[74] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
[TLIMONCE%ASGARD@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU: Re: competition [answer to the question]]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu)
Wed Oct 31 17:08:12 1990
From: karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 90 16:52:58 -0500
To: tlimonce@asgard.BITNET (Tom Limoncelli), bob@MorningStar.Com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: bob@MorningStar.Com's message of Wed, 31 Oct 90 15:48:26 EST
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 90 15:48:26 EST
From: bob@MorningStar.Com
Karl, the Compu$erve gateway's author, can check me on this one...
OK...
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 90 14:53 EST
From: "Tom Limoncelli@Drew University" <TLIMONCE%ASGARD@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Perhaps someday Compu$erve will get a UUCP
link to ATTmail and "acceptable use" will be a non-problem.
(...or perhaps they'll all wire into PSI or AlterNet or CERFnet...)
The latter is more likely. I'm not aware of a DEC-20 that can speak
UUCP...
Compu$erve has a link to the internet. ATTMail has a link to the
internet. I thought you'd be able to use the internet link the
two. Are you sure about blocking?
Yes, he's sure, but he's imprecise.
Oops, I was wrong. Only traffic to and from MCImail and DASnet are
blocked from traversing the Internet before or after passing through
the Compu$erve gateway.
The situation is a bit more contorted than that.
Inbound to CompuServe from the Internet, the gateway host is blind as
to the origin of a message, neither knows nor cares who sent it or
how. I figure that, if it gets here, it was someone else's problem as
to whether it should done so or not.
Outbound to the Internet, CompuServe-originated mail is prevented from
going to MCI or DASNet. Within CompuServe itself, before it hits the
gateway host here, they also block to/from MCI, DASNet, and
attmail.com. (Yes, there is some redundancy here.) I heard from Mark
Horton that he was probably going to have implement a corresponding
block at his end for attmail stuff heading for CompuServe.
Mark and I had a bitch-and-moan session in mail a month or so ago when
this was going down. The idea of needing to create a stop list of
entities to which mail may not be sent via our Internet connections is
preposterous. My current restricted destinations are just hard-coded
in the gateway scripts; it could be easily generalized to a proper
stop list, but I really REALLY don't want to do so.
Apple can speak UUCP direct to osu-cis so that stuff between AppleLink
and CompuServe can't be questioned. I don't know if it's used much or
not -- my logs don't show much activity there -- check with Erik Fair
for details.
It seems that there's already a private link from Compu$erve to
MCImail,
True, addressable from within CompuServe as ">MCI:mci-user-id."
like the one I had postulated with ATTmail. I don't know why
ATTmail or others besides DASnet or MCImail might be excepted from the
filter.
The restrictions are a mish-mash of who noticed what improper traffic
when, and whoever was nearest/most-available/most-readily-abusable for
complaints was directed to close off the access.
I think it sucks. Someone will probably notice Connect, Inc or GEnie
or Prodigy sometime soon and tell me to block it.
Or perhaps I'm simply missing something, God knows that
gateway's a twisted, ugly beast to behold :-)
Bob, you have no sense of humor at all.
For the rest of you, Bob says that because the bulk of the gateway on
the Internet side is written as a set of csh scripts.
no shame whatever,
--karl
