HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: reed@snake.tc.cornell.edu (Michael G. Reed)
Subject: Re: Child porn posting investigated by FBI
Followup-To: comp.org.eff.talk
Reply-To: reed@TC.Cornell.EDU
Organization: Cornell National Supercomputing Facility
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1992 02:13:47 GMT

In article <1992Nov20.232602.9842@clarinet.com>, brad@clarinet.com (Brad Templeton) writes:
|> According to our story this morning from UPI (in clari.tw.computers) the
|> FBI is investigating the alleged posting of child porn to the net from
|> Cornell.
|> 
|> The student in question's dorm room has been raided (!) but no charges have
|> been filed.
|> 
|> Lovely.

Yes, and just like clockwork Cornell started to restrict the campus newsfeed.
No more a.b.p.e tree (not that I frequent the area, just found it interesting
when the newsgroups showed up missing....).

|> -- 
|> Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Sunnyvale, CA 408/296-0366

-Michael
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael G. Reed                                         (reed@TC.Cornell.EDU)
Cornell National Supercomputing Facility
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Why be normal, it's boring; and boring people should be shot.

Note:  These are not the views of my employer (and probably not mine either).
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.admin.policy,rec.music.synth,rec.music.makers.synth
From: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly)
Organization: The Man With Ten Cats
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 05:27:21 GMT
Reply-To: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly)

In article <1992Nov16.155802.25830@news.columbia.edu> dan@cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis) writes:
>In article <9211150013.37@rmkhome.UUCP> rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
>>
>>But the bottom of the line federal line in the US is:
>>
>   Is this a federal law? I was under the impression that it was a state
>controlled area.

You're right.  I was mistaken.

>>Depictions of children under the age of 18 engaged in sex or posed to
>>sexually tittilate are illegal.
>>
>  How do you define "posed to sexually tittilate"?  Most laws on child porn
>are very bad. I gues most such laws actually illegalize much more than
>than what we would call "pornography". They are usually criticised as being 
>overbroad.

In Massachusetts it merely comes down to a naked child is pornography and/or
obscene.

>>The government does not have to prove whether it is pornographic or not.
>>
>  Indeed not. I think they did prior to 1982. BTW, it is not "pornographic",
>but "obscene", and that's what we were debating.

In Massachusetts, all depictions of naked children that show the genitals
are obscene.

>  The point is that we want to stop child porn not because it is obscene, but
>because it inevitably derives from child sexual abuse. If we belive that
>children under a certain age cannot consent, then it must be against consent 
>that we force them to engage in sexual activity (whether that activity is
>actual sex or just sexual poses).

That's right.

>  Ideally, child porn laws would become part of the general child abuse laws,
>and finally sever the connection between porn and child-porn.

That makes sense to me.

In the meantime, I will not gate a.b.p.e through my system, as I don't want
to spend my time being a censor.

I took news.sysadmin out of the newsgroups line, as somebody somewhere has
it aliased to news.admin.technical, which is a moderated group.

-- 

Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.UUCP	unixland!rmkhome!rmk	rmk@frog.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.admin.policy
From: jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz)
Subject: Re: Harmlessness of a.b.p.e (long, but read it anyway)
Organization: Mount Holyoke College
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 22:32:57 GMT

In article <1992Nov20.012853.14667@news.columbia.edu> dan@cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis) writes:
>   I think that if they aren't being hurt, that most creators would be happy
>that others are making good use of thier works. At least works that they
>have exposed to the public. Since I think a.b.p.e is harmless, I think most
>creators wouldn't object to it. I don't think I would.

Humph!  You don't think you would do you?  Why do I get a funny
feeling you haven't ever "created" anything?

Most "creators" (i.e. artists, authors, software designers, etc.)
copyright their works *precisely* because they feel quite strongly
that since aforementioned works are the result of their labour and
creativity it should be their priviledge to retain control over what
is done with said works.

Note that even "creators" who give their works away without financial
compensation (such as for example the Free Software Foundation) feel
this way most of the time and thus claim copyright of their work.

