Computer underground Digest Sun Dec 1, 1996 Volume 8 : Issue 84 ISSN 1004-042X Editor: Jim Thomas (cudigest@sun.soci.niu.edu) News Editor: Gordon Meyer (gmeyer@sun.soci.niu.edu) Archivist: Brendan Kehoe Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala Ian Dickinson Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest CONTENTS, #8.84 (Sun, Dec 1, 1996) File 1--Cato Institute paper on Net-speech regulation, by S.Bernstein File 2--DC-ISOC Meeting About Domain Names File 3--Re: "News.groups reform" File 4--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 1 Dec, 1996) CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION ApPEARS IN THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 17 Nov 1996 19:37:56 -0800 (PST) From: Declan McCullagh Subject: File 1--Cato Institute paper on Net-speech regulation, by S.Bernstein From - fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu [Among other things, Solveig's paper talks about the "harmful to minors" standard in a future CDA that we've discussed before and I wrote about in June: http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/96/24/declan4a.html --Declan] --------------- http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-262es.html Cato Policy Analysis No. 262 November 4, 1996 BEYOND THE COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT: CONSTITUTIONAL LESSONS OF THE INTERNET by Solveig Bernstein (sberns@cato.org) Solveig Bernstein is assistant director of telecommunications and technology studies at the Cato Institute. _________________________________________________________________ Executive Summary On February 8, 1996, the Communications Decency Act was enacted into law. The law criminalizes the use of any computer network to display "indecent" material, unless the content provider uses an "effective" method to restrict access to that material to anyone under the age of 18. But there is no affordable, effective way for nonprofit or low-profit speakers to restrict children's access to such a broad, ill-defined category of material. Thus, the statute effectively bans much speech from the Internet and other networks. The Internet promised the ordinary citizen a low-cost method of reaching an audience beyond immediate family, friends, and neighbors. Legislation like the CDA betrays that hope and is clearly unconstitutional. No regulation of computer network indecency, however carefully tailored, should pass constitutional scrutiny. First, no legislator has been able to define indecency coherently. Such regulation is inherently unfair, especially as applied to spontaneous, casual speech of the sort that the Internet facilitates between unsophisticated and noncommercial speakers. Second, government cannot legitimately claim that it has any interest in content control, when civil society has solved the perceived problem on its own. Here, private sector solutions include both software filters that parents can use to screen out offensive material and Internet service providers who provide access only to child-safe materials. [...] Why Indecency on Computer Networks Should Not Be Censored One can be certain, however, that the censors will not give up. If the CDA ultimately is declared unconstitutional, the censors will try to craft new legislation along similar lines. Possible Alternatives to the CDA Legislation somewhat less broad than the CDA would cover only material that is "harmful to minors." This option would essentially still ban much amateur speech because of the technical and economic difficulties of restricting access. More sophisticated plans have also been suggested. Use of site rating labels could be added to the available defenses (which would in effect make labeling of sexually explicit sites mandatory) to ease this problem somewhat. Labels can be used to rate newsgroups, Web sites, and content posted on online networks. Eugene Volokh of the University of California Los Angeles Law School has suggested that governments could require all content providers to rate their own sites. [77] Parents could then buy software filters that would reject adult-rated content. In defending the CDA, the Department of Justice crafted a similar argument. Under one proposal supported by the Department of Justice, all "indecent" materials would be tagged "L18," for "not less than 18." At the first CDA hearing in Philadelphia, the Department of Justice explained that computer network users would be registered as "adults" or "minors," and that information would be encoded in their online personas. Network servers (the computers on which content is stored) would be customized to deny minors access to Web sites tagged "L18." [78] The proposal would require all Internet service providers to reprogram a substantial number of their servers. The CDA does not require Internet service providers to undertake any such project; generally, only those that control content are liable under the law. Thus, the argument that the L18/server scheme could alleviate the burdens of the CDA on speakers was essentially absurd, as Judge Sloviter noted. [79] Additionally, courts have recognized that advanced speaker registration requirements stifle the spontaneity of free expression. [80] And advanced registration would threaten the existence of electronic forums operated for the benefit of those most anxious to protect their identity, such as victims of sexual abuse. [81] Finally, the suggestion that servers be restructured is eerily reminiscent of the Singapore government's insistence that Internet communications be routed through "proxy servers" to facilitate intensive political censorship. By the second CDA hearing, the government had apparently abandoned the server/registration approach to tagging, and explained that the tags could work with filtering software controlled by the end user. But that would not satisfy the CDA's effectiveness requirement, as Judge Cabranes noted, because many parents do not use filtering software; the Department of Justice's assertions at the hearing that it would not prosecute labeled sites were not binding on any prosecutor. [82] As a defense of the CDA, both incarnations of the L18 scheme failed. But they might suggest a direction for future legislative efforts. Any form of mandatory labeling, however, is objectionable for several reasons. First, it is compelled speech, which should not be constitutionally permissible. [83] It would place an extraordinary burden on entities with large collections of works, such as libraries. [84] It would be oppressive to expect such labels to be applied to casual or intimate speech, such as statements in chat rooms, private e-mail, or individual newsgroup or bulletin board postings. For spontaneous computer speech, mandatory tagging would be the equivalent of requiring the labeling of conversations around a backyard barbecue. Second, mandatory labeling as unsophisticated as the L18 scheme proposed by the Department of Justice would prevent older children from accessing information about reproduction, art, and other topics, or from contributing to discussions of those topics. Minors, too, have free speech rights. Sixteen-year-olds should not be restricted to viewing what is fit for