That's pretty clever! But I use IMAPS, personally, because I don't like push protocols and I want to leave my mail spools on my SMTP node... where my valuable communcation is on a RAID5 device that gets backed up, and is less likely to be stolen than a laptop.
Very true. I'm not trying to start a technical definition war here, I just pointed out a bug in the original article and things rolled downhill...
Capitalization is usually used to define which thing you're writing about: UUCP is a protocol, and uucp is a suite of programs.
I think some implementations used the name uucpd for the daemon and uucp for the uid it ran under, but older versions ran as root and were named uucp. (Don't trust this last comment, though, it's based on my foggy recollections of using UUCP for mail delivery two decades ago.)
I didn't say it was obsolete, I said it was unnecessary.
Sendmail and fetchmail's queueing functions implement store-and-forward quite nicely... and in any case, I have been helping to run a full MTA (sendmail) for three domains on a dynamic IP *without* the co-operation of the (completely evil and un-nice) provider for three years now, so I have to say you're mistaken about the need for UUCP.
Dynamic DNS is a simple solution that works fine for me and hundreds of other people with DHCP-assigned IP addresses.
I can accomplish anything UUCP can accomplish without using UUCP. Thus, while not obsolete, it is unnecessary.
If you really enjoy pointless configuration tasks, you can run UUCP over anything that can simulate a serial line.
But the main selling point of UUCP was to be able to handle scheduled intermittent connections.
This was useful before the Internet got its mojo on, when Email was delivered in batches in a fido-style bucket brigade. "This Email is for California, dial up Chicago at midnight and have them pass it on".
Usenet also started on UUCP (yes, Usenet existed before the Internet) but migrated to NNTP over IP just as Email has migrated to SMTP over IP.
Today, you'd use pppd, a daemon that implements the Point-to-Point protocol. PPP has compression and authentication features that UUCP lacks, but does everything else that UUCP does.
one thing unix doesnt really have to worry about is viruses..
I'm not so sure.
Since people frequently use tools like NIS, rdist, rsync/ssh, and LDAP to create single authentication domains that span multiple physical boxen, somebody could use one of the usual social engineering tricks to get root on a single box and then load a boot-sector infector into the.profile in root's home dir. Then, every time root logs in on any particular physical box, that box get the boot-sector virus loaded.
Best that *nix sysadmins remain on guard, regardless.
UUCP coverage was dumped because UUCP simply is not a practical anymore now that more advanced alternatives like sendmail exist.
Um, I think you meant "UUCP is not necessary anymore now that PPP, NNTP and SMTP are widely supported".
Sendmail (a program) is not an alternative to UUCP (a protocol). Even if you are talking about the UUCP software and not the protocol, the alternative is pppd, not sendmail.
Sendmail still supports UUCP, but most distros do not enable that support, and hardly anyone uses UUCP anymore.
Long before Sobig.F hit the net, I configured our mailscanners to skip sending autoreplies to senders of sobig* virii (the asterisk being a wildcard to catch all variants). I also don't autoreply to Klez, Yaha, Bugbear, Braid-A, or WinEvar since they all forge their source mail addresses.
Think about it; Linux can be misconfigured to do bad things (tm) - is this a reason to stop using it? No, it's a reason to identify those who can configure it properly and put them in charge of doing so. It's also a reason to have someone conscientious on the payroll - hiring consultants to configure services that represent security risks is just asking for a reaming.
Same thing with virus scanners. It is appropriate to autorespond to certain virii, and not to others. A more appropriate question might have been "should antivirus products identify mail-spoofing virii in their API?" or "should virus scanners default to not auto-responding, and require additional configuration to implement this feature?".
+ Yes I used the word virii on purpose. I like the distinction between computer virii and biological viruses because it is useful in my work. And I don't give a damn about latin declensions or Tom Christiansen's opinion on the matter.
The users of a language have an interest in reducing pointless linguistic fragmentation.
You're missing the point... this isn't a pointless fragmentation, it's a valid distinction intended to make communication clearer and reduce confusion.
If there is no point in having distinct separate words for distinct separate concepts and physical items, how is one to communicate?
Hey, I know - instead of having separate nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns, we can use the extremely cromulent word "MARKLAR" to replace them all. That will stop that nasty "linguistic fragmentation" cold!
