[1403] in SIPB bug reports
GRIPE about XRN 6.13
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Wed Oct 31 20:03:50 1990
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 90 20:02:50 -0500
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: clsmith@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, usenet@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: clsmith@ATHENA.MIT.EDU's message of Mon, 29 Oct 90 18:10:29 -0500 <9010292310.AA28288@M11-113-11.MIT.EDU>
From: clsmith@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 90 18:10:29 -0500
This is more like a question than a gripe. I'm an MBA student at
MIT doing a paper on computer conferencing. How does this thing
work? Are any of the postings censored for anything? I've done
conferencing on BBS's and in a variety of other places for about 8
years, but I've never learned how this specific party works.
I've seen some minor responses to your questions, but I haven't seen
any attempts to answer everything, so I'll take a stab at it. I'm
sure that if I make any mistakes, people will jump in to correct me.
First of all, my credentials :-). I'm one of the people who helps to
maintain NetNews (what you get when you run xrn) at our site. The
people who run news are the people on the mailing list
usenet@athena.mit.edu. At Project Athena, news is run by the Student
Information Processing Board (SIPB), of which I am a member.
Furthermore, most of the other sites on campus which let their
computer users read news (e.g. LCS, the AI lab, etc.) get their main
news feed (i.e. incoming source of news) from our news server, so we
are the major supplier of news to most of campus.
For a technical description of how the Usenet works, I suggest you do
"attach jik" and take a look at the file
"/mit/jik/News/news/announce/newusers/USENET_software". Another
useful file to read is the file "primer" in the same directory.
Basically, there are sites all over the world that receive (and, in
most cases, although not all, transmit) news. Each site that
participates in the net keeps local copies of its news. When you post
a message to the net, it is first sent to your local news machine, and
then transmitted (if your site does outbound news, and as I said, most
sites do) to all the other machines on the net, using a "you tell two
friends, and they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so
on, and so on," type of the system until it gets to the whole world.
There are exceptions to this. For example, some newsgroups are
moderated -- only the moderator of the newsgroup is allowed to post
messages to it, and postings to those newsgroups are submitted to the
moderator for approval. For example, newsgroups whose only purpose is
the transmission of source code are often moderated.
Also, it is possible to limit the distribution of messages. If you
put "athena" in the Distribution: field of a message you are posting,
it only goes to Project Athena. If you put "na", it only goes to
North America. And stuff like that.
The Usenet is almost completely uncensored. When someone posts
something REALLY inappropriate, it is usually peer pressure that keeps
things like that from happening again. However, since each site
chooses which newsgroups it wants to get and which it does not, each
site gets to "censor" the news that users of that site see.
I've really only touched on the complexities of the net; the documents
I referenced above go into more detail about some things; you may want
to browse through some of the other documents in that directory as
well. If you have more questions, please feel free to contact me
directly or the usenet@athena mailing list.
--> Jonathan Kamens
One of usenet@athena.mit.edu
Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) member
Project Athena Watchmaker and User Consultant
jik@Athena.MIT.EDU
