Zen and the Art of Internet, Brendan P. Kehoe [top 100 novels TXT] 📗

distribution. Tom Truscott made further modifications, and this became the ``A'' news release.

In 1981 at the University of California at Berkeley, grad student Mark Horton and high school student Matt Glickman rewrote the news software to add functionality and to cope with the ever increasing volume of news---A'' news was intended for only a few articles per group per day. This rewrite was theB'' news version. The first public release was version 2.1 in 1982; all versions before 2.1 were considered in beta test. As The Net grew, the news software was expanded and modified. The last version maintained and released primarily by Mark was 2.10.1.

Rick Adams, then at the Center for Seismic Studies, took over coordination of the maintenance and enhancement of the news software with the 2.10.2 release in 1984. By this time, the increasing volume of news was becoming a concern, and the mechanism for moderated groups was added to the software at 2.10.2. Moderated groups were inspired by ARPA mailing lists and experience with other bulletin board systems. In late 1986, version 2.11 of news was released, including a number of changes to support a new naming structure for newsgroups, enhanced batching and compression, enhanced ihave/sendme control messages, and other features. The current release of news is 2.11, patchlevel 19.

A new version of news, becoming known as ``C'' news, has been developed at the University of Toronto by Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer. This version is a rewrite of the lowest levels of news to increase article processing speed, decrease article expiration processing and improve the reliability of the news system through better locking, etc. The package was released to The Net in the autumn of 1987. For more information, see the paper News Need Not Be Slow, published in the Winter 1987 Usenix Technical Conference proceedings.

Usenet software has also been ported to a number of platforms, from the Amiga and IBM PCs all the way to minicomputers and mainframes.

Hierarchies Newsgroups are organized according to their specific areas of concentration. Since the groups are in a tree structure, the various areas are called hierarchies. There are seven major categories:

comp Topics of interest to both computer professionals and hobbyists, including topics in computer science, software sources, and information on hardware and software systems.

misc Group addressing themes not easily classified into any of the other headings or which incorporate themes from multiple categories. Subjects include fitness, job-hunting, law, and investments.

sci Discussions marked by special knowledge relating to research in or application of the established sciences.

soc Groups primarily addressing social issues and socializing. Included are discussions related to many different world cultures.

talk Groups largely debate-oriented and tending to feature long discussions without resolution and without appreciable amounts of generally useful information.

news Groups concerned with the news network, group maintenance, and software.

rec Groups oriented towards hobbies and recreational activities

These world'' newsgroups are (usually) circulated around the entire Usenet---this implies world-wide distribution. Not all groups actually enjoy such wide distribution, however. The European Usenet and Eunet sites take only a selected subset of the moretechnical'' groups, and controversial ``noise'' groups are often not carried by many sites in the U.S. and Canada (these groups are primarily under the talk and soc classifications). Many sites do not carry some or all of the comp.binaries groups because of the typically large size of the posts in them (being actual executable programs).

Also available are a number of ``alternative'' hierarchies:

alt True anarchy; anything and everything can and does appear; subjects include sex, the Simpsons, and privacy.

gnu Groups concentrating on interests and software with the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. For further info on what the FSF is, FSF.

biz Business-related groups.

Moderated vs Unmoderated

Some newsgroups insist that the discussion remain focused and on-target; to serve this need, moderated groups came to be. All articles posted to a moderated group get mailed to the group's moderator. He or she periodically (hopefully sooner than later) reviews the posts, and then either posts them individually to Usenet, or posts a composite digest of the articles for the past day or two. This is how many mailing list gateways work (for example, the Risks Digest).

news.groups & news.announce.newgroups

Being a good net.citizen includes being involved in the continuing growth and evolution of the Usenet system. One part of this involvement includes following the discussion in the groups news.groups and the notes in news.announce.newgroups. It is there that discussion goes on about the creation of new groups and destruction of inactive ones. Every person on Usenet is allowed and encouraged to vote on the creation of a newsgroup.

How Usenet Works

The transmission of Usenet news is entirely cooperative. Feeds are generally provided out of good will and the desire to distribute news everywhere. There are places which provide feeds for a fee (e.g. UUNET), but for the large part no exchange of money is involved.

There are two major transport methods, UUCP and NNTP. The first is mainly modem-based and involves the normal charges for telephone calls. The second, NNTP, is the primary method for distributing news over the Internet.

With UUCP, news is stored in batches on a site until the neighbor calls to receive the articles, or the feed site happens to call. A list of groups which the neighbor wishes to receive is maintained on the feed site. The Cnews system compresses its batches, which can dramatically reduce the transmission time necessary for a relatively heavy newsfeed.

