>                          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