Ah, humanity.
Michael R Weholt
most mornings, things are looking up, you start to feel sort of OK
about people in general, and then you wake up one morning and find some
asshole thinks it would be funny to post a bunch of bot crap.
Right, well.
--
mrw
Michael R Weholt
news:Xns90DE51B58F3...@166.84.0.240:
For those of you using Xnews, the following in your score file gets
rid of this crap (It gets rid of any article cross-posted from
news.admin.net-abuse.email to the rec* hierarchy. Adjust to taste):
[rec\..*]
Score:: -9999
Xref:.*news\.admin\.net-abuse\.email.*
--
mrw
Tim Illingworth
or for KA9Q: in \demon\spool\news\kill
Newsgroups: *news.admin.net-abuse.email*
Tim
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Illingworth t...@smof.demon.co.uk Go not to Usenet for advice, for
Coveney, tim...@compuserve.com they will say both 'No' and 'Yes'
Cambs, UK tim...@cix.co.uk and 'Try Another Newsgroup'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rob Hansen
wrote:
The moronic are always with us, alas.
--
Rob Hansen
=============================================
Home Page: http://www.fiawol.demon.co.uk/rob/
RE-ELECT GORE IN 2004.
Cally Soukup
Yeah. And I woke up this morning to discover that the idiot spoofer is
using my email address to mailbomb people again. It appears that AOL
still hasn't pulled their account, in spite of multiple people
complaining and providing detailed evidence. *sigh*
--
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend
to the death your right to say it." -- Beatrice Hall
Cally Soukup sou...@pobox.com
Loren Joseph MacGregor
>In tin, in .tin/filter:
>group=rec.*
>type=0
>case=1
>xref=*news.admin.net-abuse.email*
>score=kill
>#####
Yep, already got that.
-- LJM
Vlatko Juric-Kokic
wrote:
ab...@netscape.com, ab...@wanadoo.fr, ab...@aol.com are your friends.
vlatko
--
_Neither Fish Nor Fowl_
http://www.webart.hr/nrnm/eng/index.htm
vlatko.ju...@zg.hinet.hr
Del Cotter
Tim Illingworth <t...@smof.demon.co.uk> said:
>awnb...@panix.com "Michael R Weholt" writes:
>>For those of you using Xnews, the following in your score file gets
>>rid of this crap (It gets rid of any article cross-posted from
>>news.admin.net-abuse.email to the rec* hierarchy. Adjust to taste):
>>
>>[rec\..*]
>> Score:: -9999
>> Xref:.*news\.admin\.net-abuse\.email.*
>
>or for KA9Q: in \demon\spool\news\kill
>
>Newsgroups: *news.admin.net-abuse.email*
Or for Turnpike:
/^Newsgroups: .*news\.admin\.net-abuse\.email)/h
You get the picture.
(Sometime I want to check whether using the Xref: line instead will
speed Turnpike up, but I'm not actually suffering from slow news
collection, so it's not a priority)
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
Kip Williams
>
> On 14 Jul 2001 12:01:22 GMT, Michael R Weholt <awnb...@panix.com>
> wrote:
>
> >You know, it never fails. You go along for a while, the sun's shining
> >most mornings, things are looking up, you start to feel sort of OK
> >about people in general, and then you wake up one morning and find some
> >asshole thinks it would be funny to post a bunch of bot crap.
>
> ab...@netscape.com, ab...@wanadoo.fr, ab...@aol.com are your friends.
I wonder if it's somebody who fell off a trike and cracked their
head.
--
--Kip (Williams) ...at http://members.home.net/kipw/
TANJ: Impeach Clarence
Arwel Parry
<t...@smof.demon.co.uk> writes
>In article <Xns90DE56D7094...@166.84.0.240>
> awnb...@panix.com "Michael R Weholt" writes:
>
>>Michael R Weholt <awnb...@panix.com> wrote in
>>news:Xns90DE51B58F3...@166.84.0.240:
>>
>>> You know, it never fails. You go along for a while, the sun's
>>> shining most mornings, things are looking up, you start to feel
>>> sort of OK about people in general, and then you wake up one
>>> morning and find some asshole thinks it would be funny to post a
>>> bunch of bot crap.
>>>
>>> Right, well.
>>
>>For those of you using Xnews, the following in your score file gets
>>rid of this crap (It gets rid of any article cross-posted from
>>news.admin.net-abuse.email to the rec* hierarchy. Adjust to taste):
>>
>>[rec\..*]
>> Score:: -9999
>> Xref:.*news\.admin\.net-abuse\.email.*
>
>or for KA9Q: in \demon\spool\news\kill
>
>Newsgroups: *news.admin.net-abuse.email*
>
Or in Turnpike create a Custom rule:
/^Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email,/h
Reviewing my kill file for this newsgroup I see that Odious is still in
there -- is it safe to take him out, yet?
--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> I wonder if it's somebody who fell off a trike and cracked their
> head.
I thought it was more likely to be somebody who was pissed off at being
told "please, do not crosspost."
--
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
substitute tin for nit to mail me
http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
"Hello, my name is Anna, and I write trilogies." -- Anna Mazzoldi
Erik V. Olson
SLRN users....
[*]
Score: -9999
Xref: news\.admin\.net-abuse\.email
You could replace [*] with [rec.*] or [rec.arts.sf.fandom], but bugger that.
If they're crossposting, they're up to no good. Better yet,
[*]
Score: -9999
Xref: :.*:
This kills *all* crossposts. Some think this is wrong.
--
Erik V. Olson: er...@mo.net : http://walden.mo.net/~eriko/
David T. Bilek
Feruglio Dal Dan) wrote:
>Kip Williams <ki...@home.com> wrote:
>
>> I wonder if it's somebody who fell off a trike and cracked their
>> head.
>
>I thought it was more likely to be somebody who was pissed off at being
>told "please, do not crosspost."
>
No, apparently it's some nutter ex-pat Brit who now lives in India and
has vowed to destroy Usenet. Seriously.
-David
Mary Kay Kare
> Vlatko Juric-Kokic wrote:
> >
> > On 14 Jul 2001 12:01:22 GMT, Michael R Weholt <awnb...@panix.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >You know, it never fails. You go along for a while, the sun's shining
> > >most mornings, things are looking up, you start to feel sort of OK
> > >about people in general, and then you wake up one morning and find some
> > >asshole thinks it would be funny to post a bunch of bot crap.
> >
> > ab...@netscape.com, ab...@wanadoo.fr, ab...@aol.com are your friends.
>
> I wonder if it's somebody who fell off a trike and cracked their
> head.
>
No, that's Gary Busey. While the name sounds like abuse, so far as I
know, he has never been guilty of any abuse except drug abuse.
MKK--okay, it was a motorcycle, but some people call them bikes
--
Lassitude: Scottish version of grrl power
Cally Soukup
> In tin, in .tin/filter:
> group=rec.*
> type=0
> case=1
> xref=*news.admin.net-abuse.email*
> score=kill
> #####
It sure looks well-formed, but I stuck that in my .tin/filter file and
nothing happened. *sigh*
Kate Schaefer
news:3B50DBED...@home.com...
> Vlatko Juric-Kokic wrote:
> >
> > On 14 Jul 2001 12:01:22 GMT, Michael R Weholt <awnb...@panix.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >You know, it never fails. You go along for a while, the sun's shining
> > >most mornings, things are looking up, you start to feel sort of OK
> > >about people in general, and then you wake up one morning and find
some
> > >asshole thinks it would be funny to post a bunch of bot crap.
> >
> > ab...@netscape.com, ab...@wanadoo.fr, ab...@aol.com are your friends.
>
> I wonder if it's somebody who fell off a trike and cracked their
> head.
I doubt it. This sort of attack is more likely to be aimed at Seth, or
possibly to have nothing to do with us whatsoever. It will go away
eventually, and in the meantime the killfiles get larger.
Andrew Stephenson
> Michael R Weholt <awnb...@panix.com> wrote in article
> <Xns90DE51B58F3...@166.84.0.240>:
> > You know, it never fails. You go along for a while, the sun's shining
> > most mornings, things are looking up, you start to feel sort of OK
> > about people in general, and then you wake up one morning and find some
> > asshole thinks it would be funny to post a bunch of bot crap.
>
> Yeah. And I woke up this morning to discover that the idiot spoofer is
> using my email address to mailbomb people again. It appears that AOL
> still hasn't pulled their account, in spite of multiple people
> complaining and providing detailed evidence. *sigh*
You are in good company; I see they have done the same to Dorothy
Heydt. In her case, they are using a feed via blueyonder.co.uk,
another ISP who make it easy for loonies. The more recent batch
favour rr.com. I have posted to ab...@rr.com and expect they'll
do the necessary. Both ISPs have in the past shown themselves
willing to act. Why they don't fix the leaks in their systems is
another question.
--
Andrew Stephenson
Beth Friedman
<ar...@cartref.demon.co.uk>, <5k4Jf2AG...@cartref.demon.co.uk>,
wrote:
>Or in Turnpike create a Custom rule:
>
> /^Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email,/h
What about for Agent?
--
Beth Friedman
b...@wavefront.com
Dorothy J Heydt
Andrew Stephenson <am...@deltrak.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>You are in good company; I see they have done the same to Dorothy
>Heydt.
They have? Shucks. Or words to that effect. I'll forward your
post to Sean.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Kate Schaefer
news:GGHwD...@kithrup.com...
> In article <995161...@deltrak.demon.co.uk>,
> Andrew Stephenson <am...@deltrak.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >You are in good company; I see they have done the same to Dorothy
> >Heydt.
>
> They have? Shucks. Or words to that effect. I'll forward your
> post to Sean.
They have, but it was easy to see that those words had nothing to do with
you, no matter what name was attached to them. Definitely not your voice.
Keith F. Lynch
> xref=*news.admin.net-abuse.email*
Now if only someone could find something that works ON
news.admin.net-abuse.email, to keep that valuable newsgroup usable.
I marked all articles read yesterday. Today, there were 82,985 (!)
unread articles, of which perhaps 99.9% are garbage. They seem to
come from all over, are forged to appear to be from the usual posters,
and consist of semi-grammatical randomly generated content.