- Jurgen Botz
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.admin.policy
From: dan@cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis)
Subject: Re: What is pornography, anyway?
Organization: Columbia University, Dept. of Biological Sciences.
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 20:07:28 GMT

In article <9211180027.36@rmkhome.UUCP> rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
>In article <1992Nov16.155802.25830@news.columbia.edu> dan@cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis) writes:
>
>>>The government does not have to prove whether it is pornographic or not.
>>>
>>  Indeed not. I think they did prior to 1982. BTW, it is not "pornographic",
>>but "obscene", and that's what we were debating.
>
>In Massachusetts, all depictions of naked children that show the genitals
>are obscene.
>
   I think you are overstating the law. Child porn laws don't (anymore) have
to deal with 'obscene'. A work is illegal because it sexually explaoits
children.
   Obscene refers only to non-child-porn. Pornography is legal. Obscene
works (of whatever description) can be banned from certain localities.

   So you don't refer to obscenity when talking about child porn.

DanZ (drifting further away from news.admin)

-- 
This article is for entertainment purposes only. Any facts, opinions,
narratives or ideas contained herein are not necessarily true, and do
not necessarily represent the views of any particular person.  

Newsgroups: news.admin,news.sysadmin,alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.d,news.admin.policy
From: mbrandan@gmuvax2.gmu.edu (Mario Brandan)
Subject: Re: a.b.p.e. distribution (was, Re: Does USENET condone CHILD
Organization: George Mason University, Fairfax, Va.
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 03:32:10 GMT

In article <BxL4J5.147@servalan.servalan.com> rmtodd@servalan.servalan.com (Richard Todd) writes:
>system administrator *does* have a Quadra 700 on his desk; in addition to 
>being his desktop machine, it's the news server, and he puts up with the
>(decidedly non-trivial) load providing Usenet service to the whole campus 
>puts on his machine.  

Nobody forced him to do that right?  Fine, what is your point?

>
>Look, *you* think Usenet is important.  *I* think Usenet is important, so
>much so that I bought my own machine for it, with my own money (which is
>probably more than *you*'ve ever done).  But the people who sign purchase
>orders at Universities *don't* think this.  Wake up and smell the coffee.
>
Buddy, what you do with your money is your business, if you have
problems with what people want, take your server else where!

>You think disk drives are cheap.  Fine.  *You* send us one.  We prefer
>the 1.2GB Fujitsu SCSI drives.  Write me and I'll tell you the address to
>put on the package.  Put up or shut up.

That's the kind of drive you probably have!  Maybe if you looked around
you'd find cheap ones so you can store more info.  You know, I just
think you have an attitude problem  I really didn't like your language
either, if you want to write to this newsgroup, you should straighten
out your foul language.  It takes up disk space buddy!

Newsgroups: news.admin,news.admin.policy
From: dan@cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis)
Subject: Re: a.b.p.e. distribution 
Organization: Columbia University, Dept. of Biological Sciences.
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 22:09:37 GMT

In article <BxvKG8.73s@unix.amherst.edu> twpierce@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce) writes:
>In article <1992Nov16.232911.6987@news.columbia.edu> dan@cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis) writes:
>
>>I suggest that if you aren't harming anyone, then what you
>>are doing is OK. Do you want to argue with that statement?
>
>Fine by me.  Try telling it to the judge.
>
   Good, so you carry a.b.p.e? I'm not asking any judge to carry the group.

>> [about Event Horizons]  Unless I am very wrong, EH was claiming
>>ownership of the images, and threatening other BBS's. It makes perfect sence
>>to me that Playboy would sue.
>
>Gosh.  I thought that that didn't hurt pornography publishers.  Why on
>earth would they sue?
>
   Don't be snide. Claiming ownership is clearly different from freely
distributing. I claim that free distribution doesn't harm the publishers, but
transfer of ownership would.

>>>They do think it does them harm and it is not up to us to decide whether
>>>it causes them harm.
>>
>>  I deny this (the first sentance). I believe they do not think usenet is
>>causing them harm, or they would have taken action before.
>
>There's such a thing as waiting to enact a suit until a legal climate
>favors a particular injunction, you know.

   Then why haven't they pursued a case against other pay BBS's? We need more
than just the suggestion that they object to stand against the complete
failure of the publishers to pursue this. It may change in the future, of
course.

