Often, the dishonorable acts of administrators can cause radical
changes in people's willingness to cooperate and a person's direction
of participation. In this section, I offer the words, viewpoints,
histories, and stories of other people on the net who have been
the effect of a rogue administrator or clan thereof. 

In order to debias the stark content of the words, the identities
of these people are being left to the imagination of the reader. 
Please try and see what they are saying, rather than attempting
to guess who said it. 

6.1) One user's viewpoint of net history and politics

UUNET was a for-profit company from its very beginning, at least 10
years ago.  It used to get lots of $$$ from the U.S.Government. Now
it's no longer getting $$ from the government, so it tries to peddle
its services to businesses and the general public. One of the services
they sell is the access/feed to Usenet.

UUNET did not create Usenet, contrary to what they may claim, and have
no right to control anything in it. In fact, most of the cabal members
who try to gain control of Usenet are relative newcomers who have made
no contributions to the development of Usenet.

When I started reading Usenet about the time of the Great Renaming,
the various folks who cooperated on setting up Usenet (mostly sys
admins at schools and research labs) agreed on a more-or-less
democratic procedure for creating new newgroups: the proponent would
conduct a poll to see if there's enough interest to warrant creating
the group. The poll had to rely on the honor of the participants: they
were expected to vote once, and to vote NO for valid reasons. Once the
poll was completed, someone would issue a 'newgroup' control article
and all sites would create the newsgroup.

This was before David Lawrence and all the other human trash that came
onto Usenet later and became known as the 'usenet cabal'. Here are
some of the changes the Cabal attempted to institute in the group
creation process:

1. One of the cabal members, Kent Paul Dolan, was caught blatantly
cheating in the poll for the newsgroups who reorg he proposed. Rather
than penalize the cabal, the cabal imposed on the rest of the Usenet a
system of 'Usenet volunteer votatakers'. This way, the cheatting by
Cabal members would be harder to detect.

Basically, when one of their own was caught cheating, they created the
system off UVV's that inconvenienced everyone _other_ than the cabal
and made the blatant cheating by the likes of Jan Isley and Bill Aten
harder to detect.

2. The function of spaff used to be to announce the results of the
interest polls. However there was at least one case when a sex-related
newsgroup passed the 'vote' and David Lawrence refused to create
it. (I guess he's not into sex.) This was before the cabal started
rigging 'votes' making them totally meaningless. Today the Cabal would
have just forged enough anonymous no votes.

3. Another change instituted by the Cabal a few years ago is the
requirement that before a new group proposal even gets to the uvv
'vote', it must go through a cabal screening process known as
'group-advice'. Examples of group-advice's censorship include the
recent announcement that no new unmoderated newsgroups will be
permitted in soc.culture.* (too much flaming going on in the existing
newsgroups), and their insistence that most new newgroups be moderated
-- with the cabal picking subservient moderators.

Usenet is a popular store-and-forward conferencing system. There are
other such systems, like Fidonet. Those who don't like free Usenet
should go elsewhere to sergvices like AOL or COmpuServe or Prodigy and
have their own censored forums there. They must not be allowed to take
over Usenet.

Again, INN comes configured to honor all of tale's newgroups, but not
newgroups issued by others. Honorable sites, like Netcom, honor all
newgroups and drop all rmgroups.

Because 'tale@uunet.uu.net' is a generic name used by INN, David
Lawrence no longer has any exclusive right to it. Anyone is free to
issue newgroups and rmgroups in tale's name. However it's more
honorable to issue newgroups under one's own name.

It is not our objective to destroy the UVVs or the group
advice. Rather, we seek to deprive them of their monopoly. ANYONE can
issue a newgroup on Usenet.

The UVV, the group-advice, et al, should be free to play their silly
power games, to hold rigged elections, and to newgroup or rmgroup
anything they like.  Sites are free to honor only tale's
newgroups/rmgroups, which is the default INN confoguration.  We hope
that the majority of Usenet sites will choose to act honorably and
carry ALL newsgroups.  We also expect that most new newsgroup
proponents won't deal with the dishonest and abusive group-advice,
because they won't have to -- they can get pretty good propagation by
issing the newgroup themselves. No one but masochists and cabal
members will go through the humiliating and unpleasant process of
getting 'advice' from group advice, because the marginal gain (the
sites who'll carry cabal's groups, but not free groups) will be
immaterial. Let the cabal create a moderated news.groups and
news.admin.net-abuse.* if they want to. They have lost control of the
group creation process and will never regain it.

Tale got into the position of issuing newgroups for the new newsgroups
that passed the vote by default: spaff quit and no one else wanted to
take this boring duty. However tale's been trying to abuse this
position to silence his opponents and to make a few quick bucks for
UUNET. So far, he's only hurt UUNET with his net-abuse.

6.2) An excerpt from the alt.sex.sounds FAQ

          In closing I'd like to add something VERY funny I found in
regards to ADMIN-TYPES that have become over-zealous and
closed-minded.  It was posted in news.admin.net-abuse.misc by
imp@yoyo.mil (impLAnt) .  I found it to be one of the funniest, most
on-target articles I have ever read. Enjoy. Keep your minds open and
your tapes rolling.

peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva) wrote:

<yawn; groin scratch>. coffee, please. Robert L. Chapman's _Dictionary
of American Slang_ (Harper & Row, 1986) defines:

kook : 1 n fr 1950s teenagers, an eccentric person; = nut, screwball:
'The bomb cannot be exploded by a single 'kook'" -- Nation   /  "The
early Streisand played kook" --Look 2.  modifier: '...did a kook piece
with dancers' -- Village Voice 3 n surfers, a novice surfer. [Fr
cuckoo or coo-coo; early 1900's; crazy, very eccentric = nutty; fr the
bird _cuculus canorus_, that cries "coocoo", remarkable for depositing
its eggs in the nests of other birds].

Beyond the KoTM definition, we also tend to file under "kook" those
self-important, self-aggrandizing sysadmin sorts. Chiefly, the ones
who've dug their little net.techie foxholes a little too deeply to see
out of: who have spent too many man-years politicking, sucking up, and
worming their way into imaginary "status"; and are now unable to think
rationally or philosophically in "real world" terms because they no
longer have a "real world" for reference.

The term "foxholes" is used advisedly, for they see USENET as
war...replete with dehumanized "enemies" and various acts of high-tech
propoganda, disinformation, and subterfuge. As un-hired, non-paid <!> 
and non-professional rogue mercenaries, they somehow believe their
own "devotion" and "contributions to the net" [read: years of phony
obsessive altruism] must be repaid by the "users" they typically
degrade and disrespect.

This infectious fascism manifests itself, Stockholm syndrome-like,
within these same "users" in the form of domain ghettoization (a la
AOL) and vigilantism (complaint-generators and net.cop wannabes). The
fallout from such shenanigans instills a general fear & loathing;
their circa 1985 model of USENET withstands neither the onslaught of
traffic, nor the freedoms "users" demand and expect as manifest
destiny. The fact that the world will little note nor long remember
them confuses no one else; that USENET simply needs them no longer (if
ever) is a jagged little pill they can't seem to swallow.

Sounds like your footwear, Peteness. When the jackboot fits...

Some parts © 2009 Advameg, Inc.