In fact, marklar marklar and marklar? Marklar's marklar to marklar on marklar. Have marklar marklar the marklar that marklar should marklar marklar? The marklar of marklar is to marklar the marklar of marklars, and marklar marklar marklar of marklar through marklar marklar (which is marklar marklar marklar) marklars that marklar.
The fact that you've received no spam and/or virus on your private email indicates that the people you correspond with are savvy and conscientious beyond the norm. It only takes one idiot nephew a couple of mouse clicks to heave your address into the spamfields... say, by sending a chain letter to everyone he knows without BCC'ing. That does it every time!
Given your previous.sig, I recommend you google for the Arrogant Worms single "Carrot Juice is Murder". You'll probably enjoy it; I have the Huff recording and it's pretty damn funny.
No. I've posted this before, mosly because I think Tom Christiansen's being annoying pedantic about it (Tom's a Perl ghod, but that doesn't make him an authority on "natural" languages.)
I give you credit for thinking on your feet.
Thanks, but it's not deserved.:)
The OED cites several colloquial and figurative uses of "virus" as a rapidly spreading "poisonous influence." It's from this sub-text that computers are said to have viruses.
I'm not English (although I have a sibling at Oxford) so I have a limited interest in what the OED says. And to be honest I have even less interest in latinate etymological root stocks.
And furthermore, I guarantee you that the people who named this particular type of malicious code a "virus" didn't consult the OED or Wheelock's Latin either.
Language evolves. It would be better to have a new word for the singlar form, and not just for the plural, but evolution is rarely biddable.
There is no such word in either Latin or English. In Latin, "virus" is a collective noun, like 'butter.'
Certainly there is such a word in English - or at least in the Computerese variant; you can find it all over the websites of virus authors and script kiddies. Despite Bishop Berkeley, things don't stop existing just because you don't believe in them.
Why don't you substitute a word in Klingon? You'll still sound just as goofy, but at least you won't be flat-out incorrect.
Because the authors of virii call them virii, and not some Klingon word. The word "viruses" refers to biological organisms, and the distinction is valid and desirable.
Do you insist on calling eight-bit quantities "bites" since there was no English word "byte" before computer programmers decided to make one?
I don't know how you would determine that "most spammers use Outlook or Outlook Express."
Certainly, most spamblower software forges Outlook MUA header tags, but it doesn't take much effort to figure out that the formatting of the spam is inconsistent with Outlook's abilities. I've got an archive of 2074 spams I've received (as of this morning) and the majority of it appears to have been generated with spamware optimized for that purpose, not with a commercial MUA like Outlook.
Think about it, Outlook is too slow, inefficient and buggy to be worth a spammer's time. Except perhaps as their own personal MUA, but I don't have any way to know that, since I don't receive personal mail from spammers, just spam from their spamblowers.
On the other claw, spammers are using viral techniques more and more frequently, and it's said that they frequently use virii to recruit the zombie nodes, so it's pretty likely that they are contributing to the problem in one way or another.
I spent hours trying to get my FX-3d card (AD1816 chipset) working in Red Hat 9. No joy, regardless of whether I used Red Hat's system (that used to support this card, but no longer) or loaded OSS, or built ALSA from scratch.
Seems like linux sound is there for those with lots of money or time on their hands, but those of us who scrounge hardware from the recycling bin are out of luck.
I hope this isn't the future of linux...
Common names are what advertisements say they are
on
DNSSEC: Good Enough?
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· Score: 1
There's nothing "revisionist" about what I'm saying. Perhaps you're just misinterpreting or maybe I'm not making my point clearly enough.
Since you are being so reasonable, I'll tone down the inflammatory rhetoric... but I still think your capsule descriptions of Internet history (like "At one time, there was a transition from a technically-oriented Internet to a commercially-oriented one") are very misleading; the problems encountered during the period you mention were primarily due to the influx of new users (most of whom were not marketers or businessmen, but rather college students and scientists from non-technical fields) and the explosion of public interest (which was not due to commercialism but rather to the accumulation of a critical mass of information in forms useable without extensive prior training).
As for freeing the namespace, the objections you raise are the same ones ICANN trots out (well, except you didn't mention their favorite "without central control nothing could possibly work!"). I'll trot out the usual responses, although you've probably heard them already.
If I'm understanding you, this would give anyone and everyone the ability to register any top-level domain they wanted.
