Use" Contains various SF magazine columns, texts of speeches, etc.
Available via anonymous FTP from `ftp.eff.org' in directory `/pub/agitprop'.
Or use Gopher at `gopher.well.sf.ca.us', and see under `Bruce Sterling/'.
*"...and the silicon chip inside her head,
has turned to overload."*
-- Bob Geldof, "I don't like Mondays"
* "Subject: A Perspective on NREN" by Greg Chartrand *
**************************************************
By *Greg Chartrand* (1)
National Science Foundation Develops a National Super Highway
GREG CHARTRAND
3/11/93
"I just returned from a network meeting in San Diego today and though you
would be interested in my interpretation of what NSF proposes for the
National Education and Research Network (NREN). Rather than comment
specifically, I decided it would be interesting to write a *parody*
which relates the NREN to the construction of a national super highway.
Doing so removes the highly technical aspects of the overall planned
functions the NREN. Please excuse this style, but I think its the only
way to explain my understanding of their plan in a way that does not
immediately get very technical. It may be flawed, but the information is
based upon Hans-Werner Braun's presentation.... as I understood it."
The National Science foundation is in the process of developing plans to
build a national super highway that will advance transportation technology in
our country. The super highway proposed will replace the existing interstate
highway system and allow speeds of at least 240 MPH. the following interview
with NSF developers explores their current plans.
*
ME: I understand you are building a new Super national highway(2) to serve
the purposes of advancing ground transportation throughout our county.
NSF: Yes we are, as a part of an earlier initiative sponsored by the then
Senator Gore. We are very excited about the technology that will allow
transportation speeds of 240 MPH(3) across the country.
ME: That sounds exciting, how will it be built?
NSF: Well, we will have this super highway designed to allow the high speed
travel(4) and it will have six entrance/exit ramps.(5)
ME: Ahh.... that doesn't sound like very many ramps, where will they be
located?
NSF: Well, several years ago we funded the establishment of six gourmet
restaurants(6) scattered across the country, we are going to fund the building
of the super highway and access ramps at the restaurant locations. We are
however allowing the ramp contractor(7) to build as many ramps as he wishes,
at his own expense.
ME: I assume then the contractor for the highway(8) builds ramps where
ever it makes sense to optimize access.
NSF: Well, not exactly. We are separating the contracts for the ramps and
the highway so the bidders can be very competitive.
ME: I see. How to you plan to connect the rest of the interstate highway
system(9) to your super national highway?
NSF: Well actually, its not part of our plan. We are having the highway and
access ramps built for us, its up to the states or other government agencies
to provide the highways to the access ramps. We will however fund a few
temporary roads(10) to connect parts of the existing interstate highway
system, but don't intend to make them permanent. Did I forget to mention that
we will be shutting down the existing interstate highway system?(11)
ME: You mean I will no longer be able to drive across the existing
interstate highway system?
NSF: Yes, it will be destroyed.
ME: OK, lets see If I understand. I have a state highway system for
example, and I put in a connecting highway to your super highway, and I can
now travel on it, right?
NSF: Well, no you can't. The super highway will only be used for vehicles
that can run 240 MPH(12) and we must approve every vehicle, destination, and
trip the vehicle takes.(13) We don't want our super highway clogged with
vehicles which can only travel 70 MPH!(14)
ME: I'm confused. You mean you want my state for example, to build an
access road to a super highway it can't generally use?
NSF: Well, yes and no. You see we also want to encourage development of
toll roads in our country.(15) Our six high speed access ramps are wide
enough to allow parallel toll roads to be accessed as well as our super
highway. Private road builders will be able to put in toll roads between our
access ramps, for a fee.
ME: So there will no longer be a "free" interstate highway system?
NSF: Right!
ME: Lets see if I got this straight. You build a national super highway
that has six access ramps located where you once established gourmet
restaurants and you destroy the interstate highway system. There are no plans
to replicate the functionality of the interstate highway systems, but you
will allow private toll road builders to use your wide access ramps and
develop parallel toll roads to your super highway. My state or the government
has to build the roads that lead to the super highway, but once there, cannot
travel on it unless the specific vehicle can run at 240 MPH and has specific
permission from you to travel on it.
NSF: You've got it!
ME: Well then you must have a very interesting reason to put this highway
and the access ramps at these restaurant locations.
NSF: Well, you see, the gourmet food business isn't what it used to be.
Fast food has really taken over in our country, we really need to preserve the
gourmet food business.(16) High quality restaurants should be located right
off of classy high speed highways. We really would like to encourage
restaurant patrons to use the super highway so they can have breakfast in San
Diego and dinner in Champaign Illinois. We will be looking for patrons who
can afford to eat at multiple restaurants and we will let them ride the
highway for free! Of course they must have a vehicle that can go 240 MPH.(17)
ME: I'm even more confused. How will I get across the country?
NSF: Well, if your state puts in an access road to one of our access ramps
you take it, and then exit-off on to one of the toll roads that will be built
parallel to our super highway.
ME: How fast will I be able to go?(18)
NSF: What ever the speed limit is on the toll road.
ME: What will it cost me to ride on it?
NSF: What ever the toll is. You see, we expect that several toll roads
will be developed. Competition! It should keep the price down.
ME: When the super highway is empty, how will it be used?
NSF: Well, we are telling the gourmet restaurants that they should work
together even though they will be competing with each other for customers.(19)
You know, they could develop plans to send trash to each other so they can
demonstrate how fast the transportation is on the super highway, it would be
in their best interest.(20)
ME: Aren't there plans for development of high speed toll roads already in
progress by several toll road builders? What makes you think they will put
their roads in-between your access ramps?(21)
NSF: F.O.D.
ME: What?
NSF: Field Of Dreams. If we build it they will come.
ME: So again, tell me who pays for what?
NSF: The government funds the super highway and six access ramps. The toll
road providers build their own roads and pays an access fee for the ramps. The
states and other government agencies pay for any roads necessary to get to the
access ramps. When you get on a toll road and pay what ever the price is.
ME: And the only one's allowed to ride on the super highway are those
persons who have special vehicles that can go 240 MPH with your specific
permission, or those who can afford to frequent the gourmet restaurants and
travel at 240 MPH. Everyone else takes the toll roads.
NSF: Right, but don't forget the trash runs between restaurants!
ME: Oh, how silly of me! Hmmmm. I wonder if this is really what Senator
Gore had in mind?
*"If we do not succeed, then we face the risk of failure."*
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
*"What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind.
Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is."*
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
(winning friends while peaking to the United Negro College Fund)
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) Copyright (C) 1993 by Greg Chartrand. All rights reserved.
(2) NSFnet backbone project
(3) 155 megabit
(4) high speed data transfer
(5) Network Access Points (NAP's)
(6) NSF sponsored super computer centers
(7) The contractor providing the NAP's.
(8) The contractor to provide the backbone telecommunications services
(9) The Existing internet, regional, state, and other networks
(10) NSF plans to provide interim funding for NSF regionals to connect to
the NAP's. State networks and other government agencies are on their own.
(11) The existing NSFnet will be turned off at some point after the new
"arrangement" is in place.
(12) The Very High Speed Backbone Service (VBNS) is reserved for
applications and purposes where a demonstrated need for high speed/capacity
transmission is needed.
(13) NSF will require approval.
(14) NSF does not wish to clog the VBNS with low speed aggregate traffic
unless additions are made to the network. 70 MPH = 45 MBS.
(15) The NSF expects commercial providers like AT&T, MCI to put networking
between NAP's. Most of the existing NSFnet traffic would go over these
commercial networks which would have to be paid for by the users.
(16) The usefulness of super computer systems has been grossly reduced by
the technological advances associated with very powerful Unix work stations.
Super computers fill a diminishing niche in science and industry.
(17) NSF is looking for potential users that can use more than one super
computer center and use the VBNS to make the application work. Applications of
this nature are a bit obscure.
(18) There are no specifications for commercial providers.
(19) NSF super computer centers are no longer funded by NSF so they
compete for commercial and non-commercial business.
(20) NSF is asking the NSF super computer centers to develop demonstration
applications which show how the network might be used. These applications
would demonstrate, and not necessarly do anything useful.
(21) The major telecommunications suppliers will be selling similar
services this year without the complications of the NAP's. The NAP's primary
function would allow communications between commercial vendors which would be
very useful, but it is unclear if the telecommunications suppliers will "buy"
into this concept.
Lingo
*****
This glossary is only a tiny subset of all of the various terms and other
things that people regularly use on The Net. For a more complete (and more
entertaining) reference, get a copy of "The New Hacker's Dictionary", which
is based on a VERY large text file called the Jargon File, edited by Eric
Raymond . It is available from the MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02142; its ISBN number is `0-262-68069-6'. The
up-to-date version of the Jargon File "The on-line hacker Jargon File,
version 3.0, 29 July 1993", is kept on various FTP servers (e.g. from
`ftp.gnu.ai.mit.edu' as file `/pub/gnu/jarg300.txt.gz').
`:-)': This odd symbol is one of the ways a person can portray "mood" in
the very flat medium of computers--by using "smilies." This is
`metacommunication', and there are literally hundreds of them, from the
obvious to the obscure. This particular example expresses "happiness."
Don't see it? Tilt your head to the left 90 degrees. Smilies are also used
to denote sarcasm.
ASCII: Has two meanings. ASCII is a universal computer code for English
letters and characters. Computers store all information as binary numbers.
In ASCII, the letter "A" is stored as 1000001, whether the computer is made
by IBM, Apple or Commodore. ASCII also refers to a method, or protocol, for
copying files from one computer to another over a network, in which neither
computer checks for any errors that might have been caused by static or other
problems.
ANSI: Computers use several different methods for deciding how to put
information on your screen and how your keyboard interacts with the screen.
ANSI is one of these "terminal emulation" methods. Although most popular on
PC-based bulletin-board systems, it can also be found on some Net sites. To
use it properly, you will first have to turn it on, or enable it, in your
communications software.
ARPANet: A predecessor of the Internet. Started in 1969 with funds from
the Defense Department's Advanced Projects Research Agency.
Backbone: A high-speed network that connects several powerful computers.
In the U.S., the backbone of the Internet is often considered the NSFNet, a
government funded link between a handful of supercomputer sites across the
country.
Baud: The speed at which modems transfer data. One baud is roughly equal
to one bit per second. It takes eight bits to make up one letter or
character. Modems rarely transfer data at exactly the same speed as their
listed baud rate because of static or computer problems. More expensive
modems use systems, such as Microcom Network Protocol (MNP), which can
correct for these errors or which "compress" data to speed up transmission.
BITNet: Another, academically oriented, international computer network,
which uses a different set of computer instructions to move data. It is
easily accessible to Internet users through e-mail, and provides a large
number of conferences and databases. Its name comes from "Because It's Time."
Bounce: What your e-mail does when it cannot get to its recipient - it
bounces back to you.
Command line: On Unix host systems, this is where you tell the machine
what you want it to do, by entering commands.
Communications software: A program that tells a modem how to work.