If they catch whoever is doing this, I suggest he be required to write
on a blackbaord "I will not post * to the newsgroups." Replace the *
with the totality of all the garbage messages he has ever posted. Any
estimates on how long this would take?
How can anyone hate free speech so much, to work so hard to try to put
an end to it?
--
Keith F. Lynch - k...@keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/
I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but
unsolicited bulk e-mail sent to thousands of randomly collected
addresses is not acceptable, and I do complain to the spammer's ISP.
Keith F. Lynch
> No, apparently it's some nutter ex-pat Brit who now lives in India
> and has vowed to destroy Usenet. Seriously.
Where are the Thugees now that we need them?
David G. Bell
ka...@oz.net "Kate Schaefer" wrote:
Previously, most of the noise had been a three-line 'quote' followed by
a three-line piece of new drivel. Dorothy got a whole couple of screens
of drivel.
It might be something of an honour, but I'm sure she would willingly
forego the attention.
--
David G. Bell -- Farmer, SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
If I were to go back to my schooldays, knowing what I know now, I would
pack cheese sandwiches for lunch.
Eddie Cochrane
wrote:
>On Sun, 15 Jul 2001 00:17:26 +0100, Arwel Parry
><ar...@cartref.demon.co.uk>, <5k4Jf2AG...@cartref.demon.co.uk>,
>wrote:
>
>>Or in Turnpike create a Custom rule:
>>
>> /^Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email,/h
>
>What about for Agent?
Unfortunately Agent doesn't allow you to filter newsgroup articles on
the Newsgroups or Xref fields, which are the ones used in the above
examples. It will only kill filter on the Subject or From headers.
I've never quite understood the reason for this lack of choice, and
I've always regarded it as Agents biggest deficiency, but it has never
been much of an issue in the past. So far, I've found that since the
crap all seems to arrive in one block, I can mark it all, scan though
visually for the names of rasseff posters, and for variants of current
thread titles and un0mark those, then delete. It's still a pain
though, and I'm beginning to wonder about trying Xnews instead.
--
Cheers, Eddie Cochrane
Del Cotter
Whatever happened to the nutter who lived in Canada and automatically
sent out cancels to cancel messages? You could say he won, since no-one
honours cancels anymore :-(
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
Del Cotter
>Tim Illingworth <t...@smof.demon.co.uk> writes
>>>For those of you using Xnews, the following in your score file gets
>>>rid of this crap (It gets rid of any article cross-posted from
>>>news.admin.net-abuse.email to the rec* hierarchy. Adjust to taste):
>>> Xref:.*news\.admin\.net-abuse\.email.*
>>Newsgroups: *news.admin.net-abuse.email*
>
>Or in Turnpike create a Custom rule:
>
> /^Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email,/h
Arwel, you ought to escape out the dots with backslashes (although I
don't think it's likely to do much harm in this case). I'd also add a
".*" between "Newsgroups: " and "news", to allow for the possibility of
nana.email appearing elsewhere in the Newsgroups: line.
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
Arwel Parry
<d...@branta.demon.co.uk> writes
Yes, I noticed you'd supplied the backslashed version when you posted in
this thread, Del. I got my syntax directly out of the help screen (in
Turnpike 5 -- I tried beta 3 of Turnpike 6 for a few weeks, but decided
to go back to 5 until all the bugs are sorted out) and it seems to work
(or else the cross-posts stopped).
Michael Kube-McDowell
carefully left the following thoughtprints where they could be seen:
>No, apparently it's some nutter ex-pat Brit who now lives in India and
>has vowed to destroy Usenet. Seriously.
Is that the person referred to by the handle "Bloxy"?
Joyce Reynolds-Ward
<edd...@cobrabay.org> wrote:
snip
>Unfortunately Agent doesn't allow you to filter newsgroup articles on
>the Newsgroups or Xref fields, which are the ones used in the above
>examples. It will only kill filter on the Subject or From headers.
>I've never quite understood the reason for this lack of choice, and
>I've always regarded it as Agents biggest deficiency, but it has never
>been much of an issue in the past. So far, I've found that since the
>crap all seems to arrive in one block, I can mark it all, scan though
>visually for the names of rasseff posters, and for variants of current
>thread titles and un0mark those, then delete. It's still a pain
>though, and I'm beginning to wonder about trying Xnews instead.
What I've been doing for Free Agent is checking the first title in the
block, and the size of the file. The junk has been showing up in
blocks of weird headers with 7-10 listed in the file size...so I
merrily skip through killing all threads until I reach something which
appears to be of substance, check it out, then act appropriately.
jrw
David T. Bilek
Sorry, I've exhausted my Usenet-rumor knowledge base.
-David
Erik V. Olson
He(?) wasn't a nutter. The problem was certain groups were forging cancels,
trying to stop discussion, or just trying to break Usenet as a whole.
Cancelling Cancels fixed that.
The real problem is Usenet is built on the theory that people will be
responsible.
Randolph Fritz
Erik V. Olson wrote:
>
> The real problem is Usenet is built on the theory that people will be
> responsible.
>
Well, it was built by and for a particular community which it has now
far outgrown. It was much more governed in the early years; most
abuses that have become common would, in the early times, have lead to
discipline or outright banning of abusers. And, finally, there are
not people willing to spend the time and effort to make substantive
improvements to it and it would be very difficult to get the large
ISPs to adopt such improvements. Which is a shame.
Randolph
Cheryl Martin
No. HipCrime is a whole nother kettle of kookiness. Bloxy's is using
some of HipCrime's "tools" though.
Cheryl
--
% Moderator: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, soc.personals %
% Personal: http://www.geocities.com/grumpywitch %
% Arizona Poly: http://www.geocities.com/grumpywitch/azpoly.html %
Mark Atwood
>
> Well, it was built by and for a particular community which it has now
> far outgrown. It was much more governed in the early years; most
> abuses that have become common would, in the early times, have lead to
> discipline
*SERIOUS* discipline, too.
For the early users, getting cut off from the `net would cause
them to fluck out of school.
--
Mark Atwood | I'm wearing black only until I find something darker.
m...@pobox.com | http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Mark Atwood
> And, finally, there are
> not people willing to spend the time and effort to make substantive
> improvements to it and it would be very difficult to get the large
> ISPs to adopt such improvements.
Now that's just plain false on it's face.
I've met some of the people who have spent that "time and
effort". There have indeed been "substantive improvements", both to
the underlying technological plumbing (the new servers, automoderation
software, spam suppression, etc), and to the "soft tech" such as the
group creation procedures, the UDP, etc.
Alison Hopkins
Mark Atwood wrote in message ...
>rand...@panix.com (Randolph Fritz) writes:
>> And, finally, there are
>> not people willing to spend the time and effort to make substantive
>> improvements to it and it would be very difficult to get the large
>> ISPs to adopt such improvements.
>
>
>Now that's just plain false on it's face.
>
>I've met some of the people who have spent that "time and
>effort". There have indeed been "substantive improvements", both to
>the underlying technological plumbing (the new servers, automoderation
>software, spam suppression, etc), and to the "soft tech" such as the
>group creation procedures, the UDP, etc.
>
Good Lord, that wouldn't have been because the Usenet community worked on
it, would it.
Ali
Vlatko Juric-Kokic
<edd...@cobrabay.org> wrote:
>On Sat, 14 Jul 2001 20:50:40 -0500, Beth Friedman <b...@wavefront.com>
>wrote:
>>
>>What about for Agent?
>Unfortunately Agent doesn't allow you to filter newsgroup articles on
>the Newsgroups or Xref fields, which are the ones used in the above
>examples. It will only kill filter on the Subject or From headers.
>I've never quite understood the reason for this lack of choice, and
>I've always regarded it as Agents biggest deficiency, but it has never
>been much of an issue in the past.
Er, there *is* a possibility. Go to Group -> View Messages -> Advanced
and then play with boolean operators until satisfied.
I admit I've just discovered it and have no idea how you do anything
there.
vlatko
--
_Neither Fish Nor Fowl_
http://www.webart.hr/nrnm/eng/index.htm
vlatko.ju...@zg.hinet.hr
Del Cotter
Arwel Parry <ar...@cartref.demon.co.uk> said:
>Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> writes
>>> /^Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email,/h
>>
>>Arwel, you ought to escape out the dots with backslashes (although I
>>don't think it's likely to do much harm in this case). I'd also add a
>>".*" between "Newsgroups: " and "news", to allow for the possibility of
>>nana.email appearing elsewhere in the Newsgroups: line.
>
>Yes, I noticed you'd supplied the backslashed version when you posted in
>this thread, Del. I got my syntax directly out of the help screen (in
>Turnpike 5 -- I tried beta 3 of Turnpike 6 for a few weeks, but decided
>to go back to 5 until all the bugs are sorted out) and it seems to work
>(or else the cross-posts stopped).
I never touch Turnpike betas, but I hear good things about TP6, and
can't wait to hear it's been released.
(Reflow quoted text, yay!)
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
Mary Kay Kare
er...@mvp.net wrote:
Just like, oh, fandom or anarchy or Libertarian utopias or or or
MKK
Andrew Stephenson
k...@KeithLynch.net "Keith F. Lynch" writes:
> [ floods of rubbish generated by loonies and a humorous way to
> punish them, once caught ]
>
> How can anyone hate free speech so much, to work so hard to try
> to put an end to it?
I dunno. Do they actually get as far as thinking about it as a
free speech issue? They have a target they hate, inches in front
of their noses, and that's all they need, in their tiny universe.
--
Andrew Stephenson
Nicklas Andersson
...crossroads in the middle of the city without a signal system.
/ Nicklas
--
holo...@algonet.se http://www.algonet.se/~hologram/
"She refuses to believe that an ancient, super-intelligent race of cone-
shaped beings inhabiting pre-Pleistocene times are responsible for the
breakup. I've got to convince her; I've got to recover her love."
-- William Browning Spencer, "Resume with monsters"
Nicklas Andersson
But if they hate it so much, why even bother to put down all
this work just for destroying it?
I don't think I'll even understand people like that, no matter
how hard I try.
