On Tue, 17 Jan 1995, Charles Bell wrote:

On Mon, 16 Jan 1995, Hadmut Danisch wrote:

...

I just had a view into the alt.religion.scientology and alt.clearing.technology newsgroups. There are some messages about a Scientology decision to shut down every internet traffic about Scientology. If the messages are true, Scientology sent rmgroup Control messages to remove the groups.

The request to stop the remailers seems to come from the same people...

After reading the lawyer's threatening letter I tried to check out the two newsgroups mentioned, and was told they do not exist. (This is not a local filter here; Eskimo does not censor newsgroups.) So have they been deleted? If so, by whom and how? What is 'rmgroup' and who has the authority to remove alt. groups?

An 'rmgroup' is a control message used by Usenet when a group needs to be removed globally. Etiquette suggests that only big, important people should send these out, but technically anyone can send one. I followed the Scientology debate with little interest until yesterday, when I fired up my newsreader and was asked "Subscribe to new group alt.religion.scientology?" At that point, I knew that the real war had begun. :-)

From what I was able to ascertain here, an rmgroup was sent out, followed soon after by a newgroup (or two or three or...). My news server doesn't honor newgroups in the alt hierarchy automatically as a rule, but did so in this case for some reason.

News server: news.cso.uiuc.edu, on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Licquia (lame .sig, huh?) | Finger for PGP 2.6 public key jalicqui@prairienet.org | Me? Speak for whom? You've got licquia@cei.com (work) | to be kidding!