::scr Technical Priesthood

[Piers Cawley]

Gather 'round oh my children and let Uncle Piers tell you a story of
the days when September only lasted around 50 days. The elder days,
before, during and just after The Great Renaming. For I was there.

When I went up to Nottingham I knew nothing about Usenet or the
ARPAnet (in fact, in my years at university I never got ARPAnet
access, though it was apparently available during my last year there).
There was this weird bulletin board system called, if I remember
rightly, 'info', which carried mostly local groups, and something
called sf-lovers which was a science fiction discussion group and
which was far and away the most active.

Then one day in my second term, a second year told me to 'type rn,
it's cool'. So I did. And it was. I read the Frequently Asked
Questions lists on net.announce.newusers with a mounting 'wow! this is
really cool!' reaction, and off I went to start reading. I didn't
actually send my first post to usenet. The 'hundreds, if not thousands
of dollars' warning successfully put me off.

Looking back, the only real difference between Usenet then and Usenet
now was that there was no commercial spam and the volume was *way*
lower. There were still idiots who'd crosspost to 101 newsgroups, but
that was generally ok, so long as they didn't multipost. There were
still flaming lusers and splendidly stupid flamewars (generally about
Robert Heinlein, at least on net.sf-lovers, later rec.arts.sf-lovers).
The mythical, luser free age was already looked back on nostalgically
by the Old Farts, but I got the strong feeling that it never really
existed. We were (and still are) a cliquey bunch and I'm quite sure
that we've always had to deal with people we thought of as assholes.

What has changed since those days? (and, to a lesser extent, since my
early days as a demon customer and later as the sysadmin at Frontier).
Well, there's been a steady erosion of trust, which has been awful to
watch. Back in the day, if a site had access to the 'net you could be
reasonably sure that the postmaster at least had a clue, and was
probably in a position of some authority over the people who posted
from that site. Posting priviledges could be (and sometimes were)
removed from abusive users. You could generally rely on people not to
abuse the system. Just look at the protocols in use at the time. By
todays standards they seem terribly naive, most of the time they
worked by relying on everyone to play nice and not to start lying to
machines. And, dammit, for a long time that was all that was needed.

The world changed with Canter and Siegel, and with the Morris Worm. I
don't think we realised quite how much C&S's spam changed the world at
the time, but looking back, here were people who genuinely didn't care
how much they were costing the 'net and who had consciously broken the
rules (and in those days they were *real* rules) about commercial
traffic. Trouble is, they could, and probably did, point at all the
.com companies for whom the rules had been quietly bent in order to
allow them onto ARPAnet and Usenet. But C&S really drove home the
point that these rules were just a gentlemen's agreement and totally
unenforceable. The RTM worm did something similar, but it pointed out
that we weren't in a playground any more. There were Bad Men out there
(or in RTM's case, possibly, Naive Men) who didn't care if they broke
things. 

By the time that the ISPs started going, the world had changed again.
The people who gained access via Delphi, Genie, AOL and others were no
longer being granted access by some benevolent sysadmin. They were
paying for it directly and they were the masters now. They had their
own, provider culture and they expected Usenet to fit how they
expected the world to work. Look at early posts from these people, and
the reaction to them, and you'll see massive communications breakdowns
between two very different world views. There was always going to be
trouble. 

But, on usenet at least, all that really happened was that the volume
of traffic exploded yet again, so we got a whole lot more kooks and a
whole lot more spammers. And a few of us went off and started the
network that shall not be named, which is still going strong, and we
also attempted to start usenet2, which failed dismally.

But i still lament the death of trust. It pains me that there are
contemptible little shits out there who are prepared to run dDOS
attacks, or who are happy to break into dabox simply because it's
there. I hate the fact that I've had to become paranoid. I hate having
to run spam filters and I really hate that spam still gets through. I
hate the fact that my cix email address gets somewhere in the region
of 10 spams a day, that the GOOD NEWS email virus actually exists now
albeit under a different name and I despise Microsoft for
unapologetically allowing it to happen. I hate the fact that, if I
want to reply to someone on usenet by mail now, the odds are good that
if I just hit 'r' and send the message then that message will bounce
because of address munging.

All that (and a good deal more if I really start ranting) said, the
'net is still a fantastically useful and, for me at least, life
enhancing resource. Tools and places like google, imdb, amazon and its
brethren, the kgs go server, okbridge, PernMUSH, London.pm, The scary
devil monastery, rhizomatic.net, use.perl.org and all those other
places where cool people hang out have enriched my life. A couple of
years ago Gill and I went to the 'States for a couple of weeks and had
a fantastic time staying with people that I'd only met on the net
before. They were, without exception, great people who made our
holiday so much more enjoyable. Without the 'net, we'd probably still
have had a fine holiday, but I doubt we'd've taken the trouble to
visit Seattle, which was fantastic, or to then drive from Seattle to
LA (which was just stunning, I love the Oregon coast, and coming into
San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge on a gorgeous, clear day as
the sun was setting is definitely something I'm not going to be
forgetting in a hurry).

These are resources that should be shared and that everyone should
have the opportunity to use. The loss of trust is, I believe a price
worth paying, but you can make your own decisions. 

-- 
Piers

   "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language in
    possession of a rich syntax must be in need of a rewrite."
         -- Jane Austen?