Andrew Stephenson
holo...@algonet.se "Nicklas Andersson" writes:
> But if they hate it so much, why even bother to put down all
> this work just for destroying it?
>
> I don't think I'll even understand people like that, no matter
> how hard I try.
You and me both, kiddo... And all those other guys... And those
in the next country/continent... Wild guess: by the loonies' odd
standards, all that work may "confirm" their own cleverness and
superiority. Lots of people are very clever but not very wise.
--
Andrew Stephenson
Mark Atwood
> >
> >I've met some of the people who have spent that "time and
> >effort". There have indeed been "substantive improvements", both to
> >the underlying technological plumbing (the new servers, automoderation
> >software, spam suppression, etc), and to the "soft tech" such as the
> >group creation procedures, the UDP, etc.
> >
>
> Good Lord, that wouldn't have been because the Usenet community worked on
> it, would it.
No. It wouldn't.
The "USENET community" has never written a single line of code, has
never set up or run a newsserver, has never applied a PGP patch
script, has never running the ISC website, has never written a
moderator aid, has never moderated a newsgroup, did not join the UVV.
About the only things one can say "USENET community" has ever done, is
play with this wonderful toy, and participated in the various creation
votes.
Or are you saying that the "USENET community" has somehow accidently
turned into an emergent "Chinese Room" AI?
Erik V. Olson
>> Erik V. Olson wrote:
>> The real problem is Usenet is built on the theory that people will be
>> responsible.
>
>Just like, oh, fandom or anarchy or Libertarian utopias or or or
Or.
Avram Grumer
wrote:
> "Alison Hopkins" <fn...@dial.pipex.com> writes:
> >
> > Good Lord, that wouldn't have been because the Usenet community
> > worked on it, would it.
>
> No. It wouldn't.
>
> The "USENET community" has never written a single line of code, has
> never set up or run a newsserver, has never applied a PGP patch
> script, has never running the ISC website, has never written a
> moderator aid, has never moderated a newsgroup, did not join the UVV.
I assume that what you're arguing here is that these developments were
made by individual programmers, and therefore not by a community, right?
> About the only things one can say "USENET community" has ever done, is
> play with this wonderful toy, and participated in the various creation
> votes.
You can't have it both ways, Mark. If the improvements were made by
individuals, and not a community, then the same is true of use and
voting. And likewise everything that you don't like about communities.
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed
corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a
trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Doug Wickstrom
<j513ltk1jlgog7oan...@4ax.com>
Eddie Cochrane <edd...@cobrabay.org> excited the ether to say:
>On Sat, 14 Jul 2001 20:50:40 -0500, Beth Friedman <b...@wavefront.com>
>wrote:
>
>>On Sun, 15 Jul 2001 00:17:26 +0100, Arwel Parry
>><ar...@cartref.demon.co.uk>, <5k4Jf2AG...@cartref.demon.co.uk>,
>>wrote:
>>
>>>Or in Turnpike create a Custom rule:
>>>
>>> /^Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email,/h
>>
>>What about for Agent?
>Unfortunately Agent doesn't allow you to filter newsgroup articles on
>the Newsgroups or Xref fields, which are the ones used in the above
>examples. It will only kill filter on the Subject or From headers.
This isn't entirely true. Agent can filter on other fields, but
only after download. See:
http://jlbradley.home.att.net/REGULAR.HTM#IV.D
for a discussion of the problem, and links to client-side news
filters add-ons that can be used with Agent and also with clients
that cannot filter at all.
--
Doug Wickstrom
"It's like an Alcatraz around my neck."
--Boston Mayor Thomas Menino on the shortage of city parking spaces
Robert Sneddon
writes
>I doubt it. This sort of attack is more likely to be aimed at Seth, or
>possibly to have nothing to do with us whatsoever. It will go away
>eventually, and in the meantime the killfiles get larger.
It's a trollfest. There are open servers through which they post these
bot-generated screeds. The crossposts are designed to suck other people
in. The bot-runners grep the targeted newsgroups and recover and reuse
usernames and addresses, hence the familiar names turning up in the
From: and Subject: headers in the bot-spew.
At a guess, the use of rec.arts.sf.fandom in the xpost list is simply
because it's an active group with a lot of posters. The idea is to
reduce the number of xposts to a minimum as that keeps the spew out of
many filters that are set to reject any message xposted to, say, over
five groups. This requires the bot-runner to choose an active newsgroup,
like this one, in order to maximise the number of people targeted. There
is also a presumption of naivety among a non-flame non-technical group
like this; we are expected to shoot off complaints to the putative
senders of the bot-posts by hitting "Reply-to-sender".
What to do, if you decide you have to something?
1. Filter. If your newsreader can't filter, it is best to either get one
that does, or temporarily suspend your downloading of this group for a
couple of days, if you can't stand the bot-spew.
2. Inform the owners of the NNTP-Posting-Host: in the headers. This is
where the spew came from, and it is about the only line in the post's
header that is at all trustworthy. Nearly everything else can be, and
will be faked. You can always email to postmaster@ if there is no
clearly-specified abuse@ address (and the X-Abuse lines *can* be faked.
This can lead to some innocent target getting fifty thousand complaints
in his personal mailbox).
Don't hit reply-to-sender. Don't answer back (there's no-one
listening). Take a deep breath, and move on.
--
Robert Sneddon
Randolph Fritz
Me:
> now far outgrown. It was much more governed in the early years;
> most abuses that have become common would, in the early times, have
> lead to discipline
Mark Atwood:
>
> *SERIOUS* discipline, too.
>
> For the early users, getting cut off from the `net would cause
> them to fluck out of school.
>
Blink.
(Raps cane on floor.) Mark, time was, Usenet wasn't part of "the
'net" at all. The integration of Usenet into the internet came fairly
late in Usenet's development; being cut off from Usenet didn't mean
much at the beginning.
> rand...@panix.com (Randolph Fritz) writes:
>> And, finally, there are
>> not people willing to spend the time and effort to make substantive
>> improvements to it and it would be very difficult to get the large
>> ISPs to adopt such improvements.
In article <m3y9ppr...@flash.localdomain>, Mark Atwood wrote:
>
> Now that's just plain false on it's face.
>
> I've met some of the people who have spent that "time and
> effort". There have indeed been "substantive improvements", both to
> the underlying technological plumbing (the new servers, automoderation
> software, spam suppression, etc), and to the "soft tech" such as the
> group creation procedures, the UDP, etc.
>
Fair enough. I'd say, substantive changes in functionality; there
have been improvements in operation. It's very striking to me.
Usenet was designed as a primarily text service because of interface
and bandwidth limitations (when I hooked a leaf node onto the net, I
was using a 1200bps modem.) It didn't have much security because
everyone it was operated by a small research community and net abusers
could be trivially identified. It was operated by research labs and
universities; Bell Labs was especially prominent because they didn't
use internet technology at all--they had their own stuff. Most of the
arts groups are packed into rec.* because the overwhelming majority of
early users were researchers and computer professionals for whom art
was a hobby. There were no volume limitations because there were no
groups we would now consider high-volume.
As Usenet has evolved, it now carries an enormous amount of
pornography, an enormous amount of bandwidth goes into spam (most of
it eventually cancelled), and it is enormously subject to abuse; the
new crime of spamming was invented here. It has become a heavily
commericialized service, and many of the social groups are so high
volume that they demand major daily time committments to maintain a
substantial presence.
Directions it might develop in include:
- Improved authentication & better control of abuse. As it is, a
single crank can seriously impair the functionality of Usenet; a
concerted, well-funded attack would not doubt shut it down,
perhaps permanently.
- Carrying both visually richer text (italics!) and modestly-sized graphics.
- Integrated archival facilities; I appreciate Google groups, but it
is, after all, a private service and could shut down tomorrow, or
sudden chose to censor the archives.
- Experimentation with volume control, with the intention of
developing areas in Usenet which are accessible to people willing
to spend only modest amounts of time.
- Use of multi-cast distribution; so far as I know the basic
protocols are still point-to-point, despite fairly extensive
multi-cast internet service. (This was actually tried in 1994; it
has not been deployed, AFAIK.)
- Client improvements that would make Usenet accessible to joe user,
rather than just us expents.
There's a lot left to be done, if someone chooses to pursue it; what
we have now has not exhausted the possibilities by any means.
Randolph
References:
On multi-cast Usenet (authentication is also addressed)
<http://www.usenix.org/
publications/library/proceedings/sf94/full_papers/lidl.a>
A Usenet performance study,
<http://www.research.compaq.com/wrl/projects/newsbench/>
I cannot find anything on carrying multi-media traffic on Usenet.
Loren Joseph MacGregor
>Nate Edel <na...@keir.ml.spamblock.org> wrote:
>> xref=*news.admin.net-abuse.email*
>Now if only someone could find something that works ON
>news.admin.net-abuse.email, to keep that valuable newsgroup usable.
>I marked all articles read yesterday. Today, there were 82,985 (!)
>unread articles, of which perhaps 99.9% are garbage. They seem to
>come from all over, are forged to appear to be from the usual posters,
>and consist of semi-grammatical randomly generated content.
A note of praise for EFN (from someone still a bit resentful over
a claim, from someone who -doesn't- know anything about filters,
that if I were seeing -any- spam at all I "should get a -real-
ISP"). I saw a few of the initial rush of garbage, but nothing
since. They've done an extremely effective job of filtering out
the attack and leaving (as far as I can tell) legitimate messages
alone. Cool beans.
>How can anyone hate free speech so much, to work so hard to try to put
>an end to it?
I doubt that much thought goes into it. I don't think, in fact,
that there's any though of consequences, but only, "Look at this
cool thing I can do!"
-- LJM
Ross Smith
>
> - Use of multi-cast distribution; so far as I know the basic
> protocols are still point-to-point, despite fairly extensive
> multi-cast internet service. (This was actually tried in 1994; it
> has not been deployed, AFAIK.)
We've been working on this, and have an implementation in use with our
customers now. We're broadcasting our full newsfeed over multicast, and
people can pick up whichever groups they're interested in. (We're also
using it to send the newsfeed to our own news servers and several other
ISPs around NZ and Australia.)