six-year-olds. Third, because there is so much content on computer networks, the only practically feasible kind of universal labeling scheme would require content providers to rate their own material. A substantial number of amateur or casual speakers would, out of an excess of caution or as an act of civil disobedience, deliberately give their sites a more or less restrictive label than the law requires. Libraries might be forced to slap an "adult" label on their entire collection, because they could not afford to rate all their content. There are so many thousands of communications traveling over computer networks every day that only a very small proportion of the labels would be checked by third parties. Thus, ironically, a mandatory labeling regime is more likely than voluntary labeling to be substantially inaccurate and unhelpful to parents. Under the market-driven voluntary systems that will work with the new rating standards known as PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection), unrated sites can be blocked automatically by filter software; a greater proportion of those fewer sites that are rated can be checked by private ratings groups. Only voluntary rating would be consistently undertaken with care. The Fallacy Motivating the Search for CDA Alternatives Proposing any legislative alternative to the CDA makes a fundamental error: such proposals assume that government has constitutional authority to regulate nonobscene sexually explicit computer network speech. Judge Dalzell identified this as the central issue at the hearings concerning the constitutionality of the CDA, stating that: from the Supreme Court's many decisions regulating different media differently, I conclude that we cannot simply assume that the Government has the power to regulate protected speech over the Internet....Rather, we must decide the validity of the underlying assumption as well, to wit, whether the Government has the power to regulate protected speech at all. [85] The analysis below shows that this assumption is not valid. Even if we assume that the precedents that allow the government to regulate nonobscene sexual speech on other media are correct, these precedents do not supply any convincing rationale for regulation of computer networks. Communication over computer networks does not raise entirely new constitutional issues. But it raises two particularly important issues in such a way that they cannot be avoided. First, computer networks empower millions of ordinary citizens to become speakers. As censorship laws are enforced, the court's failure to coherently define categories of forbidden talk about sex will look more and more obviously unjust and arbitrary. Second, the power of the private sector to offer alternatives to censorship erodes arguments that government has any legitimate interest in this problem. Without a constitutionally cognizable interest in imposing the regulation, government cannot act. These are both sound reasons to believe that indecency (or its cousin, material that is "harmful to minors") on computer networks cannot constitutionally be regulated at all. First Amendment jurisprudence must evolve to address these issues or become divorced from the reality of the marketplace of ideas. Defining Forbidden Speech Unwilling to rule that government simply may not censor any speech, the Supreme Court has struggled to distinguish between speech about sex that may be censored, and speech that may not be. Early on, the Court decided that obscene speech was not entitled to First Amendment protection. But what was obscene? The Court's attempts to define this category coherently have important implications for regulation of indecency or material that is "harmful to minors" on computer networks. This is not because obscenity and indecency are the same thing. Whatever is obscene is almost certainly indecent; a wide range of material that is indecent is not obscene. But our judgments about what is obscene and what is indecent are closely tied to subjective moral judgments. If the Court cannot define one category coherently, it is unlikely to make much headway with the other. Nor is it likely to make headway with the in-between category of "harmful to minors." For years, the Supreme Court struggled to create a national definition of obscenity. It failed. At bottom, the question of what is "obscene" is a matter of taste. No power in the world can convert a subjective question into an objective one, even by abstracting from the myriad subjective tastes of members of a national community. Under the "national" approach, ultimately, a work was obscene if it offended enough Justices of the Supreme Court. This was evidenced by hilarious yet deeply troubling statements such as that of Justice Potter Stewart, who, in attempting to define hard-core pornography declared, "I know it when I see it." [86] In 1963, Chief Justice Earl Warren stated, "I believe there is no provable 'national standard.'" [87] Still later, in abandoning the national standard, the Court explained: it is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the First Amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas, or New York City. People in different states vary in their tastes and attitudes, and this diversity is not to be strangled by the absolutism of imposed uniformity. [88] Similarly, the FCC has failed to craft a coherent national standard of broadcast indecency. According to the FCC, broadcast indecency is to be judged according to the tastes of the "average broadcast viewer." But who is this "average" viewer? In a country with local standards as diverse as those of San Francisco or Iowa, there can be no such animal. The national standard boils down to what offends the FCC. Insofar as interpreters of the CDA are directed by the legislative history to craft a national indecency standard, they will be no more successful than the FCC. The early print media precedents are no more helpful. It is possible for any court to string together words in an important sounding way, crafting phrases such as "prurient interest," or a mythical national consensus, and claim to have created a uniform definition of indecency. What it will have done, in effect, is to impose its tastes on the rest of the nation. Nor can the Court resolve the problem by referring to a hypothetical "average" computer network user. A First Amendment that protected only "average" speech would provide little or no protection at all to unpopular minorities. Part of the reason that computer networks are special is that they empower an extraordinary range of speakers from diverse communities. The tastes of the "average" user are thus not only hard to identify, but should be of no relevance. If there cannot be a national standard for forbidden speech about sex on computer networks, can there be local standards? The Supreme Court allowed states to adopt community standards to alleviate the embarrassment of its failure to craft a national obscenity standard for the print media. [89] The question of what was obscene was largely left to local juries. [90] But some members of the Court long resisted adopting a local community standard, for good reason. Justice William Brennan argued