Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet by Electronic Frontier Foundation (early reader chapter books .txt) 📕

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4.6 THE FIRST AMENDMENT AS LOCAL ORDINANCE

Usenet’s international reach raises interesting legal questions that

have yet to be fully resolved. Can a discussion or posting that is legal

in one country be transmitted to a country where it is against the law?

Does the posting even become illegal when it reaches the border? And

what if that country is the only path to a third country where the

message is legal as well? Several foreign colleges and other

institutions have cut off feeds of certain newsgroups where Americans

post what is, in the U.S., perfectly legal discussions of drugs or

alternative sexual practices. Even in the U.S., some universities have

discontinued certain newsgroups their administrators find offensive,

again, usually in the alt. hierarchy.

An interesting example of this sort of question happened in 1993,

when a Canadian court issued a gag order on Canadian reporters covering a

particularly controversial murder case. Americans, not bound by the gag

order, began posting accounts of the trial — which any Canadian with a

Net account could promptly read.

4.7 USENET HISTORY

In the late 1970s, Unix developers came up with a new feature: a

system to allow Unix computers to exchange data over phone lines.

In 1979, two graduate students at Duke University in North

Carolina, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using

this system, known as UUCP (for Unix-to-Unix CoPy), to distribute

information of interest to people in the Unix community. Along with

Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina

and Steve Daniel, they wrote conferencing software and linked together

computers at Duke and UNC.

Word quickly spread and by 1981, a graduate student at Berkeley,

Mark Horton and a nearby high school student, Matt Glickman, had

released a new version that added more features and was able to handle

larger volumes of postings — the original North Carolina program was

meant for only a few articles in a newsgroup each day.

Today, Usenet connects tens of thousands of sites around the world,

from mainframes to Amigas. With more than 3,000 newsgroups and untold

thousands of readers, it is perhaps the world’s largest computer

network.

4.8 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

When you start up rn, you get a “warning” that “bogus

newsgroups” are present.

Within a couple of minutes, you’ll be asked whether to keep these or

delete them. Delete them. Bogus newsgroups are newsgroups that your

system administrator or somebody else has determined are no longer

needed.

While in a newsgroup in rn, you get a message: “skipping

unavailable article.”

This is usually an article that somebody posted and then decided to

cancel.

You upload a text file to your Unix host system for use in a

Usenet message or e-mail, and when you or your recipient reads the file,

every line ends with a ^M.

This happens because Unix handles line endings differently than MS-

DOS or Macintosh computers. Most Unix systems have programs to convert

incoming files from other computers. To use it, upload your file and

then, at your command line, type

dos2unix filename filename or

mac2unix filename filename

depending on which kind of computer you are using and where filename is

the name of the file you’ve just uploaded. A similar program can prepare

text files for downloading to your computer, for example:

unix2dos filename filename or

unix2mac filename filename

will ensure that a text file you are about to get will not come out

looking odd on your computer.

4.9 FYI

Leanne Phillips periodically posts a list of frequently asked

questions (and answers) about use of the rn killfile function in the

news.newusers.questions and news.answers newsgroups