It's described at:
http://www.ihug.co.nz/ultra/multicast/index.html
I wrote most of the software involved (and the web pages).
(The newsfeed to private customers is only available in Auckland, so I
hope this message doesn't count as spam :-) )
--
Ross Smith ....................................... Auckland, New Zealand
r-s...@ihug.co.nz ......................... http://halflife.mani.ac.nz/
"A wise man learns from the mistakes of others; a fool
learns only from his own." -- Gen. Aleksandr Lebed
Jo Walton
rand...@panix.com "Randolph Fritz" writes:
> Directions it might develop in include:
> - Improved authentication & better control of abuse. As it is, a
> single crank can seriously impair the functionality of Usenet; a
> concerted, well-funded attack would not doubt shut it down,
> perhaps permanently.
That's a really good idea.
> - Carrying both visually richer text (italics!) and modestly-sized graphics.
What on earth for? Because everything needs to be all singing all dancing?
The wonderful thing about usenet is that it is a text medium. You want
graphics, use the web.
> - Integrated archival facilities; I appreciate Google groups, but it
> is, after all, a private service and could shut down tomorrow, or
> sudden chose to censor the archives.
Usenet is conversation. An archive is fine, but not necessary. I stopped
no-archiving my posts when Google got Deja, because I trust Google.
> - Experimentation with volume control, with the intention of
> developing areas in Usenet which are accessible to people willing
> to spend only modest amounts of time.
There are moderated groups and .announce groups already.
_Social_ groups (see those italics!) where you spend only modest
amounts of time are also available -- soc.singles.moderated is
mostly pretty low traffic, frex. But I can't see how you could
limit that deliberately and have a social group at all -- if people
can't post what they want to say you don't have a social group.
It's very interesting to look at the different dynamic of different
newsgroups, socially. People are here because they want to be. I'm
on mailing lists where it's a serious pain to post and you don't
ever, ever, post off-topic. They're useful resources, but they are
not and never can be social groups, nor could you have a social
group that worked like that.
> - Use of multi-cast distribution; so far as I know the basic
> protocols are still point-to-point, despite fairly extensive
> multi-cast internet service. (This was actually tried in 1994; it
> has not been deployed, AFAIK.)
If you say so. Is this a compatibility issue?
> - Client improvements that would make Usenet accessible to joe user,
> rather than just us expents.
Uh... Randolph, you were just complaining about modest amounts of time.
You want newsgroups ten times this size?
It doesn't require experts now. Just knowing it's here, really. That's
something that could be done, but better subversively by telling people
who would like it than by broadcasting its easy graphic appeal and
killing what's good about it.
> There's a lot left to be done, if someone chooses to pursue it; what
> we have now has not exhausted the possibilities by any means.
I expect nobody improves it because the suggestions make them want to
put their heads in buckets.
--
Jo J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk
I kissed a kif at Kefk
*THE KING'S PEACE* out now *THE KING'S NAME* out in November from Tor.
Sample Chapters, Map, Poems, & stuff at http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk
Doug Wickstrom
<995285...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>
J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton) excited the ether to say:
>In article <slrn9l58ar....@panix6.panix.com>
> rand...@panix.com "Randolph Fritz" writes:
>> - Carrying both visually richer text (italics!) and modestly-sized graphics.
>
>What on earth for? Because everything needs to be all singing all dancing?
Unicode would be a useful thing. As it is, there are a multitude
of competing double-byte encoding systems (and, as usual,
Microsoft has their own, non-compliant schemes). Yes, it would
double the size of plain-text messages, but they would still be
plain text.
>The wonderful thing about usenet is that it is a text medium. You want
>graphics, use the web.
I don't know if I would go that far, but I find it very useful to
have full control over how I see a newsgroup message presented to
me, in terms of font type, size, and format. I don't want to see
people playing with their formatting, I want the content without
bells and whistles. Some of that content comes in ways that
cannot be represented by the Latin alphabet, but plain text is
what I want to see.
--
Doug Wickstrom
"It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion,
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion." --Unknown
Andrew Plotkin
> In article <slrn9l58ar....@panix6.panix.com>
> rand...@panix.com "Randolph Fritz" writes:
>> Directions it might develop in include:
>> - Improved authentication & better control of abuse. As it is, a
>> single crank can seriously impair the functionality of Usenet; a
>> concerted, well-funded attack would not doubt shut it down,
>> perhaps permanently.
> That's a really good idea.
I've thought for years that some shared-moderation system must be
possible -- not so much for concerted. mechanical abuse (which must
also be dealt with) but for abusive conversation. A troll should not
be able to launch a week-long drag on a newsgroup, with a single post.
Disproportionality of effort, right?
Observation of shared-moderation systems (such as slashdot) implies
that they can work, but the details are going to be finicky,
complicated, and inelegant.
>> - Carrying both visually richer text (italics!) and
>> modestly-sized graphics.
> What on earth for? Because everything needs to be all singing all dancing?
Because italics are expressive.
> The wonderful thing about usenet is that it is a text medium. You want
> graphics, use the web.
And Doug Wickstrom wrote:
> I don't know if I would go that far, but I find it very useful to
> have full control over how I see a newsgroup message presented to
> me, in terms of font type, size, and format. I don't want to see
> people playing with their formatting, I want the content without
> bells and whistles.
I agree that it's tremendously useful -- probably vital -- for the
reader to ultimately control how his messages are presented. This
doesn't mean that some level of rich-text formatting is impossible.
I *already* use asterisks to indicate emphatic speech; but my display
is an expensive high-resolution CRT, and my OS comes with lots of nice
reading fonts. It's sort of absurd that I can't set my semantic
stylesheet to show emphatic speech in italics, or underlined, or (if
I'm in a self-destructive mood) blinking red.
On the other hand, HTML had lost that war by 1993.
>> - Integrated archival facilities; I appreciate Google groups, but it
>> is, after all, a private service and could shut down tomorrow, or
>> sudden chose to censor the archives.
*Distributed* archival facilities. It should be easy for me, as a
rasff regular, to say "I'll donate 100 megs of space on my machine to
archiving rasff." If Google wants to donate terabytes of storage also,
that's great -- redundancy is important in a distributed, voluntary
system.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Just once, I'd like to vote for the better of two goods.
Michael R Weholt
news:9iv0du$906$1...@news.panix.com:
> I've thought for years that some shared-moderation system must be
> possible -- not so much for concerted. mechanical abuse (which must
> also be dealt with) but for abusive conversation. A troll should
> not be able to launch a week-long drag on a newsgroup, with a
> single post. Disproportionality of effort, right?
This group is often accused of shutting out outsiders. Don't you think
moderation, shared or otherwise, is just asking for more such
accusations?
I'd rather see regulars in a group learn to cope with trolls in the
old-fashioned ways. It's certainly not as tidy as moderation, shared or
otherwise, but it's tidy enough if people exercise some personal
responsibility and discipline about how/when they respond.
> Observation of shared-moderation systems (such as slashdot) implies
> that they can work, but the details are going to be finicky,
> complicated, and inelegant.
And extremely unfortunate, in my view.
--
mrw
mike weber
<lmac...@garcia.efn.org> typed
>A note of praise for EFN (from someone still a bit resentful over
>a claim, from someone who -doesn't- know anything about filters,
>that if I were seeing -any- spam at all I "should get a -real-
>ISP"). I saw a few of the initial rush of garbage, but nothing
>since. They've done an extremely effective job of filtering out
>the attack and leaving (as far as I can tell) legitimate messages
>alone. Cool beans.
>
If it's still going on, Alltel seems to have figured it out, too.
--
"He had long ago come to the conclusion that there
were no 'things Man was Not Meant To Know'. He was willing
to believe that there were things Man was Too Dumb To
Figure Out." - Mike Kurland
<mike weber> <kras...@mindspring.com>
Book Reviews & More -- http://electronictiger.com
mike weber
typed
>In article <slrn9l58ar....@panix6.panix.com>
> rand...@panix.com "Randolph Fritz" writes:
>
>
>> - Carrying both visually richer text (italics!) and modestly-sized graphics.
>
>What on earth for? Because everything needs to be all singing all dancing?
>
>The wonderful thing about usenet is that it is a text medium. You want
>graphics, use the web.
>
The graphics bit i couldn't really care about. OTPH, it *would* be
nice to have the range of control over the text i'm sending as a book
publisher has..
Thomas Yan
Jo Walton <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <slrn9l58ar....@panix6.panix.com>
> rand...@panix.com "Randolph Fritz" writes:
>
>>Carrying both visually richer text (italics!) and modestly-sized graphics.
>
>What on earth for? Because everything needs to be all singing all dancing?
>
>The wonderful thing about usenet is that it is a text medium. You want
>graphics, use the web.
I hate MIME/HTML posts and gratuitous web flashiness, but it would be
nice to have more control --used appropriately-- over the appearance
of Usenet posts: accents, mathematical symbols, fonts, bold, italic,
underline, color.
I would like DAGs instead of trees for threads: I'd like posts to be
follow-ups to one or more posts, not just one post.
[*] If you visualize each post as a point and draw an arrow
from each post to its immediate parent(s), then
+ "DAG (directed acyclic graph)" is just a fancy way of saying
no loops/"cycles", i.e. no path of arrows from a post back to itself.
+ "tree" is a fancy way of saying a dag where each post has at
most one parent.
--
Thomas Yan (ty...@cs.cornell.edu) I don't speak for Cornell University
Computer Science Department \\ Cornell University \\ Ithaca, NY 14853
(please pardon any lack of capitalization; my hands hurt from typing)
Bernard Peek
<d...@branta.demon.co.uk> writes
I'm still using TP6 beta. It's been rock solid from the first public
beta. It does need a faster machine and more memory than TP5.
--
Bernard Peek
b...@shrdlu.com
In search of cognoscenti
Mark Atwood
>
> Mark Atwood:
> >
> > For the early users, getting cut off from the `net would cause
> > them to fluck out of school.
>
> 'net" at all. The integration of Usenet into the internet came fairly
> late in Usenet's development; being cut off from Usenet didn't mean
> much at the beginning.
