Richard,
To my knowledge the software allowed individual nntp server admins to
decide whether to take all newsgroups or only those they specifically
approved. Often they proxied their decisions to someone else--a
"authoritative root" of sorts that they could mirror.
A student of mine wrote a terrific paper on USENET and its development
(including several citations to IFWP listmember Ronda's work). Here's a
brief excerpt. (We should get the rest of it online; she's happy to have
it up.)
...News admins control access by end users and propagation among
sites. This power is limited only by whatever institutional controls are
in place at the Internet Service Provider, be it university or private
company, and whatever influence the Usenet community and the end users can
bring to bear on the news admin. The same FAQ describes their role in
these terms:
"If you ran a news system you could be a petty tyrant. You could decide
what groups to carry, who to kick off your system, how to expire old news
so that you kept 60 days worth of misc.petunias but expired rec.pets.fish
almost immediately. In the long run you would probably have been happiest
if you made these decisions relatively even-handedly since that's the
posture least likely to get people to notice that you actually did have
control. . . . Your right to exercise control over netnews usually ended at
your neighbor's spool directory. Pleading, cajoling, appealing to good
nature, or paying your news feed generally yielded a better response than
flames on the net."
But few news admins wanted to be tyrants; they often wanted to spend as
little time as possible on Usenet administration or else wanted someone
else to make the decisions for it so they were not held accountable for
changes unpopular with their end users. During Spafford's tenure, his
onscreen moniker became an adjective, i.e. "if a newgroup isn't 'spaf,' it
won't be propagated." Spafford's involvement with the Backbone Cabal
illustrates his willingness to get involved and implement change. Usenet
has depended on volunteers for all of its bureaucracy since it was created
as a private project; Spafford was one of the first but far from the
last. He handed on the mantle of newsgroup arbitrator to David Lawrence in
1993. ...
At 08:53 PM 7/13/99 , Richard Sexton wrote:
At 08:38 PM 7/13/99 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Hello,
>
>it's been done already....in 1996 we wrote
>a DNS switcher application, and have distributed
>over 100,000 copies of it since the (for free).
>you can download it (for windows) from
>http://namespace.org/software
>
>enjoy!
>
>Paul Garrin
>Name.Space, Inc.
As the registry industry moves forward there is much time to
be saved by examining similar conflicts in Internet idintifier
ontologies. Does anybody remember what year the Usenet system
changed from automatically feeding all newsgroups to it's
peers to the "active file" concept of only passing selective
top level hierarchies to ones news neighbors? Or was it
always selective?
--
Richard Sexton | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://dns.vrx.net/tech/rootzone
http://killifish.vrx.net http://www.mbz.org http://lists.aquaria.net
Bannockburn, Ontario, Canada, 70 & 72 280SE, 83 300SD +1 (613) 473-1719