that the local community standard could not serve as a constitutional standard: We do not see how any "local" definition of the "community" could properly be employed in delineating the area of expression that is protected by the Federal Constitution....It would be a hardy person who would sell a book or exhibit a film anywhere in the land after this Court had sustained the judgment of one "community" holding it to be outside the constitutional protection. [91] His fear was that an adverse judgment in a few restrictive local communities would chill the national distribution of speech. The Supreme Court has since flatly refused to recognize the constitutional dimensions of this problem. In one case, the Court considered a dial-a-porn operator's argument that Congress could not force it to tailor its messages to the least restrictive community, because such a requirement in effect created a national standard of obscenity. The Court explained, "While Sable [the operator] may be forced to incur some costs in developing and implementing a system for screening the locale of incoming calls, there is no constitutional impediment to enacting a law which may impose such costs on a medium electing to provide these messages." [92] Computer networks will raise this issue again, this time with a vengeance. The impact of the law will be felt, not by the narrow, unpopular community of professional pornographers, but by ordinary citizens able to reach a wide audience for the first time. The local standard will not suffice in any country that takes free speech seriously. If the national standard is inherently incoherent, and the local standard inherently unfair, what is the Court to do? The answer is that the Court should admit that government, especially the federal government, has no place regulating the display of sexual imagery in cyberspace, especially if it is neither obscene nor categorized as child pornography. If it cannot be done consistent with the Constitution, it should not be done. But will this mean that the United States' children are to be exposed to a never-ending stream of sexually explicit images? It will not mean that at all. And the dispute surrounding the constitutionality of the CDA is the perfect opportunity for the Court to make this clear. Market Alternatives Erode the Government Interest The Supreme Court's indecency jurisprudence requires that a statute choose the least restrictive means to serve a compelling state interest. The Court's accumulated indecency cases, however, do not make clear what that interest is. It is either government's interest in helping parents protect their children, or an independent interest of government in protecting the children themselves. [93] The analysis below shows that the latter interest cannot be viewed as constitutionally compelling. And, where computer networks are concerned, parents are capable of taking care of their own children. With computer networks, government's interest falls away. An Interest in Helping Parents. The Supreme Court has described the government's interest in regulating indecency as an interest in helping parents supervise their children--not in protecting children from indecency when their parents believe the materials in question would do their children no harm: Constitutional interpretation has consistently recognized that the parents' claim to authority in their own household to direct the rearing of their children is basic in the structure of our society.... The legislature could properly conclude that parents and others, teachers for example, who have this primary responsibility for children's well-being are entitled to the support of laws designed to aid discharge of that responsibility...the prohibition against sales to minors does not bar parents who so desire from purchasing the magazines for their children [emphasis added]. [94] It is not rational to argue, however, that government can have a compelling interest in helping concerned parents when concerned parents do not need help. Government should not be able to argue that it has a compelling solution to a problem that has effective private solutions. Computer networks offer an excellent private solution to parents who want to protect their children from indecency, but who do not want to deny access to online services altogether. As with any media, parents can control their child's access to computerized indecency by exercising a little sense. Some parents, for example, do not allow their children access to online services in the privacy of their own rooms; access is available only by means of a computer in the family room, where anyone walking by can see what is on the screen. [...] An Independent Interest in Protecting Children? Perhaps government could claim a compelling interest in protecting unsupervised children, children whose parents do not purchase or use filtering software? Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the plurality in Denver Area Educational Telecommunications Consortium v. FCC, a case involving the constitutionality of restrictions on the transmission of indecent material over cable television, restates that protection of children is a compelling or at least important interest, and suggests, without further analysis, that such interest allows the federal government to intervene to protect children of "inattentive" parents. [125] There are substantial reasons to believe that protecting children from a danger that the childrens' parents do not recognize as particularly grave should not amount to a compelling interest. As pointed out above, filtering software is affordable to anyone who can afford a computer system. Nonsupervising parents have implicitly decided that exposure to material of a sexual nature probably will not harm their children enough to bother with. If the parents do not find the interest sufficiently compelling to take action, there is no reason to think that government should. Indeed, there may be parents who believe that their children should be exposed to materials that might be considered indecent, including information about disease prevention, birth control, reproduction, works of literature and art, and so on. Government's claim of an independent interest in restricting indecency contradicts government's claim of an interest in helping parents control their children's education. [126] If government did have an independent compelling interest in keeping children from viewing all sexually explicit or vulgar material, it could pass a law that parents must lock all the indecent materials in their home (Playboy, romance novels, Lady Chatterley's Lover) in special safes to ensure that their children never access it. Or that parents must use software filters to prevent teenagers from using the Internet to read about sex. Imagine police searching through private residences to enforce this law. The reaction would be public outrage. In short, when it comes down to it, there is nothing compelling about government's alleged interest in protecting children from indecency. In this context, we recognize that parents have the right and responsibility to make decisions about such matters for themselves. So why do we pretend that the interest