From Fri Nov 14 21:46:09 2008 Path: egsner!news.cirr.com!goblin2!goblin1!goblin.stu.neva.ru!news2.euro.net!newsgate.cistron.nl!newsgate.news.xs4all.nl!xs4all!news.wiretrip.org!news.dizum.com!sewer-output!mail2news Date: 13 Nov 2008 14:13:37 -0000 Message-ID: <0C4MKCAN39765.9677893519@reece.net.au> From: (Julia) Subject: [FAQ] Alt.Hacker - Frequently Asked Questions Part 3 Newsgroups: alt.hacker X-No-Archive: yes X-Remailer-Contact: abuse@reece.net.au Mail-To-News-Contact: abuse@dizum.com Organization: mail2news@dizum.com Lines: 301 Xref: egsner!news.cirr.com alt.hacker:63691 X-IMAPbase: 1230221423 1 Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 1 Archive-name: alt.hacker/faq/part 3 Posting-frequency: weekly Version: 1.1 An alternative Primer on Net Abuse, Free Speech, and Usenet Dave Hayes dave@jetcafe.org ------------------------------ Subject: 0. Table of Contents 7. Viewpoints, Case Histories, and Stories 7.1) One user's viewpoint of net history and politics 7.2) An excerpt from the alt.sex.sounds FAQ 7.3) Those who do not share the anti-spam zealotry 7.4) On the nature of Usenet 8. Credits and Revision History ------------------------------ Subject: 7. Viewpoints, Case Histories, and Stories Often, the dishonorable acts of administrators can cause radical changes in people's willingness to cooperate and a person's direction of participation. In this section, I offer the words, viewpoints, histories, and stories of other people on the net who have been the effect of a rogue administrator or clan thereof. One more time, I did not say these things. In order to debias the stark content of the words, the identities of these people are being left to the imagination of the reader. Please try and see what they are saying, rather than attempting to guess who said it. 7.1) One user's viewpoint of net history and politics UUNET was a for-profit company from its very beginning, at least 10 years ago. It used to get lots of $$$ from the U.S.Government. Now it's no longer getting $$ from the government, so it tries to peddle its services to businesses and the general public. One of the services they sell is the access/feed to Usenet. UUNET did not create Usenet, contrary to what they may claim, and have no right to control anything in it. In fact, most of the cabal members who try to gain control of Usenet are relative newcomers who have made no contributions to the development of Usenet. When I started reading Usenet about the time of the Great Renaming, the various folks who cooperated on setting up Usenet (mostly sys admins at schools and research labs) agreed on a more-or-less democratic procedure for creating new newgroups: the proponent would conduct a poll to see if there's enough interest to warrant creating the group. The poll had to rely on the honor of the participants: they were expected to vote once, and to vote NO for valid reasons. Once the poll was completed, someone would issue a 'newgroup' control article and all sites would create the newsgroup. This was before David Lawrence and all the other human trash that came onto Usenet later and became known as the 'usenet cabal'. Here are some of the changes the Cabal attempted to institute in the group creation process: 1. One of the cabal members, Kent Paul Dolan, was caught blatantly cheating in the poll for the newsgroups who reorg he proposed. Rather than penalize the cabal, the cabal imposed on the rest of the Usenet a system of 'Usenet volunteer votatakers'. This way, the cheatting by Cabal members would be harder to detect. Basically, when one of their own was caught cheating, they created the system off UVV's that inconvenienced everyone _other_ than the cabal and made the blatant cheating by the likes of Jan Isley and Bill Aten harder to detect. 2. The function of spaff used to be to announce the results of the interest polls. However there was at least one case when a sex-related newsgroup passed the 'vote' and David Lawrence refused to create it. (I guess he's not into sex.) This was before the cabal started rigging 'votes' making them totally meaningless. Today the Cabal would have just forged enough anonymous no votes. 3. Another change instituted by the Cabal a few years ago is the requirement that before a new group proposal even gets to the uvv 'vote', it must go through a cabal screening process known as 'group-advice'. Examples of group-advice's censorship include the recent announcement that no new unmoderated newsgroups will be permitted in soc.culture.