From: mpd@netcom.com (Mike Duvos)
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 08:44:23 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: [RANT] Death of Usenet: Film at 11
Message-ID: <199608192034.NAA19771@netcom17.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) writes:

[snip]

 > There are of course now more than 20,000 newsgroups.
 > Searches and greps of the newsgroup list are a way to find
 > potentially relevant newsgroups for posting a message or
 > finding messages of interest.

 > (As is well-known, the Usenet Cabal gets its orders from
 > the Bilderbergers as to which newsgroups fit in with New
 > World Order sanctioned epistemologies.)

 > Some are saying there is an alternate method. With the
 > advent of search engines which can index messages on the
 > Usenet (and in Webspace, but the idea is the same), why not
 > this alternative: put your message in a bottle and just
 > throw it into the "sea" of possible messages. Let search
 > engines find the messages of interest (modulo a day or two
 > of latency, as the spiders reach the space where the message
 > was placed). No newsgroups needed.

Permit me to go off in an orthogonal direction here and say that
I think that we should do away with the concept of a pre-ordained
newsgroups in Usenet entirely, in favor of an IRC-like dynamic 
creation of message pools.

One of the nice things about IRC is that if the Empire State
Building suddenly blows up, you can tune to #bomb and generally
find several hundred people interested in discussing it without
having to go through some complicated newgroup/rmgroup/discussion
procedure.

The real data base of Usenet is the totality of messages, indexed
by message ID, and there are so many newsgroups now that allowing
the Newsgroups: line to have arbitrary contents in the message
header would do little to increase the confusion. Entering each
arbitrary entry in the Newsgroups: line into a secondary
searchable index would provide the same functionality as we have
now with the conventional arrangement of newsgroups.

News software would certainly be free to map the Usenet hierarchy
onto a directory structure, as is done today, or to simply keep
it as a large flat database with multiple indices, or to do any
combination of the above, such as an arrangement where populated
newsgroups get their own directory, and everything else resides
in a giant directory called "/usr/spool/news/krap."

With governments creating lists of "banned" newsgroups, and an
official creation process managed by the "Cabal", Usenet is much
more vulnerable to state control than it would be if newsgroups
were simply arbitrary strings which existed somewhere in the
current window into the history file.  A newsgroup would then
exist if there were messages in it, and wouldn't exist if it had
remained unused for some reasonable period of time.

Now that search engines are becoming the best way to read Usenet
anyway, and the Newsgroups: line is just another field in a set
of search specifications, there is no reasonable reason to limit
what may be placed there to some list of "20,000" pre-defined
strings, or some government controlled subset of the above.

If Singapore bans alt.sex.hooters, you could simply post to
alt.culture.singapore.i.got.your.hooters.right.here. This
would effectly jerk the rug out from under the "banned
newsgroups" gestapo, and create a namespace so large you would
always be able to construct an appropriately suggestive new entry
in the compliment of any part that was blocked.

It would also send the correct message that "newsgroups" are
simply one of many labels on an article, and are not cyberspacial
tearooms where bad people congregate and there is guilt by
association.

The alternative to doing something reasonable like this is
probably to see mass migration from "banned newsgroups" to
off-topic groups, like Lolita pictures in rec.pets.cats, when the
inevitable crackdown comes. As long as people can post
anonymously, they will simply switch to another existing
newsgroup when the one they are posting to becomes blocked. Once
the inevitable reciprocal pissing contest between posters and
censors gets going, Usenet as we know it will likely be
destroyed.

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     mpd@netcom.com     $    via Finger.                      $