becomes compelling when the burden of complying with the law is placed on someone other than the parents? We pretend it because we place the burden of complying with the law on unpopular speakers--pornographers, purveyors of smut. The application of indecency laws to computer networks will throw the issue into stark relief. First, under the CDA, it is possible that parents and teachers could be prosecuted for allowing children in their charge to use computers to access material that the parents believe the child is mature enough to handle. Second, the easy availability of private solutions for parents who are concerned about indecency makes it obvious that the CDA is nothing but a convenience for parents who will not take the trouble to supervise their children--not a compelling problem that the government must step in to solve. Private solutions might not always be available to solve "indecency problems." On public property, for example, which everyone must access from time to time, one faces more difficult questions. But computer networks are not public parks. They are sophisticated user-controlled private spaces. And private solutions clearly should be part of the constitutional analysis. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 18:06:02 -0400 From: russ@NAVIGATORS.COM(Russ Haynal) Subject: File 2--DC-ISOC Meeting About Domain Names The Washington DC Chapter of the Internet Society (DC-ISOC) announces its Next Event! Domain Names - Issues, Policies, and Solutions Tuesday, December 3, 1996, 7-9 p.m. There have been many pressures building on the Domain Name System, including rapid growth of .com, trademark disputes, and increasing amounts of litigation. Join DC-ISOC to hear from Industry leaders how domain names are being handled and what steps are being taken to possibly expand the domain name space. Confirmed speakers include: Dr. Donald N. Telage, President and COO of Network Solutions, Inc., which manages the InterNIC Registry administering the .com, .net, .edu, and .org top level domains. Dr. Telage will discuss: - Issues involved in operating a domain name registry. - The latest Internic policies for handling domain name disputes - Network Solution's initiatives to ensure that Internic operations keep pace with the rapidly evolving Internet Donald M. Heath, President and CEO of the Internet Society. Don also serves as chairman of the Internet International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) which is charged with looking at the complex issues surrounding the current domain name and registry situation, including trademark and infringement, economics and administration of registry operations, dispute policies, fees and international Top Level Domain (iTLDs). The meeting will be held on Tuesday, December 3, 1996, at the Marriott Hotel in Tysons Corner from 7-9 p.m. Please arrive prior to the meeting start time of 7pm. Directions: Washington Beltway (I-495) Exit for Route 7 (Leesburg Pike) heading west. The Marriot is located immediately on your right. As with all of our previous events, there is no charge to attend this event. Seating will be on a first-come, first-seated basis, though we expect that there should be room for all those interested. This meeting of the DC-ISOC is being sponsored by Network Solutions, Inc. Network Solutions is a leading Internet-Intranet Solution Provider who has operated the Internic since 1991. Related Links for this meeting: Network Solutions - http://www.netsol.com Internic - http://rs.internic.net Internet Society - http://www.isoc.org Press annoucment about IAHC - http://www.isoc.org/whatsnew/iahcmembers.html IAHC - http://www.iahc.org -------------------------------------------------------------- Call for volunteers! The DC-ISOC needs YOU. The DC-ISOC would like to organize a series of events such as this one throughout 1997. We are looking for volunteers to get involved in helping to plan these events and to help shape the direction of this chapter of the Internet Society. Anyone interested in volunteering can come forward after the meeting or contact Russ Haynal ( russ@navigators.com ) Individuals who are interested in becoming members of DC-ISOC can do so by joining the Internet Society. See their web site at http://www.isoc.org for more information. The Washington DC Chapter of the Internet Society maintains its own web site at: http://www.dcisoc.org Please feel free to pass this announcement message along to other interested individuals. If this message was forwarded to you, you can join our announcement mailing list through our web site ( http://www.dcisoc.org ) _________________________________________________________ Russ Haynal - Internet Consultant, Instructor, Speaker "Helping organizations gain the most benefit from the Internet" russ@navigators.com http://www.navigators.com 703-729-1757 ------------------------------------------------------ Author:"Internet; A Knowledge Odyssey" (Top-rated CD-ROM Tutorial) Available from MindQ Publishing: http://www.mindq.com ------------------------------ From: Stanton McCandlish Subject: File 3--Re: "News.groups reform" Date: Fri, 8 Nov 1996 00:56:49 -0800 (PST) > On Oct 13, 1996 22:56:24 in , 'Christopher Stone > ' wrote: This proposal has some pretty serious flaws. I've analyzed most of the egregious ones below. > PROPOSAL FOR NEWS.GROUPS REFORM > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > 1) Group Advice, Group Mentors, and the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers (UVV) > are henceforth abolished. Their present memberships are consolidated into > a new body called the Usenet Coordinating Committee (UCC). Given that these three structures are independent and evolved by themselves, there would appear to be no one with the authority, real or theoretical, to cause their abolition and merger. Additionally they server totally different functions. It's like wanting to merge the local police department, the Salvation Army and Girl Scouts of America. I could certainly see some rationale in trying to get these semi-organizations to affiliate and perhaps move under the umbrella of the Internet Society, as IAB, IETF, IANA, IFIP, etc., have - this would provide them a fairly well funded, stable, legally-existing organizational infrastructure to fend off governmental and corporate attacks that are probably only a matter of time in coming. But as with current ISoc affliates, these entities need to remain functionally autonomous. > 2) New members may periodically join the Usenet Coordinating Committee. > New members must be nominated by a current member, and their nomination > must be ratified by a 2/3 supermajority of the current UCC membership. > Likewise, members may be expelled from the UCC by a 2/3 supermajority. > Of course, UCC members may resign of their own volition at any time. In other words, another Good Ol' Boys Club. The IETF model is perhaps better. Anyone can participate. Given that IETF produces things that actually function more or less properly, such as Internet protocol specs, this model is rather compelling, especially compared to ones that are demonstrable failures throughout history, like the proposed bureaucracy. > II. MECHANICS OF NEWSGROUP CREATION > > 