From: root@cltr.uq.oz.au (Hulk Hogan)
Subject: Re: CFD: newgroup "aus.censorship", was Re:
Organization: Centre for Language Teaching and Research, Uni of Queensland, AUSTRALIA.
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 14:05:06 GMT

bambi@bu.oz.au (David J. Hughes) writes:
>Just the facts m'am  :-
>	1.  Inclusion or exclusion of services provided by any given
>	    service provider are operation decisions made [...]
>	    providing the best *OVERALL* service possible.

>	2.  The service provider in this case is [ ...]   AVCC

>	3.  Nothing is stopping you from negotiating a feed from an OS
>	    site and calling them via UUCP to get your missing groups. [...]

>If I can't get everything I want from McDonalds, I don't expect them to
>shuffle their operational funding and resources to cater for me (even if
>"me" is a group of people, albeit the vast minority).  I pay them money for 
>my burger in the same way institutions pay AARNet membership.  If I don't
>like what the good old "Golden Arches" offers I guess I can go down the
>road to H.J.'s (or directly fund the making of the "bambi burger").

Here's a couple more facts...

In June 1990, Geoff Huston posted an article saying basically that
as a result of a newspaper article (the Abernathy article, for those
of you who recall it), attention has been focused on alt.sex* and
alt.drugs,  that AARNet was of the opinion that material was probably
illegal under obscenity and telecommunications laws, and as a result,
AARNet was banning it, and blocking postings in and out at munnari. 
Transmitting the material through any AARNet links  (including domestic
links), using NNTPSERVERs in the US or .... was explicitly forbidden.
I argued on newsgroups against it...

When I raised this issue *again* a few months ago, kre (I think) posted
that the ban was put in place because the US end of the link requested
it. No mention of morality, legality or any such matters.  Again I argued,
saying that the link capacity had been vastly improved since the time of
the ban whilst the volume in these groups has stayed pretty constant, the
cost of importing it once rather could be a win, since there ARE a number
of people who use foreign NNTPSERVERs to read banned groups.  Seems
to have fallen upon deaf ears.

A little while ago, I found I had stored the original article from
Geoff...  It didn't mention anything about the US end requesting it.

>Same applies here.  Are you generally happy with the services provided
>by AARNet?  Would you prefer you didn't have access to the net?  Would
>you prefer non-interactive access like the good old days?  Would you
>like to put up the extra funding required to extend the service base to
>cover your "requirements"?

I was around in the days of ACSnet...  Of email to the US taking a day or
more.  Of replying to news articles only to find the thread had died
long before it got into my news spool area.  A measure of how much we 
rely on the net is that it seems like a disaster nowadays if a link is
down for an hour... I do not want to go back to the old days, and not just
because the ACSnet software had a zillion options on too many commands :-)

However the network is there. All our Universities contribute funds to
pay for it.  Yet we seem to have little or no say, whether we be users
or system admins or .... The best we can do is post to aus.aarnet, and
hope that Geoff or Peter in their copious spare time >;-) will see it,
be pursuaded to agree with us and ....   AARNet needs more power sharing.

>In short, I, like the vast majority, am happy with the services provided
>with the net particularly as the empasized focus of operations is 
>legitimate "Academic and Research" activities.

The network is fine. Geoff and Peter have done exemplary jobs. In the
vast majority of cases, the good guys have won. And I'd rather not
comment on exactly what I mean by "bad guys".  One exception to this,
IMHO is the blockage/ban on various newsgroups... See my previous articles
for arguments against this ban...

However I see the fact that had it NOT been Geoff and Peter  in their
jobs, had it been others, then the "bad guys" may very well have won a
lot of other things, and AARNet might well be VERY different today...
And that is a problem with the current set up.

There is no  Hungry Jack's  down the road that we can go to to get 
a thick shake to go with our MacDonald's burgers, if we don't like 
MacDonald's shakes.  We are not purchasing merchandise from AARNet,
we are PART of AARNet. We fund it. We use it. We provide services
on it for other users. We should be able to have some say in it...

/\ndy
--
Andrew M. Jones,  Systems Programmer, 	Email: {root,andy}@lingua.cltr.uq.oz.au
Centre for Lang. Teaching & Research, 	UUCP: uunet!lingua.cltr.uq.oz.au!andy
University of Queensland,  St. Lucia, 	Phone: +61  7 365 6915 (Use 07 in Oz)
Brisbane,  Qld. AUSTRALIA  4072    	Fax: +61 7 365 7077    IRC: HulkHogan

"No matter what hits the fan, it's never distributed evenly....."