* (too much flaming going on in the existing newsgroups), and their insistence that most new newgroups be moderated -- with the cabal picking subservient moderators. Usenet is a popular store-and-forward conferencing system. There are other such systems, like Fidonet. Those who don't like free Usenet should go elsewhere to services like AOL or COmpuServe or Prodigy and have their own censored forums there. They must not be allowed to take over Usenet. Again, INN comes configured to honor all of tale's newgroups, but not newgroups issued by others. Honorable sites, like Netcom, honor all newgroups and drop all rmgroups. [Editors note: this may have changed at the time of this writing.] Because 'tale@uunet.uu.net' is a generic name used by INN, David Lawrence no longer has any exclusive right to it. Anyone is free to issue newgroups and rmgroups in tale's name. However it's more honorable to issue newgroups under one's own name. It is not our objective to destroy the UVVs or the group advice. Rather, we seek to deprive them of their monopoly. ANYONE can issue a newgroup on Usenet. The UVV, the group-advice, et al, should be free to play their silly power games, to hold rigged elections, and to newgroup or rmgroup anything they like. Sites are free to honor only tale's newgroups/rmgroups, which is the default INN confoguration. We hope that the majority of Usenet sites will choose to act honorably and carry ALL newsgroups. We also expect that most new newsgroup proponents won't deal with the dishonest and abusive group-advice, because they won't have to -- they can get pretty good propagation by issing the newgroup themselves. No one but masochists and cabal members will go through the humiliating and unpleasant process of getting 'advice' from group advice, because the marginal gain (the sites who'll carry cabal's groups, but not free groups) will be immaterial. Let the cabal create a moderated news.groups and news.admin.net-abuse.* if they want to. They have lost control of the group creation process and will never regain it. Tale got into the position of issuing newgroups for the new newsgroups that passed the vote by default: spaff quit and no one else wanted to take this boring duty. However tale's been trying to abuse this position to silence his opponents and to make a few quick bucks for UUNET. So far, he's only hurt UUNET with his net-abuse. 7.2) An excerpt from the alt.sex.sounds FAQ In closing I'd like to add something VERY funny I found in regards to ADMIN-TYPES that have become over-zealous and closed-minded. It was posted in news.admin.net-abuse.misc by imp@yoyo.mil (impLAnt) . I found it to be one of the funniest, most on-target articles I have ever read. Enjoy. Keep your minds open and your tapes rolling. peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva) wrote: coffee, please. Robert L. Chapman's _Dictionary of American Slang_ (Harper & Row, 1986) defines: kook : 1 n fr 1950s teenagers, an eccentric person; = nut, screwball: 'The bomb cannot be exploded by a single 'kook'" -- Nation / "The early Streisand played kook" --Look 2. modifier: '...did a kook piece with dancers' -- Village Voice 3 n surfers, a novice surfer. [Fr cuckoo or coo-coo; early 1900's; crazy, very eccentric = nutty; fr the bird _cuculus canorus_, that cries "coocoo", remarkable for depositing its eggs in the nests of other birds]. Beyond the KoTM definition, we also tend to file under "kook" those self-important, self-aggrandizing sysadmin sorts. Chiefly, the ones who've dug their little net.techie foxholes a little too deeply to see out of: who have spent too many man-years politicking, sucking up, and worming their way into imaginary "status"; and are now unable to think rationally or philosophically in "real world" terms because they no longer have a "real world" for reference. The term "foxholes" is used advisedly, for they see USENET as war...replete with dehumanized "enemies" and various acts of high-tech propoganda, disinformation, and subterfuge. As un-hired, non-paid and non-professional rogue mercenaries, they somehow believe their own "devotion" and "contributions to the net" [read: years of phony obsessive altruism] must be repaid by the "users" they typically degrade and disrespect. This infectious fascism manifests itself, Stockholm syndrome-like, within these same "users" in the form of domain ghettoization (a la AOL) and vigilantism (complaint-generators and net.cop wannabes). The fallout from such shenanigans instills a general fear & loathing; their circa 1985 model of USENET withstands neither the onslaught of traffic, nor the freedoms "users" demand and expect as manifest destiny. The fact that the world will little note nor long remember them confuses no one else; that USENET simply needs them no longer (if ever) is a jagged little pill they can't seem to swallow. Sounds like your footwear, Peteness. When the jackboot fits... 7.3) Those who do not share the anti-spam zealotry >I've been on the Internet for over 3 years now and seen my share of spam, >certainly. I've *never* complained about it....