Cream of the Crop 26/Cream of the Crop 26.iso/bbs/fnewse28.zip/FIDO1428.NWS

Text File | 1997-07-14 | 98KB | 2,053 lines

     F I D O N E W S --       Volume 14, Number 28          14 July 1997
     +----------------------------+-----------------------------------------+
     |  The newsletter of the     |   ISSN 1198-4589 Published by:          |
     |    FidoNet community       |   "FidoNews"                            |
     |          _                 |        1-904-409-7040    [1:1/23]       |
     |         /  \               |                                         |
     |        /|oo \              |                                         |
     |       (_|  /_)             |                                         |
     |        _`@/_ \    _        |                                         |
     |       |     | \   \\       |   Editor:                               |
     |       | (*) |  \   ))      |        Christopher Baker  1:18/14       |
     |       |__U__| /  \//       |                                         |
     |        _//|| _\   /        |                                         |
     |       (_/(_|(____/         |                                         |
     |             (jm)           |     Newspapers should have no friends.  |
     |                            |                    -- JOSEPH PULITZER   |
     +----------------------------+-----------------------------------------+
     |               Submission address: FidoNews Editor 1:1/23             |
     +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
     |  MORE addresses:                                                     |
     |                                                                      |
     |    submissions=> [e-mail]                                |
     +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
     |    For  information,   copyrights,   article   submissions,          |
     |    obtaining copies of FidoNews or the internet gateway FAQ          |
     |    please refer to the end of this file.                             |
     +----------------------------------------------------------------------+


                      Happy Bastille Day?


                        Table of Contents
     1. EDITORIAL  ................................................  1
        History and Future?  ......................................  1
     2. GUEST EDITORIAL  ..........................................  2
        FidoNet: Past and Future  .................................  2
     3. ARTICLES  .................................................  5
        FidoNews Article Submission Guidelines update  ............  5
        Re: CRC and The Nodelist  ................................. 10
        Re: Is The End Near?  ..................................... 11
     4. FIDONET HISTORY  .......................................... 13
        From out of the past - TJ Interview!  ..................... 13
     5. COORDINATORS CORNER  ...................................... 27
        Nodelist-statistics as seen from Zone-2 for day 192  ...... 27
     6. ECHOING  .................................................. 28
        North American Backbone Echo Changes [May-Jun]  ........... 28
     7. COMIX IN ASCII  ........................................... 30
        Life from a Cow?  ......................................... 30
     8. NOTICES  .................................................. 32
        Future History  ........................................... 32
     9. FIDONEWS PUBLIC-KEY  ...................................... 33
        FidoNews PGP public-key listing  .......................... 33
     10. FIDONET BY INTERNET  ..................................... 34
     11. FIDONEWS INFORMATION  .................................... 36
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 1                   14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                                 EDITORIAL
     =================================================================

     Past, present and, future are revisited in this Issue.

     The republication of the updated ARTSPEC.DOC is here. It was hatched
     out via the FIDONEWS file distribution a couple weeks ago so you
     should already have but JIC. [grin]

     As I start my second year of editing FidoNews, I'd like to reassert
     my undying appreciation for those who make it work and keep it coming.
     Those of you who write articles, letters to the Editor, columns,
     updates, Guest Editorials, comix, and those who make the distribution
     work are the guts of this enterprise. And a special thanks to jim
     barchuk for maintaining the HTML version on the Internet and to Peter
     Popovich who compiles the software list. It's a lot of extra work and
     it IS appreciated!

     Today's Guest Editorial is anonymous but I'm not sure if that is
     intentional or an oversight. I didn't get an answer to that question
     in time for publication. It isn't required, but I suggest all
     submissions include a byline of some kind.

     One of our members sent in a reprint of an interview with Tom Jennings
     from 1994. I don't remember seeing it before and it appears here in
     the History section. You may find it interesting.

     I'm putting this Issue to bed early so if you were waiting till the
     last minute to send me something, it will appear next week. Refer to
     the submission schedule in the Masthead to avoid missing out.

     C.B.


     -----------------------------------------------------------------

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 2                   14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                              GUEST EDITORIAL
     =================================================================


     FidoNet: Past and Future


     I've read many debates about the future of the FidoNet and how it's
     sliding downhill.  The friendly arguments in echomail about when the
     FidoNet's demise will come about have taken a backseat to only the
     Windows versus <insert your favorite operating system here> wars in
     frequency.

     Having pondered this a bit myself I thought I'd write up my thoughts
     on the history and future of the FidoNet for whatever it might be
     worth.

     I've been involved with the FidoNet since 1985.  Yes, that makes me
     one of the old-timers in the net -- I date back before echomail and
     fondly remember how cool it was to run the original "toss" and "scan"
     echomail programs.  However, I like to believe (no comments:-) that
     I'm fairly alert and can realize a sinking ship when I am on one.
     Right now, that sinking ship is the FidoNet as a whole; it's not
     sinking terribly fast, but it's still sinking.

     Let's face it, BBSing is changing and its decline can be linked
     directly to the rise of the internet.  The FidoNet is not the only
     thing being changed by the rise of the internet.  The internet is
     changing all aspects of computing and some aspects of our entire
     society.  Just look at networking, for example.  LANtastic is dead as
     a small business platform (for all intents and purposes), Novell --
     despite its huge installed base -- is on the ropes and undergoing
     major change.  Even IBM's and Microsoft's networking schemes have to
     acknowledge the new god of networking: the royalty-free TCP/IP.
     There's a heckuva lot of proprietary networks that get from point to
     point actually wrapped in IP.  Let's face it, commercial computing as
     a whole is in the midst of a major flux.

     But that's the commercial realm and the FidoNet is in the hobbyist
     realm of computing.  Let's assume there's always going to be an
     amateur/hobbyist component of computing.  That means there's always
     going to be a "market" for something like the FidoNet to allow people
     to communicate.

     Let's take a look behind this, at what made the FidoNet popular and
     gave it the popularity that it enjoyed during the late 80s and early
     90s.

     The primary reason for the rise of the FidoNet is that it took common
     hobbyist-type computing platforms (DOS & CP/M) and used the most cost
     effective way of networking them/getting mail and files back and forth
     between them (i.e. phone calls late at night in a routed scheme), and
     ran with it.  In, say, 1987, the FidoNet provided a near-commercial
     level of connectivity and communication basically for free.

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 3                   14 Jul 1997


     That combination -- common computers, good connectivity and cost
     effectiveness -- made the FidoNet a hit on the amateur/hobbyist scene
     and even caused some ripples in the commercial world.

     The problem now that I see is that the FidoNet is doing a couple of
     things "wrong."  First, our level of communication/connectivity is not
     anywhere near the commercial level (commercial connectivity now being
     defined as the internet) anymore.

     Users like the GUI nature of web browsers but they're willing to take
     a small hit in terms of prettiness as long as they're getting near-
     commercial communication for free or for nearly free.  The problem is
     that the FidoNet doesn't have anything like that level of
     connectivity.

     We used to have a functioning, FidoNet-wide domain where everyone in
     the FidoNet (users and Sysops alike) had an internet mail address.
     That's been dismantled at a time when the internet popularity grew by
     leaps and bounds -- how stupid!!!  There's nothing that drives users
     up the wall faster than limitations in them sending mail.

     GUI interfaces and ease-of-use aspects of the FidoNet are important,
     but not nearly as important as the need to talk to the rest of the
     networked world -- and right now, that means internet e-mail
     capabilities.  The FidoNet simply *must* develop a working FidoNet-
     wide FidoNet <--> internet mail gateway/method/system for the entire
     net if it is to remain viable as a "networked" network.

     The FidoNet is not presently using the cheapest way to move mail.
     This is the death knell for an amateur/hobbyist network.  When the
     costs of operation are usually born by individual hobbyists, costs
     matter!  What was true in 1985 or 1988 -- that the best, cheapest way
     to move mail and files was to make long distance phone calls late at
     night -- is no longer true.

     Right now, the cheapest way to move mail and files is via the
     internet.  It only takes one echomail link or a few file-requests to
     make up $20 worth of long distance in a month.  Right now in the US,
     almost anyone can get an unlimited-usage internet link for $20 a
     month.  The internet is the cheapest way to move mail and files and
     the FidoNet has to adapt to using that cheap link.

     This new economic reality changes the way we should be sending mail
     and files.  It used to be that every second counted and so maximum
     efficiency was needed in file transfers.  That is no longer true with
     unlimited internet access.  Now, the only need for efficiency is that
     we don't want to tie up phone lines for too long -- a very different
     idea.

     But if one looks at the state of FidoNet technology, it has not
     adapted to the new economics or to take advantage of the internet.
     The internet gateway packages out there are typically massive kludges.
     The FidoNet isn't adapting.  That combined with the high cost factors
     of using long distance dial-up guarantees the death of the FidoNet.
     However, this death is totally unnecessary.

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 4                   14 Jul 1997


     The solution is to adapt and use the internet to our own advantage.
     We can take the FidoNet's strengths -- mainly free, hobbyist BBSes
     that are for the most part publicly accessible and which provide
     quality echomail conferences which are regulated and moderated -- and
     reverse the FidoNet's decline and quite possibly make the FidoNet grow
     again.  The key to this is development, development in software and in
     FidoNet standards.