DanZ

-- 
This article is for entertainment purposes only. Any facts, opinions,
narratives or ideas contained herein are not necessarily true, and do
not necessarily represent the views of any particular person.
From: svdhara@mailbox.syr.edu (Sastry Dhara)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: adding newsgroups
Keywords: novice news administrator
Date: 20 Nov 92 06:43:43 GMT
Organization: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

I am a novice news administrator.In fact I am a green-horn.
My first assignment is to add newsgroups(local) and a moderator.

Can somebody give me the details? Or show me the way where I should
look for the details?

Sastry Dhara
Network Systems
Syracuse University
Syracuse NY           email:svdhara@mailbox.syr.edu
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
From: rri!tim@vtserf.cc.vt.edu (Tim Buck)
Subject: Help with expire
Organization: Recognition Research Inc., Blacksburg, VA
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1992 00:36:31 GMT


I'm having some problems with expire.  I'm running Bnews under Interactive
Unix.

Expire has been reporting "History write failed" during expiration each night
for a couple of weeks.  I tried to run 'expire -h' and 'expire -r', and I get
a message about "Bogus local distribution rejected", then expire exits.

What do these messages mean, and what do I do about them? 

Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
From: warren@itexjct.jct.ac.il (Warren Burstein)
Subject: newgroup message with blank group
Organization: ITEX, Jerusalem, Israel
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 15:25:56 GMT

Last week someone sent out a newgroup message in which the group was
missing.  C news obligingly created an entry in the active file
 000000000 000000000 y
(I didn't count the number of zeros).  expire complains that there is
a group with a bad name, and I've been getting these messages by mail
for a few days.  Then I started to get messages that the disk was
full.  Is it possible that when expire finds a line like this that it
quits?  If so, I think that either creation of groups that expire
can't handle should be disallowed, or expire should just skip bad
groups and continue.
-- 
/|/-\/-\       The entire world		Jerusalem
 |__/__/_/     is a very strange gauze pad.
 |warren@      But the Kibo
/ nysernet.org is hungry.
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
From: eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)
Subject: Re: Help wanted on Unparsable dates
Organization: Twin Sun, Inc
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 01:08:30 GMT

rsalz@rodan.uu.net (Rich Salz) writes:

>In <bkhAb0F0@twinsun.com> eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert) writes:
>>Unfortunately, the RFCs notwithstanding, both C News and INN retransmit
>>articles with nonconforming dates.
>INN does not do this.  If the date is invalid, it rejects the article.
>If the Expires header is invalid, it ignores it.  Perhaps this is what
>Paul means?

I wasn't thinking about Expires, although that's a good point.
I was thinking that since INN's definition of ``valid date'' is more
generous than the RFCs', INN doesn't reject all nonconforming dates.
E.g. from looking at inn/lib/parsedate.y,
it appears that INN accepts and retransmits nonsense like

	Date: 1:2:3pm Serendipitous Tuesday, 13 Nov. 092

under the impression that it's equivalent to

	Date: Friday, 13 Nov 1992 13:02:03 GMT

Propagating such nonsense causes problems for folks like Lyons who have
stricter date parsers.  If you're going to accept nonsense, you must
rewrite it before retransmitting it; if you don't believe in rewriting
headers, you mustn't retransmit articles with nonconforming headers.
Unfortunately, neither C News nor INN conforms to the RFCs on this point,
at least not yet.

Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: newgroup message with blank group
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 04:26:41 GMT

In article <2437@itexjct.jct.ac.il> warren@itexjct.jct.ac.il (Warren Burstein) writes:
>... Is it possible that when expire finds a line like this that it
>quits? 

Expire's business is to destroy files.  The general policy followed in
its code is that erring on the side of caution is preferable, so most
kinds of errors are considered fatal and the expiry is not done.

>If so, I think that either creation of groups that expire
>can't handle should be disallowed...