Maybe saying "the net" was a bit of a misnomer.
At many academic installations, undergraduates whom the sysadmins
accussed of violating any part of the system's AUP, got kicked off the
computer system. There were few to no appeals.
This was not an idle threat either, it did indeed happen occationally
from USENET abuse.
Robert Sneddon
Michael Kube-McDowell <K-...@sff.net> writes
>On Sun, 15 Jul 2001 00:35:48 GMT, dbi...@mediaone.net (David T. Bilek)
>carefully left the following thoughtprints where they could be seen:
>
>>No, apparently it's some nutter ex-pat Brit who now lives in India and
>>has vowed to destroy Usenet. Seriously.
>
Bloxy is a one-trick Skippy, with a thing about the one-time snakepit
known as comp.ai. He doesn't like the idea of moderation (introduced to
comp.ai a while back to keep it from turning into yet another Black Hole
of Usenet), or of voting for newgroups in the big Eight. He won't wander
off into the sucking vortex that is alt.* and newgroup alt.comp.ai for
himself, so he endlessly whines and bitches in news.admin.* about
censorship and Cabals determined to keep his voice stilled. The logical
fallacy of this can be determined by looking at his posting stats -- I
figure the guy has a keyboard and a monitor fixed above his toilet so he
can post while pointing Percy.
The "I hate Usenet" clown referred to is probably Hipcrime. The India
thing is because Indian servers are notoriously open and the operators
don't seem either willing or able to secure them. They also don't seem
to understand they're paying for his bandwidth usage. 'Crime is
moderately intelligent, a halfway-competent coder and not willing to
give an inch. He even got a complete new (well, recycled) hierarchy,
free.* for his pains, thanks to Timmy Skirvin. Not many servers carry
it, thought, as it's even more signal-free than alt.*, and because of
this his campaign continues. He's created some tools that script-kiddies
use to rogue-cancel and flood, and gets blamed for these attacks, even
though he may not be actually involved.
--
Robert Sneddon
Morris M. Keesan
<vlatko.ju...@zg.hinet.hr> wrote:
>On Sun, 15 Jul 2001 13:10:32 +0100, Eddie Cochrane
><edd...@cobrabay.org> wrote:
>>Unfortunately Agent doesn't allow you to filter newsgroup articles on
>>the Newsgroups or Xref fields
>Er, there *is* a possibility. Go to Group -> View Messages -> Advanced
>and then play with boolean operators until satisfied.
I think you mean Group -> View Messages -> Manage Views... , and thank
you. This possibility had never occurred to me before. One of my
favorite filters in my global "rn" killfile is
/Newsgroups:.*,.*,.*,/
on the theory that anything posted to more than three newsgroups is
almost certainly going to be off-topic for all of them.
--
Morris M. Keesan -- kee...@world.std.com
Too many baby pictures at http://world.std.com/~keesan/
I'm looking for work -- resume at http://world.std.com/~keesan/resume.html
Mark Atwood
> In article <slrn9l58ar....@panix6.panix.com>
> rand...@panix.com "Randolph Fritz" writes:
>
> > Directions it might develop in include:
> > - Improved authentication & better control of abuse. As it is, a
> > single crank can seriously impair the functionality of Usenet; a
> > concerted, well-funded attack would not doubt shut it down,
> > perhaps permanently.
>
> That's a really good idea.
Step one of that process happened when some bozo started forging
newgroup and rmgroup control messages with tale's address. The
PGPverify patch was out and widely fielded within a week.
I personally have played with hacking INN to integrate strong
authentication. The problem is that the leaf servers start melting
down under the CPU load...
Mark Atwood
>
> > - Use of multi-cast distribution; so far as I know the basic
> > protocols are still point-to-point, despite fairly extensive
> > multi-cast internet service. (This was actually tried in 1994; it
> > has not been deployed, AFAIK.)
>
> If you say so. Is this a compatibility issue?
The servers on both ends need to support multicast distribution. The
patches to INN are available, but are probably out of date. (It's been
a couple of years since I was a hardcore newsadmin).
It's an issue of getting all the routers (and ISPs) between a news
server and all of it's downstreams to turn on multicast support.
The net is getting there. Slowly. I suspect that the impending wide
deployment of IPv6 in the far east is going to be the flood that
finally bursts the IPv4 unicast logjam in the US and EU.
Mark Atwood
>
> I'd like posts to be
> follow-ups to one or more posts, not just one post.
I do that *already* occationally.
The References header line is already well capable of doing that.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> I hate MIME/HTML posts and gratuitous web flashiness, but it would be
> nice to have more control --used appropriately-- over the appearance
> of Usenet posts: accents, mathematical symbols, fonts, bold, italic,
> underline, color.
Accents! You wouldn't believe how hard it is for people whose languages
call for accent. It took me a long time to learn to substitute è with
e', and now, goshdammit, I do it in Word, where I'm supposed to hand in
grammatically correct text.
--
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
substitute tin for nit to mail me
http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
"Hello, my name is Anna, and I write trilogies." -- Anna Mazzoldi
Mike Kozlowski
Michael R Weholt <awnb...@panix.com> wrote:
>Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in
>news:9iv0du$906$1...@news.panix.com:
>
>> I've thought for years that some shared-moderation system must be
>> possible -- not so much for concerted. mechanical abuse (which must
>> also be dealt with) but for abusive conversation. A troll should
>> not be able to launch a week-long drag on a newsgroup, with a
>> single post. Disproportionality of effort, right?
>
>This group is often accused of shutting out outsiders. Don't you think
>moderation, shared or otherwise, is just asking for more such
>accusations?
Sure, but you just moderate down those accusations, and then nobody has to
worry about them.
--
Mike Kozlowski
http://www.klio.org/mlk/
David G. Bell
<iqq5lt8gsvf809jgd...@4ax.com>
nims...@uswest.net "Doug Wickstrom" wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 12:04:54 GMT, in message
> <995285...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>
> J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton) excited the ether to say:
>
> >In article <slrn9l58ar....@panix6.panix.com>
> > rand...@panix.com "Randolph Fritz" writes:
>
> >> - Carrying both visually richer text (italics!) and modestly-sized
> graphics.
> >
> >What on earth for? Because everything needs to be all singing all dancing?
>
> Unicode would be a useful thing. As it is, there are a multitude
> of competing double-byte encoding systems (and, as usual,
> Microsoft has their own, non-compliant schemes). Yes, it would
> double the size of plain-text messages, but they would still be
> plain text.
Yes, some way of declaring an article to be Unicode would be useful.
With something like a ROT-13 key on the reader which could drop a text
back to pseudo-ASCII by dropping alternate characters.
> >The wonderful thing about usenet is that it is a text medium. You want
> >graphics, use the web.
>
> I don't know if I would go that far, but I find it very useful to
> have full control over how I see a newsgroup message presented to
> me, in terms of font type, size, and format. I don't want to see
> people playing with their formatting, I want the content without
> bells and whistles. Some of that content comes in ways that
> cannot be represented by the Latin alphabet, but plain text is
> what I want to see.
What could be useful would be the equivalent of such HTML tags as
<cite>, which describe rather than specify.
There's a BBS system at airgunbbs.co.uk which provides a simplified
tagging system -- it uses pretty good web-oriented BBS software.
--
David G. Bell -- Farmer, SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
If I were to go back to my schooldays, knowing what I know now, I would
pack cheese sandwiches for lunch.
David G. Bell
m...@pobox.com "Mark Atwood" wrote:
> ty...@twinkie.cs.cornell.edu (Thomas Yan) writes:
> >
> > I'd like posts to be
> > follow-ups to one or more posts, not just one post.
>
> I do that *already* occationally.
>
> The References header line is already well capable of doing that.
I think you've misunderstood what Thomas was saying, unless there's
something about the References header line that I haven't heard about
yet.
As I understand it, the current system uses a linear structure. So the
header "References: <A> <B> <C>" records the sequence "A -> B -> C"
I understood Thomas to be suggesting a system which allowed a structure
such as "A -> C <- B" to be created, without implying any direct
relationship between A and B.
Yes, we can approximate to that, but only by creating a false linkage.
And the falsity would only be detectable by checking the intermediate
articles in the chain. How do you hand the combination of chains A-B-C
and X-Y-Z in the headers of article M?
The only way we can make this work with the current References structure
would appear to be by minimising the actual references in each article,
and generating the link structure by examining _all_ articles. That
sounds rather unreliable.
Mark Atwood
>
> I think you've misunderstood what Thomas was saying, unless there's
> something about the References header line that I haven't heard about
> yet.
>
> As I understand it, the current system uses a linear structure. So the
> header "References: <A> <B> <C>" records the sequence "A -> B -> C"
Many (most? all?) news and mail clients, when they display
references trees, imply that meaning, but it's not necessarily
the complete truth.
*No* implied struture or ordering is part the data of the References
header. All it means is "the messages with these message-ids are part of
the history of this message".
If you are following up to 2 or 3 articles all in one article, go ahead
and insert their message-id's into your followup's References. It's
still "correct".
Michael R Weholt
news:9ivbj9$crd$1...@news.panix.com:
Ach! Good thinking! Never occurred to me.
Maybe you should be our moderator.
--
mrw
Avram Grumer
J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton) wrote:
> _Social_ groups (see those italics!)...
See these italics: _framistat_
Now try doing a search in Google's archive, for messages written today
by me, containing the word "framistat", without those underscores.
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
Samuel Kleiner
>Jo Walton <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> In article <slrn9l58ar....@panix6.panix.com>
>> rand...@panix.com "Randolph Fritz" writes:
>
>>> Directions it might develop in include:
>>> - Improved authentication & better control of abuse. As it is, a
>>> single crank can seriously impair the functionality of Usenet; a
>>> concerted, well-funded attack would not doubt shut it down,
>>> perhaps permanently.
>
>> That's a really good idea.
>
>I've thought for years that some shared-moderation system must be
>possible -- not so much for concerted. mechanical abuse (which must
>also be dealt with) but for abusive conversation. A troll should not
>be able to launch a week-long drag on a newsgroup, with a single post.