1) Anyone who wishes to form a new newsgroup shall contact the Usenet > Coordinating Committee, who will assist in writing a formal proposal for a > newsgroup. Whatever the merits of all this, if any, this should apply only to the "Big 7" newsgroups, of course. The proposal neglects to mention that. > 3) Members of the Usenet Coordinating may brainstorm names for the > newsgroup in question, should the proposal itself contain an inadequate > name. UCC members also may voice other objections to the creation of the > proposed newsgroup, such as a lack of demonstrated traffic on the topic > in question. This is inappropriate. If the Usenet Coordinating (sic) members have an opinion to express on things like this, they can comment and vote just like everyone else. Why on earth attempt to set up a 1st Class v. 2nd Class netizen system in which a elite have more voting power than everyone else combined? I've elided the proposed voting procedure since it can be addressed without quoting it: Removing the current democratic, if noisy, process and replacing it with a pseudo-legislative model that gives a handful of people the ability to deny newsgroup creation in contravention of the wishes of the majority of would-be voters on the issue in Usenet at large, strikes me as a darned poor plan. > Usenet readers at > large may also contribute input on proposals by crossposting to > news.groups and up to two other relevant groups. Artificial restrictions like this are a hindrance. There are often quite a few more than two relevant newsgroups. Besides which, there is no authority with the power to enforce such a restraint on people's expressive choices anyway. Even under this system, it would be in newsgroup proponent's interest to *re*post to any newsgroup beyond two that they felt were relevant. This would be a net *loss* in terms of netiquette, bandwidth, etc. > The voting record of UCC members shall not publicized outside of > the UCC. In other words, there is no accountability. In an actually democratic voting system, you need secret ballots, since everyone gets their say. In a representative system like the one proposed, voting must be accountable, or no one can be sure their interests are in fact being represented. If the proposal author does not grasp this, here's a handy analogy: When power is in YOUR hands, e.g. the power to make your own decisions about what is done with your assets, you don't need to tell anyone else what you are doing. When you yield that power to an agent, e.g. by signing a power of attorney, you have a right to know what that person is doing in your name, and ostensibly in your interest. The principle is the same. > III. NEWS.GROUPS REFORM > 1) News.groups shall be robomoderated to filter out the following posts: > > A) Articles that contain more than 75 characters per line; Where did 75 chars/line come from? This is not the "standard" Usenet preferred max line length. It's 76 to 78, depending on which FAQ you pay attention to. (76 is probably better since it leaves more room for nested >-quoting.) > B) Articles of more than 10 lines consisting of more than 3/4 > quoted text; Flawed. This needs to be smarter, so that it would not reject, for example, a post of comments on a proposal that quoted only the necessary material, but made short comments simply because the writer is brusque in style. Maybe a message over 20 lines consisting of more than 3/4 quoted text in a single block? Something a little less one-size-fits-all. (Then again, the online community is increasingly tolerant of over-quoting anyway. Virtually no one froths about this any more, because disk space and bandwith are becoming cheaper, while filters are getting better.) > E) Article from certain individuals, as discussed below. I hardly need to comment on this direct personal censorship proposition. Spamming and related forms of harassment are surely problematic, but there are better solutions, such as end-user level killfiles, a feature of almost all newsreaders. Censorship begins in the home. And it should never go farther. > These FAQ's shall also be automatically sent to every > first-time poster to news.groups. This is senseless. The entire point of rtfm.mit.edu and other FAQ archives is that people are quite capable of reading the FAQs outside of Usenet itself. As the most venerable Usenet netiquette docs recommend, users should read these documents *before* they post for the first time. It is logically inconsistent to suppose that users who refuse to do this will be any more willing to pay attention to the FAQ when it is auto-spammed at them. If anything, they'll be even more likely to ignore it, and may even come away with the idea that it is perfect netiquette to randomly mail large unsolicited files at people just for the hell of it. > 4) Discussion of proposals shall bear the tag "PROPOSAL" in their subject > lines. Discussions relating to votes in progress shall bear the tag > VOTE. FAQ's shall bear the tag FAQ. The robomoderator shall reject > articles lacking such tags. This is inconsistent. In the begining, the author calls for the initial RFD to be renamed PROPOSAL, and here calls for discussion of that proposal to be also called PROPOSAL. This prevents readers from being able to tell the two apart. At any rate, most newsware automatically inserts "Re: " before a replied-to subject anyway. This would solve the confusion problem, but as written the proposal would appear to call for the filterbot to reject such messages since they don't start with PROPOSAL. It doesn't state this explicitly, but subject line filters that accepted "PROPOSAL" at any place in the subject would let through any subject that qualified, such as spam of the form "HEY THERE! Check out the new Indecent Proposals adult Web site!", etc. "RFD" is much less likely to be encountered as a text string in other contexts. > 1) This proposal eliminates much needless haggling on news.groups. For This "needless haggling" is called "the democratic process", "public debate and consensus", and "free speech". > instance, we will not go through several weeks worth of wrangling over > whether moderation constitutes censorship, or why obscure names such as > rec.pets.cats.clowder are ill-conceived. Of course you will. You'll get even MORE discussion of moderatorial censorship, since this proposal would double it and then some, and you'd have even more voiciferous flames about newsgroup names, since this system would prevent everyone but the Cabal from having any say in the matter. Let's not be silly. > 2) This plan offers the advantage of consistency in namespace. Since the > same people will be voting on new groups, their preferences are unlikely > to vary from one proposal to another without good reason. Uh...who cares? Ever heard of keyword search? Does it really matter whether it's rec.beer or rec.food.drink.beer or rec.drink.beer? Of course not. The last time I went looking for a newsgroup by starting at the top-level hierarchy and working down was some time in the 80s. Finding a suitable newsgroup for your topic is incredibly trivial, a matter of minutes at most. Once you've found it, it might as well be called comp.fnordyaya.zibochtoobie-blah for all it would