The most modern release of C News (the Performance Release) rejects
attempts to create groups with empty names.
-- 
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry

Newsgroups: news.admin.technical,news.sysadmin
From: scott@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Scott Hazen Mueller)
Subject: Are you aliasing news.sysadmin to news.admin.technical?
Followup-To: news.admin.technical
Summary: don't
Keywords: goof
Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 06:48:55 GMT

A recent rash of submissions to news.admin.technical on the topic of
child pornography leads me to suspect that there is a B News site out there
what has aliased news.sysadmin (one of the groups the discussion has been
posted to) to news.admin.technical.  Please, do not do this; it fills my
mailbox with all kinds of cruft.

-- 
Moderator, news.admin.technical; submissions to natech@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG.
Moderator, ba.announce; submissions to ba-announce@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG.
Moderator, rec.arts.sf.announce; submissions to sf-announce@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG.
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
From: tgll@datasci.co.uk (Tim Lyons)
Subject: Help wanted on sender field
Reply-To: tgll@datasci.co.uk (Tim Lyons)
Organization: Data Sciences, Farnborough, Hampshire, UK
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 17:09:27 GMT

Why is the sender field in news articles getting changed?

I am using nntp 1.5.11 and b-news on a sun.  I have the SPOOLNEWS
and SPOOLINEWS options set in news.  I have set POSTER in nntp
to be "nntp-server".  I post a news article to a local newsgroup
using nntp, and if I look at the spoolfile (in /usr/spool/news/.rnews)
the sender says "nntp-server@datasci.co.uk" as I would expect.
However, if I run rnews -U, the sender gets changed to "tgll@datasci.co.uk".
in the actual news file. WHY?

rnews is a symbolic link to inews, and inews is owned by news and is
setuid and setgid.  When I run rnews, I am logged in as tgll, should this
matter?  I thought it might be due to aliases in the mailfiles, so
I removed the aliases for nntp-server, but that didn't make any difference.

I have now tried running rnews logged in as news, and now the sender is
changed to news@datasci.co.uk.  But normally, when news is sent out,
rnews wouldn't change the sender, so what is going on?

Thanks for any help
Tim Lyons

Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
From: huff@mcclb0.med.nyu.edu (Edward J. Huff)
Subject: moderated listed as unmoderated
Followup-To: news.admin.technical
Organization: NYU Chemistry Dept.
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 21:46:08 GMT

I am trying to verify the true cause of the following events.

I posted a note to bionet.biology.computational and got this reply:

>Please stop bombarding the nets with this message. I now have
>received 38 copies of it from various nets that forward to other nets.

I forwarded the complaint to the bionet people, and received this reply:

>This is not a loop problem.  When someone posts to a moderated
>newsgroup some news systems continue to bombard the moderator address
>until the message is posted.  The software can be configured to
>prevent this I am told but unfortunately we can not chack every news
>software installation around the world to make sure that it is working
>correctly.  The best thing is for the moderator to post the note
>promptly.

Then I forwarded that to my local Usenet guru.  He replied:

>bionet.biology.computational is not listed as moderated in my active
>file.  that means it gets sent to sites instead of to the moderator;
>i will change it on cmcl2, perhaps that's where the problem lies.

Will someone who understands this please send me e-mail which
I can forward to the appropriate people explaining

(1)  How to use the checkgroups posting to get the moderation status right.
(Is there an FAQ on this?)
(2)  Is it ever the case that this bombardment happens when the moderation
status is correct?
(3)  A short note that I can append to my next bionet.biology.computational
posting which tells people how to find out if the moderation status of
the newsgroup is correct before posting.

--
Edward J. Huff   huff@mcclb0.med.nyu.edu   (212)998-8465
Keck Laboratory for Biomolecular Imaging
NYU Chemistry Deptartment, 31 Washington Place, New York NY 10003
Posted from the new Mac NewsWatcher 1.3d5
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
From: eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)
Subject: Re: Help wanted on Unparsable dates
Organization: Twin Sun, Inc
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 21:44:32 GMT

tgll@datasci.co.uk (Tim Lyons) writes:

>Is there some change I should have made to my getdate routine,
>or are there just a lot of incorrect values being transmitted?

The latter.  But it wouldn't hurt for you to upgrade to either C News
or INN -- they both have better date parsers than B News did.

Unfortunately, the RFCs notwithstanding, both C News and INN retransmit
articles with nonconforming dates.  Most likely your news feed has
switched to C News or INN, and it's neither rejecting nor fixing
articles with nonconforming dates, which leaves you with the mess.