     If one fantasizes a bit, there's no reason at all why we couldn't have
     a FidoNet nodelist which combined both direct dial-up systems *and*
     internet transfers through a node's local ISP.  There's no reason at
     all why a 2-line BBS couldn't have users log onto one line, and if the
     second line was free, have that second line dial out to the internet
     to allow the user to ftp files from the internet.  This (and this is
     simply scratching the surface) could be done while maintaining a free
     or very-low-cost BBS structure for both the user and the Sysop.

     But the bottom line is that there isn't any software development being
     done on the basic FidoNet networking technology.  The primary
     development seems to be in reinventing yet more similar-functioning
     BBS software.

     I've seen only one place where there is some development to the basic
     FidoNet mail protocols being done -- in Linux.  Linux, an operating
     system born on the internet, has developers working on a versions of
     the FidoNet which will use a TCP/IP internet link to do mail transfers
     and file-requests.  This is the direction the FidoNet needs to go.
     It's simply taking advantage of the cheapest way to send mail and
     files.  What we need is a "FidoNet-IP" -- a standard way to do FidoNet
     mail and file transfers over the internet.

     There's no reason why the FidoNet should not flourish -- it only has
     to go back to the core principles of what made it popular in the first
     place!  Those principles are that it offered a structured, near
     commercial-level of communication and connectivity at little or no
     cost to users using the cheapest method of mail/file transfers for its
     Sysops.

     Despite my years in the FidoNet I have often thought about pulling the
     plug on the FidoNet.  But instead, I like tinkering with computers as
     a hobby so I'm hedging my bets.  I'm learning Linux and its full suite
     of TCP/IP tools, I'm tearing my hair out trying to setup "ifmail" (the
     Linux FidoNet package that makes a BinkleyTerm install look like a
     walk in the park!), and am working to keep my options open.  If the
     FidoNet somehow survives, great, I'll be covered.

     Sadly, if the FidoNet does not survive (and this look like the case)
     then I'll simply offer dial-up web server/mail/ftp functions over
     TCP/IP via Linux in a new form of BBS.

     Only one question remains.  The question that remains is this: are
     there enough good people, hackers, developers, visionaries, and
     interest left in the FidoNet to make this new "FidoNet-IP" a reality?

     -----------------------------------------------------------------

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 5                   14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                                 ARTICLES
     =================================================================

     FidoNews Article Submission Guidelines

     FidoNet address 1:1/23

     Updated 1 Jul 1997 by Christopher Baker
     Updated 29 May 1991 by Tom Jennings
     Based on the original work by Thom Henderson

     | denotes a change since the last update |.

     "Fido" and "FidoNet" are registered trademarks of Tom Jennings,
     Box 410923, San Francisco CA 94141, USA and are used with
     permission.

     --------
     SYNOPSIS:

     FidoNews is the newsletter of the FidoNet computer network, its
     Sysops and users.  It is passed to its readers electronically via
     the FidoNet and other computer networks and to non-network
     readers as well.

     This document intends to tell you how to write and submit
     articles for publication in FidoNews. Much of it describes the
     technical specifications which an article must meet in order to
     be included in the newsletter, as well as broad (very) guidelines
     on content. (Of course you realize articles can be submitted only
     electronically.) Please read it carefully. The article you save
     might be your own.


     ------------
     INTRODUCTION:

     FidoNews was originally founded in early 1984 to include all
     parts of the lives of its member Sysops and users, which of
     course means not just technical matters. We do not have fixed
     goals of maximum distribution or maximum readership (i.e. lowest
     common denominator) but only to meet the needs of our individual
     network members. The success of this venture has always been
     contentious at best (ahem).

     In any case the grand experiment continues. Twelve years later
     (at this writing) and over 30,000 Nodes in the network, the
     editorial policy, or lack of one, of FidoNews has shown to
     best fit our ever-changing and unpredictable needs.


     --------------
     SUBJECT MATTER:

     Articles on any subject of interest to FidoNet members and users
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 6                   14 Jul 1997


     are welcome and encouraged, not necessarily of a technical
     nature, though priority may be, but not necessarily, given to
     articles of importance to the FidoNet, its technology and its
     uses; other networks such as uucp and the Internet; social
     aspects of communications; ethical issues; other related matters.


     --------------
     ARTICLE LENGTH:

     Try to keep articles short. The longer it is, the less likely
     people are to read it. Consider splitting long articles (more
     than five pages) into smaller articles to be run serially.
     Exceptions will be made at the whim of the editors.

     For practical reasons, we will attempt to keep FidoNews to a
     "reasonable size", which is of course a highly subjective and
     variable thing. As of May 1991, the goal is under 100,000 bytes.
     Decisions regarding content may be made based upon this, though
     in general it shouldn't be an issue.


     ------------------
     WRITING GUIDELINES:

     We are not all professional writers, nor is that even a goal for
     the FidoNews -- we want real communication to and from real
     people; even at the expense of so-called "good writing", which is
     frequently a tool to exclude. There are a few minimum
     requirements though for any successful writing, even for the
     lowly FidoNews:

     * The subject discussed must be clear to people other than the
       author! Don't assume that people will pick up the context from
       your writing. Tell them explicitly.

     * Why are you writing this? It may seem obvious -- "Review of the
       new Acme 75-baud Modem" -- but it's not. Are you the
       manufacturer? An irate customer? Let us know your point of
       view.

     * Who are you? A good question! Anonymity is acceptable, though
       most people want to take credit for their work. Include full
       contact information including electronic mail addresses.

     * Articles submitted via Netmail or email must contain all the
       technically required lines and delimiters in the BODY of the
       message.  This includes the *[title] line and the 70 character
       width requirement. To indicate the filename type for one of
       these message submissions, place the FILENAME.TYP in the Subj:
       line of your email, Netmail, or Echomail. Those that require
       extra editing may be delayed from appearing in FidoNews.

     * Articles will appear when space becomes available, not
       necessarily the "next" issue. If your article is of a time-
       critical nature, please say so when you submit it; the editor
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 7                   14 Jul 1997


       still has final say.

     * The editor reserves the right to request changes from an author
       to meet these "standards", which you have to admit are pretty
       loose. It is not the intent for this to be a mechanism to
       refuse articles the editor does not like, but simply to keep
       the contents intelligible.

     * If we have a backlog of articles, we may get fussier about
       things. Historically, this has not been a serious problem.


     ---------------------
     SUBMITTING AN ARTICLE

     TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS:

     If all that hasn't scared you away, the next step is to create a
     text file which contains the text of your article. The resulting
     file should be sent or uploaded to "Editor", FidoNet
     address 1:1/23. The "physical" location (and phone number) of
     FidoNews varies, and hence must be found elsewhere, such as
     within a recent copy of FidoNews itself.


     Filenames must follow the MSDOS standard:

         FILENAME.TYP

         a 1 to 8 character file name (A - Z, 0 - 9)
         a period,
         a 0 to 3 character file type (A - Z, 0 - 9)


     File types are used to distinguish types of submissions, as
     follows:

         .LET Letters to the Editor.
         .ART An article, commentary, open letter, or general news
              item.
         .GUE Want to write a Guest Editorial? [*Name & Node on line 1]
         .RTX Need to make a Retraction of a previous article or notice?
         .COL Want to become a regular contributor with your own column?
         .ANS Answers to the Question of the Week.
         .BIO FidoNet biographies - tell us your | personal | story.
     |   .TRU True stories of FidoNet. |
         .HIS FidoNet history - got an anecdote to share?
         .REV Reviews of related product, services, or programs.
         .JOK Net humor in print.
     |   .FIC FidoNet (computer related) short fiction. |
         .CMX Comics in ASCII. [watch those lines at 70 columns!]
     |        [.CMX that are political will be renamed to .GUE] |
         .PRF Want to Proofread? Get a cookie for spotting errors.
         .AD  Advertising FREE services or events.
         .SAL "For Sale"
         .WAN "Wanted"
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 8                   14 Jul 1997


         .NOT A notice for the back of the issue. Keep them short.
         .INT Internet addresses for FidoNet webpages of general interest.

     If your file doesn't have one of the above extensions, then it
     will lay around taking up disk space until someone takes a look
     at it and realizes what it is. Maybe.

     The name of the file is up to you, though you should use a name
     which is not likely to be "stepped on" by someone else -- the
     system will not guarantee file names are unique. For example,
     FNEWS.ART is probably not a good name for an article.


     --------------
     CHARACTER SETS:

     The character by character contents of the file itself must meet
     the following standards or it cannot be published in FidoNews.
     The FidoNews staff WILL NOT be responsible for making file
     contents conform to these standards.

     * FLUSH LEFT MARGIN: Please do not put a "left margin" on your
       articles. Have the text start at the very first column.

     * RIGHT MARGIN AT COLUMN 70 OR LESS: Less is tolerable, more is
       definitely not.  If your cursor is resting at column 71 when
       your line is ended, you're okay.  One character past that even
       with trailing spaces and MAKENEWS will barf on your submission.
       If your submission is physically rejected, the Editor will have
       to fix it manually or send it back for reformatting.

     * RAGGED-RIGHT TEXT: Word-Star style "justification" (inserting
       spaces into sentences so that a paragraph is perfectly rec-
       tangular) is extremely hard to read, and consumes needless space.
       Please don't use it!

     * NO FUNNY CHARACTERS: This includes formfeeds, returns without
       linefeeds, linefeeds without returns, tabs and other oddities.
       The only control codes (character codes 0 through 31 decimal)
       allowed are carriage return (CR) and linefeed (LF). The only
       exception is: Control-Z "end of file" terminator characters are
       tolerated. Not required.

