Aihnss.995 net.news utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:mhtsa!ihnss!warren Wed Dec 23 11:27:26 1981 Misconceptions about Bell Labs, Netnews Content (Long Message) First, I think a lot of people think that telephone bills are of no concern to bell labs. THIS IS NOT TRUE! We pay for phone bills like everyone else out of our budget, and they are monitored. Our department's UUCP phone bill is very large, and does attract attention. Thus the volume of netnews that could not be justfied as being worthwhile to management is of great concern. Now for some flaming about the recent use of netnews. Much of the netnews distribution within bell labs is done without any explicit approval. I would be surprised to learn that many of other of the corporate participants in usenet had explicit approval for management. This makes us all very vulnerable. There is a lot of effort going on now to try to convince management in Bell Labs to improve the software work environment. Good electronic mail and bulletin board are an important part of that environment. There is a lot of interest in netnews here, with lots of people from management, and even form the legal department looking at it. This is why so much concern is being expressed over the contents. Please don't accuse me of being against free speech. Just realize that you give up some freedome when somebody else is paying the bill. This is the real world, and like it or not people do make arbitrary and harsh decisions when confronted with something they don't like. You can fight the organization directly if you like, but personally I would rather spend my time reading all of the non-controversial stuff in netnews than trying to defend it in court. I set up the original distribution of netnews to this Location (~4K employees!) and wouldn't want to see it wiped out because somebody read something they didn't like. I doin't think that just shutting off net.jokes.q in the .sys file is a viable solution at this point. First, it is impossible to prevent people from submitting questionable material to other categories. Any good hacker can figure out how to invoke rnews on a remote machine with a bogus news file and distribute anything anonomously. More important, the random interconnection of machines makes it difficult or impossible to determine whether you are cutting off the network by selectively accepting only certain newsgroups. What is probably needed is a more organized network with primary sites, that are responsible for overall distribution and must accept and forward everything, and secondary sites that are at the edges of the network and either not responsible for forwarding or responsible only for forwarding within their own organization. Until this kind of arrangement can be set up, I suggest that we not cut up the network. (I do support trying to set up a less chaotic organization for usenet.) Third, the way that the A version is implemented (and I think that this applies to the B version as well) As long as someone distributes a category to you in their .sys file, you will receive copies of all articles in that category and then throw them away. This can be a huge drain on your resources, since unix is notoriously poor at receiving lots of characters through a tty port. While it is in theory possible to coordinate .sys files of ajoining sites to avoid this, for any site with a large number of interconnections, this is awkward. (I have no idea how many sites send to ihnss, for example.) Sorry for this rather long flame, but I really don't want to see netnews killed because it got out of hand. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.