No. To have a top-level domain, you would have to be demonstrably able to reliably run the top-level nameservers for that domain, able to arbitrate disputes within that namespace, and willing to provide namespace at lower levels for a reasonable fee. It should be obvious that most top-level domains (such as, for example,.pepsi) would not generate enough income through name sales to support themselves; so simple economics would suffice (in the long run) to weed out non-viable top-level domains.
Litigation would abound...
Creating a market-based model such as the one I've mentioned would not be any more complex, litiginous, or subject to incompetence than the current system.
Think about how the nameservers are currently funded. Terp.umd.edu for example, or the Vixie nameserver. And does Paul Vixie go a single day without a lawsuit being at least threatened?
...and the root servers would have to be beefed up several orders of magnitude.
Not so. Several people have gone so far as to predict that the total number of names would decrease if the namespace was freed. Think about it; the George W. Bush campaign bought over 200 domain names, (including bushblows.com and bushsux.com, incidentally) and the average multinational corporation buys three. In a wide-open namespace, there would be no point in doing this, and companies would buy only one name and spend their money advertising it in meatspace. You might see a decrease in the total size of the DNS namespace along the order of 50% or more!
You would also see unpredictable morphing of the namespace to reflect global human economic and cultural patterns - something like ".blitzork" becoming the most popular domain, or ".lovesjesus" or whatever. That type of emergent behaviour alone would be worth the price of admission.
In my opinion, the best solution to this problem is to give the public a simple way to associate common names and marks to their official Internet entities. LDAP and X.500 would do this splendidly.
I'm afraid they won't, though. The only LDAP server that would scale to the degree required would be Novell's NDS, and I personally do not consider it stable enough for this purpose (that's just my opinion, though - I think Gary Porter at UKy might disagree).
Oddly enough, I'm at work on Saturn's Day because I am working on LDAP replication problems in a ring of boxes (linux, HP-UX, and Sun) that authenticate using LDAP (the master server runs OpenLDAP). I don't think LDAP is anywhere near as robust as DNS, and in current incarnations it's certainly just as difficult to secure properly.
Sure, modern (post V3) implementations of NFS have a key-passing mechanism.
But is it worth the ridiculous amount of time it takes to get competing vendors' software to interoperate?
It took me over a year to get HP-UX to run a stable NFS environment (because HP-UX 11.00's NFS was absolutely riddled with bugs that I had to wait for HP to patch - and HP is dead slow with patches) even before I introduced it to IBM and Sun machines.
Granted, this is more a criticism of HP and their hideous, antique *nix than it is of NFS. But I had samba up and running on HP-UX in a day....
The organization that became ICANN certainly existed before the type of search engine you are talking about. WAIS is not a locator service for sites, it's a text search on steroids. You can fiddle with the definitions of "ICANN" and "search engine" for the purposes of argument, but it's not really germane to this discussion.
Your viewpoint is interesting, but biased to the point of inaccuracy. I was actually around when DNS was designed and implemented, and I remember quite clearly when the host table system was deprecated (because my VAX was using them at the time). I remember when Alta Vista and AOL were created, too; I even used Geo-based AOL on an 8088 XT once or twice.
DNS would work fine if we freed the namespace and allowed it to work as a distributed directory (which is what it would quickly become, if it weren't for the incompetence with which it is currently managed). ICANN's objections are pseudo-technical strawmen that serve only greed.
DNSSEC has some problems, as Dr. Berstein has frequently pointed out, but key distribution through DNS is at least as good an idea as Hesiod.
URLs were never intended to be things that people could guess off the top of their heads based on what they were looking for - and they are really bad at it.
URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are a web thing. Before URLs we used hostnames and domain names - that is, DNS and before that host tables. The web is a recent invention that many people regret... but I kind of like it myself.
But regardless of whether you are talking about URLs, hostnames, or domain names, you are still wrong. All these names were most definitely intended to be as intuitive as possible, because search engines weren't invented until after ICANN's greed and foolishness wrecked the consistency of the namespace. Stop trying to rewrite the past.
In Robert Howard's "Conan" series Crom was the god of the Cimmerians. Like the rest of the Cimmerian religious iconography Howard based it on scythian and pre-christian celtic sources. Crom Cruach was the Irish Sun God; I think just before the Milesians finished kicking the collective De Danaan butt, but that's off the top of me head, it could have been in the firbolg era.