     * NO GRAPHICS CHARACTERS: Believe it or not, not everyone in the
       world has an IBM PC. Please restrict yourself to printable
       ASCII characters in the range 20 hex to 7E hex (space to
       tilde).

     * LINES TERMINATED: Each line in the article should be terminated
       with a 'newline' -- either the MSDOS standard (CR/LF) or the
       unix standard (LF only).


     -----------------
     SUBMISSION FORMAT:

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 9                   14 Jul 1997


     Below is a sample article properly formatted. Features of it are
     discussed further below.

     --article file example begins below this line--
     *A Sample Article [this is in LINE 1 starting at COLUMN 1]

     This is My Title
     by Joe Schmoe, [Netmail/email address]

     And here is my article. Note that it is flush left (zero indent).
     Also note that the right margin is at column seventy so that it
     won't overflow "most" text windows. Each line has a newline. Note
     the *'ed first line. My article will be listed in the table of
     contents exactly as it appears after the * above.

     Figure 1.                       Table 1.
             +-------+               ========
             | A Box |                  Alpha
             +-------+                 Bravo

     Note that we am not using any funny-o characters. This ensures
     that the final article will look the same to every user, no
     matter what sort of hardware he has.

     This is the last sentence of our article.

     --article file example ends above this line--


     The FIRST line of text is the Table of Contents line. It MUST
     begin with an asterisk * as shown above.  NO BLANK lines above
     title line are permitted. If you do not follow this instruction
     exactly, the article will not be listed in the Table of Contents.
     This Table of Contents listing method works for all submission
     file types.

     * Everything that follows the *'ed line will appear in the body
       of the newsletter.  The *'ed line will be stripped out of your
       article text so if you want it repeated as your title in the
       article BE SURE to | REPEAT | it on a second line without the *.

     * Next should be the title or name of your article, your name,
       and contact information (network address(es), Postal Service
       address, etc) Try to keep it to one or two lines each.

     * Put a blank line between paragraphs. Paragraphs that all run
       together are very difficult to read, and may be rejected.

     * If you want to put in a table or a figure, go right ahead.
       We do not rearrange text, so your table or figure will
       remain exactly as you entered it. Try to limit them to ones
       that make the communication CLEARER.

     * Don't put a lot of blank space at the top or bottom. The
       FidoNews-generator programs will visually separate articles
       automatically.
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 10                  14 Jul 1997


     * Please check for basic errors in spelling, grammar, and
       punctuation. We're not publishing a textbook, but you don't
       want it to embarrass yourself do you?

     * Don't use FidoNews to grind your personal axes against other
       FidoNet members. An article presenting a side of an internal
       dispute is one thing. An article defaming or perseverating over
       several Issues is another. Articles that merely quote endlessly
       from other sources to no particular effect are also not a good
       idea.

     * Don't republish copyrighted material from other sources WITHOUT
       the permission of those sources. Include the permission in such
       articles.

     * Remember that FidoNews is no better or worse than the articles
       submitted to it. If you want FidoNews to be a useful newsletter,
       get involved and submit useful articles. It's up to YOU to make
       it work.

     --------------------
     SUBMISSION DEADLINES:

     FidoNews is published on Monday of every week.  Deadline for file
     submissions to the FidoNews Editor via file-attach is 2300 ET
     [0300 UTC/GMT] the previous Saturday.  Deadline for submissions via
     Netmail, email, or in the FIDONEWS Echo is 2300 ET [0300 UTC/GMT]
     the previous Friday.  Submissions which miss the deadlines will be
     processed the following week.  Submission by deadline is not a
     guarantee of appearance in that week's FidoNews but it is likely
     depending on volume of submissions.


      -30-

     -----------------------------------------------------------------


     Re: CRC and The Nodelist
     by Gregg Jennings, 1:331/109

     [Submitted: 06-Jul-1997]

     Brainwave, 1:362/903, writes in 1425:

          Has anybody else had problems keeping current?  If it's not a
          missing DIFF now and then, it's CRC trouble... What is this CRC
          thing anyway?  I've been trying to find out for over a year now,
          it's been one of those things that just keeps coming up now and
          then.  Right now my NODELIST.164 has an improper CRC.  The
          utility I use to merge the diffs told me so, and actually added a
          line at the bottom:

          ;S This Nodelist file has an improper CRC!

     The problem you, or rather your software, encountered was some bytes
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 11                  14 Jul 1997


     in the NodeList that had the 8th bit set high (if you don't know what
     that means don't worry unless you are a programmer), which were masked
     off, converted to 7 bit. The merging program was at fault, not the
     NodeList.

     The entry for Uruguay On Line, San Carlos, Susana Baratta, had some
     strange characters in the Flags entry. The program you used to merge
     the NodeDiff made a mistake (some may say that the mistake was in the
     NodeDiff but programmers should know better).

     Your NodeList is fine, it just has some useless Flags in an entry.

     This is an example of a programming error. Now it could be not the
     writer of the Merger program, but the C (or Pascal, or whatever)
     compiler.

     This is a prime example of part of what's "wrong" with FidoNet (not to
     deride FidoNet or its programmers, all computer systems have these
     problems).

     I'll bet that is you look in the document which came with your Merger
     that it will say something like "correct the problem". Really good
     huh?

     Getting a newer or different Merger is your only answer to avoid the
     error message. Otherwise it is for all purposes harmless unless your
     process, batch files for instance, stops processing with a fatal error
     and messes up your BBS operation.

     -----------------------------------------------------------------


     Re: Is The End Near?
     by Gregg Jennings, 1:331/109

     [Submitted: 06-Jul-1997]

     This is some comments about Clay's article in 1426.

     Perhaps he (or others) can tell us all more about the SSTARS; I for am
     interested, and listening. Who are these SSTARS? for one. Were they
     elected? Are they elected? What conference was removed? Who is this
     "self appointed" individual?

     He mentions a lack of "testosterone to engage in battle those who
     would bring down this brotherhood." How can any battle those that they
     are not aware of?

     The reason for FidoNews' failure to get to Zone 2 should be found.
     Perhaps it is just a technological one? All Sysops know how much of a
     pain in the ass it is to configure most of the software upon which
     FidoNet relies.

     FIDONEWS an outlet for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)?
     Clay obviously is missing something. Mike Bilow forwards messages from
     the ACLU mailing-list from time to time to FidoNews. FidoNews has the
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 12                  14 Jul 1997


     grandest of all policies: will print anything submitted.  Pro or con
     ACLU he should be happy that at least someone is trying to inform
     people, the readers of FidoNews, of electronic communications
     legislation in the U.S. ACLU opponents respond please!

     Why don't we have articles published by Sysops in FidoNet? Because
     SYSOPS IN FIDONET ARE NOT SUBMITTING ARTICLES TO FIDONEWS! That's a no
     brainer!

     Perhaps one of the reasons Users (and Sysops) are leaving FidoNet is
     the constant barrage of insults and whining we have been seeing so
     often here in the Snooze and in the echos.

     The insulters and the whiners are killing FidoNet!

     The insulters and the whiners are causing Users to leave!

     The insulters and the whiners offer no solutions!

     To appear at least as a non-insulting whining person I submit this:

     1. Developers should think of the reasons why they do not want to
        provide the source code to programs they develop, so proudly, for
        FidoNetters. Just think about it.

     2. Developers should look at their proposals objectively and had
        better realize that there is never one best answer to a problem.
        Woe to the person who shouts at us for years only to realize that
        his was not the optimal solution.

     3. The people who are our representatives should let us know where
        they stand. Write to us here! Tell us that you exist at least!  We
        may not agree with you but that is okay. That is how things work.

     4. Sysops, do not be afraid to speak up! Do not consider the SIZE of
        FidoNews as a deterrent to writing! We, I (at least), WANT to hear
        from you.

     5. Users and readers, write us! Do not care about what others may
        think of you or your ideas, your grammar, your expertise.

        Not all that is gold glitters.

     This is OUR newsletter. This is OUR voice. Use it. It is for OUR
     benefit.

     -----------------------------------------------------------------

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 13                  14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                              FIDONET HISTORY
     =================================================================

     [One of our readers sent this in and the History section is just the
      place for it. Permission to reprint was received from Fringe Ware
      Review at http://www.fringeware.com/fwr/fwr01/ with email to:
      [e-mail]] Ed.

     From: [e-mail]
     Date: 03 Jul 97 21:14:37 -0700
     Subject: Tom Jennings Interview (for fidonews)
     To: [e-mail]
     Organization: Don't Mistake Lack Of Talent For Genius

     >From Steve Steffler, 1:342/52.3/1:342/1022
     An Interview With Tom Jennings

     I was perusing a local BBS's file areas, and I came across this old
     (circa 1994) interview with Tom Jennings.  It sheds an interesting
     light on his views on Fidonet, and perhaps shows us things from an
     interesting perspective.  Maybe his comments on how Fidonet was
     supposed to be so "decentralized" will affect the views of some of
     the people at the previously nonexistent "top" of things in the Fido
     hierarchy.