Daemon: An otherwise harmless Unix program that normally works out of
sight of the user. On the Internet, you'll most likely encounter it only when
your e-mail is not delivered to your recipient - you'll get back your
original message plus an ugly message from a "mailer daemon."
Distribution: A way to limit where your Usenet postings go. Handy for
such things as "for sale" messages or discussions of regional politics.
Domain: The last part of an Internet address, such as "news.com."
Dot: When you want to impress the net veterans you meet at parties, say
"dot" instead of "period," for example: "My address is john at site dot
domain dot com."
Dot file: A file on a Unix public-access system that alters the way you or
your messages interact with that system. For example, your .login file
contains various parameters for such things as the text editor you get when
you send a message. When you do an ls command, these files do not appear in
the directory listing; do `ls -a' to list them.
Down: When a public-access site runs into technical trouble, and you can
no longer gain access to it, it's down.
Download: Copy a file from a host system to your computer. There are
several different methods, or protocols, for downloading files, most of which
periodically check the file as it is being copied to ensure no information is
inadvertently destroyed or damaged during the process. Some, such as XMODEM,
only let you download one file at a time. Others, such as batch-YMODEM and
ZMODEM, let you type in the names of several files at once, which are then
automatically downloaded.
EMACS: From Editing MACroS. A standard Unix text editor that beginners
hate, and hackers adore.
E-mail: Electronic mail - a way to send a private message to somebody else
on the Net. Used as both noun and verb.
Emoticon: A smiley. See `:-)'.
F2F: Face to Face. When you actually meet those people you been
corresponding with/flaming.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions. A compilation of answers to these. Many
Usenet newsgroups have these files, which are posted once a month or so for
beginners.
FYI: For Your Interest.
Film at 11: One reaction to an overwrought argument: "Imminent death of
the Net predicted. Film at 11."
Finger: An Internet program that lets you get some bit of information
about another user, provided they have first created a `.plan' file.
Flame: Online yelling and/or ranting directed at somebody else. Often
results in flame wars, which occasionally turn into holy wars (*Note Flame
Wars to Killfiles::).
Followup: A Usenet posting that is a response to an earlier message.
Foo/foobar: A sort of online algebraic place holder, for example: "If you
want to know when another site is run by a for-profit company, look for an
address in the form of ."
Fortune cookie: An inane/witty/profund comment that can be found around
the net.
Freeware: Software that doesn't cost anything.
FTP: File-transfer Protocol. A system for transferring files across the
Net.
Get a life: What to say to somebody who has, perhaps, been spending a wee
bit too much time in front of a computer.
GIF: Graphics Interchange Format. A format developed in the mid-1980s by
CompuServe for use in photo-quality graphics images. Now commonly used
everywhere online.
GNU: Gnu's Not Unix. A project of the Free Software Foundation to write a
free version of the Unix operating system.
Handshake: Two modems trying to connect first do this to agree on how to
transfer data.
Hang: When a modem fails to hang up.
Holy war: Arguments that involve certain basic tenets of faith, about
which one cannot disagree without setting one of these off. For example: IBM
PCs are inherently superior to Macintoshes.
Host system: A public-access site; provides Net access to people outside
the research and government community.
IMHO: In My Humble Opinion.
Internet: A worldwide system for linking smaller computer networks
together. Networks connected through the Internet use a particular set of
communications standards to communicate, known as TCP/IP.
Killfile: A file that lets you filter Usenet postings to some extent, by
excluding messages on certain topics or from certain people.
Log on/log in: Connect to a host system or public-access site.
Log off: Disconnect from a host system.
Lurk: Read messages in a Usenet newsgroup without ever saying anything.
Mailing list: Essentially a conference in which messages are delivered
right to your mailbox, instead of to a Usenet newsgroup. You get on these by
sending a message to a specific e-mail address, which is often that of a
computer that automates the process.
MIME: Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions. A currently (1993) heavily
developing extension of the Internet mail protocol, that enables sending of 8
bit e-mail messages, e.g. to support extended character sets, voice mail, FAX
images, etc. Read `comp.mail.mime' if you want to keep up with new
developments.
MOTSS: Members of the Same Sex. Gays and Lesbians online. Originally an
acronym used in the 1980 federal census.
Net.god: One who has been online since the beginning, who knows all and
who has done it all.
Net.personality: Somebody sufficiently opinionated/flaky/with plenty of
time on his hands to regularly post in dozens of different Usenet newsgroups,
whose presence is known to thousands of people.
Net.police: Derogatory term for those who would impose their standards on
other users of the Net. Often used in vigorous flame wars (in which it
occasionally mutates to Net.nazis).
Netiquette: A set of common-sense guidelines for not annoying others.
Network: A communications system that links two or more computers. It can
be as simple as a cable strung between two computers a few feet apart or as
complex as hundreds of thousands of computers around the world linked through
fiber optic cables, phone lines and satellites.
Newbie: Somebody new to the Net. Often used derogatorily by net.veterans
who have forgotten that, they, too, were once newbies who did not innately
know the answer to everything.
Newsgroup: A Usenet conference.
NIC: Network Information Center. As close as an Internet- style network
gets to a hub; it's usually where you'll find information about that
particular network.
NREN: National Research and Education Network. The future of the U.S. part
of the Internet. Said to be 50 times faster than currently (1993).
NSA line eater: The more aware/paranoid Net users believe that the
National Security Agency has a super-powerful computer assigned to reading
everything posted on the Net. They will jokingly (?) refer to this line
eater in their postings.
NSF: National Science Foundation. Funds the NSFNet, the backbone of the
Internet in the U.S.
Offline: When your computer is not connected to a host system or the Net,
you are offline.
Online: When your computer is connected to an online service,
bulletin-board system or public-access site.
Ping: A program that can trace the route a message takes from your site to
another site.
.plan file: A file that lists anything you want others on the Net to know
about you. You place it in your home directory on your public-access site.
Then, anybody who fingers (*Note Finger: Telnet,) you, will get to see this
file.
Post: To compose a message for a Usenet newsgroup and then send it out for
others to see.
Postmaster: The person to contact at a particular site to ask for
information about the site or complain about one of his/her user's behavior.
Protocol: The method used to transfer a file between a host system and
your computer. There are several types, such as Kermit, YMODEM and ZMODEM.
Prompt: When the host system asks you to do something and waits for you to
respond. For example, if you see "login:" it means type your user name.
README: Files found on FTP sites that explain what is in a given FTP
directory or which provide other useful information (such as how to use FTP).
Real Soon Now: A vague term used to describe when something will actually
happen.
RFC: Request for Comments. A series of documents that describe various
technical aspects of the Internet.
ROTFL: Rolling on the Floor Laughing. How to respond to a particularly
funny comment.
ROT13: A simple way to encode bad jokes, movie reviews that give away the
ending, pornography, etc. Essentially, each letter in a message is replace
by the letter 13 spaces away from it in the alphabet. There are online
decoders to read these; nn has one built in.
RTFM: Read the, uh, you know, Manual. Often used in flames against people
who ask computer-related questions that could be easily answered with a few
minutes with a manual. More politely: RTM.
Screen capture: A part of your communications software that opens a file
on your computer and saves to it whatever scrolls past on the screen while
connected to a host system.
Server: A computer that can distribute information or files automatically
in response to specifically worded e-mail requests.
Shareware: Software that is freely available on the Net, but which, if you
like and use it, you should send in the fee requested by the author, whose
name and address will be found in a file distributed with the software.
.sig file: Sometimes, `.signature' file. A file that, when placed in your
home directory on your public-access site, will automatically be appended to
every Usenet posting you write.
.sig quote: A profound/witty/quizzical/whatever quote that you include in
your `.sig' file.
Signal-to-noise ratio: The amount of useful information to be found in a
given Usenet newsgroup. Often used derogatorily, for example: "the
signal-to-noise ratio in this newsgroup is pretty low."
Snail mail: Mail that comes through a slot in your front door.
Sysadmin/Sysop: The system administrator/system operator; the person who
runs a host system.
TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.
TLA: Three Letter Acronym, such as IBM, DEC, etc.
TCP/IP: Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. The particular
system for transferring information over a computer network that is at the
heart of the Internet.
Telnet: A program that lets you connect to other computers on the Internet.
Terminal emulation: There are several methods for determining how your
keystrokes and screen interact with a public-access site's operating system.
Most communications programs offer a choice of "emulations" that let you
mimic the keyboard that would normally be attached directly to the
host-system computer.
UUCP: Unix-to-Unix CoPy. A method for transferring Usenet postings and
e-mail that requires far fewer net resources than TCP/IP, but which can
result in considerably slower transfer times.
Upload: Copy a file from your computer to a host system.
User name: On most host systems, the first time you connect you are asked
to supply a one-word user name. This can be any combination of letters and
numbers.
VT100: Another terminal-emulation system. Supported by many
communications program, it is the most common one in use on the Net. VT102
is a newer version.
*"It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is.
If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's.
It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs."*
-- Oxford University Press, "Edpress News"
Dear Emily Postnews
*******************
By *Brad Templeton* (1)
The following is available as file `/pub/usenet/
news.answers/emily-postnews/ part1' on `rtfm.mit.edu'. The last changes were
made on 30 Nov 91 by Brad Templeton.
NOTE: this is intended to be satirical. If you do not recognize it as
such, consult a doctor or professional comedian. The recommendations in this
article should recognized for what they are - admonitions about what NOT to
do.
"Dear Emily Postnews"
*Ms Emily Postnews*, foremost authority on proper net behaviour, gives her
advice on how to act on the net.
*
Dear Miss Postnews: How long should my signature be? -
A: Dear Verbose: Please try and make your signature as long as you can.
It's much more important than your article, of course, so try to have more
lines of signature than actual text.
Try to include a large graphic made of ASCII characters, plus lots of cute
quotes and slogans. People will never tire of reading these pearls of wisdom
again and again, and you will soon become personally associated with the joy
each reader feels at seeing yet another delightful repeat of your signature.
Be sure as well to include a complete map of USENET with each signature,
to show how anybody can get mail to you from any site in the world. Be sure
to include Internet gateways as well. Also tell people on your own site how
to mail to you. Give independent addresses for Internet, UUCP, and BITNET,
even if they're all the same.
Aside from your reply address, include your full name, company and
organization. It's just common courtesy - after all, in some newsreaders
people have to type an *entire* keystroke to go back to the top of your
article to see this information in the header.
By all means include your phone number and street address in every single
article. People are always responding to usenet articles with phone calls
and letters. It would be silly to go to the extra trouble of including this
information only in articles that need a response by conventional channels!
*
Dear Emily: Today I posted an article and forgot to include my signature.
What should I do? -
A: Dear Forgetful: Rush to your terminal right away and post an article
that says, "Oops, I forgot to post my signature with that last article. Here
it is."
Since most people will have forgotten your earlier article, (particularly
since it dared to be so boring as to not have a nice, juicy signature) this
will remind them of it. Besides, people care much more about the signature
anyway. See the previous letter for more important details.
Also, be sure to include your signature TWICE in each article. That way
you're sure people will read it.
