[sf-lug] Suspicious email from LinuxMafia

[Rick Moen]

Posting in a flu-driven mental fog, I spaced out on finishing a
sentence.

> I was a longtime denizen of NANAE, Usenet's news.admin.net-abuse.email.
                                                                       ^
> NANAE was one of the foci of the first great spam wars, mostly because
> it was where all Internet's antispam brain trust hung out in public.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News.admin.net-abuse.email

Should have been Usenet's news.admin.net-abuse.email _newsgroup_.


While I'm here anyway:

Usenet is a globally distributed large collection of public discussion
forums ('newsgroups' or 'groups').  The predominant transport technology
(NNTP) is related to that used by e-mail and thus mailing lists (SMTP),
except in broad terms it works a lot better on a technical level.
Postings are en-masse referred to as 'netnews' or 'news' (or, er,
Usenet).  Any individual posting is called an 'article'.

To participate on Usenet, you need an NNTP newsreader client program,
analogous to your SMTP e-mail client program except written to operate
over NNTP rather than for SMTP/IMAP/POP3.  Those are easy to find.  What
is probably more difficult in 2016 is to find a specific accessible 
NNTP netnews _server_ you are permitted to use and that doesn't utterly
suck.

They tend to either utterly suck or be just difficult to find (_or_ 
be available for a custom fee per month or year) as an artifact of
Usenet becoming unfashionable -- and tending to reinforce that tendency,
and further reduce mindshare.

I still read netnews, in part because my ISP, Mike Durkin's Raw
Bandwidth Communications (which I use for home aDSL) happens to still
run a good NNTP news server, bless him.  Last time I tried to find
mention of that news server on Raw Bandwidth's Web pages, I found zero,
which I believe further illustrates the real problem (public
awareness).[1]


> Mention Usenet in this decade, and one very often sets off someone
> firing off a tired old, not-very-accurate antiUsenet talking point.

Usually, the troll's go-to objection is 'You can't be serious.  Usenet's
been unusable since 1985 [or pick some other 20th C year, more or less
at random] because it got overwhelmed by spam and died.'

I seriously doubt such a person has actual epiphenomenal knowledge;
it's just a look-at-me noise talking point that's supposed to impress
people and prove that the first speaker cannot be trusted, and the
speaker expects to get a rise out of the first speaker.  _Some_
newsgroups appear all-spam because real people stopped using them for
unrelated reasons, and the slow trickle of spam since that happened
years ago creates the illusion that spam destroyed the group.
Additionally, some news _servers_ are bad about rejecting spam articles
as a side-effect of them being terrible servers in all other ways, too.
(Cheap and easy to find sometimes precludes good.)

Anyway, at the risk of spoiling my own fun if one of these trolls pops
into the present discussion:  My usual comment is that the great thing
about anti-Usenet commenters is that they stay off Usenet.  ;->

Anyway#2, many of the better and more witty parts of the Internet today
trace their culture, traditions, and jokes to Usenet.  Fact.


[1] And honestly, public awareness on major Internet matters is hardly a
Usenet-specific problem, either.  Irony-lovers for fun sometimes ask the
question 'What's the most ubiquitous and successful Internet service?'
The answer received is overwhelmingly 'the Web'.  (Amirite?)  The punch
line:  Said answer is most often delivered to the questioner via e-mail, 
which by crowning irony is also the _correct_ answer.

-- 
Cheers,               Chip Salzenberg: "Usenet is not a right."
Rick Moen            Edward Vielmetti: "Usenet is a right, a left, a jab,
rick at linuxmafia.com                     and a sharp uppercut to the jaw.
McQ!  (4x80)                            The postman hits!  You have new mail."