     =====Cut=====

     >From alt.bbs Fri Apr  1 10:03:40 1994
     From: riddle (Prentiss Riddle)
     Date: Fri, 1 Apr 1994 15:36:01 GMT
     Newsgroups: austin.eff,houston.efh.talk,alt.bbs
     Subject: Interview with Tom Jennings from Fringe Ware Review

     [In honor of Tom Jennings' upcoming appearances in Austin (4/16, info
     from [e-mail]) and Houston (4/17, info from [e-mail]),
     Jon Lebkowsky has kindly granted permission to reproduce the following
     interview.  Enjoy.]


                           Interview with Tom Jennings

                          by Jon Lebkowsky, [e-mail]

                            reprinted with permission

          Originally published in Fringe Ware Review #1, ISSN 1069-5656.
              Copyright (c)1993 by the author.  All rights reserved.
                   For more details, contact: [e-mail]


     Our FWI prez recently had a chance to chat with Tom Jennings, who
     commented afterwards: "Think you can mention somewhere that I'm a fag
     anarcho nerd troublemaker/activist? It is important, and to me as
     well. It always gets buried. Lots of people like to know, especially
     scared people with no images of people who are gay and reasonably
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 14                  14 Jul 1997


     functional in some way." Tis our pleasure to honor Tom, whose work has
     been so brilliant and so far out on the Fringe, that when the US gov't
     precluded computer technology exports during the Cold War, they
     basically forgot/ignored a certain fag anarcho nerd from the Bay
     Area... As a result, Tom's FidoNet now provides the basis for computer
     networking in Eastern Europe, former USSR and most of the Third World,
     as well as a extraordinary conduit throughout the rest of the world.

     Tom: This people tracking stuff... what little I know of it sounds
     very creepy. I don't want a box that reports where the hell I am all
     the time, when I walk in the room, it can tell some local machine I'm
     there. It's none of anyone's goddamn business. It's the corporate
     culture invasion on real life, like the top 1% who make all the money,
     and think everyone's gonna live like them.

     Jon: Well, if you're living in an ivory tower, after you live there
     for a while, you start to think, not that it's YOUR environment, but
     it's THE environment.

     T: Yeah, it is reality, but it's a local one. Everyone they know is
     like that... well, they don't know everybody.

     J: In a conversation I had the other day with Allucquere Rosanne
     Stone, she talked about ubiquitous computing, that computers or
     computing will be invisible, it will be so omnipresent...

     T: That's what Alan Kay pointed out years ago, that when technology
     gets done right, you don't even see it. When you walk in a room, your
     hand flicks a switch... how much thought do you give to that stupid
     light switch? Hopefully very little. The light comes on, and...
     Telephones are getting close to that.

     J: Even better, there's some rooms you walk into and the light
     switches on automatically, because there's motion detectors.

     T: Yeah.


     Anarchy In The A-C-K

     J: Tell me about FidoNet. As I said, I'm sorta ignorant on the
        subject...

     T: I have a weird point of view on it, of course, having designed
     it...  February or March of '94 will be it's tenth year. It is a
     network, a collection of bulletin boards. It is a loose confederation,
     and it is completely and thoroughly and utterly decentralized. There
     is literally no top. Most of it's members have a narrow view of it
     because they have this particular reality filter on all the time from
     living amongst hierarchy addicts. But FidoNet's most basic element is
     a bulletin board. What FidoNet is, is a set of protocols that lets the
     bulletin boards communicate.  FidoNet started as a bunch of bulletin
     boards, running my Fido software.  FidoNet was added later, to allow
     point-to-point email between Fido boards.

     J: Did you start with just a single BBS?
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 15                  14 Jul 1997


     T: It started with my system. I was writing software for Phoenix
     Software, which is now Phoenix Technologies. I was their first
     employee. I did all their portable MS-DOS stuff prior to the ROM BIOS
     they did, which was partly based on my previous work with "portable"
     MS-DOS... we were doing MS-DOS installations in three days, and
     charging exorbitant sums... and delivering really good stuff, people
     got their money's worth, and got it damn fast! We had it down to an
     art of just totally portable stuff. So I had this portable attitude
     toward hardware, and wrote a bulletin board sort of based on it.

     FidoNet is more importantly a social mechanism. It was pretty obvious
     from the start that it was going to be a social monster, almost more
     so than a technical thing. And it had to do with the original
     environment of bulletin boards, which were around for quite a while by
     the time I got around to doing Fido. Every bulletin board was
     completely different, run by some cantankerous person who ran their
     board the way that they saw fit, period.  So FidoNet had to fit in
     that environment.

     J: A very anarchic environment.

     T: Yes, explicitly anarchic. Most people just ran them for their own
     reasons, and they were just separated by large distances of time and
     space, so they remained locally oriented. I just ran across old
     interviews and old documentation from '83 - '84, and we were saying it
     then. It was just...  people didn't hear it, it just went in one ear
     and out the other. They think 'Oh, anarchism, that means throwing
     rocks at the cops!' Well sometimes, I suppose, but that's mostly a
     cop's definition of it.


     The Revolution Will Be Packetized

     J: The sense of the bomb throwing anarchist, I guess, is sort of in
     the sense of political disorder...

     T: ...which was a specific event in the 20's in San Francisco having
     to do with union labor busts. And blackmail... this guy Tom Mooney, a
     bomb was planted and blame arranged to fall on Tom Mooney, tossing his
     ass in jail, putting the blame squarely on the anarchists.

     J: Anarchy has this sorta bad connotation, but anarchy itself is not
     unlike what so many seem to want to embrace now. I think the
     libertarian philosophy is fairly anarchic, and you find it widespread
     throughout the net. It's basically a hands-off philosophy.

     T: I think people often take it too seriously, like various anarchist
     camps that have more rules than not. I consider it a personal
     philosophy, not a political thing at all. It has nothing to do with
     party-type politics.

     J: If it becomes overtly political, it ceases to be anarchy...

     T: Yeah, more or less, and I don't really care about what's considered
     politics per se, it's personal interaction, how I treat other people
     and how they treat me, and my relations to other people, it's
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 16                  14 Jul 1997


     anarchism... I always call it Paul Goodman style, which is the
     principle that people work together better if they're cooperating than
     if they're coerced. Very simple, nothing to do with goddamn party
     politics. It has to do with how you treat people that you have to work
     with. And that's what FidoNet was based on, very explicitly. It was
     sort of laid over the top of a lot of Fido bulletin boards, and let
     them talk to each other in a straightforward point-to-point manner.


     Just How Big Is It?

     J: Was it just Fido boards?

     T: Just Fido at the time, because it required a fairly low-level of
     restructuring of the innards, message bases and stuff. And Fido is a
     pretty good bulletin board, has been for years, though now it's
     definitely old fashioned. I haven't done a revision to Fido for over
     two years.

     J: Are you thinking about doing that?

     T: No, I'm thinking about dropping it. <laughter> I've thought about
     it, and it's over. So FidoNet started up in spring of '84 with two
     systems, me and my friend John Madill and within four months there
     were twenty or fifty... by the end of the year, it was approaching 100
     by the next February, in nine months. It started growing really fast.
     And every single one was run by somebody for their own reasons in
     their own manner for their own purposes, so FidoNet had to accommodate
     this. And this is nothing unusual, in one sense. All computer networks
     are essentially run this way.  The Internet is. There's no central
     Internet authority where you go to get a system in Internet, you just
     put it online, and find people to help you, register with the NIC
     [Network Information Center] which is just a convention for handling
     names.

     J: Sort of ideally cooperative.

     T: Yeah, it's quite cooperative, and you don't really get kicked out
     unless you technically screw up, or do something massively illegal or
     glaringly obvious. Most likely technical, like don't answer mail for a
     long time.  Most electronic things are like that. It didn't start to
     take off until Echomail came by, which was done by this guy named Jeff
     Rush in Dallas as a way to talk among Dallas sysops about organizing
     pizza parties. It's a fully distributed, redundant database using
     FidoNet netmail to transport the records in the distributed database.
     It's functionally equivalent to Usenet, they gate back and forth very
     easily.

     J: Can you link FidoNet very easily to Internet or UUCP Mail?

     T: There's gateways between [FidoNet and UUCP] operating. You can just
     set up the UFGate package... [FidoNet and the Internet] they have
     totally different paradigms. IP, the Internet stuff, is fully
     connected all the time. When you want to connect to a system in
     Finland, you just rub packets with them and they come back in
     generally under a second. FidoNet is all store and forward, offline
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 17                  14 Jul 1997


     processing...

     J: How big is it now?

     T: Just short of 20,000 systems.

     J: Wow, that's a lot...

     T: It's doubled in a year... I think more than doubled in a year. It's
     been doubling every year for a long time <laughs>.


     QQBEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCKQQ

     J: There's a lot of discussion today of encryption schemes, are you
     involved in that?

     T: Actually, yeah, I use it routinely.

     J: Using PGP?

     T: Yeah. FidoNet was pretty intentionally involved in getting PGP
     ubiquitous the first time around... an intentional, conscious quick-
     dump of about 10,000 copies in a week, starting on a Monday, just to
     be sure that it was unstoppable, and it spread very quickly. Now
     there's all kinds of arguments over whether it's legal, or whether
     it's going to incriminate me to use PGP, and the traffic into the
     network itself...

     J: It wouldn't be a criminal issue...

     T: People believe all kinds of crazy nonsense.

     J: Somebody has a patent on the algorithm, is that it?

