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From: scw@cepu.UUCP (Stephen C. Woods)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Need for Stargate screening?
Message-ID: <425@cepu.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 11-Jan-85 14:05:36 EST
Article-I.D.: cepu.425
Posted: Fri Jan 11 14:05:36 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 13-Jan-85 09:06:58 EST
References: <494@vortex.UUCP> <1917@sun.uucp> <366@hercules.UUCP>
Reply-To: scw@cepu.UUCP (Stephen C. Woods)
Organization: VA Wadsworth Med. Center; LA CA
Lines: 70
Summary: 

In article <366@hercules.UUCP> franka@hercules.UUCP (Frank Adrian) writes:
>[reference:] <1917@sun.uucp>
>>
>>I certainly appreciate [...] "forced moderation".  Please
>>let the net decide [...] it will stand on its own
>>merits.
>>
>	Hear, hear! I don't like to disagree with Lauren, but I think he's
>missed the boat on this one. One of the reasons that USENET is USEful (sorry)
>is the fact that it is an open channel. If Lauren is so concerned about his
>node getting sued for something, he better get off the net right now.

I don't think that he's worried about his node personaly but rather the
potental liability of the carrier. This is a whole different can of worms.

>                                                                      The
>last time I checked, most of the traffic is unmoderated. What's the difference
>in the medium, Lauren? 

Yes, that's exactly it.  Currently the only people that recieve USENET are
people who (A)actively want to get it and (B)have someone who wants to
pass it on to them (narrow casting as it were). With stargate it'll be
BROADcasting that means that anyone can recieve it weither we (the net 
as a whole) want them to or not.

>                       Or does this simply seem to be a good time to put
>controls on? 

Sorry, Lauren doesn't work that way.

>             If some person out there is going to misuse the net so egregiously
>that one can be sued, why haven't they done so yet? 

Who are they going to sue? With Stargate they'd have a target, one with
substantal value that could be grabbed.

For example blatz@fubar.UUCP posts the ENTIRE source to Sys CCCLX rel 21.7
to net.sources, AT&T decides to sue (to protect its own interests) currently
the only place that could be reasonable attacked are the the owner of fubar
and M{r,s}. Blatz (and possiably the net as a whole, but I'd suspect that
they wouldn't get very far with that).  With stargate however there are
exactly two places that passed the source out, fubar and stargate (plus
perhaps any relay sites [again not likley]) guess who's going to get sued.
/* Can you say Stargate and Fubar?, I though you could. :-) */
Personally I'd think that the folks a stargate would be damm-fools (as
opposed to just fools) to broadcast ANYTHING that WASN'T screened.

>                                                 [1] Again, how does the change
>in medium effect the legality of postings and [2]if the net is unmoderated now,
>why not unmoderated over the stellite link? 

(1) The difference is between you talking over the phone to someone, and you
talking over a radio station to *EVERYONE*.

(2) However, the main reason to moderate the satellite link is to cut down
on the amount of cruft and redundancy.  Many newsgroups won't be sent through
the link anyway.

>                                            I really would like an answer to
>this (thanks alot).

As I see it now, the net as it currently is will be here for a long time.
There will ALWAYS be news groups that are not sutable for BROADCAST nationwide
(E.G. la.eats, ba.wanted). There will also be groups that would from a
distribution point of view seem to be reasonable, from a content view are
totally out of place (E.G. net.flame).
-- 
Stephen C. Woods (VA Wadsworth Med Ctr./UCLA Dept. of Neurology)
uucp:	{ {ihnp4, uiucdcs}!bradley, hao, trwrb}!cepu!scw
ARPA: cepu!scw@ucla-cs location: N 34 3' 9.1" W 118 27' 4.3"