Ross Patterson <A024012@RUTVM1>
Fri, 27 May 88 13:40:09 EDT
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> Anyone care to comment on why it managed
>to kick around on the UNIX side of the world for so long without
>anything really being done other than sounding off?
USENET is generally accepted to be an anarchy, where the only
possible response to a perceived (or perception) problem is to "flame"
to as wide an audience as possible. As an example, a professor here,
by the name of Webber, is so widely regarded as a source of wasted
bandwidth that a newsgroup named "comp.bob.webber.is.an.asshole" was
publicly suggested, and almost created, with the sole purpose of
screaming about him.
The idea of screaming loud and long is to embarass the management
of the source site, in this case "portal.com", into taking action
against the offender. Unless the site is a particularly good network
citizen, this often has no effect. It has, however, resulted in a
significant software solution: the "rn" newsreading program has a
"kill file", in which you can list (among other things) users whose
mail you don't ever wan't to see. When Webber writes, half of USENET
never even notices, since he made it into their kill files long ago.
Ross Patterson
Rutgers University
>>> Item number 121, dated 88/05/27 13:47:52 -- ALL
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