If the Aral Sea's bed was not a windswept wasteland of toxic, radioactive, and teratogenic compounds that will pose a danger to local citizenry for a thousand years, there would be no border dispute.
This is not exactly news... the problem was well documented before the collapse of the Soviet Union, after all.
Seems like using a fork in a drillpress for a daquiri blender... doable, but rather outside the intentions of the tool designers!
Perhaps this will stimulate some hardware vendor to make token-passing wireless network hardware to eliminate the latency problems. IBM, Madge and Thomas Conrad must have boatloads of relevant expertise already....
If you can't find a martial arts teacher or school that suits your personality and/or learning style, there are also many martial sports (such as paintball, fencing, and the various full-contact medieval combat systems).
I like a good karate workout, sure, but nothing quite beats smashing an opponent with a poleaxe!
A word of warning, though; just like in the martial arts, a beginner should research carefully and observe some sessions before joining in. Some groups will be more or less brutal than your physique requires.
No, now we learn "Bad" boys, and not until high school.
Hmmm, thus sacrificing the explicit distinction between black and brown. Kind of pointless, since the mnemonic is still politically incorrect even without the racist innuendo!
I think I only remember it because of the potential to offend nearly anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty clever! But I use IMAPS, personally, because I don't like push protocols and I want to leave my mail spools on my SMTP node... where my valuable communcation is on a RAID5 device that gets backed up, and is less likely to be stolen than a laptop.
Very true. I'm not trying to start a technical definition war here, I just pointed out a bug in the original article and things rolled downhill...
Capitalization is usually used to define which thing you're writing about: UUCP is a protocol, and uucp is a suite of programs.
I think some implementations used the name uucpd for the daemon and uucp for the uid it ran under, but older versions ran as root and were named uucp. (Don't trust this last comment, though, it's based on my foggy recollections of using UUCP for mail delivery two decades ago.)
I didn't say it was obsolete, I said it was unnecessary.
Sendmail and fetchmail's queueing functions implement store-and-forward quite nicely... and in any case, I have been helping to run a full MTA (sendmail) for three domains on a dynamic IP *without* the co-operation of the (completely evil and un-nice) provider for three years now, so I have to say you're mistaken about the need for UUCP.
Dynamic DNS is a simple solution that works fine for me and hundreds of other people with DHCP-assigned IP addresses.
I can accomplish anything UUCP can accomplish without using UUCP. Thus, while not obsolete, it is unnecessary.
If you really enjoy pointless configuration tasks, you can run UUCP over anything that can simulate a serial line.
But the main selling point of UUCP was to be able to handle scheduled intermittent connections.
This was useful before the Internet got its mojo on, when Email was delivered in batches in a fido-style bucket brigade. "This Email is for California, dial up Chicago at midnight and have them pass it on".
Usenet also started on UUCP (yes, Usenet existed before the Internet) but migrated to NNTP over IP just as Email has migrated to SMTP over IP.
Today, you'd use pppd, a daemon that implements the Point-to-Point protocol. PPP has compression and authentication features that UUCP lacks, but does everything else that UUCP does.
Since people frequently use tools like NIS, rdist, rsync/ssh, and LDAP to create single authentication domains that span multiple physical boxen, somebody could use one of the usual social engineering tricks to get root on a single box and then load a boot-sector infector into the
Best that *nix sysadmins remain on guard, regardless.
Sendmail (a program) is not an alternative to UUCP (a protocol). Even if you are talking about the UUCP software and not the protocol, the alternative is pppd, not sendmail.
Sendmail still supports UUCP, but most distros do not enable that support, and hardly anyone uses UUCP anymore.
Long before Sobig.F hit the net, I configured our mailscanners to skip sending autoreplies to senders of sobig* virii (the asterisk being a wildcard to catch all variants). I also don't autoreply to Klez, Yaha, Bugbear, Braid-A, or WinEvar since they all forge their source mail addresses.
Think about it; Linux can be misconfigured to do bad things (tm) - is this a reason to stop using it? No, it's a reason to identify those who can configure it properly and put them in charge of doing so. It's also a reason to have someone conscientious on the payroll - hiring consultants to configure services that represent security risks is just asking for a reaming.