>Disproportionality of effort, right?
>
>Observation of shared-moderation systems (such as slashdot) implies
>that they can work, but the details are going to be finicky,
FIRST POST!
>I agree that it's tremendously useful -- probably vital -- for the
>reader to ultimately control how his messages are presented. This
>doesn't mean that some level of rich-text formatting is impossible.
>I *already* use asterisks to indicate emphatic speech; but my display
>is an expensive high-resolution CRT, and my OS comes with lots of nice
>reading fonts. It's sort of absurd that I can't set my semantic
>stylesheet to show emphatic speech in italics, or underlined, or (if
>I'm in a self-destructive mood) blinking red.
I do that already, using slrn. To me, your *emphases* appear as black
instead of blue, but they could just as well be in bold-type.
--
"Plans are overrated," I said. "Let's just start killing things.
If there is nothing else around, we can always kill each other."
"Don't tempt me," said Morrolan --Vlad and Morrolan, Issola, SZB
Vlatko Juric-Kokic
<no...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>as it's even more signal-free than alt.*,
Not all alt.* is seriously signal-free. For instance, alt.html is a
*very* useful group. Thanks to a small group of posters mainly, who
post interesting and cluefull answers, but it _is_ useful.
vlatko
--
_Neither Fish Nor Fowl_
http://www.webart.hr/nrnm/eng/index.htm
vlatko.ju...@zg.hinet.hr
Vlatko Juric-Kokic
<kee...@world.std.com> wrote:
>>Er, there *is* a possibility. Go to Group -> View Messages -> Advanced
>>and then play with boolean operators until satisfied.
>
>I think you mean Group -> View Messages -> Manage Views...
Uh. Yes.
> and thank
>you.
Welcome.
Del Cotter
Bernard Peek <b...@shrdlu.com> said:
>Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> writes
>>Arwel Parry <ar...@cartref.demon.co.uk> said:
>>>Yes, I noticed you'd supplied the backslashed version when you posted in
>>>this thread, Del. I got my syntax directly out of the help screen (in
>>>Turnpike 5 -- I tried beta 3 of Turnpike 6 for a few weeks, but decided
>>>to go back to 5 until all the bugs are sorted out) and it seems to work
>>>(or else the cross-posts stopped).
>>
>>I never touch Turnpike betas, but I hear good things about TP6, and
>>can't wait to hear it's been released.
>
>I'm still using TP6 beta. It's been rock solid from the first public
>beta.
As I think I've said before, every single version of Turnpike I've had
since 1.1 has been rock solid, and I'm sure it's because of the
extensive beta testing the fine folk of demon.ip.support.turnpike do.
Doesn't mean I want to participate in it, especially the fun when the
beta licence is about to expire and the release date has slipped.
>It does need a faster machine and more memory than TP5.
Given the glacial wait for windows to open and close already, this news
makes my heart sink. Still, I hear they're retreating from the Windows
3.1 look-and-feel which has my (numerous) draft messages cluttering up
the screen with mysterious icons. Can I put them in a neat list now?
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
Del Cotter
>I hate MIME/HTML posts and gratuitous web flashiness, but it would be
>nice to have more control --used appropriately-- over the appearance
>of Usenet posts: accents, mathematical symbols, fonts, bold, italic,
>underline, color.
For me, some accents and symbols, and bold, italic and underline, yes.
But not colour, and dear God not fonts! Especially where the poster has
control over font size. I don't know if your newsreader does this, but
mine follows the RFCs by displaying as default the first option of
HTML/plain text multipart, so I regularly get to see just what that
would look like, and too many kiddies think it's clever to use <FONT> to
display their message as giant letters. It's quite a shock to the
system to get that in your face as you're paging through a newsgroup.
>I would like DAGs instead of trees for threads: I'd like posts to be
>follow-ups to one or more posts, not just one post.
>
>[*] If you visualize each post as a point and draw an arrow
> from each post to its immediate parent(s), then
> + "DAG (directed acyclic graph)" is just a fancy way of saying
> no loops/"cycles", i.e. no path of arrows from a post back to itself.
> + "tree" is a fancy way of saying a dag where each post has at
> most one parent.
Interesting idea. When electing to read posts in order, by pressing a
space bar, or "n" or clicking on [NEXT], or whatever, can you define an
unambiguous order to read them in?
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
Ben Yalow
>Me:
>> Well, it was built by and for a particular community which it has
>> now far outgrown. It was much more governed in the early years;
>> most abuses that have become common would, in the early times, have
>> lead to discipline
>Mark Atwood:
>>
>> *SERIOUS* discipline, too.
>>
>> For the early users, getting cut off from the `net would cause
>> them to fluck out of school.
>>
>Blink.
>(Raps cane on floor.) Mark, time was, Usenet wasn't part of "the
>'net" at all. The integration of Usenet into the internet came fairly
>late in Usenet's development; being cut off from Usenet didn't mean
>much at the beginning.
It depends on what you mean by "integration". The fa. groups were around
from the time ucbvax got on, and started moving stuff from the ARPAnet.
(And, for those who don't remember -- names like the fa. groups precede
the Great Renaming in 1986.)
Ben
>> rand...@panix.com (Randolph Fritz) writes:
>>> And, finally, there are
>>> not people willing to spend the time and effort to make substantive
>>> improvements to it and it would be very difficult to get the large
>>> ISPs to adopt such improvements.
>In article <m3y9ppr...@flash.localdomain>, Mark Atwood wrote:
>>
>> Now that's just plain false on it's face.
>>
>> I've met some of the people who have spent that "time and
>> effort". There have indeed been "substantive improvements", both to
>> the underlying technological plumbing (the new servers, automoderation
>> software, spam suppression, etc), and to the "soft tech" such as the
>> group creation procedures, the UDP, etc.
>>
>Fair enough. I'd say, substantive changes in functionality; there
>have been improvements in operation. It's very striking to me.
>Usenet was designed as a primarily text service because of interface
>and bandwidth limitations (when I hooked a leaf node onto the net, I
>was using a 1200bps modem.) It didn't have much security because
>everyone it was operated by a small research community and net abusers
>could be trivially identified. It was operated by research labs and
>universities; Bell Labs was especially prominent because they didn't
>use internet technology at all--they had their own stuff. Most of the
>arts groups are packed into rec.* because the overwhelming majority of
>early users were researchers and computer professionals for whom art
>was a hobby. There were no volume limitations because there were no
>groups we would now consider high-volume.
Note that at the time of A-news, Usenet was designed for 100 sites, with
1-2 postings per day.
And the arts groups are in rec. because they fit better there, according
to the definitions of the name space.
>As Usenet has evolved, it now carries an enormous amount of
>pornography, an enormous amount of bandwidth goes into spam (most of
>it eventually cancelled), and it is enormously subject to abuse; the
>new crime of spamming was invented here. It has become a heavily
>commericialized service, and many of the social groups are so high
>volume that they demand major daily time committments to maintain a
>substantial presence.
Mostly, that hasn't been carried on Usenet, but on other newsgroups that
use the same transport mechanisms, and are often confused with Usenet.
And, of course, there was the first used car ad on one of the net. groups.
>Directions it might develop in include:
> - Improved authentication & better control of abuse. As it is, a
> single crank can seriously impair the functionality of Usenet; a
> concerted, well-funded attack would not doubt shut it down,
> perhaps permanently.
Usenet has evolved mechanisms for dealing with this, and they will
continue to evolve.
> - Carrying both visually richer text (italics!) and modestly-sized graphics.
I expect you will find that Usenet has many people who believe that its
being text-based, not graphics-based, is a feature, not a bug.
> - Integrated archival facilities; I appreciate Google groups, but it
> is, after all, a private service and could shut down tomorrow, or
> sudden chose to censor the archives.
There have been archives from the beginning. Feel free to develop yet
another one, and pay for the bandwidth and data storage.
> - Experimentation with volume control, with the intention of
> developing areas in Usenet which are accessible to people willing
> to spend only modest amounts of time.
That's what moderated groups do -- feel free to post a call for a
moderated rasff, and see if you can get support.
> - Use of multi-cast distribution; so far as I know the basic
> protocols are still point-to-point, despite fairly extensive
> multi-cast internet service. (This was actually tried in 1994; it
> has not been deployed, AFAIK.)
The flood mechanism replaces a lot of the need for multi-cast, I suspect.
> - Client improvements that would make Usenet accessible to joe user,
> rather than just us expents.
The clients have continued to diversify, and will continue to do so as
people decide to write better ones. Usenet clients are far easier to use
than in the past. But the social barriers are far more significant that
any client effects.
And, of course, making Usenet more accessible seems to work again your
desire for lower volume. If we kept off all the newbies, the volume would
be a lot lower.
>There's a lot left to be done, if someone chooses to pursue it; what
>we have now has not exhausted the possibilities by any means.
>Randolph
>References:
> On multi-cast Usenet (authentication is also addressed)
> <http://www.usenix.org/
> publications/library/proceedings/sf94/full_papers/lidl.a>
> A Usenet performance study,
> <http://www.research.compaq.com/wrl/projects/newsbench/>
> I cannot find anything on carrying multi-media traffic on Usenet.
That depends on what you mean by "carrying multi-media" -- there's a lot
of multimedia stuff being carried in alt. right now.
Ben
--
Ben Yalow yb...@panix.com
Not speaking for anybody
Mary Kay Kare
<d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> For me, some accents and symbols, and bold, italic and underline, yes.
> But not colour, and dear God not fonts! Especially where the poster has
> control over font size.
Yeah. I have my newsreader set to display 14 point san serif which is
eminently readable even if my eyes aren't very good. And that's how I
want it to stay.
MKK
--
Lassitude: Scottish version of grrl power
Andrew Plotkin
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>>I *already* use asterisks to indicate emphatic speech; but my display
>>is an expensive high-resolution CRT, and my OS comes with lots of nice
>>reading fonts. It's sort of absurd that I can't set my semantic
>>stylesheet to show emphatic speech in italics, or underlined, or (if
>>I'm in a self-destructive mood) blinking red.
> I do that already, using slrn. To me, your *emphases* appear as black
> instead of blue, but they could just as well be in bold-type.