     T: Yeah, and some people are afraid that if they send or pass
     encrypted data, that the police will bust into the house and steal the
     computer, all this kind of stuff... FidoNet sprung up fully-formed out
     of seeming nowhere into the rest of the computer world. Most people on
     the Internet have access to it through schools or industry. They went
     to school, then they got a job, and they grew up with maintained
     Internet connectivity... they were brought up into the sort of
     Internet-hood.

     J: I think that's changing a bit...

     T: Oh, it is changing, it will continue to change, and someday it will
     be incomprehensible that it was this way, but as of today, it's sort
     of how it is. FidoNet did not come from that direction at all. It came
     from... the usual white guys who could afford a computer :-), but in
     the best tradition of radio and astronomy, they were at least
     amateurs, it's truly an amateur network. It is not professional, as in
     "profession"... "professional" is frequently used to mean legitimate,
     as opposed to amateur...

     J: You mean "hobbyist?"
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 18                  14 Jul 1997


     T: Yeah, amateur as a word became disparaging, but we mean it actually
     in the older sense, like the radio amateur sense. We don't do it for
     money, it's done for the sake of itself. So for the most part, FidoNet
     members never had that traditional kind of connectivity, and also
     didn't have the corporate culture, and didn't have the computer
     network culture, so it basically formed in the dark, on its own.


     550 Flavors of Culture

     J: Speaking of the word "culture," do you find that within the FidoNet
     universe, there's a particular set of cultural predilections? Does
     there tend to be a general kind of group or community that uses
     FidoNet?

     T: Well, it's like any of those things, it's really subjective. But,
     yeah, there do seem to be, in my travels on Internet and FidoNet,
     distinct flavors. One is not better than the other, I can tell you
     that, culturally speaking. The Internet people say, "Oh, but the flame
     level on FidoNet is so awful." Bullshit. The flame level on the
     Internet is just as high. It's in loftier language, five line
     signatures, and all that kind of crap... but I'm sorry, it's not any
     better, it's just different. What it is, is less alien to them, more
     comfortable... and vice-versa from the FidoNet side.  It's more
     comfortable, it's more familiar, the language used and the acronyms
     and the smiley faces, all of that junk.

     There is a FidoNet flavor, through the usual sociological things. The
     people who originally populated it defined this vague common set, and
     people who come onto it self-select ("Oh, I like that!") and join it,
     and then enhance it, or they're sort of neutral and they come in and
     they just absorb it because... you know, you start hanging out with
     people, and you pick up their manner of speaking. And there are
     people, of course, who are utterly opposed to this, and want to make
     it professional and some just don't care, and live in a corner of it.

     But yeah, there are things in common, and I have a hard time putting
     my finger on what they are. It is fiercely independent, utterly,
     fiercely independent. It is viciously anti-commercialization. It has a
     long history of some nasty politics, some really enlightened politics,
     and I think in a lot of ways they have more pragmatic view, and a
     better view Q better meaning more functional in today's world Q than
     people who haven't had to pay their own phone bills.

     J: Some people argue that you can't have strictly online community,
     and others believe that you can. Some feel that there has to be some
     kind of face-to-face interaction. In the Internet there has not been
     as much of that until it began to become more broadly accessible to
     regular people...

     T: The Internet is still completely and thoroughly inaccessible... I'm
     sorry, it is simply not accessible. You have to have a large amount of
     hardware or an intimate relationship with someone who does, like you
     have to go to school or something. Otherwise you're paying money...
     and there are people who fall through the cracks...

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 19                  14 Jul 1997


     J: How about public access Internet?

     T: Yeah, but if there's more than 100 terminals in the U.S. that any
     average person could walk up to and figure out how to use in less than
     a week, I would be surprised. It still takes huge amounts of
     specialized knowledge.

     J: But the technical side is fairly dense...

     T: Oh, yeah... I've been an SWTP, CP/M, DOS hacker and hardware hacker
     for fifteen fucking years, twenty years, and UNIX is so intimidating,
     arbitrarily difficult to use... a lot of the users have this macho
     attitude that "Well, you should have to plow through it, I did." The
     whole priesthood nonsense. It's stupid. And the argument whether
     online culture is possible or not, that ain't where it's gonna get
     decided. It either gets made or it doesn't. I think there are online
     communities. The people who are doing it aren't asking themselves,
     "Are we an online community?" They're just going about their business.
     They're not tangible enough to really get documented except in
     hindsight, you look back and say "Oh, yeah, those people are" or "No,
     they really weren't, when push came to shove, they didn't stay
     together."

     J: At EFF-Austin we've been a little more self-conscious about it,
     we've actually been trying to do some community-building, to try to
     structure an online community in Austin where we'd have some force to
     get things done, various projects. One of the things we're doing that
     other EFF-related groups haven't been doing is arts projects, and in
     doing those things, in talking to some of the people who are
     interested in doing that, I realized that there are a lot of writers
     and artists who are hungry to get online.  They know it's there,
     they'd like to be using it, but they can't get access to it because
     they can't, unless they stumble into it, find a system that'll give
     them an account. It's kind of like what you were saying about
     barriers... but I wonder if, in the FidoNet world, you find writers
     and artists using FidoNet to share information and to form arts
     communities?

     T: Well, there's a lot more less-technical people involved, because
     you can put a $300 system together, line cord to phone jack. That just
     means that the entry level is a lot lower. And it's functional as
     hell! I mean, So what if it's slow? 5 seconds or 100 milliseconds,
     what's the difference to most people?


     All Look Completely Different

     J: The link, the network, is strictly for email? Or do you have some
     other stuff, file transfer... ?

     T: Oh, there's lots of file transfer stuff. In some ways it's a lot
     more sophisticated than the FTP stuff from the user's point of view.
     There's this thing called the SDN, the Software Distribution Network,
     which looks like a conference for files, where the objects are not
     messages, but files.  And they're stored in a redundant manner, some
     locally concentrated, some far away and scattered. It's kind of
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 20                  14 Jul 1997


     nebulous, like most network things are. They do monthly announcements
     of new files, and most of it's shareware, or free. You can do things
     like file attach (send with a message), and file requests (file fetch
     via message).

     FidoNet doesn't have the problem that a lot of older networks have,
     with seven bit channels and all that crap. We have eight bit channels
     with 32 bit CRCs. We do run into the alien system problems... ASCII
     character sets vs. the Cyrillic alphabets and all that kinda stuff.
     Those problems are about as chaotic as they are anywhere else.

     J: How about remote login?

     T: No... the systems in FidoNet are radically different. There's Radio
     Shack color computers, there's CP/M machines, Apple IIs, giant DOS
     machines, giant LANs of UNIX boxes, all running common protocols in a
     far broader hardware base than most, even UNIX boxes. There's no
     unified operating system, there's a set of protocols, there's 40 or 50
     different mailers, and FidoNet interfaces in bulletin boards, and they
     all look completely different. So it's at a much higher level of
     abstraction than the FidoNet gets defined at. I bet a lot of the
     Internet, some huge proportion, is UNIX...

     J: You certainly need some kind of standard to be interoperable to the
     extent that the Internet is, don't you?

     T: No, where the real compatibility is is the TCP/IP layer, and that's
     rock solid, and that's the thing in common. All the rlogin, telnet,
     and ftp stuff partly user paradigm, rather than just a set of
     protocols. It's well, and fine, and wonderful, and I love it, but it
     does put a real crimp on style.

     [Ed Cavazos, almost-attorney and vice-prez of EFF-Austin, shows up and
     settles in to listen. The conversation continues.]


     The Color Of Money

     T: A lot of FidoNet is so radically different, you can't get people to
     either hear it or understand what's going on, because it's NOT like
     any of the others, and it was intentionally not made like the others,
     and some of the really basic principles that seem random are
     intentional... they're in writing, and have been in writing for seven
     years. The strictly American anarchist principles that it's based on
     are written into the policy documents.

     We actually had in '85, '86, '87 an attempted takeover by a
     corporation that was formed from within, it was like a cancer that
     became a giant boil on the surface, called IFNA, the International
     FidoNet Association, that was sort of a good idea, or a potentially
     good idea, when we started it at the 200 node level. By the time it
     got around to being implemented, at 500 nodes, the world had utterly
     changed. With 200 people, you can run it like a club. It was 90% U.S.,
     90% white guys with computers, and at the 500 node level, it was about
     20% European and definitely, obviously growing. It hopped the puddle,
     with systems appearing in South America, scattered, but you know how
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 21                  14 Jul 1997


     that goes... when you get one, then you get two, and then four, and
     they start to grow.

     We were very naive, and I was right in the middle of it. Some of us
     learned quickly, this isn't going to work! But this corporation grew,
     and became a 501(c)(3), and like all of those things, they get power-
     hungry, and they get grabby of territory, and we had to fight it off,
     and it was fought off by the constituents of the network... and it was
     killed off. They had gained control of the copyright and the
     trademarks, and they were fought off. The network, instead of dying,
     like everyone predicted, thrived.

     J: So how did this fight go?

     T: It was fought by lawyers and proxy votes and all the usual crap, in
     a goddamn hotel in San Jose, was the final straw...

     J: Were you a part of this corporation at all?