*ever*. It's not that it's >never caused a bit of irritation on occasion, but I'm of the belief that >hindering the freedom that people now have to send these things to my >mailbox is of a greater disservice to the Internet Community and >society-at-large than getting the spam in my mailbox. [I've felt the same >about Usenet spam, also, but that's for another forum.] Now, has >jumped on the bandwagon that so many other ISP's are on. The result has >been a downgrade in quality of e-mail service...qualities that once >attracted me to , particularly the speed of e-mail delivery and >the freedom to protect my home e-mail address by using e-mail forwarding. >So, as I've feared, all this whining about spam has resulted in more >negative things than positive. I'd much rather get fast spam mail >over a friend's mail hours late. Truth be told, I'll be ISP shopping >tomorrow morning. If the only way I get my freedom [from unwanted >"protection"] back in the end is with my own server, I guess that's what >I'll end up doing. 7.4) On the nature of Usenet USENET is a seedling to the forest it shall become. Besides being our only public DTDP (different time, different place) CMC (computer mediated communication) medium, it is our only many-to-many medium. The tools have been so crude as to practically be unuseable; its pioneers and providers a power-mongering elite. This is being remedied. All other mediums Mankind has gifted (cursed?) itself with have been One-to-Many, with the many influenced by the decisions of a few. But USENET represents the greatest decentralization in the dissemination of communication since the printing press. "Great is jornalism," wrote Thomas Carlyle in _History of the French Revolution_, "for every able editor is now a ruler of the world." With USENET we see that A.J. Leibling's quip "Freedom of the press only applies to those who own one" is, after all, finally made a lie. We all own one. It is important to defend those attacked by the few who will not acknowledge this Truth. But it is *more* important to illustrate the true promise and import of what USENET is and shall ever become. This next quantum leap into a hive of human communication shall not be corrupted and debased by Censors and Moderators. Working to revert our Many-to-Many back to some old One-to-Many rules-based paradigm, they shall be defeated. This is the fight of a Freedom Knight. ------------------------------ Subject: 8. Credits and Revision History Section 7's contributors will remain anonymous. As to the rest of the sections, my heartfelt thanks to the following netizens for their insightful and constructive criticism: Russ Allbery Sir iMplant Dr. Jai Maharaj Dr. Dimitri Vulis Also, I would like to thank the many members of the Cabal for their doggedly destructive criticisms, rabid opposition, and smug superiority. These things had their part in creating and revising this document. $Log: freedom.html,v $ Revision 1.1 1997/12/06 08:14:01 dave "VERSION.pm: fksite version 1.0" Revision 1.11 1997/12/05 05:37:59 dave Finally found a workable censorship definition. Cleaned up a few inconsistancies. This one should fly better. Revision 1.10 1997/08/19 06:56:10 dave Lots of things, added more in table of contents, attempted to tie together the 'strawman' section, added more definitions, added suggestions, and updated as much as I could. Revision 1.9 1996/09/30 06:37:19 dave Added section 5.1. Added the funny blurb from alt.sex.sounds. (ROFL) Revision 1.8 1996/04/27 19:52:01 dave Added reference to J.D. Falk's FAQ after he agreed to reference this FAQ in his. Revision 1.7 1996/04/16 08:31:53 dave Added section 6 Revision 1.6 1996/03/13 22:56:11 dave /Added Dr. Vulis suggested changes: Approved line = censorship, examples of speech commonly considered damage, other misc. Revision 1.5 1996/03/04 00:03:59 dave Added definition of Cabal Revision 1.4 1996/02/28 21:53:33 dave Changed libel back to defamation. Revision 1.3 1996/02/28 00:32:34 dave Changed "slander" to "libel", as the latter is more appropriate for USENET. Revision 1.2 1996/02/19 08:16:15 dave Tightened up the definition of TFS, added a definition for Censorship, added a few words here and there for da flow. Revision 1.1.1.2 1996/02/19 07:52:11 dave Initial Import