matter. This simple fact is one of the reasons you don't hear the clueless demanding that a consistent naming system for mailing lists be imposed. *It just doesn't matter*. As for the assertion about the consistency of voting paterns of people given exclusive power to vote as representatives of aggregates, the author has obviously never observed a parliamentary or legislative body in action. > 3) The proposal eliminates the problem of vote fraud altogether. And replaces it with an oligarchic dictatorship. > No longer will throngs of angry nationalist voters be able to nix newsgroups > for ethnic groups they dislike. Nor will a determined proponent be able > to ram proposals through news.groups -- thereby increasing the quality of > proposals. As things currently stand, news.groups is a paper tiger. We > cannot hope to defeat proposals such as soc.culture.indian.jammu-kashmir. > My proposal puts an end to such nonsense. This is all much better solved with digital signature and authentication technology. > Additionally, this proposal will vastly cut down on harrassment of UVV > members and people whose e-mail addresses appear in RESULT postings. How so? If anything, it would get them flamed into oblivion on a daily basis. > 4) The proposal makes it extremely easy for anyone who sincerely desires > to participate in the creation of newsgroups to do so. This is already the default situation. The proposal makes it easy only to ask someone else to do it for you, and then you have to go away, having no further input of any consequence. > Basically, any new > poster who hangs out on news.groups for a while will be able to join the > UCC if he or she wants to. Not so. This proposal calls for a 2/3 supermajority vote, remember? A supermajority vote to admit someone that has to be nominated by people already in the club, itself a body that no one ever votes for but which this proposals would appointed by fiat. > At the same time, the proposal prevents > net.kooks from disrupting the newsgroups creation process. Kooks do not disrupt this process now. They make some noise, but if you RFTM and learn to use a killfile, you don't have to listen to them. The proposal, on the other hand, has a high likelihood of putting kooks in control of the entire process, since only a kook would want that kind of control in the first place. I'd bet whatever money I had, every cent of it, that if this proposal were to go anywhere, that the majority of the people this "reform" wants to appoint by merging current volunteer [dis]organization, would refuse to participate. They didn't decide to spend a lot of time and effort helping make Usenet work so they could lord it over people (with a few exceptions, who've gotten flamed into oblivion for it). They did it because they like Usenet and felt like giving sometime and energy from their lives to making it better. > Furthermore, in some ways, my proposal makes the newsgroup creation > process less intimidating to outsiders. Putting control in the hands of some nebulous body with ultimate power over whether or not your proposal flies is hardly "less intimidating" than the current process, in which one must simply have a reasonable proposal, rather than be willing to appease capricious net.gods who would hold the power to bestow favors or punish by witholding priviledges. > By allowing discussion to be > crossposted to two other groups besides news.groups, the proposal ensures > that readers of all relevant groups are aware of a given RFD. The above is a self-contradictory sentence. 2 is not all, plainly. "All" in this context is by definition a variable, and will remain one; "2" is an aribtrary constant (hell, it's not even based on any established netiquette. It is perfectly respectable crossposting behavior in every netiquetter treatise I've ever seen (lots; I archive this kind of thing at http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture) to include more than other newsgroups in a crosspost, as long as they are relevant. > News.groups > will become more hospitable once robomoderation cuts down on all the > racist spam we have seen recently. One word: Killfile. > And by eliminating acronyms such as > "RFD" and "CFV" in favor of clear English-language terminology, the > newsgroup creation process seems less mysterious. If you don't understand the acronyms, read the FAQ. The acronyms are meaningful. They are calls to *do* something. The suggested replacements are not. It is far more productive to *request for comments* or *call for votes* that to simply observe, with no explicate purpose, that a proposal exists, or that a message has something to do with voting. > I hope that Russ Allbery will consider integrating his proposal for > news.groups moderation with mine. I hope he doesn't. This one would be best buried, and if his is as bad as this, combining the two would be awful. > 5) The proposal saves a lot of labor and time in the newsgroup creation > process. Increasingly, creating newsgroups takes far too much time and > effort. Many would argue a contrary position. There are too many newsgroups already, and the rate of their creation is accelerating. We'd all be better off if it took longer and was more difficult, at least until/unless the process is improved in genuinely useful. Making the process more accessible would be great provided that in doing so the potential newsgroup parent was educated about the raison d'etre of newsgroups and hierarchies, what is and is not appropriate (as defined by a decade+ of Usenet culture), how the voting process works, what kinds of newsgroups make it and which fail, etc. But the actual process should not be any easier or faster, even if more accessible. Creating useful tools and communities requires careful thought, planning, open debate, and time to mull things over. If people are in a hurry let them set up mailing lists. Issuing an RFD is essentially asking the entire online community to bear the burden of making a new forum available, globally with local expenses and consumption. You have to make a solid case that this is reasonable, that the topic is of enough interest to warrant this, and that people interested in this topic should not have only the option of setting up mailing lists or web pages about it, in which cases the single host bears most of the economic and effort/time costs of making it available. Usenet is, unlike the web, essentially a finite resource. It is already literally impossible for most Usenet hosts to carry a "full" news feed any more. (i.e. all Big 7 and alt groups, plus relevant local news). A 56K line is physically unable to do it - more news arrives per second than can actually be transferred. Even a site like ours, with a T1 line, cannot practicably do it, because it sucks up too much of our bandwidth, even with a machine devoted to nothing but nntp service. We also have to serve web pages, handle email, and run gopher, ftp, dns and lot of ther services that need part of the T1's capacity. > Bottlenecks in the newsgroup creation process are becoming all > too frequent. This just gets less and less coherent and consistent with every step. The author complains that there are so many poorly named lousy newsgroups, to