*
Dear Ms. Postnews: I couldn't get mail through to somebody on another
site. What should I do? -
A: Dear Eager: No problem, just post your message to a group that a lot of
people read. Say, "This is for John Smith. I couldn't get mail through so
I'm posting it. All others please ignore."
This way tens of thousands of people will spend a few seconds scanning
over and ignoring your article, using up over 16 man-hours their collective
time, but you will be saved the terrible trouble of checking through Usenet
maps or looking for alternate routes. Just think, if you couldn't distribute
your message to 30,000 other computers, you might actually have to (gasp)
call directory assistance for 60 cents, or even phone the person. This can
cost as much as a few DOLLARS (!) for a 5 minute call!
And certainly it's better to spend 10 to 20 dollars of other people's
money distributing the message then for you to have to waste $9 on an
overnight letter, or even 29 cents on a stamp!
Don't forget. The world will end if your message doesn't get through, so
post it as many places as you can.
*
Q: What about a test message?
A: It is important, when testing, to test the entire net. Never test
merely a subnet distribution when the whole net can be done. Also put
"please ignore" on your test messages, since we all know that everybody
always skips a message with a line like that. Don't use a subject like "My
sex is female but I demand to be addressed as male." because such articles
are read in depth by all USEnauts.
*
Q: Somebody just posted that Roman Polanski directed Star Wars. What
should I do?
A: Post the correct answer at once! We can't have people go on believing
that! Very good of you to spot this. You'll probably be the only one to
make the correction, so post as soon as you can. No time to lose, so
certainly don't wait a day, or check to see if somebody else has made the
correction.
And it's not good enough to send the message by mail. Since you're the
only one who really knows that it was Francis Coppola, you have to inform the
whole net right away!
*
Q: I read an article that said, "reply by mail, I'll summarize." What
should I do?
A: Post your response to the whole net. That request applies only to dumb
people who don't have something interesting to say. Your postings are much
more worthwhile than other people's, so it would be a waste to reply by mail.
*
Q: I collected replies to an article I wrote, and now it's time to
summarize. What should I do?
A: Simply concatenate all the articles together into a big file and post
that. On USENET, this is known as a summary. It lets people read all the
replies without annoying newsreaders getting in the way. Do the same when
summarizing a vote.
*
Q: I saw a long article that I wish to rebut carefully, what should I do?
A: Include the entire text with your article, particularly the signature,
and include your comments closely packed between the lines. Be sure to post,
and not mail, even though your article looks like a reply to the original.
Everybody *loves* to read those long point-by-point debates, especially when
they evolve into name-calling and lots of "Is too!" - "Is not!" - "Is too,
twizot!" exchanges.
Be sure to follow-up everything, and never let another person get in the
last word on a net debate. Why, if people let other people have the last
word, then discussions would actually stop! Remember, other net readers
aren't nearly as clever as you, and if somebody posts something wrong, the
readers can't possibly realize that on their own without your elucidations.
If somebody gets insulting in their net postings, the best response is to get
right down to their level and fire a return salvo. When I read one net
person make an insulting attack on another, I always immediately take it as
gospel unless a rebuttal is posted. It never makes me think less of the
insulter, so it's your duty to respond.
*
Q: How can I choose what groups to post in?
A: Pick as many as you can, so that you get the widest audience. After
all, the net exists to give you an audience. Ignore those who suggest you
should only use groups where you think the article is highly appropriate.
Pick all groups where anybody might even be slightly interested.
Always make sure followups go to all the groups. In the rare event that
you post a followup which contains something original, make sure you expand
the list of groups. Never include a "Followup-to:" line in the header, since
some people might miss part of the valuable discussion in the fringe groups.
*
Q: How about an example?
A: Ok. Let's say you want to report that Gretzky has been traded from the
Oilers to the Kings. Now right away you might think `rec.sport.hockey' would
be enough. WRONG. Many more people might be interested. This is a big
trade! Since it's a NEWS article, it belongs in the `news.*' hierarchy as
well. If you are a news admin, or there is one on your machine, try
`news.admin'. If not, use `news.misc'.
The Oilers are probably interested in geology, so try `sci.geo.fluids'.
He is a big star, so post to `sci.astro', and `sci.space' because they are
also interested in stars. And of course `comp.dcom.telecom' because he was
born in the birthplace of the telephone. And because he's Canadian, post to
`soc.culture.Ontario.southwestern'. But that group doesn't exist, so
cross-post to `news.groups' suggesting it should be created. With this many
groups of interest, your article will be quite bizarre, so post to
`talk.bizarre' as well. (And post to `comp.std.mumps', since they hardly get
any articles there, and a "comp" group will propagate your article further.)
You may also find it is more fun to post the article once in each group.
If you list all the newsgroups in the same article, some newsreaders will
only show the the article to the reader once! Don't tolerate this.
*
Q: How do I create a newsgroup?
A: The easiest way goes something like `inews -C newgroup ...', and while
that will stir up lots of conversation about your new newsgroup, it might not
be enough.
First post a message in news.groups describing the group. This is a "call
for discussion." (If you see a call for discussion, immediately post a one
line message saying that you like or dislike the group.) When proposing the
group, pick a name with a TLA (three-letter acronym) that will be understood
only by "in" readers of the group.
After the call for discussion, post the call for flames, followed by a
call for arguments about the name and a call for run-on puns. Eventually
make a call for "votes." USENET is a democracy, so voters can now all post
their votes to ensure they get to all 30,000 machines instead of just the
person counting. Every few days post a long summary of all the votes so that
people can complain about bad mailers and double votes. It means you'll be
more popular and get lots of mail. At the end of 21 days you can post the
vote results so that people can argue about all the technical violations of
the guidelines you made. Blame them on the moderator-of-the-week for
news.announce.newgroups. Then your group might be created.
To liven up discussion, choose a good cross-match for your hierarchy and
group. For example, comp.race.formula1 or soc.vlsi.design would be good
group names. If you want your group created quickly, include an interesting
word like "sex" or "activism." To avoid limiting discussion, make the name
as broad as possible, and don't forget that TLA.
If possible, count votes from a leaf site with a once-a-week polled
connection to botswanavax. Schedule the vote during your relay site's head
crash if possible.
Under no circumstances use the trial group method, because it eliminates
the discussion, flame, pun, voting and guideline-violation accusation phases,
thus taking all the fun out of it. To create an ALT group, simply issue the
creation command. Then issue an rmgroup and some more newgroup messages to
save other netters the trouble of doing that part.
*
Q: I cant spell worth a dam. I hope your going too tell me what to do?
A: Don't worry about how your articles look. Remember it's the message
that counts, not the way it's presented. Ignore the fact that sloppy
spelling in a purely written forum sends out the same silent messages that
soiled clothing would when addressing an audience.
Q: How should I pick a subject for my articles?
A: Keep it short and meaningless. That way people will be forced to
actually read your article to find out what's in it. This means a bigger
audience for you, and we all know that's what the net is for. If you do a
followup, be sure and keep the same subject, even if it's totally meaningless
and not part of the same discussion. If you don't, you won't catch all the
people who are looking for stuff on the original topic, and that means less
audience for you.
*
Q: What sort of tone should I take in my article?
A: Be as outrageous as possible. If you don't say outlandish things, and
fill your article with libelous insults of net people, you may not stick out
enough in the flood of articles to get a response. The more insane your
posting looks, the more likely it is that you'll get lots of followups. The
net is here, after all, so that you can get lots of attention.
If your article is polite, reasoned and to the point, you may only get
mailed replies. Yuck!
*
Q: The posting software suggested I had too long a signature and too many
lines of included text in my article. What's the best course?
A: Such restrictions were put in the software for no reason at all, so
don't even try to figure out why they might apply to your article. Turns out
most people search the net to find nice articles that consist of the complete
text of an earlier article plus a few lines.
In order to help these people, fill your article with dummy original lines
to get past the restrictions. Everybody will thank you for it.
For your signature, I know it's tough, but you will have to read it in
with the editor. Do this twice to make sure it's firmly in there. By the
way, to show your support for the free distribution of information, be sure
to include a copyright message forbidding transmission of your article to
sites whose USENET politics you don't like.
Also, if you do have a lot of free time and want to trim down the text in
your article, be sure to delete some of the attribution lines so that it
looks like the original author of - say - a plea for world peace actually
wrote the followup calling for the nuking of Bermuda.
*
Q: They just announced on the radio that the United States has invaded
Iraq. Should I post?
A: Of course. The net can reach people in as few as 3 to 5 days. It's
the perfect way to inform people about such news events long after the
broadcast networks have covered them. As you are probably the only person to
have heard the news on the radio, be sure to post as soon as you can.
*
Q: I have this great joke. You see, these three strings walk into a bar...
A: Oh dear. Don't spoil it for me. Submit it to rec.humor, and post it
to the moderator of `rec.humor.funny' at the same time. I'm sure he's never
seen that joke.
*
Q: What computer should I buy? An Atari ST or an Amiga?
A: Cross post that question to the Atari and Amiga groups. It's an
interesting and novel question that I am sure they would love to investigate
in those groups. There is no need to read the groups in advance or examine
the "frequently asked question" lists to see if the topic has already been
dealt with. In fact, you don't need to read the group at all, and you can
tell people that in your query.
*
Q: What about other important questions? How should I know when to post?
A: Always post them. It would be a big waste of your time to find a
knowledgeable user in one of the groups and ask through private mail if the
topic has already come up. Much easier to bother thousands of people with
the same question.
*
Q: Somebody just posted a query to the net, and I want to get the answer
too. What should I do?
A: Immediately post a following, including the complete text of the query.
At the bottom add, "Me too!" If somebody else has done this, follow up
their article and add "Me three," or whatever number is appropriate. Don't
forget your full signature. After all, if you just mail the original poster
and ask for a copy of the answers, you will simply clutter the poster's
mailbox, and save people who do answer the question the joyful duty of noting
all the "me (n)s" and sending off all the multiple copies.
*
Q: What is the measure of a worthwhile group?
A: Why, it's Volume, Volume, Volume. Any group that has lots of noise in
it must be good. Remember, the higher the volume of material in a group, the
higher percentage of useful, factual and insightful articles you will find.
In fact, if a group can't demonstrate a high enough volume, it should be
deleted from the net.
*
Q: Emily, I'm having a serious disagreement with somebody on the net. I
tried complaints to his sysadmin, organizing mail campaigns, called for his
removal from the net and phoning his employer to get him fired. Everybody
laughed at me. What can I do?
A: Go to the daily papers. Most modern reporters are top-notch computer
experts who will understand the net, and your problems, perfectly. They will
print careful, reasoned stories without any errors at all, and surely
represent the situation properly to the public. The public will also all act
wisely, as they are also fully cognizant of the subtle nature of net society.
Papers never sensationalize or distort, so be sure to point out things
like racism and sexism wherever they might exist. Be sure as well that they
understand that all things on the net, particularly insults, are meant
literally. Link what transpires on the net to the causes of the Holocaust,
if possible. If regular papers won't take the story, go to a tabloid paper -
they are always interested in good stories.
By arranging all this free publicity for the net, you'll become very well
known. People on the net will wait in eager anticipation for your every
posting, and refer to you constantly. You'll get more mail than you ever
dreamed possible - the ultimate in net success.