Part of the problem is that the RFCs aren't crystal clear on exactly
what's allowed in a date line.  E.g. in the line

	Date: 8 Nov 1992 00:22:34+0900 (JST)

Is a space required before the `+'?  Is the trailing `(JST)' comment OK?
Implementors disagree.
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
From: rsalz@rodan.uu.net (Rich Salz)
Subject: Re: Help wanted on Unparsable dates
Organization: UUNET Technologies Inc, Falls Church, VA
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 17:45:25 GMT

In <bkhAb0F0@twinsun.com> eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert) writes:
>Unfortunately, the RFCs notwithstanding, both C News and INN retransmit
>articles with nonconforming dates.
INN does not do this.  If the date is invalid, it rejects the article.
If the Expires header is invalid, it ignores it.  Perhaps this is what
Paul means?

>Part of the problem is that the RFCs aren't crystal clear on exactly
>what's allowed in a date line.
If it is not clear, then INN can't be passing nonconforming articles, can
it? :-)
	/r$

Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
From: rsalz@uunet.uu.net (Rich Salz)
Subject: Re: Help needed with INN
Organization: UUNET Technologies Inc, Falls Church, VA
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 21:35:33 GMT

In <BLYMN.92Nov15174625@siren.awadi.com.au>, you write in news.admin.technical:
:After a bit of to and froing between me and the sys ad of our news
:feed we worked out that there was a hung innxmit process on the feed
:machine.  Killing that restarted our news feed...for a while.  The
:newsfeed stopped again and would not run until I had killed innd and
:restarted it on my machine.  Note that the innd was functional during
:this time as it was still servicing nnrp requests.
:
:Both hangs were associated with the
:network between my machine and our newsfeed being down for a while, it
:seems to me that inn is not recovering from a network failure.  Has
:anyone had a similar experience?

Perhaps your network software (and on the remote end, too, since their innxmit
is hanging) is returning some uncommon error code that innd does not
recognize.  Wait for the hang to happen again and try doing a ping or
other network diagnostic between the two hosts.

If your network software returns any kind of error code back from the
read or write syscalls, then innd will notice and take the right action.

I believe that I have Pyramid's have a problem along these lines.
	/r$

Newsgroups: news.admin,news.admin.policy,rec.music.synth,rec.music.makers.synth
From: bogstad@blaze.cs.jhu.edu (Bill Bogstad)
Subject: Re: STRAW POLL ON NEWSGROUP RENAMING  (more synth traffic)
Organization: Johns Hopkins Computer Science Department, Baltimore, MD
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 18:35:05 GMT


>Newsgroups: news.admin,news.admin.policy,rec.music.synth
					 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

	What no rec.music.makers.synth?  Seems like you are deliberately
trying to bias your poll by leaving out people who have made the switch and
therefore see no need to follow all the news.* groups anymore.  Which they
shouldn't until a valid RFD appears in news.announce.newgroups.  (which is
unclear at this point.)  And in any case, following news.admin.* would
generally not be required anyway.  News.groups is the place for such
discussion.

					Bill Bogstad

[I've added rec.music.makers.synth to this and included the full article
below so that readers of that group can participate in your "poll".]

In article <EMCGUIRE.92Nov15175242@fuller.intellection.com> emcguire@intellection.com (Ed McGuire) writes:
>Please reply by mail to the mailbox <ed@intellection.com>.
>
>1.  Do you read rec.music.synth?
>	(yes/no)
>
>2.  On the issue of rec.music.synth renaming, do you
>	(a) strongly favor rec.music.synth, please proceed with revote
>	(b) strongly favor rec.music.makers.synth, please leave as is
>	(c) strongly favor dropping the dispute, please leave me alone
>	(d) not care as long as a synth group exists
>-- 
>Ed McGuire                   1603 LBJ Freeway, Suite 780
>Systems Administrator/       Dallas, Texas 75234
> Member of Technical Staff   214/620-2100, FAX 214/484-8110
>Intellection, Inc.           <ed@intellection.com>


Newsgroups: news.admin,rec.music.synth