     T: Well, a bunch of us started it... at first, we were brainstorming
     what we could do... deals on modems, some obvious stuff. And we'd have
     a spokesperson from FidoNet who'd attend the EMA meetings once a year
     and represent bulletin board operators and FidoNet members in
     electronic privacy things and the technical trade stuff and the
     obvious things. And those are still lacking, we still need them. But
     it was established really early that everyone not only retains control
     of their system, but they're expected to do their part to run it,
     because there is no one else to run it. And as simple as it sounds,
     it's a really radical act to get that across, so that people don't
     just sit on their butts. And of course, the usual 10% does the work,
     and 90% sits on their butts, but that's fine, too.


     Double Plus Plus Good

     T: FidoNet's a little odd, unlike the Internet, which has a domain
     name system... you say "Connect to toad.com," it says, ".com, okay,
     over there, toad... here's the address," and you go after it. FidoNet
     has what appears to be a centralized database that every system in the
     net has, a copy of this at the moment 2 megabyte long ASCII database,
     with 20,000 records in it. And it's updated every week, it contains
     the full physical and logical information about the entire network...
     phone number, system name, restrictions on use, protocols supported,
     some ASCII text, like system name, and city, all that kind of junk. It
     contains the hierarchical addressing scheme of the network, and it
     contains a lot of redundancy.

     J: Given that there's no central authority, who maintains this
        database?

     T: A local autonomous unit in FidoNet... First... the terminology in
     FidoNet is point-node-net-zone. Points aren't really part of FidoNet,
     they're a peculiar thing... a node is the basic unit, it is a bulletin
     board or a mail-only site, generally a phone number with a modem on
     it. A net is a cluster of Fidos, a cluster of nodes, like San
     Francisco has Net 125, SFBay Net, 75-80 systems. A node in a net is
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 22                  14 Jul 1997


     the basic social organizational unit. It was designed to be small
     enough to comprehend in regular old terms, like we all know and love,
     clubs and that kind of group... when they get too big they tend to
     fragment into pieces, which become autonomous units, then nets are
     collected into the real-life geography of continents.

     The North American phone system is alien to the Western European ones,
     and they have lots of mutually-alien phone systems. The North
     Americans tend to be a lot less political... Zone 1 encompasses
     Mexico, U.S., and Canada, and nobody ever batted an eye over it. It's
     like, "Oh, okay, that makes sense." In Europe, they're fiercely
     defensive of the political boundaries, and it's really silly. Local
     autonomy was the critical thing to make it work, because who's going
     to allow somebody in New Jersey to dictate how they're going to run
     their system? There'd be no way to exert any kind of control, and once
     you start getting into control wars, you spend all your time doing
     that.

     So the way the node list is made is that every net fragment makes its
     own chunk of the node list, which is a very straightforward task, even
     though it ends up being work. They're passed up through regional
     coordinators who take these fragments, and everybody gets a copy of
     everybody else's weekly list, and each of them compiles a giant list,
     then they do a difference, this week from last week, and mail out that
     difference back down the tree.  So if you chopped off half the network
     and smashed it flat, it would regenerate itself. It's a balance of
     terror, that's what it is. It's a genuine balance of terror in
     responsibility and power. What you get for that redundancy is that no
     one can cut you out of the network, no one can declare that you can't
     communicate.

     In the UUCP world none of this happens because the social environment
     is much more substantial... universities, Hewlett Packard... Your
     neighbors, in theory, can cut you off, and you disappear, no one knows
     about you, if you're eliminated from the bang path, no one can talk to
     you, and that's it, you don't exist, it's as simple as that.

     In FidoNet, and this has happened recently in England... a bunch of
     religious fundamentalists by just hammering away gained control of
     large chunks of the FidoNet in the U.K., and they started having
     fits... "Why, there's perverts on this board, and we're not gonna have
     'em in FidoNet!" <laughter> And they clipped them out of the goddamn
     list, they removed the entries from the U.K. list. You sort of noticed
     they disappeared, but those people can still communicate, they can
     mail you their fragment, hand-generated if necessary, and all the node
     list processors let you incorporate private lists, and you can reply
     back, just like that. No one can be cut out of the network.

     If you start thinking about it, you realize that there are a number of
     good and bad side effects from this. Like, if you have some real
     asshole troublemaker, there's nothing you can do about it. Like,
     unless somebody comes in and pulls out a gun or something, it's kinda
     hard to get someone kicked out of a more or less public place... well,
     [here in] the hotel would be relatively easy, but out in the street,
     you've just gotta live with your neighbors. And the same is true in
     the FidoNet. You have to learn to live with your neighbors, and vice
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 23                  14 Jul 1997


     versa. The flaming assholes have to learn how to behave well enough to
     not be utterly censured. Which is what generally happens to them...
     people just ignore them.

     There was one guy, he was another fundamentalist Christian nut case.
     He was amusing, actually. He was a "true Bible" believer, this was
     called pre-rapture, or something or other, some pre-rapture network...
     he was persecuted by all sides, and he loved it. He was mailing
     everybody this gibberish, pages and pages of gibberish. And there's
     programs that just filter out mail, and you say, I don't wanna see
     mail from this address...

     J: A bozofilter.

     T: Yeah, basically, it's a bozofilter, we've had 'em for a long time.
     And there's also another one that's called bounce... whenever you get
     anything from this guy, bounce it back. It appends a bit of text that
     says "This message is refused at site so-and-so, have it back," which
     IRRITATES people! But it just works out that people, even the crazy
     ones are social organisms. We don't really like to be disliked too
     widely, we like to have an audience, if nothing else. So that's the
     underpinnings...

     FidoNet has been very flexible technically. When technological changes
     or opportunities come by, within a year half the net supports them. In
     about '85 U.S. Robotics very smartly discovered bulletin boards, and
     they realized the way it works is, even though there's a relatively
     small number of bulletin board sysops, if you're bulletin board
     caller, who do you look to to see what hardware to buy? The sysop. And
     they ask, "What kind of modem do you have... oh, it must be pretty
     good if you use it," because when it's bad, they mouth off to hundreds
     of people about it.

     So USR basically courted the FidoNet, and said "What do you want to
     see in a modem?" The first modem they did this with was the Courier
     2400, which was 600 bucks new at the time, or 700 bucks. They offered
     a 50% off deal, down to about 300 or 400 dollars, which was a bargain,
     relatively speaking.  We wanted true flow control, and a symmetrical
     modem with basic AT command set, and they did it. It was an instant
     success. And then they did the HST, much to most of the industry's
     annoyance, they did this kludgey proprietary asymmetrical protocol
     9600 one way, 300 baud the other way... they came to us again, and we
     worked out more handshake stuff, and started changing protocols on our
     side.

     FidoNet was originally based on xmodem, which is amazingly similar to
     X.25's packet ack, like Kermit, only much more efficient than Kermit,
     and very much like UUCP-G, only it's not windowed... block ack block
     ack block ack... it's fine at 2400 baud and below, above 2400 baud it
     was not good.  We had asymmetrical modems that collapsed. So there had
     been another protocol called Wazoo around, and it instantly became
     hot, because it did protocol negotiation when you started a session,
     and it could pick ZMODEM [trademark Chuck Forseberg], which is fully-
     windowed, screaming fast, you can run it ackless. You could work the
     hell out of an HST in ways that other protocols couldn't. Internet
     protocols and UUCP-G were just useless, in other words, the modem was
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 24                  14 Jul 1997


     useless for existing protocols. So FidoNet's historically been very
     flexible, technology-wise.


     McLuhanites: Myopy, My Opium

     Ed: Are you familiar with John Quarterman? Have you seen his maps of
     FidoNet?

     T: No, I haven't seen his maps of FidoNet. [Quarterman did show 'em
     off later in the conference.] I talk to him occasionally, I
     republished one of his articles in FidoNews a while ago... FidoNews is
     a weird phenomenon in itself... a 20,000 circulation weekly newsletter
     in its tenth year. It sort of goes unacknowledged... FidoNet has a
     giant credibility problem, because it sprang forth fully-formed 'way
     outside all traditional computer things, and because it works on PCs
     and Radio Shack Color Computers (which actually turns out to be a nice
     processor, it runs OS9 on a 6809... you can run multiusers on a $99
     packaged machine). It's really some amazing software.

     FidoNews was designed in '84 in the first year as the meta-net, to
     discuss the net itself, to discuss the social end of the net. In the
     first issue was a retired Air Force colonel or something, whining
     about the military retirement process, and people instantly said,
     "This is supposed to be a technical newsletter, this is FidoNet..."
     and I said, "No, bullshit, it's not. I'm tired of just this techie
     crap. Do you talk on the phone about your telephone all the time?
     'Gee, I've got a great new phone, it's got all these pushbuttons...'
     and you get bored very quickly. It's like radio amateurs talking about
     their goddamn antennas." Who wants to put up with that stuff?

     J: We've been talking about that a lot. There's three or four
     magazines devoted to online cultures, cultures of the Matrix, that
     focus on the Internet a lot. Wired is one, Mondo in a real different
     way, and bOING-bOING, of course, in a REAL different way. And we
     realized that a lot of the articles are preoccupied with the carrier,
     with the technology for carrying messages, and not so much with the
     messages themselves or the cultures themselves, the sorts of cultures
     that are evolving.

     T: Yeah, they forget that what we're making is a goddamn conduit; it's
     a medium, it's not content! A content comes with it, because they're
     brand new mediums, they fail a lot, and they need to be developed...
     all software sucks, and all hardware sucks, so you end up talking
     about it a lot, but yeah, that's not the point.

     J: What's really more fascinating is what's at either end of the
     conduit...