*
Q: What does foobar stand for?
A: It stands for you, dear.
*"News articles are separated into divisions called newsgroups. Each
division is supposed to limit itself to a single topic, and the name of
the group is supposed to give you some idea as to the content of the
group. These groups are then organized into hierarchies of related
topics. Usenet Network News started out with just two hierarchies, mod
and net. The mod hierarchy had those groups that had a person as the
moderator to edit and control the information. The net hierarchy handled
all other groups. With the release of B News and its ability to have any
single group be moderated or open, the great renaming was undertaken."*
-- Weinstein (1992)
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) Copyright (C) 1991 by Brad Templeton. All rights reserved.
ÅFF Informatioï
***************
General Information About the Electronic Frontier Foundatioï
============================================================
*The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)* was founded in July of 1990 to
ensure that the principles embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights are protected as new communications technologies emerge.
From the beginning, EFF has worked to shape our nation's communications
infrastructure and the policies that govern it in order to maintain and
enhance First Amendment, privacy and other democratic values. We believe that
our overriding public goal must be the creation of Electronic Democracy, so
our work focuses on the establishment of:
* new laws that protect citizens' basic Constitutional rights as they use
new communications technologies,
* a policy of common carriage requirements for all network providers so
that all speech, no matter how controversial, will be carried without
discrimination,
* a National Public Network where voice, data and video services are
accessible to all citizens on an equitable and affordable basis, and
* a diversity of communities that enable all citizens to have a voice in
the information age.
Information Infrastructure
--------------------------
EFF's Open Platform Proposal advocates that the nation's telecommunications
infrastructure providers offer affordable, widely available transmission of
voice, data and video information. The telecommunications infrastructure
must promote broad access and enable citizens to receive and publish a
diversity of information. In addition, a competitive environment must be
ensured to preserve the core principles of common carriage, universal service
and open standards.
In the near term, EFF supports the implementation of services such as ISDN
and ADSL, currently available digital technologies, for sending voice, data
and video at reasonable cost to consumers.
EFF supports federal funding to promote the development of network tools
and applications that will make the Internet and the NREN easier to use.
Although the NREN will be made up of services from commercial providers,
government also has a vital role to play in making grants to institutions
that cannot afford to pay for Internet connectivity.
Civil Liberties
---------------
EFF has been working to ensure that common carrier principles are upheld in
the information age. Common carrier principles require that network
providers carry all speech, regardless of its controversial content. Common
carriers must also provide all speakers and information providers with equal,
nondiscriminatory access to the network.
EFF chairs the Digital Security and Privacy Working Group, a coalition of
over 50 organizations-from computer software and hardware firms,
telecommunications and energy companies to civil liberties advocates-that
work on sound privacy policies in telecommunications. For example, the group
has worked to oppose the FBI's Digital Telephony proposal and
government-mandated encryption policies.
EFF is working to convince Congress that all measures supporting broader
public access to information should be enacted into law. EFF supports an
Electronic Freedom of Information Act and other legislation to make
information more accessible to citizens in electronic formats.
EFF supports both legal and technical means to enhance privacy in
communications. We, therefore, advocate all measures that ensure the
public's right to use the most effective encryption technologies available.
Legal Services
--------------
EFF sponsors legal cases where users' online civil liberties have been
violated. The Steve Jackson Games case, decided in March of 1993,
established privacy protections for electronic publishers and users of
electronic mail. We continue to monitor the online community for legal
actions that merit EFF support.
EFF provides a free telephone hotline for members of the online community
who have questions regarding their legal rights.
Members of EFF's staff and board speak to law enforcement organizations,
state attorney bar associations and university classes on the work that we do
and how these groups can get involved.
Community Building
------------------
EFF, in conjunction with the Consumer Federation of America and the
American Civil Liberties Union, coordinates and sponsors the Communications
Policy Forum (CPF). CPF enables nonprofit organizations, computer and
communications firms, and government policymakers to come together in a
nonpartisan setting to discuss communications policy goals and strategies.
EFF works with local organizations that support online communications
issues. In September of 1993, EFF will cosponsor a cryptography conference
with a group in Austin, Texas. Earlier this year, EFF sponsored a summit of
groups from around the country to discuss common goals. We also participate
in an online mailing list for organizations that share our interests.
EFF is a funder and organizer of the annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy
conference, where academics, civil libertarians, law enforcement officials
and computer users all meet to discuss the privacy implications of
communicating online. Each year at the conference, EFF presents its Pioneer
awards to individuals who have made significant contributions to computer
communications.
EFF maintains several communications forums online. We have our own
Internet node, eff.org, which houses our FTP and Gopher sites and our
discussion areas, `comp.org.eff.talk' and `comp.org.eff.news'. EFF also
maintains conferences on the *Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL)*,
*CompuServe* and *America Online*.
Íow to connect to EFF?
======================
Internet and USENET
-------------------
General information requests, including requests to be added to the
EFFector Online mailing list, can be sent to .
If you receive any USENET newsgroups, your site may carry the newsgroups
`comp.org.eff.news' and `comp.org.eff.talk'. The former is a moderated
newsgroup for announcements, newsletters, and other information; the latter
is an unmoderated discussion group for discussing EFF and issues relating to
the electronic frontier.
For those unable to read the newsgroups, there are redistributions via
electronic mail. Send requests to be added to or dropped from the
`comp.org.eff.news' mailing list to . For the
`comp.org.eff.talk' mailing list, send a note to .
Please note that eff-talk can be extremely high-volume at times.
A document library containing all EFF news releases and other publications
of interest, including John Perry Barlow's history of EFF, "Crime and
Puzzlement", is available via anonymous FTP from `ftp.eff.org'. Send a note
to if you have questions or are unable to use FTP. This
archive is also accessible via Gopher. Try `gopher gopher.eff.org'.
The WELL
--------
The WELL is host to an active EFF conference, as well as many other related
conferences of interest to EFF supporters. Access to the WELL is $15/month
plus $2/hour. Telecom access is available through the CompuServe Packet
Network for an additional $4.50/hour. If you have an Internet connection, you
can reach the WELL via telnet at `well.sf.ca.us'; otherwise, dial +1 415 332
6106 (data). The WELL's voice number is +1 415 332 4335.
CompuServe
----------
Our forum on CompuServe is also open. `GO EFFSIG' to join. Many of the
files on `ftp.eff.org', as well as other items of interest, are mirrored in
the EFFSIG Libraries.
America Online
--------------
EFF hosts a Special Interest Group on America Online as part of the
*Macintosh Communications Forum (MCM)*. `GOTO Keyword EFF' to join. Many of
the files on `ftp.eff.org', as well as other items of interest, are mirrored
in this forum. In addition, EFF sponsors an interactive discussion on this
forum the second Saturday night of each month at 9:00 p.m. ET.
Ìembership in the Electronic Frontier Foundatioï
================================================
I wish to become a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I
enclose:
$__________ Regular membership - $40 $__________ Student membership - $20
Special Contribution
I wish to make a tax-deductible donation in the amount of $__________ to
further support the activities of EFF and to broaden participation in the
organization.
Documents Available in Hard Copy Form
The following documents are available free of charge from the Electronic
Frontier Foundation. Please indicate any of the documents you wish to
receive.
___ Open Platform Proposal - EFF's proposal for a national
telecommunications infrastructure. 12 pages. July, 1992
___ An Analysis of the FBI Digital Telephony Proposal - Response of
EFF-organized coalition to the FBI's digital telephony proposal of Fall,
1992. 8 pages. September, 1992.
___ Building the Open Road: The NREN and the National Public Network - A
discussion of the National Research and Education Network as a prototype for
a National Public Network. 20 pages. May, 1992.
___ Innovative Services Delivered Now: ISDN Applications at Home, School,
the Workplace and Beyond - A compilation of ISDN applications currently in
use. 29 pages. January, 1993.
___ Decrypting the Puzzle Palace - John Perry Barlow's argument for strong
encryption and the need for an end to U.S. policies preventing its
development and use. 13 pages. May, 1992.
___ Crime and Puzzlement - John Perry Barlow's piece on the founding of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the world of hackers, crackers and
those accused of computer crimes. 24 pages. June, 1990.
___ Networks & Policy - A quarterly newsletter detailing EFF's activities
and achievements.
Your Contact Information:
Name: ___________________________________________________________________
Organization: ___________________________________________________________
Address: ________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
Phone: (____) _______________ FAX: (____) _______________ (optional)
E-mail address: _________________________________________________________
Payment Method
___ Enclosed is a check payable to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
___ Please charge my: ___ MasterCard ___ Visa ___ American Express
Card Number: ____________________________________________
Expiration Date: ________________________________________
Signature: ______________________________________________
Privacy Policy
EFF occasionally shares our mailing list with other organizations promoting
similar goals. However, we respect an individual's right to privacy and will
not distribute your name without explicit permission.
___ I grant permission for the EFF to distribute my name and contact
information to organizations sharing similar goals.
Print out and mail to:
Membership Coordinator
Electronic Frontier Foundation
1001 G Street, N.W.
Suite 950 East
Washington, DC 20001
(202) 347-5400 voice
(202) 393-5509 fax
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization
supported by contributions from individual members, corporations and private
foundations. Donations are tax-deductible.
Get GUMMed
*"The Gurus of Unix Meeting of Minds (GUMM) takes place Wednesday, April
1, 2076 (check THAT in your perpetual calendar program), 14 feet above the
ground directly in front of the Milpitas Gumps. Members will grep each other
by the hand (after intro), yacc a lot, smoke filtered chroots in pipes, chown
with forks, use the wc (unless uuclean), fseek nice zombie processes, strip,
and sleep, but not, we hope, od. Three days will be devoted to discussion of
the ramifications of whodo. Two seconds have been allotted for a complete
rundown of all the user- friendly features of Unix. Seminars include
"Everything You Know is Wrong," led by Tom Kempson, "Batman or Cat:man?" led
by Richie Dennis "cc C? Si! Si!" led by Kerwin Bernighan, and "Document
Unix, Are You Kidding?" led by Jan Yeats. No Reader Service No. is necessary
because all GUGUs (Gurus of Unix Group of Users) already know everything we
could tell them."*
-- Dr. Dobb's Journal, June '84
Internet Country Codes
**********************
This appendix gives a list of country codes with e-mail accessibility. It
is helpful in finding-out if a country has easy access to e-mail and Internet
facilities and is aimed at general e-mail and Internet users. This file is
continuously updated and available by FTP from `rtfm.mit.edu' as
`pub/usenet/news.answers/mail/country-codes'. *Note Archiving:: below.
This document is based on *International Standard ISO 3166 Names*.
Compiled by OLIVIER M.J. CREPIN-LEBLOND (1) Release: 93.8.1
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) Copyright (C) 1993 by Olivier M.J. Crepin-Leblond. All rights
reserved.
Description of codes
====================
FI
stands for FULL INTERNET access. This includes 'telnet', 'ftp', and
internet e-mail.
B
stands for BITNET access although the address may be in internet DNS
(Domain Name System) format.