Same thing with virus scanners. It is appropriate to autorespond to certain virii, and not to others. A more appropriate question might have been "should antivirus products identify mail-spoofing virii in their API?" or "should virus scanners default to not auto-responding, and require additional configuration to implement this feature?".
+ Yes I used the word virii on purpose. I like the distinction between computer virii and biological viruses because it is useful in my work. And I don't give a damn about latin declensions or Tom Christiansen's opinion on the matter.
If there is no point in having distinct separate words for distinct separate concepts and physical items, how is one to communicate?
Hey, I know - instead of having separate nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns, we can use the extremely cromulent word "MARKLAR" to replace them all. That will stop that nasty "linguistic fragmentation" cold!
In fact, marklar marklar and marklar? Marklar's marklar to marklar on marklar. Have marklar marklar the marklar that marklar should marklar marklar? The marklar of marklar is to marklar the marklar of marklars, and marklar marklar marklar of marklar through marklar marklar (which is marklar marklar marklar) marklars that marklar.
No mod points today, sorry.
.sig, I recommend you google for the Arrogant Worms single "Carrot Juice is Murder". You'll probably enjoy it; I have the Huff recording and it's pretty damn funny.
The fact that you've received no spam and/or virus on your private email indicates that the people you correspond with are savvy and conscientious beyond the norm. It only takes one idiot nephew a couple of mouse clicks to heave your address into the spamfields... say, by sending a chain letter to everyone he knows without BCC'ing. That does it every time!
Given your previous
And furthermore, I guarantee you that the people who named this particular type of malicious code a "virus" didn't consult the OED or Wheelock's Latin either.
Language evolves. It would be better to have a new word for the singlar form, and not just for the plural, but evolution is rarely biddable.
Because the authors of virii call them virii, and not some Klingon word. The word "viruses" refers to biological organisms, and the distinction is valid and desirable.
Do you insist on calling eight-bit quantities "bites" since there was no English word "byte" before computer programmers decided to make one?
I don't know how you would determine that "most spammers use Outlook or Outlook Express."
Certainly, most spamblower software forges Outlook MUA header tags, but it doesn't take much effort to figure out that the formatting of the spam is inconsistent with Outlook's abilities. I've got an archive of 2074 spams I've received (as of this morning) and the majority of it appears to have been generated with spamware optimized for that purpose, not with a commercial MUA like Outlook.
Think about it, Outlook is too slow, inefficient and buggy to be worth a spammer's time. Except perhaps as their own personal MUA, but I don't have any way to know that, since I don't receive personal mail from spammers, just spam from their spamblowers.
On the other claw, spammers are using viral techniques more and more frequently, and it's said that they frequently use virii to recruit the zombie nodes, so it's pretty likely that they are contributing to the problem in one way or another.
Testify, Brother.
I spent hours trying to get my FX-3d card (AD1816 chipset) working in Red Hat 9. No joy, regardless of whether I used Red Hat's system (that used to support this card, but no longer) or loaded OSS, or built ALSA from scratch.
Seems like linux sound is there for those with lots of money or time on their hands, but those of us who scrounge hardware from the recycling bin are out of luck.
I hope this isn't the future of linux...
As for freeing the namespace, the objections you raise are the same ones ICANN trots out (well, except you didn't mention their favorite "without central control nothing could possibly work!"). I'll trot out the usual responses, although you've probably heard them already. No. To have a top-level domain, you would have to be demonstrably able to reliably run the top-level nameservers for that domain, able to arbitrate disputes within that namespace, and willing to provide namespace at lower levels for a reasonable fee. It should be obvious that most top-level domains (such as, for example,
Think about how the nameservers are currently funded. Terp.umd.edu for example, or the Vixie nameserver. And does Paul Vixie go a single day without a lawsuit being at least threatened?
Not so. Several people have gone so far as to predict that the total number of names would decrease if the namespace was freed. Think about it; the George W. Bush campaign bought over 200 domain names, (including bushblows.com and bushsux.com, incidentally) and the average multinational corporation buys three. In a wide-open namespace, there would be no point in doing this, and companies would buy only one name and spend their money advertising it in meatspace. You might see a decrease in the total size of the DNS namespace along the order of 50% or more!
