It's not a real Usenet flame war until there's been a spelling flame or two*. "UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED". At 10:03 AM 1/8/2014, Griffin Boyce wrote:
On 2014-01-08 12:59, shelley@misanthropia.info wrote:
On Jan 8, 2014 9:48 AM, Patrick Mylund Nielsen <cryptography@patrickmylund.com> wrote: (snip)
You should spend some of that energy on learning not to top-post. Ah, there it is. *Now* it feels like authentic usenet.
Maybe we should have a hundred-message thread fighting about top vs bottom ;)
And Detweiler and Sternlight were useful practice. Detweiler had a few serious points, but also gave us the insight that killfiles weren't just for Usenet any more; we needed to develop email filtering to deal with spammers* and other undesirable noise sources. Sternlight was one of the early advocates of building censorship into everything. They haven't gone away, and the UK's Tory-LibDem coalition just forced the major British ISPs to make heavy-duty censorship the default behaviour, though if you want to access suspicious sites like the EFF and BoingBoing you can tell the ISP to allow you to endanger your children by letting your internet access like access all the nasty internet p0rn. (* One of the few good things about spam was that "how do we stop spam" replaced "libertarians vs. socialists" as the default topic that all discussions rapidly devolve into.)