* (Asterisk)
means that the country is reachable by e-mail. If this is not preceded
by FI or B, it means that the connection may be a UUCP connection. An
asterisk is included after FI or B for consistency.
PFI
stands for a provisional full internet connection.(+)
P
stands for provisional connection.
This is used when one or more of the following is true:
* address not verified or lack of address
* UUCP dialup not active
* net connection possible but not officially announced
* premature official announcement of connection
Networks which are not included
===============================
Networks such as MILNET (U.S. Army) have computers all around the world.
It is generally possible to assume that wherever there is a U.S. military
base, there will be a node reachable through gateways.
Private company networks such as for DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.), or Sun
Microsystems, for example, have nodes in many exotic locations. However the
connection may take place via UUCP and cost a lot of money. Those networks
have therefore not been included. In addition, those are PRIVATE networks.
Many companies (like U.S. Sprint, for example) offer commercial services
to many countries which are not readily available on the Internet. The
service is VERY COSTLY, usually takes place via UUCP or X.400 connections.
X.400 e-mail is usually charged to someone and if the telecommunication
carrier cannot find someone to pay for the message transfer, it will reject
it. As a result, those types of network have not been included in the list.
Although a user may RECEIVE e-mail from a user on those networks, one may not
be able to reply to it.
FIDONET nodes are NOT included. While all nodes agree to forward e-mail as
a condition to be included in the tables, the high cost of phone calls in
more exotic locations prompts some sysadmins not to want their site
publicised. Many FIDO nodes exist throughout the Middle-East and Africa.
Updates
=======
The situation changes from day to day. The growth in international
networking is such that the information contained in this document may be out
of date by the time it reaches you. If you have any update (i.e. knowledge
that a new country is connected), please send a message to
, including an example address from the country
reached so that it can be verified.
.us sites
=========
While there are several hundreds of BITNET nodes in USA, none have a name
in the format `.us'. That's why the `.us' domain is only `FI' and `*'.
.edu, .com, etc.
================
The domains in this section are special in that some of them are used in
more than one country. The domains which have full internet access are marked
accordingly. However, this doesn't mean that *all* of those domains have
full internet access. For example, only a small proportion of .mil
sites have full internet access. The same is true for .com sites, for example.
UK and GB domains
=================
There are two codes for United Kingdom, namely UK and GB. While UK is used
for addressing of most domains in DNS format, the field GB is used mainly in
the X.400 addressing of United Kingdom sites. However, there is an
increasing trend in some United Kingdom sites being directly connected to
Internet under the GB domain. The GB domain is hence a perfectly suitable
Internet top level domain.
Ìain nameservers
================
This is the main nameserver as listed in the `rs.internic.net' database.
Those often change as the network grows, and it is hard to keep track of all
nameservers, but they should usually work. Nameservers can be queried by
users using `nslookup'.
Àrchiving
=========
Once released, this document is archived in a number of archive sites
around the world. Amongst them:
`rtfm.mit.edu' (18.70.0.224)
directory: `/pub/usenet/news.answers/mail'
`lth.se' (130.235.20.3)
directory: `/pub/archive2/netnews/news.answers/mail'
# `ftp.uu.net' (192.48.96.9)
directory: `/usenet/news.answers/mail'
# `unix.hensa.ac.uk' (129.12.21.7)
directory: `/pub/uunet/usenet/news.answers/mail'
# `grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr' (134.214.100.25)
directory: `/pub/faq/mail'
The tagged hosts (#) may not be accessible via Bear access or direct PC
access in some cases.
Via listserver request: with the
command: `get faq mail/country-codes'.
All FAQs are also available via or
. For an index of all FAQs available, put the
command `GET NETFAQS FILELIST' in the body of your message.
The document is also retrievable by sending e-mail to
, blank subject line and the command: `send
usenet/news. answers/mail/country-codes'
The up-to-date, pre-release document is also available using an
experimental simple mail-server that I have setup from my account. Send
e-mail to: with a subject: `archive-server-request' and the
command: `get mail/country-codes' in the body of your message.
ISO 3166 Codes & Top level domains
==================================
Code Country Conn Notes main nameserver
AD Andorra
AE United Arab Emirates * ns.uu.net
AF Afghanistan
AG Antigua and Barbuda * upr1.upr.clu.edu
AI Anguilla
AL Albania P gwd2i.cnuce.cnr.it
AM Armenia Ex-USSR
AN Netherland Antilles
AO Angola
AQ Antarctica FI * luxor.cc.waikato.ac.nz
AR Argentina FI B * ns.uu.net
AS American Samoa
AT Austria FI B * pythia.edvz.univie.ac.at
AU Australia FI * munnari.oz.au
AW Aruba
AZ Azerbaidjan Ex-USSR
BA Bosnia-Herzegovina Ex-Yugoslavia
BB Barbados * upr1.upr.clu.edu
BD Bangladesh
BE Belgium FI B * ub4b.buug.be
BF Burkina Faso * orstom.orstom.fr
BG Bulgaria FI B * pythia.ics.forth.gr
BH Bahrain B * Gulfnet
BI Burundi
BJ Benin
BM Bermuda * ns.uu.net
BN Brunei Darussalam
BO Bolivia * ns.uu.net
BR Brazil FI B * fpsp.fapesp.br
BS Bahamas * upr1.upr.clu.edu
BT Buthan
BV Bouvet Island
BW Botswana * hippo.ru.ac.za
BY Belarus * Ex-USSR
BZ Belize P upr1.upr.clu.edu
CA Canada FI B * relay.cdnnet.ca
CC Cocos (Keeling) Isl.
CF Central African Rep.
CG Congo
CH Switzerland FI B * scsnms.switch.ch
CI Ivory Coast
CK Cook Islands
CL Chile FI B * dcc.uchile.cl
CM Cameroon FI * in .fr domain inria.inria.fr
CN China PFI * iraun1.ira.uka.de
CO Colombia B * cunixd.cc.columbia.edu
CR Costa Rica FI B * ns.cr
CS Czechoslovakia FI B * still works... ns.cesnet.cz
CU Cuba * igc.org
CV Cape Verde
CX Christmas Island
CY Cyprus B * pythia.ics.forth.gr
CZ Czech Republic FI * ns.cesnet.cz
DE Germany FI B * deins.informatik.uni-dortmund.de
DJ Djibouti
DK Denmark FI B * ns.dknet.dk
DM Dominica P upr1.upr.clu.edu
DO Dominican Republic P upr1.upr.clu.edu
DZ Algeria *
EC Ecuador FI B * ecua.net.ec
EE Estonia FI * Ex-USSR uvax2.kbfi.ee
EG Egypt PFI B * frcu.eun.eg
EH Western Sahara
ES Spain FI B * sun.rediris.es
ET Ethiopia
FI Finland FI B * funet.fi
FJ Fiji * truth.waikato.ac.nz
FK Falkland Isl.(Malvinas)
FM Micronesia
FO Faroe Islands P danpost.uni-c.dk
FR France FI B * inria.inria.fr
FX France (European Ter.) ???
GA Gabon
GB Great Britain (UK) FI * X.400 & IP ns1.cs.ucl.ac.uk
GD Grenada P upr1.upr.clu.edu
GE Georgia * Ex-USSR ns.eu.net
GH Ghana
GI Gibraltar
GL Greenland
GP Guadeloupe (Fr.)
GQ Equatorial Guinea
GF Guyana (Fr.)
GM Gambia
GN Guinea
GR Greece FI B * pythia.ics.forth.gr
GT Guatemala * ns.uu.net
GU Guam (US)
GW Guinea Bissau
GY Guyana
HK Hong Kong FI B * hp9000.csc.cuhk.hk
HM Heard & McDonald Isl.
HN Honduras * ns.uu.net
HR Croatia FI * Ex-Yugo dns.srce.hr
HT Haiti
HU Hungary FI B * sztaki.hu
ID Indonesia * ns.uu.net
IE Ireland FI B * nova.ucd.ie
IL Israel FI B * relay.huji.ac.il
IN India FI B * sangam.ncst.ernet.in
IO British Indian O. Terr.
IQ Iraq
IR Iran B *
IS Iceland FI B * isgate.is
IT Italy FI B * dns.nis.garr.it
JM Jamaica * upr1.upr.clu.edu
JO Jordan
JP Japan FI B * jp-gate.wide.ad.jp
KE Kenya * rain.psg.com
KG Kirgistan Ex-USSR
KH Cambodia
KI Kiribati
KM Comoros
KN St.Kitts Nevis Anguilla P upr1.upr.clu.edu
KP Korea (North) P
KR Korea (South) FI B * ns.kaist.ac.kr
KW Kuwait FI * No BITNET dns.kuniv.edu.kw
KY Cayman Islands
KZ Kazachstan * Ex-USSR in .su domain
LA Laos
LB Lebanon P
LC Saint Lucia P upr1.upr.clu.edu
LI Liechtenstein PFI * scsnms.switch.ch
LK Sri Lanka * ns.eu.net
LR Liberia
LS Lesotho * hippo.ru.ac.za
LT Lithuania PFI * Ex-USSR aun.uninett.no
LU Luxembourg FI B * menvax.restena.lu
LV Latvia FI * Ex-USSR lapsene.mii.lu.lv
LY Libya
MA Morocco P
MC Monaco
MD Moldavia Ex-USSR
MG Madagascar
MH Marshall Islands
ML Mali
MM Myanmar
MN Mongolia
MO Macau * hkuxb.hku.hk
MP Northern Mariana Isl.
MQ Martinique (Fr.)
MR Mauritania
MS Montserrat
MT Malta P ns.iunet.it
MU Mauritius
MV Maldives
MW Malawi
MX Mexico FI B * mtecv1.mty.itesm.mx
MY Malaysia FI B * mimos.my
MZ Mozambique * hippo.ru.ac.za
NA Namibia * rain.psg.com
NC New Caledonia (Fr.)
NE Niger * in .fr domain inria.inria.fr
NF Norfolk Island
NG Nigeria
NI Nicaragua * ns.uu.net
NL Netherlands FI B * sering.cwi.nl
NO Norway FI B * nac.no
NP Nepal
NR Nauru
NT Neutral Zone
NU Niue
NZ New Zealand FI * truth.waikato.ac.nz
OM Oman
PA Panama B *
PE Peru B * rain.psg.com
PF Polynesia (Fr.)
PG Papua New Guinea * munnari.oz.au
PH Philippines * ns.uu.net
PK Pakistan * ns.uu.net
PL Poland FI B * danpost.uni-c.dk
PM St. Pierre & Miquelon
PN Pitcairn
PT Portugal FI B * ns.dns.pt
PR Puerto Rico (US) FI B * sun386-gauss.pr
PW Palau
PY Paraguay * ns.uu.net
QA Qatar
RE Reunion (Fr.) FI * In .fr domain inria.inria.fr
RO Romania FI B * roearn.ici.ac.ro
RU Russian Federation P Ex-USSR
RW Rwanda
SA Saudi Arabia B * GulfNet
SB Solomon Islands
SC Seychelles
SD Sudan
SE Sweden FI B * sunic.sunet.se
SG Singapore FI B * solomon.technet.sg
SH St. Helena
SI Slovenia FI * Ex-Yugos via .yu klepec.yunac.yu
SJ Svalbard & Jan Mayen Is
SK Slovak Republic FI * ns.eunet.sk
SL Sierra Leone
SM San Marino
SN Senegal * rain.psg.com
SO Somalia
SR Suriname P upr1.upr.clu.edu
ST St. Tome and Principe
SU Soviet Union FI B * Still used. ns.eu.net
SV El Salvador
SY Syria
SZ Swaziland
TC Turks & Caicos Islands
TD Chad
TF French Southern Terr.
