[994] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Thank you for your comments
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roy Smith)
Mon Jul 15 14:01:58 1991
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 91 11:18:33 EDT
From: Roy Smith <roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu>
To: alan@curta.cc.columbia.edu, sob@tmc.edu
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, edtjda@magic322.chron.com, nren-discuss@uu.psi.com
Stan Barber says:
> There is room for it if it is called news analysis or editorial. If it is
> not so marked, it is like deceptive advertising to me.
I just went back and re-read the whole of Abernathy's article. It is clearly
not an editorial; he espouses no opinion, he simply presents facts. Perhaps
he doesn't present a particularly balanced view of the Internet as a whole,
but then again, he doesn't claim to. He's dug up some dirt and written an
expose piece about it. Sure, it may be embarrasing to some people, but if so,
the blame lies not with the writer who did the embarrasing, but with the
people who had something to be embarrased about.
Abarnathy apparantly thinks it's a waste of taxpayer's money to be shipping
erotic stories and images around over the Internet. I happen to agree with
him. Of course I understand that alt.sex, etc is only a small part of what
goes on on the Internet, but it is not an insignificant part, and I also
understand that when I read an article about cops on the take, it doesn't
mean that the entire police force is on the take; you can write an article
exposing corruption in a police force without condeming the whole force, and
I think that is exactly what Abernathy's article did.
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).
Stan, you seem to feel (and correct me if I misunderstand this) that you
have been somehow misquoted, or quoted out of context. The article says:
> Medical students will soon be granted regular access to Internet ^- once
> they've received an education about Internet.
> "We need to be sure that the students are cognizant of the respon
> sibilities they have,'' said Stan Barber, director of networking. "We
> don't want some of the problems students have caused in the past to
> be caused by Baylor College of Medicine students.''
> These problems ^- created by other users as well as students ^-
> include hacking and the use of valuable computer facilities to circulate
> pornography.
What is the problem here? This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to
say, and a responsible one, and exactly the sort of thing directors of
networking should be saying. How is it that you feel your statement was
misrepresented?
