aron (10/24/82)
Recently, there has been some discussion about ads on the net. This has mainly been of the "I do/don't" like it variety. But now this issue has the potential to become a more serious problem, and for this reason I am calling it to the attention of the general readership. Net.micro is currently gatewayed to Arpa's mailing list info-micro. Some people have been posting (innocently) 4sale messages on the usenet. These have been shipped over to Arpa, which is of course a big no-no. If this continues (even innocently) the gateway may have to be severed. This would be a great loss to both Arpa and Usenet. Moreover this potential problem exists in other gatewayed lists. I know this has been suggested before, but I urge that it finally be implemented. Let's have a net.ads, with appropriate subgroups like net.ads.4sale, net.ads.jobs etc. All commercial messages should be restricted to these groups. Net.wanted should be for non-commercial "wants". This will solve both the aesthetic and gateway problems. aron shtull-trauring harpo!presby!aron
thomas (10/26/82)
I thought that was one of the purposes of net.wanted. =Spencer
mark (10/26/82)
No commercial use of the ARPANET? Are you sure? There is lots of commercial use of the ARPANET, there are entire companies who do their business making heavy use of the ARPANET. BBN and RAND are two examples that come to mind. I do know that, technically, any "use" of the ARPANET by someone who is not a DOD contractor is illegal. Some people interpret this to include netnews articles originated by a person who is not a DOD contractor, others (including myself) feel that anything two consenting DOD contractors decide to send each other over the ARPANET in order to help do their DOD contract (and netnews, as a whole, helps them do their jobs) is OK. If there really is a problem with the ARPANET, and the ARPANET sites are worried that ads might be politically a bad thing to have appear on their machine, those sites should speak up. Mark
smith@umn-cs.UUCP (06/06/83)
#R:utah-gr:-60000:umn-cs:7700001:000:22 umn-cs!smith Oct 29 16:34:00 1982 q: Command not found.
smith@umn-cs.UUCP (06/06/83)
#R:utah-gr:-60000:umn-cs:7700002:000:696 umn-cs!smith Nov 8 10:45:00 1982 Concerning commercial use of Arpanet: You're misunderstanding the meaning of the word "commercial". Non commercial use is work on government contracts; commercial use means using the net for non government related work. Believe it or not, places like BBN take the distinction seriously. When I was there they had several 10's and 20's with megabytes of routine mail traffic between them. None of this traffic used Arpanet lines; they had a local switch to handle all of that. If you look at SIGSOFT's "Software Engineering Notes" you'll see the distinction again. You can submit articles via Arpanet FTP as long as the work in the article was supported by a government contract. Rick.