TG Togo
TH Thailand FI * chulkn.chula.ac.th
TJ Tadjikistan Ex-USSR
TK Tokelau
TM Turkmenistan * Ex-USSR in .su domain
TN Tunisia FI B * alyssa.rsinet.tn
TO Tonga
TP East Timor
TR Turkey FI B * knidos.cc.metu.edu.tr
TT Trinidad & Tobago P upr1.upr.clu.edu
TV Tuvalu
TW Taiwan FI B * moevax.edu.tw
TZ Tanzania
UA Ukraine FI * Ex-USSR via .su ns.eu.net
UG Uganda
UK United Kingdom FI B * ISO 3166 is GB ns1.cs.ucl.ac.uk
UM US Minor outlying Isl.
US United States FI * see note (4) venera.isi.edu
UY Uruguay B * ns.uu.net
UZ Uzbekistan Ex-USSR
VA Vatican City State
VC St.Vincent & Grenadines P upr1.upr.clu.edu
VE Venezuela FI * nisc.jvnc.net
VG Virgin Islands (British)
VI Virgin Islands (US) *
VN Vietnam *
VU Vanuatu
WF Wallis & Futuna Islands
WS Samoa
YE Yemen
YU Yugoslavia FI B * Bitnet is cut klepec.yunac.yu
ZA South Africa FI * rain.psg.com
ZM Zambia
ZR Zaire
ZW Zimbabwe * rain.psg.com
*Note Main nameservers:: for the next top level domains
(`rs.internic.net'):
ARPA Old style Arpanet * alias still works ns.nic.ddn.mil
COM Commercial FI * ns.internic.net
EDU Educational FI B * ns.internic.net
GOV Government FI * ns.internic.net
INT International field FI * used by Nato ns1.cs.ucl.ac.uk
MIL US Military FI * ns.nic.ddn.mil
NATO Nato field * soon to be deleted
NET Network FI * ns.internic.net
ORG Non-Profit OrganizationFI * ns.internic.net
Disclaimer
==========
While every effort is made to provide accurate information, this list is
not guaranteed to be accurate. This document is in NO WAY an official
document. The information given should not be used as a basis for routing
tables but only as general end-user information. This is a voluntary effort.
I would appreciate greatly if errors/omissions could be pointed out to me and
they would be corrected in the next release. The information included in
this document implies no view whatsoever regarding questions of sovereignty
or the status of any place listed. Affiliation to Imperial College is given
for identification purposes only.
OLIVIER M. J. CREPIN-LEBLOND
Digital Comms. Section
Elec. Eng. Department
Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
London SW7 2BT, UK
*"I hate definitions."*
--Benjamin Disraeli, "Vivian Grey" Bk I, Chap II
Ðaperware on the Net
********************
The following is a compendium of sources that have information that will
be of use to anyone reading this guide. Some of them were used in the
writing of this guide, while others are simply noted because they are a must
for any good net.citizen's bookshelf.
It might also be useful for those, who are interested in the history of
the Internet. Thanks for the better part of this compilation to HENRY EDWARD
HARDY. It has been stripped from his Master's Thesis "The History of the Net"
at the School of Communications, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI
49401. The version 7.2 was posted to `comp.org.eff.talk' on August 28, 1993.
Note that some publishers might also be contacted by e-mail, e.g. O'Reilly
& Associates at .
Íardcover & Softcover Publications
==================================
Bamford, James (1982) "The Puzzle Palace: a report on NSA, America's most
secret agency" Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Barnouw, Erik (1968a) "A Tower in Babel" Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barnouw, Erik (1968b) "The Golden Web" Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brand, Stewart (1974) "Two Cybernetic Frontiers" Random House, New York,
NY.
Brand, Stewart (1988) "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT" New
York, NY: Penguin.
Brunner, John (1975) "The Shockwave Rider"
Cathcart, Robert & Gumpert, Gary (1986) "Intermedia: Interpersonal
Communication in a Media World" (2nd ed) New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Cerf, Vincent G. (1990) "Requiem for the ARPANET" Poem, reprinted in
LaQuey (1990), p. 202-204.
Comer, Douglas E. (1991) "Internetworking With TCP/IP, 2nd ed., 2v"
Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Davidson, John (1988) "An Introduction to TCP/IP" Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Frey, Donnalyn, and Adams, Rick (1989) "!@%:: A Directory of Electronic
Mail Addressing and Networks" O'Reilly & Associates, Newton, MA.
Garfinkel, Simson and Spafford, Gene (1992) "Practical UNIX Security"
O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, CA.
Gibson, William (1984) "Neuromancer" Ace, New York, NY.
Gibson, William (1987) "Count Zero" Ace, New York, NY.
Hahn, Harley (1993) "A Student's Guide to UNIX" McGraw Hill.
Hunt, Craig (1992) "TCP/IP Network Administration" O'Reilly & Associates,
Sebastopol, CA.
Innis, Harold Adams (1949) "Minerva's Owl; presidential address reprinted
from the Procedings of the Royal Society of Canada" Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Jones, Paul (1992) "What is the Internet?" Chapel Hill, NC: Office for
Information Technology. University of North Carolina.
Kehoe, Brendan P. (1992) "Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's
Guide to the Internet. 2nd ed." Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Kidder, Tracy (1981) "The Soul of a new Machine" Little, Brown & Company,
Boston, MA.
Kochmer, Jonathan (1993) "The Internet Passport: NorthWestNet's Guide to
Our World Online" NorthWestNet, Bellevue, WA. (Contact: )
Krol, Ed (1992) "The Whole Internet: Catalog & User's Guide" O'Reilly &
Associates, Sebastopol, CA.
LaQuey, Tracy (1990) "Users' Directory of Computer Networks" Digital
Press, Bedford, MA.
LaQuey, T. and Ryer, J.C. (1992) "The Internet Companion: A Beginner's
Guide to Global Networking" Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Laver, Murray (1975) "Computers, Communications, and Society" Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Levy, Stephen (1984) "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" Anchor
Press/Doubleday, Garden City, NY.
McLuhan, Marshall (1967) "Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man"
London: Sphere Books.
McLuhan, Marshall (1989) "The Global Village: transformations in world
life and media in the 21st Century" New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Mosco, Vincent (1982) "Pushbutton Fantasies: critical perspectives on
videotext and information technology" Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Mulgan, Geoff J. (1991) "Communication and Control: networks and the new
economics of communication" New York: Guilford Press.
Office of Technology Assessment (1981) "Computer-Based National
Information Systems" Technology and Public Policy Issues. Washington, DC:
U.S. Government Printing Office.
O'Reilly Tim and Todino, Grace (1992) "ManagingUUCP and USENET: A Nutshell
Handbook, 10th ed." O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, CA.
Partridge, Craig (1988) "Innovations in Internetworking" ARTECH House,
Norwood, MA.
Quarterman, John S. (1989) "The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing
Systems Worldwide" Digital Press, Bedford, MA.
Raymond, Eric (ed) (1991) "The New Hacker's Dictionary" MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Rheingold, Howard (1985) "Tools for Thought" New York, NY.
Reingold, Howard (1991) "Virtual Reality" New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Rheingold, Howard (1993) "The Virtual Community: Homesteading On The
Electronic Frontier" Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Reinhart, Robert B. (1993) "An Architectural Overview of Unix Security"
Annapolis, MD: ARINC Research Corporation.
Rubin, R. B., Rubin, A. M., & Piele, L. J. (1990) "Communications
research: Strategies and sources (2nd ed.)" Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Russel, Deborah and Gangemi Sr., G.T. (1992) "Computer Security Basics"
O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, CA.
Sterling, Bruce (1992) "The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder at the
Electronic Frontier" Viking, London, England.
Stanford Research Institute (SRI) (1973) "Computer Abuse" Prepared for
National Science Foundation (Publication Number PB-231 320). Springfield,
VA: Reproduced by National Technical Information Service, U.S. Department of
Commerce.
Stoll, Clifford (1989) "The Cuckoo's Egg" Doubleday, New York, NY.
Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1988) "Computer Networks, 2nd ed." Prentice-Hall,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Todinao, Grace (1986) "Using UUCP and USENET: A Nutshell Handbook"
O'Reilly & Associates, Newton, MA.
The Waite Group (1991) "Unix Communications, 2nd ed." Howard W. Sams &
Company, Indianapolis.
U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties,
and the Administration of Justice (1985) "1984" Civil Liberties and the
National Security State. Committee Serial No. 103. Hearings to assess the
threat to civil liberties posed by Government national security secrecy and
surveillance activities, including restrictions on disclosure of certain
types of information and use of electronic surveillance and other
information-gathering practices. Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing
Office.
Journals & Papers
=================
Alexander, Michael (1991) "Hacker probe bogged down; Operation Sundevil
case going nowhere" Computerworld, February 11, p. 1.
Anderson, Christopher (1993) "The Rocky Road to a Data Highway" Science,
260(21), 1064-1065.
Anonymous (1992) "Merit Network Signs Agreement to Pass Commercial Data
Traffic" Information Technology Digest, 1(10) 3.
Anonymous (1991) "National research network driven by differing goals and
visions" Common Carrier Week, 8(23) 4+.
Anonymous (1992) "Portal Communications" UNIX Review, 8(11) 141 et passim.
Anonymous (1990) "SOVIET UNIX USERS GROUP TO JOIN Usenet NETWORK"
Computergram International.
Anonymous (1992) "Usenet AND LISTSERVS: ELECTRONIC NEWS AND CONFERENCING"
Online Libraries & Microcomputers, 10(5) 1.
Anonymous (1988) "Usenet/Eunet machen Btx zum Info-Center" Computerwoche,
p. 14.
Anonymous (1992) "Using uucp and Usenet" UNIX Review, 10(8) 54.
Anonymous (1989) "Farewell to the free Minitel?" Data Communications,
March, p. 73.
Barlow, J. (1990) "Beeing in Nothingness" NONDO 2000, Number 2, Summer
1990.
Barlow, J. (1991) "Coming Into The Country" Communications of the ACM
34:3, March 1991, p.2. (Addresses "Cyberspace" -John Barlow was a co-founder
of the EFF.)
Barlow, John Perry (1993) "Bill 'O Rights" Communications of the ACM 36(3)
21-23.
Basch, Reva (1991) "Books online: visions, plans and perspectives for
electronic text" Online v. 15, July, p. 13+.
Beishon, M (1984) "Usenet's Pranks and Pragmatism" Hardcopy, 13(8) 20-28.
Bjerklie, David "Email, the boss is watching" Technology Review, v. 96, p.