the point where (he belives) we need a pseudo-government to regulate it, yet wants to speed up the process that causes this mess in the first place, AND proposes that the way to make it easier and faster to create a newsgroup is to make it impossible to do so without the explicit permission of a bureaucracy. I've heard of doublethink before, but this would appear to be a rare example of triplethink. > The UVV does not have enough votetakers to cope with the > mass of CFV's they must run, and more and more votetakers are quitting A perfect reason and opportunity for modification of the CFV process to slow it down to a level that can be managed by the people volunteering to manage it. This would also have the beneficial effect of weeding out a lot of ill-conceived newsgroups without staying power. Whatever the details of the solution, it must come from the *Usenet community*, handled by people who actually understand and participate in the process and make it all happen, rather than folks too lazy to look up an acronym, or people so irritated at not getting their own pet newsgroup that they propose to overhaul the system in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with the entire online ethos. > after proposals such as rec.music.white-power. People who cannot handle the idea that someone may have a very different opinion and want to express that opinion, probably should find something else to do that handle newgrouping and CFVs. Anyone who takes on such a thing should understand intuitively that the proposal of such newsgroups is inevitable. C.f. Van der Leun's Corollary to 6) The proposal recognizes that a CFV is *not* an interest poll, but > rather a measure of a proponent's skill at campaigning. These days, most > every CFV that fails does draw significant votes does not fail because of > a genuine lack of interest in the topic, but because the proponent did not > widely publicize the CFV. Faulty reasoning. That the process is not immune to "popularity contest" abuse that runs contrary to the intent of the process is a necessary evil in all forms of democratic decisionmaking (the alternatives are worse). The so-called logic in the quoted passage above reduces to "if the system does not work with 100% effectiveness, destroy it and replace it with its opposite". > Usenet has become so popular that virtually any topic will command some > traffic. Faulty reasoning (the sentence is true, but does not support the proposition that preceded it.) Rise in overall Usenet traffic is largely irrelevant for the purposes of determining whether a newsgroup will have enough interest to be worth voting for. If there are 500,000 people reading usenet, and .00001% of them might be interested in a newsgroup called misc.activism.right-to-stand-on-street-corners, this is really no different than the same situation in a Usenet of 5,000,000 participants - The percentage interest level will scale pretty uniformly. Even with ten times the readership, the newsgroup is probably too trivial to create. However, in a long-passed Usenet of only 50,000 people, a newsgroup called alt.fan.tim-allen would probably have enough interest to warrant its creation. Most CFV voters are clever enough to do guestimations of this sort in their heads. They know that even with a vastly larger Usenet than we had 5 years ago, a newsgroup like rec.games.party.swallowing-goldfish is probably of too little interst to vote "yes" for. Yes, there will be (has been) an increase in newsgroups, but not along the lines the author of the proposal is thinking, except of course in the alt hierarchy where the newsgroup creation process is far more lax. > The trick these days is to name groups correctly, so that > interested readers can readily find the groups they want. Faulty reasoning. Naming conventions in Usenet are essentially becoming irrelevant. All newsreaders worth using support search features to find keywords in Newsgroup names, and advanced newsreaders like strn and recent versions of trn support "virtual newsgrouping" in which articles are scored on their relevance to your criteria, with what newsgroup they came from having minimal if any relevance. Functionality like this would be trivial to import into Netscape, Nuntius, Newswatcher and other less geeky tools, especially as the source code is freely available. It's just a matter of time. At any rate, the stuff works much like a Web search engine works (in concept, not mechanics), constrasted with linear page-by-page browsing (analogous to heirarchy-by-heirarchy, group-by-group attempts to find newsgroups or interesting posts.) In addition, over-enforcement of naming conventions actually prevents the introduction of genuinely useful newsgroups. About 2 years ago, I issued an RFD on sci.cognitive.enhancement, for discussion of intelligence increase and memory improvent, a fairly hot topic in some circles, and certainly one worthy of a newsgroup given the amount of pharmaceutical research going on in this area, and the popularity of books on the topic by folks like Dean Morgenthaler. The proposal died because naming convention pundits flamed incessantly that sci.cognitive.* was ONLY for newsgroups dealing with a particular discipline called cognitive science, unrelated to the bio-chemistry, feedback, mnemonic and other issues involved in cognitive enhancement (for which there is no other accurate term.) All the alternatives names anyone came up with were useless, even confusing. Like sci.cog-enhancement - what's that? Improving gears? sci.cognitive-enhancement and sci.intelligence-increase exceed sub-hierarchy name length limits, and there is no sci.intelligence, so sci.intelligence.increase was out, since under nipicky naming "rules" the latter presupposes the existence of the former. And so forth. To this day there is still no newsgroup for this topic (though there is, I think, an alt.smartdrugs for discussion of a subset of the cognitive enhancement issues, but of course being in alt, it is overrun with blather, and being out of sci.*, it does not focus on research in this area but on various random crud like how cool it is, what Mondo 2000 articles say about it, etc.) The Usenet world is a tiny bit poorer as a result of death of that RFD, all due to over-zealous application of obsolete newsgroup naming rationale. > The conventional RFD/CFV process, which relies on the goodwill of > proponents to name groups properly, is producing gems such as Nonsense. As I just pointed out, if the names aren't "good", the proposal gets defeated. The only exceptions are when the process is bent by popularity of the topic, to an extreme degree. *If* one accepts the notion that consistency in newsgroup names is desirable, one could propose adjustments to the RFD & CFV process that do not call for a complete overhaul. > soc.culture.scientists, misc.activism.mobilehome, sci.aquaria, > rec.aviation.air-traffic, and so forth. Some of these absurdities pass There is nothing absurd about newsgroups devoted to examining the culture (or subculture) of scientific academia (a [sub]culture which very certainly exists, most of the members of which are on the Net by now, many of them before just about anyone else but DoD and Rand