NNTP, on the other hand, offers a little more latitude with how news is sent. The traditional store-and-forward method is, of course, available. Given the ``real-time'' nature of the Internet, though, other methods have been devised. Programs now keep constant connections with their news neighbors, sending news nearly instantaneously, and can handle dozens of simultaneous feeds, both incoming and outgoing.

The transmission of a Usenet article is centered around the unique Message-ID: header. When an NNTP site offers an article to a neighbor, it says it has that specific Message ID. If the neighbor finds it hasn't received the article yet, it tells the feed to send it through; this is repeated for each and every article that's waiting for the neighbor. Using unique IDs helps prevent a system from receiving five copies of an article from each of its five news neighbors, for example.

Further information on how Usenet works with relation to the various transports is available in the documentation for the Cnews and NNTP packages, as well as in RFC-1036, the Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages and RFC-977, Network News Transfer Protocol: A Proposed Standard for the Stream-Based Transmission of News. The RFCs do tend to be rather dry reading, particularly to the new user.

Mail Gateways

A natural progression is for Usenet news and electronic mailing lists to somehow become merged---which they have, in the form of news gateways. Many mailing lists are set up to ``reflect'' messages not only to the readership of the list, but also into a newsgroup. Likewise, posts to a newsgroup can be sent to the moderator of the mailing list, or to the entire mailing list. Some examples of this in action are comp.risks (the Risks Digest) and comp.dcom.telecom (the Telecom Digest).

This method of propagating mailing list traffic has helped solve the problem of a single message being delivered to a number of people at the same site---instead, anyone can just subscribe to the group. Also, mailing list maintenance is lowered substantially, since the moderators don't have to be constantly removing and adding users to and from the list. Instead, the people can read and not read the newsgroup at their leisure.

from Dear Emily Postnews'' by Brad Templeton UsenetNetiquette''

There are many traditions with Usenet, not the least of which is dubbed netiquette---being polite and considerate of others. If you follow a few basic guidelines, you, and everyone that reads your posts, will be much happier in the long run.

Signatures

At the end of most articles is a small blurb called a person's signature. In Unix this file is named .signature in the person's login directory---it will vary for other operating systems. It exists to provide information about how to get in touch with the person posting the article, including their email address, phone number, address, or where they're located. Even so, signatures have become the graffiti of computers. People put song lyrics, pictures, philosophical quotes, even advertisements in their ``.sigs''. (Note, however, that advertising in your signature will more often than not get you flamed until you take it out.)

Four lines will suffice---more is just extra garbage for Usenet sites to carry along with your article, which is supposed to be the intended focus of the reader. Netiquette dictates limiting oneself to this ``quota'' of four---some people make signatures that are ten lines or even more, including elaborate ASCII drawings of their hand-written signature or faces or even the space shuttle. This is not cute, and will bother people to no end.

Similarly, it's not necessary to include your signature---if you forget to append it to an article, don't worry about it. The article's just as good as it ever would be, and contains everything you should want to say. Don't re-post the article just to include the signature.

Posting Personal Messages

If mail to a person doesn't make it through, avoid posting the message to a newsgroup. Even if the likelihood of that person reading the group is very high, all of the other people reading the articles don't give a whit what you have to say to Jim Morrison. Simply wait for the person to post again and double-check the address, or get in touch with your system administrator and see if it's a problem with local email delivery. It may also turn out that their site is down or is having problems, in which case it's just necessary to wait until things return to normal before contacting Jim.

Posting Mail

In the interests of privacy, it's considered extremely bad taste to post any email that someone may have sent, unless they explicitly give you permission to redistribute it. While the legal issues can be heavily debated, most everyone agrees that email should be treated as anything one would receive via normal snailmail, {The slang for the normal land and air postal service.} , with all of the assumed rights that are carried with it.

Test Messages

Many people, particularly new users, want to try out posting before actually taking part in discussions. Often the mechanics of getting messages out is the most difficult part of Usenet. To this end, many, many users find it necessary to post their tests to ``normal'' groups (for example, news.admin or comp.mail.misc). This is considered a major netiquette faux pas in the Usenet world. There are a number of groups available, called test groups, that exist solely for the purpose of trying out a news system, reader, or even new signature. They include

alt.test gnu.gnusenet.test misc.test

some of which will generate auto-magic replies to your posts to let you know they made it through. There are certain denizens of Usenet that frequent the test groups to help new users out. They respond to the posts, often including the article so the poster can see how it got to the person's site. Also, many regional hierarchies have test groups, like phl.test in Philadelphia.

By all means, experiment and test---just do it in its proper place.

Famous People Appearing

Every once in a while, someone says that a celebrity is accessible through ``The Net''; or, even