29+.
Bricken, W. "Cyberspace 1999" NONDO 2000, Number 2, Summer 1990.
Buerger, David J. (1988) "AT&T's shutdown of Usenet backbone nodes need
not spell doom to users" InfoWorld. 10(28) 14.
Buerger, David J. (1988) "Long-term stability and prosperity of Usenet
rests on fee-based trunk feeds" InfoWorld. 10(30) 16.
Campbell, A. "E-mail Beyond Unix" UnixWorld, November 1991, pp.77-80.
Carl-Mitchell, S. and Quarterman, J.S. "Building Internet Firewalls"
UnixWorld, February 1992, pp.93-103.
Cathcart, Robert & Gumpert, Gary (1983) "Mediated Interpersonal
Communication: Toward a New Typology" Quarterly Journal of Speech, v. 69,
267-277.
Cerf, Vincent G. (1991) "Networks" Scientific American, v. 265, p. 72+.
Clark, Paul C. and Hoffman, Lance J. "Imminent policy considerations in
the design and management of national and international computer networks"
IEEE Communications Magazine, 68-74.
Collyer, G., and Spencer, H. "News Need Not Be Slow" Proceedings of the
1987 Winter USENIX Conference, USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, January
1988, pp. 181-90.
Comer, Douglas (1983) "The Computer Science Research Network CSNET: A
history and status report" Communicaitons of the ACM (26)10 747-753.
DeLoughry, Thomas J. (1993) "Regional Networks Prepare for Change in the
Internet: New company seeks to provide continuity for college customers"
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 9, 1993, A16.
Denning, Dorothy E. (1993) "To tap or not to tap" Communications of the
ACM, 36(3) 25-33.
Denning, P. (1989) "The ARPANET after twenty years" American Scientist
77:530+.
Denning, P. "The Internet Worm" American Scientist, March-April 1989,
pp.126-128.
Denning, P. "The Science of Computing: Computer Networks" American
Scientist, March-April 1985, pp.127-129.
Dern, D.P. "Plugging Into the Internet" BYTE, October 1992, pp.140-156.
Duncanson, J. and Chew, J. "The Ultimate Link? ISDN -- a new
communications technology that could change the way we use our computers and
telephones" BYTE, July 1988, pp.278-286.
Emerson, Sandra L. (1983) "Usenet: A Bulletin Board for Unix Users" BYTE,
8(10) 219-220.
Erickson, C. "USENET as a Teaching Tool" Proceedings of the 24th ACM
Conference on Science and Education, ACM-24thCSE-2/93-IN, USA, February 1993,
pp.43-47.
Farrow, Rik (1991a) "Commercial Links to the Internet" UNIX World, p. 82.
Farrow, Rik (1991b) "How the Internet Grew" UNIX World, p. 80.
Farrow, Rik (1991c) "Who Pays for All This Great Stuff?" UNIX World, p. 84.
Farrow, Rik (1991d) "Will Success Spoil the Internet?" UNIX World, pp.
79-86.
Fair, E. "Usenet: Spanning the Globe" UNIX World, 1(7) 46-49.
Fiedler, David "PROWLING THE NETWORKS: Getting on the Usenet network, and
what to do when you've gotten there" BYTE, 15(5) 83.
Frey, D., and Adams, R. "USENET: Death by Success?" UNIX Review, August
1987, pp.55-60.
Gifford, W.S. "ISDN User-Network Interfaces" IEEE Journal on Selected
Areas in Communications, May 1986, pp. 343-348.
Ginsberg, K. "Getting from Here to There" UNIX Review, January 1986, p.45.
Godwin, Mike (1991) "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and virtual
communities" Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1991, p. 40+.
Godwin, Mike (1993) "New Frontiers: a visitor's guide -- Computers are
creating new-style communities that could be commonplace by 2001" Index on
Censorship 22(2) 11-13.
Hardy, Henry E. (1992b) "The Usenet System" International Teleconferencing
Association (ITCA) Yearbook 1993, p. 140-151.
Heim, Judy (1991) "The information edge" PC World, 9(4) 213 et passim.
Hiltz, S.R "The Human Element in Computerized Conferencing Systems"
Computer Networks, December 1978, pp.421-428
Hold, David F., Sloan, Michael B., et. al. (1991) "First Amendment rights
for electronic media" Viewtext, 12(6) 3+.
Horton, M. "What is a Domain?" Proceedings of the Summer 1984 USENIX
Conference, USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, June 1984, pp. 368-372.
Horvitz, Robert (1989) "The Usenet underground" Whole Earth Review, n. 4,
p. 112.
Jacobsen, Ole J. "Information on TCP/IP" ConneXions--The Interoperability
Report, July 1988, pp.14-15.
Jennings, D., et al. "Computer Networking for Scientists" Science, 28
February 1986, pp.943-950.
Karracker, Roger (1991) "Highways of the Mind" Whole Earth Review, Spring,
1991, p. 8+.
Laulicht, Murray J. & Lindsay, Eileen L. (1991) "First Amendment
Protections don't extend to genocide" New Jersey Law Journal, 129(5) 15+.
Law Reform Commission of Australia (1991) "Censorship Procedure" Sydney:
Law Reform Commission of Australia
Leslie, Jaques (1993) "Technology: MUDroom" Atlantic 272(3) 28-34.
Levy, Steven "Crypto Rebels: the battle is engaged. Its the FBI's, NSA's
and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling movement of cypherpunks, civil
libertarians and millionaire hackers. At stake: whether privacy will exist in
the 21st century" Wired 1.2, 54-61.
Licklider, J. C. R. & Vezza, Albert (1978) "Applications of Information
Technology" Proceedings of the IEEE 66(11) 1330-1346.
Livingston, James W. (1988a) "Y'know I heard it through the Usenet"
Digital Review, 5(14), 79.
Livingston, James W. (1988b) "No shortage of topics on the Usenet" Digital
Review, 5(16) 73.
Livingston, James W. (1988c) "Take Your Pick with Netnews *Readers*"
Digital Review. 5(15) 97.
Lunin, Louis F. (1991) "Wanted, civil liberties for the network: forum at
ASIS explores roles and responsibilities of nets in public interest"
Information Today, 8(1) 12+.
Madsen, Wayne (1992) "THE CHANGING THREAT -- Information security and
intelligence" Computer Fraud & Security Bulletin, February.
Markoff, J. "Author of computer `virus' is son of U.S. electronic
security expert." New York Times, Nov. 5, 1988, A1.
Markoff, J. "Computer snarl: A `back door' ajar." New York Times, Nov. 7,
1988, B10.
Markoff, John and Shapiro, Ezra (1984) "Fidonet, Sidekick, Apple, Get
Organized!, and Handle: Homebrew electronic mail, some integrated software,
and other tidbits" BYTE, 9(11) 357+.
McQuillan, J.M., and Walden, D.C. (1977) "The ARPA Network Design
Decisions" Computer Networks, pp.243-289.
Metcalfe, Bob (1993) "On the wild side of computer networking" InfoWorld
15(13) 54.
Miller, Philip H. (1993) "New technology, old problem: determining the
First Amendment status of electronic information services" Fordham Law Review
61(5) 1147-1201.
Monge, Peter R. (1977) "The Systems Perspective as a Theoretical Basis for
the Study of Human Communication" Communication Quarterly, Winter, 19-29.
Mueller, Milton (1993) "Universal service in telephone history: A
reconstruction" Telecommunications Policy, July, 352-369.
Nance, Barry (1992) "On-the-fly disk compression: managing your Apple menu:
navigating through Usenet News" BYTE, 17(6) 357.
Nickerson, Gord (1992a) "Effective use of Usenet" Computers in Libraries,
12(5) 38 et passim.
Nickerson, Gord (1992b) "Free Software on Usenet" Computers in Libraries,
12(6) 51 et passim.
Nickerson, Gord (1992c) "Networked Resources: Usenet" Computers in
Libraries. 12(4) 31-34.
Ornstein, S.M. (1989) "A letter concerning the Internet worm"
Communications of the ACM 32:6, June.
Pacanowsky, Michael E. & O'Donnell-Trujillo, Nick (1982) "Communication
and Organizational Cultures" The Western Journal of Speech Communication, v.
46, 115-130.
Padovano, Michael (1990) "Need help with your Unix system? Here's a whole
network of it" Systems Integration. 23(12) 17.
Partridge, C. (1986) "Mail Routing Using Domain Names: An Informal Tour"
Proceedings of the 1986 Summer USENIX Conference USENIX Association,
Berkeley, CA, June. pp.366-76.
Perlman, G. (1985) "Usenet: Doing Research on the Network" UNIX World,
2(11) 75-78.
Quarterman, J. "Etiquette and Ethics" ConneXions--The Interoperability
Report, March 1989, pp.12-16.
Quarterman, J. "Notable Computer Networks" Communications of the ACM
29:10, October 1986. (This was the predecessor to "The Matrix".)
Raeder, A.W., and Andrews, K.L. "Searching Library Catalogs on the
Internet: A Survey" Database Searcher 6, September 1990, pp.16-31.
Reid, B. K. (1989) "The Usenet cookbook---an experiment in electronic
[publishing]" Electronic Publishing Review, 1(1) 55-76.
Reisler, Kurt (1990) "Usenet: a loosely organized, but binding network"
Digital Review, 7(6) 28.
Richard, Jack (1993) "Home-grown BBS" Wired 1.4, 120+.
Schatz, Willie (1993) "DARPA's Industrial Policy Overkill" Upside 5(5),
35-48.
Schultz, B. "The Evolution of ARPANET" DATAMATION, August 1, 1988,
pp.71-74.
Seeley, D. "A tour of the worm" Proceedings of the 1989 Winter USENIX
Conference, USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, February 1989, pp.287-304.
Shelly, Dale (1986) "Globally speaking" Digital Review. 3(9) 150 et passim.
Shulman, G. "Legal Research on USENET Liability Issues" ;login: The
USENIX Association Newsletter, December 1984, pp.11-17.
Smith, Norris Parker (1993) "Jockeying for Position on the Data Highway"
Upside 5(5), 50-60.
Smith, K. "E-Mail to Anywhere" PC World, March 1988, pp.220-223.
Sproull, Lee & Kiesler, Sara (1991) "Computers, networks and work"
Scientific American, 265(3) 116+.
Smith, Ben (1992) "UNIX: Navigating Through Usenet News" BYTE, 17(6) 357.
Smith, Ben (1989) "The Unix Connection: Usenet, UUCP, and NetNews give
Unix worldwide communications power" BYTE 14(5) 245.
Stoll, C. "Stalking the Wily Hacker" Communications of the ACM 31:5, May
1988, p.14. (This article grew into the book "The Cuckoo's Egg".)
Taylor, D. "The Postman Always Rings Twice: Electronic Mail in a Highly
Distributed Environment" Proceedings of the 1988 Winter USENIX Conference,
USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, December 1988, pp.145-153.
Tillman, Hope N. & Ladner, Sharyn J. (1992) "Special librarians and the
INTERNET" Special Libraries, 83(2) 127 et passim.
