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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.