You would also see unpredictable morphing of the namespace to reflect global human economic and cultural patterns - something like ".blitzork" becoming the most popular domain, or ".lovesjesus" or whatever. That type of emergent behaviour alone would be worth the price of admission. I'm afraid they won't, though. The only LDAP server that would scale to the degree required would be Novell's NDS, and I personally do not consider it stable enough for this purpose (that's just my opinion, though - I think Gary Porter at UKy might disagree).
Oddly enough, I'm at work on Saturn's Day because I am working on LDAP replication problems in a ring of boxes (linux, HP-UX, and Sun) that authenticate using LDAP (the master server runs OpenLDAP). I don't think LDAP is anywhere near as robust as DNS, and in current incarnations it's certainly just as difficult to secure properly.
The first twenty times I configured samba I wasn't running a web server. Come to think of it, I don't use a web server to configure samba now.
The parent post is either a troll or someone grievously misinformed. It should not have been moderated "interesting".
Samba does not require a web server, regardless of whether one is a "newbie" or not.
Sure, modern (post V3) implementations of NFS have a key-passing mechanism.
But is it worth the ridiculous amount of time it takes to get competing vendors' software to interoperate?
It took me over a year to get HP-UX to run a stable NFS environment (because HP-UX 11.00's NFS was absolutely riddled with bugs that I had to wait for HP to patch - and HP is dead slow with patches) even before I introduced it to IBM and Sun machines.
Granted, this is more a criticism of HP and their hideous, antique *nix than it is of NFS. But I had samba up and running on HP-UX in a day....
The organization that became ICANN certainly existed before the type of search engine you are talking about. WAIS is not a locator service for sites, it's a text search on steroids. You can fiddle with the definitions of "ICANN" and "search engine" for the purposes of argument, but it's not really germane to this discussion.
Your viewpoint is interesting, but biased to the point of inaccuracy. I was actually around when DNS was designed and implemented, and I remember quite clearly when the host table system was deprecated (because my VAX was using them at the time). I remember when Alta Vista and AOL were created, too; I even used Geo-based AOL on an 8088 XT once or twice.
DNS would work fine if we freed the namespace and allowed it to work as a distributed directory (which is what it would quickly become, if it weren't for the incompetence with which it is currently managed). ICANN's objections are pseudo-technical strawmen that serve only greed.
DNSSEC has some problems, as Dr. Berstein has frequently pointed out, but key distribution through DNS is at least as good an idea as Hesiod.
But regardless of whether you are talking about URLs, hostnames, or domain names, you are still wrong. All these names were most definitely intended to be as intuitive as possible, because search engines weren't invented until after ICANN's greed and foolishness wrecked the consistency of the namespace. Stop trying to rewrite the past.
Since I'm deaf in one ear, and these things block hearing in one ear, the possibilities are interesting...
"I can't hear you honey, I have a bluetooth phone in my ear!"
"Uh-oh, it's the Pointy-Headed-Boss calling - I better switch ears on my phone!"
In Robert Howard's "Conan" series Crom was the god of the Cimmerians. Like the rest of the Cimmerian religious iconography Howard based it on scythian and pre-christian celtic sources.
Crom Cruach was the Irish Sun God; I think just before the Milesians finished kicking the collective De Danaan butt, but that's off the top of me head, it could have been in the firbolg era.
If the Aral Sea's bed was not a windswept wasteland of toxic, radioactive, and teratogenic compounds that will pose a danger to local citizenry for a thousand years, there would be no border dispute.
This is not exactly news... the problem was well documented before the collapse of the Soviet Union, after all.
Now, if you want to defend the shrub's pollution policies, there's some chance of success.
Seems like using a fork in a drillpress for a daquiri blender... doable, but rather outside the intentions of the tool designers!
Perhaps this will stimulate some hardware vendor to make token-passing wireless network hardware to eliminate the latency problems. IBM, Madge and Thomas Conrad must have boatloads of relevant expertise already....
If you can't find a martial arts teacher or school that suits your personality and/or learning style, there are also many martial sports (such as paintball, fencing, and the various full-contact medieval combat systems).
I like a good karate workout, sure, but nothing quite beats smashing an opponent with a poleaxe!
A word of warning, though; just like in the martial arts, a beginner should research carefully and observe some sessions before joining in. Some groups will be more or less brutal than your physique requires.
I think I only remember it because of the potential to offend nearly anybody.