gazette@watserv1.waterloo.edu (Chris Redmond) (03/12/91)
There was a modest, but enthusiastic, and 97 per cent male, audience for John McCarthy's talk about electronic communication and the net last evening. McCarthy, one of the rival fathers of Artificial Intelligence, is a senior faculty member at Stanford University in California, and was influential in getting the famous decision made that at Stanford the contents of the Usenet are the electronic equivalent of a library, to be accorded the same level of tolerance -- as he put it, "the principle is universality, tempered only by lack of money." Sponsored by the Computer Science Club, he was talking about the present explosive growth of "the net" and his vision for the future. Briefly, his vision is that it will continue to grow, to the point that many unmoderated groups are unmanageably large. At that point, moderated digests or alternate groups will spring up, and he foresees a charging system that will make it possible for such moderation to be the full-time jobs of people who provide digests that readers find useful. Censorship of the net is "not merely a wrong thing to do but an ignorant thing to do", he told his audience, citing a decision in Norway to cut off what was essentially the country's only feed of all the "alt" discussion groups -- just in time to block most discussion of the Gulf war, which took place in alt.desert-storm (and latterly alt.desert-storm.facts). It will be interesting to see whether McCarthy's model is also the model favoured by the advisory committee on news groups which is currently in the early stages of its work at UW. The talk came during a week when I have been flooded (well, not flooded, but dampened anyway) with interesting advice about this particular group, uw.campus-news. A few days ago I noted in this space that I had heard suggestions that the group was not as useful as it might be, and I asked for advice on changes. The advice so far has ranged from "no change" to "post the entire contents of the Gazette, as well as material from other publications when available". I suspect that the latter (a) is not practical and (b) would be more than most people want to read electronically. But there may be some halfway measures that would be useful. A number of people said strongly that they want to see a group available to which coming-events and similar announcements can be posted by anyone, with or without moderation. It appears that "uw.talks" is not entirely adequate for that purpose, and to make uw.campus-news available for the purpose would mean drowning out other kinds of information in a deluge of event listings, I think. As a result I am coming to think that the creation of "uw.events" would be a good thing for all. But I am not yet at the stage where I will recommend that to anybody (assuming that I can figure out whose job it is to receive such a recommendation). Further comments are welcome, on that subject or on the whole issue of what would be useful in uw.campus-news, which I continue to moderate. Chris Redmond director of internal communications, UW gazette@watserv1 credmond@watdcs
gazette@watserv1.waterloo.edu (Chris Redmond) (03/13/91)
Brad Templeton of Looking Glass Software (brad@looking) adds the following perceptive comment to my observation about the ban on "alt" newsgroups in Norway. He's obviously more conscious of the chronology of events here than I was. Can't imagine why he would be interested :-). ............................................................ An important note is that the Alt ban in norway cut off alt.desert-shield, but so did the alt ban at UW cut it off from the invasion in August to mid-november, when Alt groups were restored. The point being that UW's capricious decision to cut out all of ALT removed it from one of the more interesting networking and political phenomena of the war era.