Tribe, Lawrence H. (1991) "The Constitution in Cyberspace" Keynote address
at the first conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy. Woodside, CA:
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
Ubois, Jeff (1992) "TECH ANALYSIS: What is acceptable Internet use?"
MacWeek, p. 30.
U.S. Gen'l Accounting Ofc. "Computer Security: Virus Highlights Need for
Improved Internet Management" GAO/IMTEC-89-57, 1989. (Addresses the Internet
worm.)
Wagner, Mitch (1991) "PSI's Policy Change Irks Usenet Readers" UNIX Today,
p. 5.
Wagner, Mitch (1991) "Update For Usenet" UNIX Today, p. 22.
Wagner, Mitch (1991) "Usenet: Information At Users' Fingertips" UNIX
Today, p. 12.
Weinstein, Sydney S. (1991) "comp.sources.reviewed" C Users Journal (9)6
127 et passim.
Weinstein, Sydney S. (1992) "Where to get the sources" C Users Journal.
10(2) 115 et passim.
Ñyberspace-related News bits
============================
Anonymous (1992) "Computers and Privacy: the eye of the beholder; through
new laws on privacy, piracy and censorship; governments are writing a
rulebook for the computer age" Economist 319, p. 21-23. London.
Anonymous (1993) "Excerpts from Senate Hearings on Ginzburg Supreme Court
Nomination" New York Times, July 23, A 16.
Anonymous (1992) "The fruitful, tangled trees of knowledge" The Economist,
323, p. 85+.
Anonymous (1993) "Interactive: What it means to you" Newsweek, 121(22)
38-51.
Anonymous (1991) "National research network driven by differing goals and
visions; OTA concerns outlined; private control questioned; ANS advocates
open policy" Communications Daily, 11(108) 2+.
Anonymous (1992) "Secret Service undercover hacker investigation goes awry"
Communications Daily 12(218) 2+.
Anonymous (1993) "NTIA warned of regulating 'hate' speech" Communications
Daily, 13(84) 3+.
Blankenhorn, Dana (1990) "Dalai Lama starts his own online network"
Newsbytes, January 11.
Buckler, Grant (1990) "Canada Remote expanding mail networks" Newsbytes.
Buckler, Grant (1992) "Canada Remote announces UNIX-based services"
Newsbytes, January 14.
Bulkeley, William M. (1993) "Censorship fights heat up on academic
networks" Wall Street Journal, p. B1+.
Gold, Steve (1990) "CIX increases online charges; intros Usenet mail"
Newsbytes, January 4.
Gold, Steve (1991) "UK: Direct Connection offers Usenet news service"
Newsbytes, March 25.
Huston, John (1993) "Virtual Journalism" Detroit Metro Times, 13(38) 24,28.
McCormick, John (1990) "Stoned virus source code published" Newsbytes,
Sept. 7.
McMullen, Barbara E. & McMullen, John F. (1990a) "Electronic frontiersmen
launch online newsletter" Newsbytes, Dec. 12.
McMullen, Barbara E. & McMullen, John F. (1990b) "Review: the User's
Directory of Computer Networks, a book edited by Tracy L. LaQuey" Newsbytes,
August 8, 20.
McMullen, Barbara E. & McMullen, John F. (1992) "EFF examining arrest of 5
hackers" Newsbytes, July 15.
McMullen, Barbara E. & McMullen, John F. (1993) "EFF's Godwin -- Don't
self-censor" Newsbytes, April 26, 1993.
McMullen, Barbara E. & McMullen, John F. (1991) "Well suspends
international connect charge" Newsbytes, January 9.
Powers, Rebecca (1993) "Gizmo gadgets: New generation of technology"
Detroit News, July 19, p. 1E, 2E.
Rohrbaugh, Linda (1992) "New T4 Mac viruses spread on Internet via Gomoku
game" Newsbytes, July 8.
Siverstein, Stewart (1990) "Getting the message by computer. Home users
attracted to electronic mail and other networks" Los Angeles Times, v. 109,
Oct. 12, p. A1.
Templeton, Brad (1992) "CFP-2: computer crime session focuses on FBI
wiretap bill" Newsbytes, March 25.
Woods, Wendy (1990) "Update -- new electronic newspaper available for Unix
community" Newsbytes, May 8.
Ålectronically published Texts
==============================
Botz, Jurgen (1992) "Re: Commercialization of the Nets?" Usenet
Newsgroups: `news.misc', `alt.activism'.
December, John (1992) "Information Sources: the Internet and
Computer-Mediated Communication" WAIS database query: `[email protected]'.
Desbiens, Jean Yves (1992) "Famous flame wars, examples please?" Usenet
Newsgroup: `alt.folklore.computers', Nov. 28.
Detweiler, L. (1993) "Identity, Privacy, and Anonymity on the Internet"
Usenet newsgroup `alt.answers', May 7 1993.
Farley, Laine (ed) (1992) "Library Resources on the Internet: Strategies
for Selection and Use" Database query to `[email protected]'.
Foulston, Catherine Anne (1992) "Re: Commercialization of the Nets?"
Usenet Newsgroups `news.misc', `alt.activism', Oct. 6.
Frost, Jim (1992) "Re: Famous flame wars, examples please?" Usenet
Newsgroup: `alt. folklore.computers', December 1.
Hardy, Henry E. (1993) "National Information Systems and the US Bill of
Rights" Anonymous FTP - `umcc.umich.edu', `/pub/seraphim/doc/nisbor17.txt'.
Hardy, Henry E. (1992a) "The Future of Text-Oriented Virtual Reality"
Anonymous FTP - `umcc.umich.edu', `/pub/seraphim/doc/FutTVR2.txt'.
Hauben, Jay Robert (1992) "Commercialization of the Nets?" Usenet
Newsgroups: `news.misc', `alt.activism', October 6.
Hauben, Michael (1992a) "The Social Forces Behind the Development of `the
Largest Machine that man has ever constructed -- the global
telecommunications network' (or Usenet News)" Usenet Newsgroup:
`alt.amateur-comp'.
Hauben, Michael (1992b) "The Social Forces Behind the Development of
Usenet News" Usenet Newsgroups: `comp.misc', `news.misc', etc, December 9.
Hauben, Ronda (1993) "The Town Meeting of the World: Usenet News, uucp,
and the Internet" Dearborn, MI: `wuarchive.wustl.edu', `/doc/misc/acn'.
Kadie, Carl M. (1992) "File 4--Hacker Crackdown Review" Usenet Newsgroups:
`alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk', `comp.org.eff.talk', December 1.
Kadie, Carl M., et al. (ed) (ND) "Computers and Academic Freedom News
abstracts" Database query response via `[email protected]'.
Krol, Ed (1988) "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet" RFC-1118.
Lewis, Chris (1992) "Re: Famous flame wars, examples please?" Usenet
Newsgroups: `alt. folklore.computers', `news.admin.misc', December 4.
Mehl, Nathan J. (1992) "Re: Famous flame wars, examples please?" Usenet
Newsgroup: `alt.folklore.computers', Dec. 4.
MERIT Inc (1993b) "History.hosts" Anonymous FTP - `nic.merit.edu'
`/nsfnet/statistics/ history.hosts', June 1993.
MERIT Inc (1993b) "Internet Monthly Report January 1993" Anonymous FTP -
`nic.merit.edu' `/internet/newsletters/internet.monthly.report/imr93-01.txt'.
MERIT Inc (1993c) "Internet Monthly Report February 1993" Anonymous FTP -
`nic.merit.edu' `/internet/newsletters/internet.monthly.report/imr93-02.txt'.
MERIT Inc (1993d) "Internet Monthly Report March 1993" Anonymous FTP -
`nic.merit.edu' `/internet/newsletters/internet.monthly.report/imr93-03.txt'.
MERIT Inc (1993e) "Internet Monthly Report April 1993" Anonymous FTP -
`nic.merit.edu' `/internet/newsletters/internet.monthly.report/imr93-04.txt'.
MERIT Inc (1993f) "Internet Monthly Report May 1993" Anonymous FTP -
`nic.merit.edu' `/internet/newsletters/internet.monthly.report/imr93-05.txt'.
MERIT Inc (1993g) "Internet Monthly Report June 1993" Anonymous FTP -
`nic.merit.edu' `/internet/newsletters/internet.monthly.report/imr93-06.txt'.
Presno, Odd de (1993) "The Online World" Saltrod, Norway: On-line book -
anonymous FTP from `ftp.eunet.no' `/pub/text/online.txt'.
Sterling, Bruce (1992) "Free as Air, Free as Water, Free as Knowledge"
Speech to the Library Information Technology Association, June 1992. San
Francisco, CA.
Sterling, Bruce (1992, 1993) "Agitprop disk: Literary Freeware -- Not for
Commercial Use" Contains various SF magazine columns, texts of speeches, etc.
Available via anonymous FTP from `ftp.eff.org' in directory `/pub/agitprop'.
Or use Gopher at `gopher.well.sf.ca.us', and see under `Bruce Sterling/'.
Sterling, Bruce & Gibson, William (1993) "Literary Freeware -- Not for
Commercial Use" Speeches to National Academy of Sciences Convocation on
Technology and Education, May 10, 1993, Washington, D.C.: Computer
Underground Digest #5.54.
Tomblin, Paul (1992) "Re: Famous flame wars, examples please?" Usenet
Newsgroup: `alt.folklore.computers', Dec. 4.
Woodbury, G. Wolfe (1992) "Re: Famous flame wars, examples please?" Usenet
Newsgroups: `alt.folklore.computers', `alt.culture.usenet',
`news.admin.misc', Nov. 30.
FYI:
====
The following lists a selection of addresses you might find helpful, when
you want to hook into cyberspace.
Snail Mail Addresses
--------------------
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), 27 Gate Five Rd, Sausalito CA 94966,
$15/mo; $2/hr, (415) 332-4335.
WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, P.O. Box 38, Sausalito, CA 94966-9932, $20/yr; four
issues.
MONDO 2000 (Cyberpunk Magazine), P.O. Box 10171, Berkeley, CA 94709-5171,
$24 five issues more or less quarterly.
bOING bOING (World's Greatest Neurozine), 11288 Ventura Blvd #818, Studio
City CA 91604, $14/ 4 issues kind of quarterly.
SCIENCE FICTION EYE, P.O. Box 18539, Asheville, NC 28814, $10 three
issues; two a year, more or less.
THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, P.O. Box 56, Cornwall, CT
06753, $26 twelve issues a year.
E-Mail and List server Addresses
--------------------------------
Computers and Academic Freedom: To subscribe send `add
comp-academic-freedom-news' to .
Computer Underground Digest:
Phrack:
RISKS Digest:
FTP'able & Gopher'able Addresses
--------------------------------
`ftp.eff.org' In directory `/pub/agitprop' you'll find the contents of a
disk containing "Literacy Freeware" by Bruce Sterling.
In directory `/pub/cud' you'll find the "Computer underground Digest"
archives.
`gopher.well.sf.ca.us' Gopher this site and browse through the index. It's
full of e-text publications.
*"And all else is literature."*
-- Paul Verlaine, The Sun, New York
While he was city editor in 1873-1890.