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posted by janrinok on Monday March 12 2018, @03:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the full-of-300bps-goodness dept.

Professor Steve Bellovin at the computer science department at Columbia University in New York City writes in his blog about early design decisions for Usenet. In particular he addresses authentication and the factors taken into consideration given the technology available at the time. After considering the infeasiblity of many options at the time, they ultimately threw up their hands.

That left us with no good choices. The infrastructure for a cryptographic solution was lacking. The uux command rendered illusory any attempts at security via the Usenet programs themselves. We chose to do nothing. That is, we did not implement fake security that would give people the illusion of protection but not the reality.

For those unfamiliar with it, Usenet is a text-based, worldwide, decentralized, distributed discussion system. Basically it can be likened to a bulletin board system of sorts. Servers operate peer to peer while users connect to their preferred server using a regular client-server model. It was a key source of work-related discussion, as well as entertainment and regular news. Being uncensorable, it was a key source of news during several major political crises around the world during the 1980s and early 1990s. Being uncensorable, it has gained the ire of both large businesses and powerful politicians. It used to be an integral part of any ISP's offerings even 15 years ago. Lack of authentication has been both a strength and a weakness. Professor Bellovin sheds some light on how it came to be like that.

Despite weaknesses, Usenet gave rise to among many other things the now defunct Clarinet news, which is regarded to be the first exclusively online business.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 13 2018, @10:04AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday March 13 2018, @10:04AM (#651751) Homepage
    Begging the question.

    I still use Usenet for discussions on several topics. Sure, some of the fora have degrated such that the signal is way below the noise floor, but not all of them.
    Sure, AOL's arrival was annoying, but it was nothing to the absolute floodgates of Google Groups, which lied to and stole from those who care about usenet, and then proceded to shit on it in industrial quantities from a great height. Had GG not arrived, Usenet would have been healthier now.

    And for those who want to put humerous dates in their usenet posts, because as I say, it's still alive, have some macros:

    alias aoldate='echo $((`date +%s`/86400-8643))'
    alias ggdate='echo $((`date +%s`/86400-11364))'
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
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