     T: Yeah, the telephone proved that. It's actually a way to convey
     social information, emotion, that's why telephones worked, you can
     talk over them.  How many ways can you say "No" with a keyboard? Not
     very many. 25 or 50 if you're incredibly ingenious. Smiley faces and
     uppercase... All the cultural information is stripped. And a lot of it
     has simply been access. Those at the gates determine who comes in. If
     you own the $5,000 PC...
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 25                  14 Jul 1997


     J: Is that what brings you here [to the fourth conference on
     Computers, Freedom, and Privacy), access issues?

     T: Yeah, that's why I'm always skeptical of large-scale networks.
     While I'm on the Internet, I don't have any pretensions of being...
     "Why, the world is connected!" No, one percent of one percent is
     connected, barely, and the tools really suck. Through no fault of the
     authors, they're incredible works, the foundation to a world. But
     they're hardly accessible to everyone in the world.

     J: I had to buy my access to the Internet, at first. The WELL...

     T: Mine I get because I'm managing a small IP cooperative, and I get
     it sort of as a perk to my $400 to $500 salary for what is essentially
     a full-time job.

     J: Actually, I've been able to pick up other accounts since, but the
     only way that I could have got in in the first place was by buying
     access, because I'm not really very technical. My interests are more
     sociopolitical, I guess...

     T: I don't really have any serious problems with the way things exist.
     For better or worse, that's the way that all complicated things have
     been developed in our little Western history timeline. It takes
     resources and effort and energy, and they do spread out, eventually.
     And they get defined along the way, they definitely have basic
     cultural assumptions glued into them at the very base.

     J: It allows a more distributed way of organizing and doing things...

     T: We'll see if it's ever as good as the telephone is. It doesn't get
     much better than the telephone, when you think about its position in
     society.  Like Bruce said in his Hacker Crackdown, you notice them
     when you don't have one, they're so ubiquitous, they're like light
     switches. You don't think of a telephone, it's not an exciting object.

     J: I can remember when there was a single phone in the house, and it
     was a big deal to have a second phone, which was usually on the same
     line. And now I have three phone lines, and one is a dedicated data
     line. I don't think I know many people who don't have at least two or
     three phones in their house.

     T: I'm down to two, and I consider that rarefied... I only need two
     lines now, after having six at one point, all these bulletin boards
     and data lines, now it's like, oh, a voice line, and a data line...

     J: I prefer asynchronous text swapping, but I'm not sure why, maybe a
     personal idiosyncrasy. It seems funny to me, because Matisse Enzer,
     the support guy on the WELL... when we're having a problem, and we
     can't quite figure out how to communicate about it, he always says,
     "Well look, why don't I call you up, and we'll talk about it." And I
     always say, "No, wait, I don't wanna talk, I just wanna text!"
     <laughter>


     -----
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 26                  14 Jul 1997


     Originally published in Fringe Ware Review #1, ISSN 1069-5656.
     Copyright (c)1993 by the author.  All rights reserved.
     For more details, contact: [e-mail]

     [e-mail]
     [e-mail]
     http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/3755
     team os/2

     -----------------------------------------------------------------

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 27                  14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                            COORDINATORS CORNER
     =================================================================


     Nodelist-statistics as seen from Zone-2 for day 192
     By Ward Dossche, 2:292/854
        ZC/2

      +----+------+------------+------------+------------+------------+--+
      |Zone|Nl-164|Nodelist-171|Nodelist-178|Nodelist-185|Nodelist-192|%%|
      +----+------+------------+------------+------------+------------+--+
      |  1 |  8182| 8182     0 | 8182     0 | 7828  -354 | 7828     0 |30|
      |  2 | 15703|15666   -37 |15640   -26 |15577   -63 |15485   -92 |60|
      |  3 |   758|  758     0 |  743   -15 |  728   -15 |  718   -10 | 3|
      |  4 |   514|  514     0 |  519     5 |  517    -2 |  517     0 | 2|
      |  5 |    87|   87     0 |   87     0 |   87     0 |   87     0 | 0|
      |  6 |  1078| 1079     1 | 1079     0 | 1079     0 | 1079     0 | 4|
      +----+------+------------+------------+------------+------------+--+
           | 26322|26286   -36 |26250   -36 |25816  -434 |25714  -102 |
           +------+------------+------------+------------+------------+

     -----------------------------------------------------------------

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 28                  14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                                  ECHOING
     =================================================================

     North American Backbone Echo Changes [May-Jun]
     by Lisa Gronke, 1:105/16
     [e-mail]

     Summary of backbone & quasi-backbone echo changes during May & Jun.

     Brought to you courtesy of (unix) diff.

     diff (backbone.na + backbone.no) 04-May-97 06-Jul-97 [edited].

     Echotag change
     --------------
     < WIN97               Windows 97 Echo     [old echotag]
     > MEMPHIS             Windows 97 Echo     [new echotag]

     Added to the backbone
     ---------------------
     > ASCII_ART           G-rated ASCII Art Showcase
     > ATM                 Amateur Telescope Making
     > ET_SIGHTINGS        ET_SIGHTINGS Discussion Conference
     > FIDS_DEV            Fidonet/Internet Distribution System Developers
                           Forum
     > FIDS_SYSOP          Fidonet/Internet Distribution System Sysops
                           Forum
     > HDTV                High Definition TeleVision Conference
     > INTBBS_WK           International BBS Week echo
     > MOD1000             Tandy Model 1000 Personal Computers Conference
     > NATURE              (low traffic since  6/1/97)
     > OFFICE97            Microsoft Office 97 Support Echo
     > POOH                Pooh and Friends
     > REPUBLICAN          Republican GOP Party Policy and Events
                           Discussion
     > SHOTGUN_USERS       Shotgun Professional SVGA BBS Support
     > TECH-CHAT           TECHnical-CHAT conference
     > WC4_32BIT           Wildcat 4 32-Bit
     > WHITEHOUSE_TALK     Discussions of current White House Press
                           Releases
     > Z1_FIDONET          FidoNet Echo Distribution discussion

     Removed from the backbone or quasi-backbone
     -------------------------------------------
     < ANIMANIACS          Discussions about the TV show Animaniacs
     < AOP                 (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < AVICULTURE          (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < BARBIE              (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < BIOMED              (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < CAD-CAM             (low traffic since  3/1/97)
     < CARE_GIVER          (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < CHICORA_GEN         (not in EchoList since  4/1/97)
     < DARKSOFT            (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < DEMOCRATS           (low traffic since  3/1/97)
     < ECSTASY             (low traffic since  3/1/97)
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 29                  14 Jul 1997


     < FLAME               National Flame! Echo
     < JAZZ                Jazz and related topics
     < LASERPUB            (low traffic since  3/1/97)
     < MOD_COUNCIL         (low traffic since  3/1/97)
     < MS_SUPPORT          (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < NATIVE_ISSUES       (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < NETLINE             (low traffic since  3/1/97)
     < OMEGA_SOFT          (low traffic since  3/1/97)
     < PROBLEM_CHILD       (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < RARE_CONDITION      (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < SIP_SAA             (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < TREK_FAN_ORG        (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < ULTRABETA           (low traffic since  3/1/97)
     < VHEAL               (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < VOCAL               (low traffic since  3/1/97)
     < WRESTLE_RPG         (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     < ZMODEM              (low traffic since  4/1/97)
     -----------------------------------------------------------------
     o There are 734 echos in backbone.na [06-Jul-97] (down 29)
     o There are 73 echos in backbone.no [06-Jul-97] (up 18)
     o for a total of 807 backbone & quasi-backbone echo (down 11)

     -----------------------------------------------------------------

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 30                  14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                              COMIX IN ASCII
     =================================================================


     --- Following message extracted from ASCII_ART @ 1:18/14 ---
         By Christopher Baker on Sun Jul 13 17:05:57 1997

     From: SB Perelman
     To: All
     Date: 06 Jul 97  07:07:33
     Subj: BovinEducation

     All I Need To Know About Life I Learned From A Cow:

                                            __.----.___
                ||            ||  (\(__)/)-'||      ;--` ||
               _||____________||___`(QQ)'___||______;____||_
               -||------------||----)  (----||-----------||-
               _||____________||___(o  o)___||______;____||_
               -||------------||----`--'----||-----------||-
                ||            ||       `|| ||| || ||     ||jgs
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

      1. Wake up in a happy MOOO-d.
      2. Don't cry over spilled MILK.
      3. When chewing your cud, remember: There's no fat, no calories,
         no cholesterol, and  no taste!
      4. The grass is green on the other side of the fence.
      5. Turn the UDDER cheek and MOOO-ve on.
      6. Seize every opportunity and MILK it for all its worth!
      7. It's better to be seen and not HERD.
      8. Honor thy FODDER and thy mother and all your UDDER relatives.
      9. Never take any BULL from anybody.
     10. Always let them know who's the BOSSY.
     11. Stepping on COWpies brings good luck.
     12. Black and white is always an appropriate fashion statement.
     13. Don't forget to COW-nt your blessings every day.