Thus demonstrating that there *is* a general, Usenet-wide acceptance
of this sort of thing. It doesn't all cause people to throw buckets
over their heads.
But since the system does not currently support it in any consistent
way, we have a bunch of broken hacks to approximate it.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Margaret Young
>
>I expect you will find that Usenet has many people who believe that its
>being text-based, not graphics-based, is a feature, not a bug.
>
It lack of graphics is certainly a feature in my estimation.
Margaret
-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
-----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 16 Different Servers! =-----
Avram Grumer
mar...@kare.ws (Mary Kay Kare) wrote:
> In article <elbAiBDZ...@branta.demon.co.uk>, Del Cotter
> <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > For me, some accents and symbols, and bold, italic and underline,
> > yes. But not colour, and dear God not fonts! Especially where the
> > poster has control over font size.
>
> Yeah. I have my newsreader set to display 14 point san serif which
> is eminently readable even if my eyes aren't very good. And that's
> how I want it to stay.
Yup. I've got mine set up to show in ProFont (a monospaced font) at 9
points, but a few weeks back when I was trying to read with my eyes all
blurry from optometrist's eyedrops, I cranked it up to a much larger
point size for a few hours.
Robert Sneddon
Juric-Kokic <vlatko.ju...@zg.hinet.hr> writes
>On Sun, 15 Jul 2001 23:58:31 +0100, Robert Sneddon
><no...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>as it's even more signal-free than alt.*,
>
>Not all alt.* is seriously signal-free. For instance, alt.html is a
>*very* useful group. Thanks to a small group of posters mainly, who
>post interesting and cluefull answers, but it _is_ useful.
But if you agglomerate the alt.* groups? M'lud, I wish to present in
evidence the alt.sex.* sub-hierarchy as Exhibit A.
Oh yeah, there are some outstanding exceptions -- one of my favourite
haunts is alt.peeves. Its "sister" group, alt.tasteless, lives up to its
name, but there is some good (if tasteless) writing in there. But all-
in-all the alt.* hierarchy makes me glad tale is still in business
riding herd on the Big Eight. (makes it sound like a cattle ranch in a
B-western, doesn't it?)
--
Git along, little posting, git along...
Robert Sneddon
Ben Yalow
>db...@zhochaka.demon.co.uk ("David G. Bell") writes:
>>
>> I think you've misunderstood what Thomas was saying, unless there's
>> something about the References header line that I haven't heard about
>> yet.
>>
>> As I understand it, the current system uses a linear structure. So the
>> header "References: <A> <B> <C>" records the sequence "A -> B -> C"
>Many (most? all?) news and mail clients, when they display
>references trees, imply that meaning, but it's not necessarily
>the complete truth.
It's implied by the way that 1036 says you should generate references
headers from a followup. At a minimum, you can say that the sequence
listed above will generate that References line.
<long quote from 1036 will be at the bottom, so people can skip it>
>*No* implied struture or ordering is part the data of the References
>header. All it means is "the messages with these message-ids are part of
>the history of this message".
>If you are following up to 2 or 3 articles all in one article, go ahead
>and insert their message-id's into your followup's References. It's
>still "correct".
I agree that 1036 doesn't seem to prohibit doing that. And the first
sentence sort-of-implies that it might even be reasonable.
- - - feel free to ignore the long quote from 1036 below:
2.2.5. References
This field lists the Message-ID's of any messages prompting the
submission of this message. It is required for all follow-up
messages, and forbidden when a new subject is raised.
Implementations should provide a follow-up command, which allows a
user to post a follow-up message. This command should generate a
"Subject" line which is the same as the original message, except
that if the original subject does not begin with "Re:" or "re:", the
four characters "Re:" are inserted before the subject. If there is
no "References" line on the original header, the "References" line
should contain the Message-ID of the original message (including the
angle brackets). If the original message does have a "References"
line, the follow-up message should have a "References" line
containing the text of the original "References" line, a blank, and
the Message-ID of the original message.
The purpose of the "References" header is to allow messages to be
grouped into conversations by the user interface program. This
allows conversations within a newsgroup to be kept together, and
potentially users might shut off entire conversations without
unsubscribing to a newsgroup. User interfaces need not make use of
this header, but all automatically generated follow-ups should
generate the "References" line for the benefit of systems that do
use it, and manually generated follow-ups (e.g., typed in well after
the original message has been printed by the machine) should be
encouraged to include them as well.
It is permissible to not include the entire previous "References"
line if it is too long. An attempt should be made to include a
reasonable number of backwards references.
>--
>Mark Atwood | I'm wearing black only until I find something darker.
>m...@pobox.com | http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Ben
Ian Burrell
David G. Bell <db...@zhochaka.org.uk> wrote:
>
>Yes, some way of declaring an article to be Unicode would be useful.
>With something like a ROT-13 key on the reader which could drop a text
>back to pseudo-ASCII by dropping alternate characters.
>
It is already possible to do that. Using the UTF-8 encoding leaves all
ASCII characters intact. The non-English newsgroups must be using
non-ASCII encodings to communicate. The following header defines the
type as text and the encoding.
Content-Type: text/plain; encoding=utf-8
- Ian
--
ibur...@stanfordalumni.org http://www.homestead.com/iburrell/
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations."
-- Tolkien
Ian Burrell
>something about the References header line that I haven't heard about
>yet.
>
>As I understand it, the current system uses a linear structure. So the
>header "References: <A> <B> <C>" records the sequence "A -> B -> C"
>
>I understood Thomas to be suggesting a system which allowed a structure
>such as "A -> C <- B" to be created, without implying any direct
>relationship between A and B.
>
You should have the arrows point the other way.
>Yes, we can approximate to that, but only by creating a false linkage.
>And the falsity would only be detectable by checking the intermediate
>articles in the chain. How do you hand the combination of chains A-B-C
>and X-Y-Z in the headers of article M?
>
>The only way we can make this work with the current References structure
>would appear to be by minimising the actual references in each article,
>and generating the link structure by examining _all_ articles. That
>sounds rather unreliable.
>
The new message format standard, RFC 2822, does allow having multiple
parents for a message. The In-Reply-To header contains the Message-Id
for all the parents. But it only defines References with regards to a
single parent. In-Reply-To is only used for email messaages. The
internet draft for newsgroup messages defines References similarly.
Cally Soukup
> Cally Soukup <sou...@pobox.com> wrote:
>> It sure looks well-formed, but I stuck that in my .tin/filter file and
>> nothing happened. *sigh*
> I'm running 1.4.4, from Redhat 7.1, if it makes a difference. The filter I
> posted was a straight cut-and-paste out of my file.
I'm running 1.4.1. I don't know if it's now working or if they've
stopped, but I've not seen any more of the nonsense messages since
Saturday.
--
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend
to the death your right to say it." -- Beatrice Hall
Cally Soukup sou...@pobox.com
Randolph Fritz
> Randolph Fritz wrote:
>>
>> - Use of multi-cast distribution; so far as I know the basic
>> protocols are still point-to-point, despite fairly extensive
>> multi-cast internet service. (This was actually tried in 1994; it
>> has not been deployed, AFAIK.)
>
> customers now.
Great!
I wasn't even thinking of satellite transmission; I expect Lauren
Weinstein will be...um, I'm not sure what. But something.
Is the software proprietary or open? Are you going to publish the
protocols?
Randolph
Vlatko Juric-Kokic
<no...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> But if you agglomerate the alt.* groups? M'lud, I wish to present in
>evidence the alt.sex.* sub-hierarchy as Exhibit A.
Oh, well. If you take groups like
alt.who.creates.these.stupid.groups.anyway into account, alt.*
hierarchy is certainly signal-free. :-)
Bernard Peek
<d...@branta.demon.co.uk> writes
Re Turnpike 6.
>>It does need a faster machine and more memory than TP5.
>
>Given the glacial wait for windows to open and close already, this news
>makes my heart sink. Still, I hear they're retreating from the Windows
>3.1 look-and-feel which has my (numerous) draft messages cluttering up
>the screen with mysterious icons. Can I put them in a neat list now?
TP6 is a complete rewrite, it's completely different to TP5. It works as
an extension to Windows Explorer, so messages and news posts appear to
be stored in folders -- the same way as files on disk.
You can create a draft message and file it away in a folder called
"drafts" until you decide to send it. You can keep it open in a separate
window if you like.
--
Bernard Peek
b...@shrdlu.com
In search of cognoscenti
Nicklas Andersson
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>>
>>that they can work, but the details are going to be finicky,
>
> FIRST POST!
I Don't Like Slashdot, for many reasons. I don't think their
moderation system works that well, and if it does -- let's
say that I don't ever want to read it unfiltered.
> I do that already, using slrn. To me, your *emphases* appear as black
> instead of blue, but they could just as well be in bold-type.
Yes, slrn is marvelous. I just wish it could display it in italics
instead of bold though. Bold attracts too much attention from the
rest of the text.
/ Nicklas
--
- Dr O'Hanrahan, who was al-Hakim?
- I'm not here to correct your many ignorances. Go look it up.
- What's this?
- After you look up al-Hakim, you can look up vegetables. It's under V.
-- Lucy and O'Hanrahan in "Gospel" by Wilton Barnhardt
Thomas Yan
>Thomas Yan <ty...@twinkie.cs.cornell.edu> said:
>
>>I hate MIME/HTML posts and gratuitous web flashiness, but it would be
>>nice to have more control --used appropriately-- over the appearance
>>of Usenet posts: accents, mathematical symbols, fonts, bold, italic,
>>underline, color.
>
>For me, some accents and symbols, and bold, italic and underline, yes.
>But not colour, and dear God not fonts! Especially where the poster has
Ah, yes, I was failing to distinguish among: features I'd like,
feasible features, and features that would work well in practice. I
would like the option of logical and absolute control over color,
fonts, and font size, where by "logical" I mean something like
"symbolic" or "semantic", as in, use the "fixed width font, the
highlight color, the footnote font size".
However, I agree that HTML posts and webpages are incontrovertible
proof that, as a general rule, color/font/size are much too easily
abused, and thus in practice, could lead to really crappy formatting
on way too many posts.
