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Usenet Gag Order
An anonymous coward sent us this link, noting that a judge in Seattle has issued a restraining order barring the defendant from posting in a specific Usenet group, even non-harassing posts. Taking a look at the newsgroup, it looks like one of any number of Usenet flamewars, and the defendant might well meet the definition of Usenet kook (as do the petitioners, it seems). The question is whether anyone should have the ability to use the legal system to exclude another from posting in a public forum; unlike other forms of harassment, a Usenet post is not directed to any particular person.
If you go through the whole article, the bit at the bottom says "help remove the gag order from our Assistant Webmaster"... I'm thinking that there's perhaps a bit of reporting bias here?
The judge's decision is ridiculous as reported in that article, but I'm pretty sure we haven't seen the entire story here. (Not that I'd care to ever see the courts interfere on USENET...)
The restraining order is not for all of Usenet but for a specific newsgroup. The individual's freedom of speech is therefore not curtailed.
;)
Postings directed to a particular newsgroup may not be targetted at a specific individual, but they are targetted at a community of people formed by the newsgroup's ``regulars''. It's reasonable for these people to want some sort of remedy for someone who is an utter nuisance.
In recent years, groups of individuals have emerged on Usenet whose only intent is to harass. They crosspost on purpose between completely unrelated newsgroups. When someone trims followups, they put them back. They fill their postings with tons of garbage, ASCII graphic crud and whatnot. Clearly, when your only aim is to disturb rational conversation, you aren't expressing your freedom of speech, you are abusing your freedom to curtail that of others.
There are no adequate means of moderation in Usenet (as there is in slashdot), so turning to the courts may be the only way to get peace.
Someone mentioned that there are moderated newsgroups; how little this individual knows how Usenet really works!
First of all, the moderation can be bypassed; you can still post directly to a moderated newsgroup, even though this is obviously highly frowned upon. I have done it once or twice in the past when the moderator's address wouldn't work for me, due to broken software or whatever. Even though there was nothing wrong with my messages---they were the sort that would be passed by the moderator---I received a slap-on-the wrist e-mail not to do that again.
Secondly, newsgroup moderation works by filtering postings through the mailbox of some tireless, tolerant individual who has to sift through everything and decide what gets posted. Thus harassment and spam is simply hidden away from the public and suffered by the moderator.
Thirdly, moderated newsgroups tend to be not nearly as lively as their unmoderated counterparts. For example, comp.lang.c.moderated tends to be dead compared to comp.lang.c.
Ultimately, Usenet moderation (as we know it) is not the answer.
In my opinion, mailing-lists and www-boards suck donkey poo-poo compared to Usenet.
Slashdot proves that building a moderation system is easy within the confines of a single web site where everyone is authenticated, and the information isn't distributed across a wide area. You could do the same thing with a single private NNTP server with authenticated access, and kill files.
Usenet is a world-wide distributed system, with many points of entry and countless users who aren't tracked in any way. The problems to be solved there are entirely on a different plane.
IMHO, what Usenet needs is a protocol for sharing killfile information among like-minded individuals. Killfiles are far better than Slashdot-type moderation because they are content sensitive, and can be made quite specific, like ignoring a particuliar user, or even news server. Scoring newsreaders can assign a score to each article based on multiple filter criteria, similar to slashdot scores. Killfiles and scoring scale nicely, because they are processed at the client side. What you need is to be able to share ``kill packets'' with other users. Instead of having one huge moderation system, you have a disconnected model. There is no need for there to be one monolithic moderation database which appears identical to everyone, so it would be a waste of resources to try to construct one.
Slashdot doesn't compare to Usenet. I find that you can't have meaningful threads of conversation, and then sense of community just isn't here! Topics keep being thrown in, then some fast exchanges ensue and die out in favor of the next topic. Also, the graphically-intensive layout sucks, and you have little choice in how it's presented, since there is no protocol here other than HTML. Also, Slashdot can't even be viewed properly unless you use non-free software like Netscape or Internet explorer. Last time I tried Mozilla, it blew up on Slashdot. Maybe the latest milestone does a better job, who knows! On the other hand, Usenet participation requires only free software, like tin, trn or slrn.
Also I find that the Usenet technical forums tend to provide very good quality answers (if you are willing to sift through the rubbish a little bit). From time to time you see postings from people like Dennis Ritchie, Chris Torek, Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Andrew Koenig, Doug Smith (of ACE fame) and many others. Yes, these guys are on Usenet, not on some web bulletin board. And they use their real names, not some 3l33t pseudonyms.
If you try, you can find far higher calibre discussions on Usenet than in Slashdot. The most interesting aspect of Slashdot are the links to outside stories. I know people that don't even bother reading the replies to a story, and just follow the links from here on out.