tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) writes: [snip]
There are of course now more than 20,000 newsgroups. Searches and greps of the newsgroup list are a way to find potentially relevant newsgroups for posting a message or finding messages of interest.
(As is well-known, the Usenet Cabal gets its orders from the Bilderbergers as to which newsgroups fit in with New World Order sanctioned epistemologies.)
Some are saying there is an alternate method. With the advent of search engines which can index messages on the Usenet (and in Webspace, but the idea is the same), why not this alternative: put your message in a bottle and just throw it into the "sea" of possible messages. Let search engines find the messages of interest (modulo a day or two of latency, as the spiders reach the space where the message was placed). No newsgroups needed.
Permit me to go off in an orthogonal direction here and say that I think that we should do away with the concept of a pre-ordained newsgroups in Usenet entirely, in favor of an IRC-like dynamic creation of message pools. One of the nice things about IRC is that if the Empire State Building suddenly blows up, you can tune to #bomb and generally find several hundred people interested in discussing it without having to go through some complicated newgroup/rmgroup/discussion procedure. The real data base of Usenet is the totality of messages, indexed by message ID, and there are so many newsgroups now that allowing the Newsgroups: line to have arbitrary contents in the message header would do little to increase the confusion. Entering each arbitrary entry in the Newsgroups: line into a secondary searchable index would provide the same functionality as we have now with the conventional arrangement of newsgroups. News software would certainly be free to map the Usenet hierarchy onto a directory structure, as is done today, or to simply keep it as a large flat database with multiple indices, or to do any combination of the above, such as an arrangement where populated newsgroups get their own directory, and everything else resides in a giant directory called "/usr/spool/news/krap." With governments creating lists of "banned" newsgroups, and an official creation process managed by the "Cabal", Usenet is much more vulnerable to state control than it would be if newsgroups were simply arbitrary strings which existed somewhere in the current window into the history file. A newsgroup would then exist if there were messages in it, and wouldn't exist if it had remained unused for some reasonable period of time. Now that search engines are becoming the best way to read Usenet anyway, and the Newsgroups: line is just another field in a set of search specifications, there is no reasonable reason to limit what may be placed there to some list of "20,000" pre-defined strings, or some government controlled subset of the above. If Singapore bans alt.sex.hooters, you could simply post to alt.culture.singapore.i.got.your.hooters.right.here. This would effectly jerk the rug out from under the "banned newsgroups" gestapo, and create a namespace so large you would always be able to construct an appropriately suggestive new entry in the compliment of any part that was blocked. It would also send the correct message that "newsgroups" are simply one of many labels on an article, and are not cyberspacial tearooms where bad people congregate and there is guilt by association. The alternative to doing something reasonable like this is probably to see mass migration from "banned newsgroups" to off-topic groups, like Lolita pictures in rec.pets.cats, when the inevitable crackdown comes. As long as people can post anonymously, they will simply switch to another existing newsgroup when the one they are posting to becomes blocked. Once the inevitable reciprocal pissing contest between posters and censors gets going, Usenet as we know it will likely be destroyed. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $