[1003] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Thank you for your comments
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (francis%zaphod@gargoyle.uchicago.e)
Mon Jul 15 17:49:57 1991
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 91 16:48:33 CDT
From: francis%zaphod@gargoyle.uchicago.edu
To: com-priv@psi.com, nren-discuss@uu.psi.com
In-Reply-To: Roy Smith's message of Mon, 15 Jul 91 11:18:33 EDT <9107151518.AA10346@alanine.phri.nyu.edu>
Reply-To: francis%zaphod@gargoyle.uchicago.edu
Roy Smith <roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu> writes:
>And as for the claim that he is confusing the Internet and Usenet, I think
>that's a red herring. The Sappho mailing list he talks about isn't part
>of Usenet, nor are the GIF ftp repositories (and while the former could
>very well be done over UUCP or some other transport layer, the latter is
>ndeed Internet specific).
The problem is that his main target (as I recall) was the alt.sex*
heirarchy; no site needs to receive this or any other newsfeed. I
don't understand why the high school student in the article found it;
why would his school get it? Were they using some university's system?
If so, he raises an empty point; once the K-12 sites start getting
their own Internet links, they can get only the groups they want their
students to read. (Or, if they're using a remote NNTP server, find
somebody to modify their newsreaders so that they can't enter these
groups.)
Admittedly, the FTP access can't be cut off without killing all FTP
access; but it can be monitored--let the students know that any
excessive FTPing will be reported by the software, to watch for this
kind of thing. There's precedent; a school can open a student's
locker, for example. And anyway, as near as I can tell, nearly all
pornographic FTP sites are unauthorized by the local administrators.
And the Sappho mailing list should not even be a point of discussion;
people should be able to talk about whatever they want. It's not as
if the university or the government were paying extra to carry this
particular traffic. (It seems to me that M. Abernathy very carefully
omitted that point, that it costs no more to carry extra traffic--it
slows things down, but usually only locally; and mail and news
transport are low-priority enough to remove even that problem.)
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| Francis Stracke | My opinions are my own. I don't steal them.|
| Department of Mathematics |=============================================|
| University of Chicago | Dave Barry for President! |
| francis@zaphod.uchicago.edu | He'll Keep Dan Quayle. |
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