employees), or about aquarium maintenance in scientific environments (I assure you this is a hot topic in certain fields. I've seen a *huge* bibliography of journal articles on experiments with axolotl salamanders in various bio reasearch, including genetics.) Air traffic control as fun is certainly rather iffy. Having lived in an area with a lot of mobile homes, and a lot of attempts to pass local ordinance forbidding them in NIMBY neighborhoods, I'd say the m.a.mh. newsgroup is probably for real and of interest to a significant number of people. The aviation group, I would be willing to bet, is either a) bogus and carried on few sites*, or b) the product of over-enforcement of naming conventions and probably not the original proposed name (remember, the naming conventions are far more concerned with *where things go in the heirarchy*, not with how well a name matches the subject of discussion, which is determined by a newsgroup charter that people are expected to read to figure out what a newsgroup is about, especially as many of the names are abbreviated.) [* It's important to remember that anyone can issue a newgroup command, and that newgrouped groups are forever. The "newsgroup police" send out rmgroups to kill them, but it is up to each site whether or not they honor these rmgroups. Many do not. This is one reason why the "reorganization" of sub-heirarchies to give them better names is always controversial. Those who understand how the protocols work know that the old newsgroups never really die, and people will continue to post to these "ghost' newsgroups indefinitely. If you don't believe this, I give you alt.society.civil-liberty and alt.society.civil-liberties, both of which are simultaneously burgeoning with traffic, and have been since the former was created to "replace" the latter". That was years ago.] > their CFV in spite of the poor name. Even those groups that news.groupies > manage to defeat would have made interesting groups had the proponent been > more reasonable about selecting a good name. The new proposal eliminates > this problem. No, it simply leaves it up to self-appointed and nepotic bureaucrats to impose one view of what a "good" name is. > In short, a reformed newsgroup creation process allows us to get on with > our business -- the creation of interesting, well-named newsgroups -- > with a minimum of disruption. Therefore I urge support of this proposal > for news.groups reform. If that's your business, or even your hobby, I suggest finding something else to do. Such an attitude is a large part of the problem, not of the solution. This is why we have newsgroups en masse for topics no one but a handful are interested in. Such people should start mailing lists instead. It is not the function of Usenet to "creat[e]...interesting well-named newsgroups". Newsgroups as discrete entities are not an end in themselves. They are a means of organizing discussion. A newsgroup should be created only if a discussion of the target topic is met with hostility in all newsgroups in which it might be appropriate, when there is no appropriate place for the target topic, when a narrow target topic threatens to overrun all other discussion in a newsgroup with a broader charter, or a particular type of discussion of the target topic in a particular context is undermined or drowned by other discussion of the topic in different contexts (thus separate aquaria newsgroups for scientists and hobbyists, and brewing newsgroups as well as general beer groups.) Our "business" is communication, not newsgroup creation, and the proposal offered would undermine the ability of Net participants to decide for, and as a cooperative part of, their own virtual community whether or not resources should be devoted to setting aside a place for discussions of a particular topic to flourish. It would have been easy for me to just ignore this whole proposition, since it will never fly and I have better things to do. But I would rather point out flaws in proposals, and hopefully see better ones since there are some real problems underling the concerns this proposal tries, but fails, to address. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Mar 1996 22:51:01 CST From: CuD Moderators Subject: File 4--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 1 Dec, 1996) Cu-Digest is a weekly electronic journal/newsletter. Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically. CuD is available as a Usenet newsgroup: comp.society.cu-digest Or, to subscribe, send post with this in the "Subject:: line: SUBSCRIBE CU-DIGEST Send the message to: cu-digest-request@weber.ucsd.edu DO NOT SEND SUBSCRIPTIONS TO THE MODERATORS. The editors may be contacted by voice (815-753-0303), fax (815-753-6302) or U.S. mail at: Jim Thomas, Department of Sociology, NIU, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA. To UNSUB, send a one-line message: UNSUB CU-DIGEST Send it to CU-DIGEST-REQUEST@WEBER.UCSD.EDU (NOTE: The address you unsub must correspond to your From: line) Issues of CuD can also be found in the Usenet comp.society.cu-digest news group; on CompuServe in DL0 and DL4 of the IBMBBS SIG, DL1 of LAWSIG, and DL1 of TELECOM; on GEnie in the PF*NPC RT libraries and in the VIRUS/SECURITY library; from America Online in the PC Telecom forum under "computing newsletters;" On Delphi in the General Discussion database of the Internet SIG; on RIPCO BBS (312) 528-5020 (and via Ripco on internet); and on Rune Stone BBS (IIRGWHQ) (860)-585-9638. CuD is also available via Fidonet File Request from 1:11/70; unlisted nodes and points welcome. EUROPE: In BELGIUM: Virtual Access BBS: +32-69-844-019 (ringdown) In ITALY: ZERO! BBS: +39-11-6507540 In LUXEMBOURG: ComNet BBS: +352-466893 UNITED STATES: etext.archive.umich.edu (192.131.22.8) in /pub/CuD/CuD ftp.eff.org (192.88.144.4) in /pub/Publications/CuD/ aql.gatech.edu (128.61.10.53) in /pub/eff/cud/ world.std.com in /src/wuarchive/doc/EFF/Publications/CuD/ wuarchive.wustl.edu in /doc/EFF/Publications/CuD/ EUROPE: nic.funet.fi in pub/doc/CuD/CuD/ (Finland) ftp.warwick.ac.uk in pub/cud/ (United Kingdom) The most recent issues of CuD can be obtained from the Cu Digest WWW site at: URL: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/ COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST is an open forum dedicated to sharing information among computerists and to the presentation and debate of diverse views. CuD material may be reprinted for non-profit as long as the source is cited. Authors hold a presumptive copyright, and they should be contacted for reprint permission. It is assumed that non-personal mail to the moderators may be reprinted unless otherwise specified. Readers are encouraged to submit reasoned articles relating to computer culture and communication. Articles are preferred to short responses. Please avoid quoting previous posts unless absolutely necessary. DISCLAIMER: The views represented herein do not necessarily represent the views of the moderators. Digest contributors assume all responsibility for ensuring that articles submitted do not violate copyright protections. ------------------------------ End of Computer Underground Digest #8.84 ************************************