5 Snoozenet I Post, Therefore I Am “Usenet is a cesspool, a dung heap.” —Patrick A. Townson We’re told that the information superhighway is just around the corner. Nevertheless, we already have to deal with the slow-moving garbage trucks clogging up the highway’s arteries. These trash-laden vehicles are NNTP packets and compressed UUCP batches, shipping around untold gigabytes a day of trash. This trash is known, collectively, as Usenet. Netnews and Usenet: Anarchy Through Growth In the late 1970s, two graduate students in North Carolina set up a tele- phone link between the machines at their universities (UNC and Duke) and wrote a shell script to exchange messages. Unlike mail, the messages were stored in a public area where everyone could read them. Posting a message at any computer sent a copy of it to every single system on the fledgling network.

94 Snoozenet The software came to be called “news,” because the intent was that people (usually graduate students) at most Unix sites (usually universities) would announce their latest collection of hacks and patches. Mostly, this was the source code to the news software itself, propagating the virus. Over time the term “netnews” came into use, and from that came “Usenet,” and its legions of mutilations (such as “Abusenet,” “Lusenet,” “Snoozenet,” and “Net of a Million Lies.”1) The network grew like kudzu—more sites, more people, and more mes- sages. The basic problem with Usenet was that of scaling. Every time a new site came on the network, every message posted by everybody at that site was automatically copied to every other computer on the network. One computer in New Hampshire was rumored to have a five-digit monthly phone bill before DEC wised up and shut it down. The exorbitant costs were easily disguised as overhead, bulking up the massive spending on computers in the 1980s. Around that time, a group of hackers devised a protocol for transmitting Usenet over the Internet, which was completely subsidized by the federal deficit. Capacity increased and Usenet truly came to resemble a million monkeys typing endlessly all over the globe. In early 1994, there were an estimated 140,000 sites with 4.6 million users generating 43,000 messages a day. Defenders of the Usenet say that it is a grand compact based on coopera- tion. What they don’t say is that it is also based on name-calling, harass- ment, and letter-bombs. Death by Email How does a network based on anarchy police itself? Mob rule and public lynchings. Observe: Date: Fri, 10 Jul 92 13:11 EDT From: nick@lcs.mit.edu Subject: Splitting BandyHairs on LuseNet To: VOID, FEATURE-ENTENMANNS, UNIX-HATERS The news.admin newsgroup has recently been paralyzed (not to say it was ever otherwise) by an extended flamefest involving one bandy@catnip.berkeley.ca.us, who may be known to some of you. 1From A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (Tom Doherty Associates, 1992).