Hm. I'm going to try to think about what my version of DreamUsenet
would look like using current technology and some handwaving and
trying to take real people into account....
>>I would like DAGs instead of trees for threads: I'd like posts to be
>>follow-ups to one or more posts, not just one post.
>>
>>[*] If you visualize each post as a point and draw an arrow
>> from each post to its immediate parent(s), then
>> + "DAG (directed acyclic graph)" is just a fancy way of saying
>> no loops/"cycles", i.e. no path of arrows from a post back to itself.
>> + "tree" is a fancy way of saying a dag where each post has at
>> most one parent.
>
>Interesting idea.
Usually one parent suffices, but reasonably often I find related
points in multiple posts that I'd like to respond to in a single post.
I'm not entirely happy with either posting lots of little follow-ups
or assembling a master reply.
Hm. I'm not sure how quotes would be handled -- how would the source
of each one be reasonably clearly indicated without incurring too much
clutter? I'm not currently fully satisfied anyway about quoting as
currently (non-)implemented, so I'll think about that some more,
too....
>When electing to read posts in order, by pressing a
>space bar, or "n" or clicking on [NEXT], or whatever, can you define an
>unambiguous order to read them in?
I think the two natural orders can be generalized.
Call a post a "parent", its immediate follow-ups its "children", all
of which are each others "siblings". The newreader tracks how many
unread parents each article has. By default, the newsreader presents
unread parents before presenting a child. As I believe is currently
done, order siblings by their local article number.
Two standard orders to list things in a tree are:
+ DFT (depth-first traversal): read children before siblings,
i.e. when reach an article, insert/move its children at/to the start
of the to-do list, but only present a child when all its parents
are marked read.
+ BFT (breadth-first traversal): read siblings before children,
i.e. when reach an article, insert/move its children at/to the end
of the to-do list, and only present a child when all its parents
are marked read. (This ordering by itself seems kind of pointless.)
======================================================================
Example: Children are shown below parents.
1
/ \
4 2
/ \ |\
6 5 | 3
|\ /| | |
10 7 8 | |
\|/
9
DFT: 1 2 3 4 5 8 9 6 7 10 BFT: 1 2 4 3 5 6 8 7 10 9
todo action todo action
1 1
present 1; prepend 2 4 present 1; append 2 4
2 4 2 4
present 2; prepend 3 9 present 2; append 3 9
3 9 4 4 3 9
present 3; prepend 9 present 4; append 5 6
9 4 3 9 5 6
skip 9: 2 unread parents present 3; move 9 to end
4 5 6 9
present 4; prepend 5 6 present 5; append 7 8
5 6 6 9 7 8
present 5; prepend 7 8 present 6; move/append 7 10
7 8 6 9 8 7 10
skip 7: 1 unread parent skip 9: 1 unread parent
8 6 8 7 10
present 8; prepend 9 present 8; append 9
9 6 7 10 9
present 9; prepend nothing present 7; append nothing
6 10 9
present 6; prepend 7 10 present 10; append nothing
7 10 9
present 7; prepend nothing present 9; append nothing
10 empty
present 10; prepend nothing
empty
Notes:
+ An empty todo list can be restocked by scanning for an unread article
with 0 unread parents.
+ Each article skipped can be deleted from the todo list:
It will be found again as a child of a later post.
+ The newsreader should give the option of treating a missing article
as read, to allow one to read its children despite a spotty newsfeed.
+ Maybe one parent should be explicitly designated as the main parent --
one could then treat other posts kind of like footnotes, e.g. when tying
threads together.
--
Thomas Yan (ty...@cs.cornell.edu) I don't speak for Cornell University
Computer Science Department \\ Cornell University \\ Ithaca, NY 14853
(please pardon any lack of capitalization; my hands hurt from typing)
Samuel Kleiner
>Samuel Kleiner <s...@grey.pseudo> wrote:
>> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>>>I *already* use asterisks to indicate emphatic speech; but my display
>>>is an expensive high-resolution CRT, and my OS comes with lots of nice
>>>reading fonts. It's sort of absurd that I can't set my semantic
>>>stylesheet to show emphatic speech in italics, or underlined, or (if
>>>I'm in a self-destructive mood) blinking red.
>
>> I do that already, using slrn. To me, your *emphases* appear as black
>> instead of blue, but they could just as well be in bold-type.
>
>Thus demonstrating that there *is* a general, Usenet-wide acceptance
>of this sort of thing. It doesn't all cause people to throw buckets
>over their heads.
No... But my bucket is in the shop.
>But since the system does not currently support it in any consistent
>way, we have a bunch of broken hacks to approximate it.
>
Granted, a consistent method for showing emphasised text might be useful.
I challenge you, however, to find another format that really
is useful and needed on usenet.
Taking the formatting methods of early html as an example:
Multiple book, chapter and paragraph header formatting options
- Unecessary. Our posts are not thesii (thesises?).
Image and other media inclusion within single post.
- Too much bandwidth needed. even xfaces are annoying after 15 minutes.
Tables
- Could actually be useful, but would replace unilength character
terminal tabbing, which works well for simple tables
Different forms of denoting emphasized text
- One is useful, and one already exists namely *this*
Inline URLs.
- Official method already exists
Inline equations? Not that much, even in rassef.
Have I missed anything?
--
"What a villain you are, to boast of killing women and children of your own
nation! What will God say when you appear before him?" "He will say,"
replied he, "that I was a very clever fellow." --as told by Livingstone.
Mike Kozlowski
Samuel Kleiner <news....@ulterior.org> wrote:
>Granted, a consistent method for showing emphasised text might be useful.
>I challenge you, however, to find another format that really
>is useful and needed on usenet.
Bulleted lists. Doing the asterisk-and-hanging-indent thing is kind of a
pain in the ass, especially when it gets mangled in some newsreaders.
Super- and sub-scripts. These would be handy for footnoting (the
bracketed number notation is a bit awkward) as well as for writing
equations when it's necessary.
--
Mike Kozlowski
http://www.klio.org/mlk/
Randolph Fritz
> Samuel Kleiner <s...@grey.pseudo> wrote:
>> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>>>I *already* use asterisks to indicate emphatic speech; but my display
>>>is an expensive high-resolution CRT, and my OS comes with lots of nice
>>>reading fonts. It's sort of absurd that I can't set my semantic
>>>stylesheet to show emphatic speech in italics, or underlined, or (if
>>>I'm in a self-destructive mood) blinking red.
>
>> I do that already, using slrn. To me, your *emphases* appear as black
>> instead of blue, but they could just as well be in bold-type.
>
> Thus demonstrating that there *is* a general, Usenet-wide acceptance
> of this sort of thing. It doesn't all cause people to throw buckets
> over their heads.
>
> But since the system does not currently support it in any consistent
> way, we have a bunch of broken hacks to approximate it.
>
I draw everyone's attention to the (mostly not implmeneted, alas)
MIME "rich text" (*no* relation to MS rich text) format, which appears
(for Roman alphabet languages) to be just the thing. The MIME
"alternative" mechanism would allow for the inclusion of both enriched
and plain text in the same message; the plain text could be served to
NNTP newsreaders that couldn't handle the enriched version.
Randolph
Nancy Lebovitz
Samuel Kleiner <news....@ulterior.org> wrote:
(Does usenet need richer formatting?)
>
>Inline equations? Not that much, even in rassef.
The folks in sci.math and various technical newgroups would probably
find it handy.
I occasionally use superscripts, and I find expressing them in ascii
to be counter-intuitive, hard to read, profoundly irritating, and
just plain wrong.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Kevin J. Maroney
>For the early users, getting cut off from the `net would cause
>them to fluck out of school.
What? I mean, besides the obvious typo, what are you trying to say?
--
Kevin Maroney | kmar...@ungames.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
<http://www.nyrsf.com>
Bernard Peek
Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca> writes
>On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 13:30:26 GMT, Doug Wickstrom <nims...@uswest.net>
>scripsit:
>>Unicode would be a useful thing. As it is, there are a multitude of
>>competing double-byte encoding systems (and, as usual, Microsoft has
>>their own, non-compliant schemes). Yes, it would double the size of
>>plain-text messages, but they would still be plain text.
Many years ago I suggested a multi-byte code that didn't double the size
of ASCII text.
>
>Not necessarily; UTF-8 would do fine, and the stuff that's ASCI or 8859
>now could stay that way.
>
>I wouldn't mind an XML usenet if the DTD was *very* simple.
It needn't be particularly complex but I don't see the point. We already
have workable standards, I'm not sure what advantage XML might have.
Del Cotter
Thomas Yan <ty...@twinkie.cs.cornell.edu> said:
>Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>I hate MIME/HTML posts and gratuitous web flashiness, but it would be
>>>nice to have more control --used appropriately-- over the appearance
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>>of Usenet posts: accents, mathematical symbols, fonts, bold, italic,
>>>underline, color.
>>
>>For me, some accents and symbols, and bold, italic and underline, yes.
>>But not colour, and dear God not fonts! Especially where the poster has
>>control over font size. [...]
>
>Ah, yes, I was failing to distinguish among: features I'd like,
>feasible features, and features that would work well in practice.
Point taken. I'd like full control over the appearance of my Usenet
posts, because I know I'd use it appropriately, and I know you would
too. I just don't want everyone *else* on Usenet to have it :-)
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
Anna Mazzoldi
ada...@nit.it.invalid (Anna Feruglio Dal Dan) wrote:
> Accents! You wouldn't believe how hard it is for people whose languages
> call for accent. It took me a long time to learn to substitute č with
> e', and now, goshdammit, I do it in Word, where I'm supposed to hand in
> grammatically correct text.
Set up the AutoCorrect feature to change e' to č (and some of the
other most common accented words too, like piů or perché). That's
what I've been doing for years -- in my case, because I use an
English keyboard and accents are a tiny bit of a pain (though I
do know all the ASCII codes for them by heart, and use them
without thinking when I'm not in word -- like here, for example).
Ciao,
Anna
--
Anna Mazzoldi writing from Dublin, Ireland
http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/ (Translation links and more)