     -joan
     --                                          .-.
                                              {\('v')/}
              (\_/)        ____________________`(   )'_____
          (  =(^Y^)=      (_ [e-mail] ^^" "^^
       ____\_(m___m)_________)tark, joan
       ASCII art: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/

       ---

             o       SB Perelman, 1:103/505
           )/\,[_)   [e-mail]
           `T7 ]=[   Moderator & Curator: ASCII_ART
          ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

      Origin: Shofar _ 714-838-3837 _ ASCII & Ye Shall Receive (1:103/505)

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 31                  14 Jul 1997


     -----------------------------------------------------------------

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 32                  14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                                  NOTICES
     =================================================================

                                Future History

      1 Aug 1997
        International FidoNet PENPAL [Echo] meeting in Dijon, France

     13 Oct 1997
        Thanksgiving Day, Canada.

      1 Dec 1997
        World AIDS Day.

     10 Dec 1997
        Nobel Day, Sweden.

     12 Jan 1998
        HAL 9000 is one year old today.

     30 Apr 1998
        Queens Day, Holland.

     22 May 1998
        Expo '98 World Exposition in Lisbon (Portugal) opens.

      1 Dec 1998
        Fifteenth Anniversary of release of Fido version 1 by
        Tom Jennings.

     31 Dec 1999
        Hogmanay, Scotland. The New Year that can't be missed.

      1 Jan 2000
        The 20th Century, C.E., is still taking place thru 31 Dec.

     15 Sep 2000
        Sydney (Australia) Summer Olympiad opens.

      1 Jan 2001
        This is the actual start of the new millennium, C.E.

     -- If YOU have something which you would like to see in this
        Future History, please send a note to the FidoNews Editor.

     -----------------------------------------------------------------

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 33                  14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                            FIDONEWS PUBLIC-KEY
     =================================================================


     [this must be copied out to a file starting at column 1 or
      it won't process under PGP as a valid public-key]


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     File-request FNEWSKEY from 1:1/23 [1:18/14] or download it from the
     Rights On! BBS at 1-904-409-7040 anytime except 0100-0130 ET and Zone
     1 ZMH at 1200-9600+ HST/V32B. The FidoNews key is also available on
     the FidoNews homepage listed in the Masthead information.

     -----------------------------------------------------------------
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 34                  14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                            FIDONET BY INTERNET
     =================================================================

     This is a list of all FidoNet-related sites reported to the Editor as
     of this appearance.

     ============

     FidoNet:

       Homepage     http://www.fidonet.org
       FidoNews     http://ddi.digital.net/~cbaker84/fidonews.html
       HTML FNews   http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6894/
       WWW sources  http://www.scms.rgu.ac.uk/students/cs_yr94/lk/fido.html
       FTSC page    http://www2.blaze.net.au/ftsc.html
       Echomail     http://www.portal.ca/~awalker/index.html
       WebRing      http://ddi.digital.net/~cbaker84/fnetring.html

     ============

     Zone 1:       http://www.z1.fidonet.org

       Region 10:  http://www.psnw.com/~net205/region10.html

       Region 11:  http://oeonline.com/~garyg/region11/

       Region 13:  http://www.smalltalkband.com/st01000.htm

       Region 14:  http://www.netins.net/showcase/fidonet/

       Region 15:  [disappeared?]

       Region 16:  http://www.tiac.net/users/satins/region16.htm

       Region 17:  http://www.portal.ca/~awalker/region17.htm
           REC17:  http://www.westsound.com/ptmudge/

       Region 18:  http://www.citicom.com/fido.html

       Region 19:  http://www.compconn.net

     ============

     Zone 2:       http://www.z2.fidonet.org

     ZEC2:         http://www.proteus.demon.co.uk/zec.htm
     Zone 2 Elist: http://www.fbone.ch/z2_elist/

       Region 20:  http://www.fidonet.pp.se (in Swedish)

       Region 24:  http://www.swb.de/personal/flop/gatebau.html (in German)

       Region 25:
                   http://members.aol.com/Net254/

     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 35                  14 Jul 1997


       Region 27:  http://telematique.org/ft/r27.htm

       Region 29:  http://www.rtfm.be/fidonet/  (in French)

       Region 30:  http://www.fidonet.ch  (in Swiss)

       Region 34:  http://www.pobox.com/cnb/r34.htm  (in Spanish)
           REC34:  http://pobox.com/~chr

       Region 36:  http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/7207/

       Region 41:  http://www.fidonet.gr (in Greek and English)

       Region 48:  http://www.fidonet.org.pl

     ============

     Zone 3:       http://www.z3.fidonet.org

     ============

     Zone 4:       (not yet listed)

       Region 90:
         Net 904:  http://members.tripod.com/~net904 (in Spanish)

     ============

     Zone 5:       (not yet listed)

     ============

     Zone 6:       http://www.z6.fidonet.org

     ============

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     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 36                  14 Jul 1997


     =================================================================
                           FIDONEWS INFORMATION
     =================================================================

     ------- FIDONEWS MASTHEAD AND CONTACT INFORMATION -------

     Editor: Christopher Baker

     Editors Emeritii: Tom Jennings, Thom Henderson, Dale Lovell,
                       Vince Perriello, Tim Pozar, Sylvia Maxwell,
                       Donald Tees

     "FidoNews Editor"
         FidoNet  1:1/23
         BBS  1-904-409-7040,  300/1200/2400/14400/V.32bis/HST(ds)

      more addresses:
         Christopher Baker -- 1:18/14, [e-mail]
                                       [e-mail]
                                       [e-mail]

     (Postal Service mailing address)
         FidoNews Editor
         P.O. Box 471
         Edgewater, FL 32132-0471
         U.S.A.


     voice:  1-904-409-3040 [1400-2100 ET only, please]
                            [1800-0100 UTC/GMT]

     ------------------------------------------------------

     FidoNews is published weekly by and for the members of the FIDONET
     INTERNATIONAL AMATEUR ELECTRONIC MAIL system.  It is a compilation
     of individual articles contributed by their authors or their
     authorized agents.  The contribution of articles to this compilation
     does not diminish the rights of the authors.  OPINIONS EXPRESSED in
     these articles ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHORS and not necessarily those of
     FidoNews.

     Authors retain copyright on individual works; otherwise FidoNews is
     Copyright 1997 Christopher Baker.  All rights reserved.  Duplication
     and/or distribution permitted for noncommercial purposes only.  For
     use in other circumstances, please contact the original authors, or
     the Editor.

                            =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=

     OBTAINING COPIES: The most recent issue of FidoNews in electronic
     form may be obtained from the FidoNews Editor via manual download or
     file-request, or from various sites in the FidoNet and Internet.
     PRINTED COPIES may be obtained by sending SASE to the above postal
     address.  File-request FIDONEWS for the current Issue.  File-request
     FNEWS for the current month in one archive.  Or file-request specific
     back Issue filenames in distribution format [FNEWSEnn.ZIP] for a
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 37                  14 Jul 1997


     particular Issue.  Monthly Volumes are available as FNWSmmmy.ZIP
     where mmm = three letter month [JAN - DEC] and y = last digit of the
     current year [7], i.e., FNWSFEB7.ZIP for all the Issues from Feb 97.

     Annual volumes are available as FNEWSn.ZIP where n = the Volume number
     1 - 14 for 1984 - 1997, respectively. Annual Volume archives range in
     size from 48K to 1.4M.


     INTERNET USERS: FidoNews is available via:

                          http://www.fidonet.org/fidonews.htm
                          ftp://ftp.fidonet.org/pub/fidonet/fidonews/
                          ftp://ftp.aminet.org/pub/aminet/comm/fido/

                                      *=*=*

     You may obtain an email subscription to FidoNews by sending email to:

                          [e-mail]

     with a Subject line of: subscribe fnews-edist

     and no message in the message body. To remove your name from the email
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     message to the same address above.

                                      *=*=*

     You can read the current FidoNews Issue in HTML format at:

                          http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6894/

     STAR SOURCE for ALL Past Issues via FTP and file-request -
     Available for FReq from 1:396/1 or by anonymous FTP from:

                          ftp://ftp.sstar.com/fidonet/fnews/

     Each yearly archive also contains a listing of the Table-of-Contents
     for that year's issues.  The total set is currently about 11 Megs.

                                 =*=*=*=

     The current week's FidoNews and the FidoNews public-key are now also
     available almost immediately after publication on the Editor's new
     homepage on the World Wide Web at:

                  http://ddi.digital.net/~cbaker84/fidonews.html

     There are also links there to jim barchuk's HTML FidoNews source and
     to John Souvestre's FTP site for the archives. There is also an email
     link for sending in an article as message text. Drop on over.

                            =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=

     A PGP generated public-key is available for the FidoNews Editor from
     FIDONEWS 14-28               Page 38                  14 Jul 1997


     1:1/23 [1:18/14] by file-request for FNEWSKEY or by download from
     Rights On! BBS at 1-904-409-7040 as FIDONEWS.ASC in File Area 18.  It
     is also posted twice a month into the PKEY_DROP Echo available on the
     Zone 1 Echomail Backbone.

                                *=*=*=*=*

     SUBMISSIONS: You are encouraged to submit articles for publication in
     FidoNews. Article submission requirements are contained in the file
     ARTSPEC.DOC, available from the FidoNews Editor, or file-requestable
     from 1:1/23 [1:18/14] as file "ARTSPEC.DOC".  ALL Zone Coordinators
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     "Fido", "FidoNet" and the dog-with-diskette are U.S. registered
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     and are used with permission.

             "Disagreement is actually necessary,
              or we'd all have to get in fights
              or something to amuse ourselves
              and create the requisite chaos."
                                -Tom Jennings

      -30-

     -----------------------------------------------------------------