Don was talking about alt.right (obviously a play on alt-right: but probably also the alt-right news group, if there is one). However, the standard acronym expansion for the alt hierarchy on the usenet (it actually stands for alternative) is Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists: partly a running gag and partly because alt.* was (and still is) the wild west of the usenet: a lawless wasteland, with the occasional specks of civilization.
Well, you see, there used to be a network coexistant with the internet, backed by UUCP, because Unix didn't have internet support yet (among other reasons).
And then there were these guys called Tom and Steve. And they wrote Usenet. And all was well until September fell. And then the usenet gradually faded into obscurity, as users moved towards walled gardens, and away from netnews. Some of these users were weeaboos: This is how the -chans made their way here from Japan.
Awesome! that totally reads like a future history of post apocalyptic script kiddy explaining the current state of the world.
Usenet was created because "networks" were expensive and "fax lines" were cheap. If you did it correctly machine A could call machine B in its local calling zone which could call machine C in its local calling zone and a message could go from A!B!C!user without incurring any long distance charges (aka "free").
Because you would lose your news feed if you pissed people off, spam was low because no admin would tolerate one of their users putting their system at risk of disconnection.
When networks because "free" and anyone could talk to anyone, there was no impediment to spam and no way to scale, and much of the infrastructure collapsed on itself.
That said, there is absolutely nothing preventing anyone from creating their own peer to peer messaging network. They could re-use the netnews code or write their own with a bit more security built in. The argument to that is "but hey no one will use it." to which you say "Who cares? My friends and I will use it." and since it is free and it is just you and your friends it will be fun and enjoyable. And if you're very unlucky everyone will join you.
Ah, Byte. There's nothing like it, and there probably never will be. Where else could you find circuit diagrams, assembly listings, and explorations of HLLs, next to all kinds other computer-related explorations?
It has a kind of magic to it, which I can't find in any other magazine to this day.
Each user gets his or her own newsfroup subhierarchy which anyone may subscribe, cache, archive, or distribute.
Postings are signed by the user, where the signature points to a parent, Merkle-tree style. A valid posting must encrypt its Message-Id and Newsgroups header lines with the newsgroup's posting-user's private key, and with half of a key shared with the hierarchical parent newsgroup's owner set out in e.g. the cmsg newgroup message and follow-ups to it.
Postings may be signed cleartext or signed ciphertext with the decrypt key encrypted on the public keys of eligible readers.
Postings may be dropped (and should not be presented by a reader UA) if a signature trace upwards, potentially to the root of the hierarchy -- there may be many hierarchies, but each would have unique root newsgroup -- fails.
Posting would work like moderated newsgroups, with the "moderator" being whoever posseses the valid signing information, and any unmoderated postings going ignored.
The equivalent of posting on a friend's wall would involve either posting into a subgroup of the friend's primary newsgroup for which the posting-friend has the appropriate signing information, or goes into a dropbox subgroup encrypted on the wall owner's public key, which the wall owner should monitor, and from which the wall owner could sign-and-promote postings onto her or his own wall or some other non-dropbox subgroup.
There are similar drawbacks to USENET: once posted, a message cannot be unposted or edited reliably. Postings may be lost.
Additionally, postings might not be permanently secret. Posting and reading credentials may be lost or stolen. Legitimate readers might repost information they shouldn't. None of these are too different from the facebooks.
The bright side is that this could be started today with just UA work, using the existing USENET transfer-and-storage systems. Newsgroup creation and policies on expiration and peer-and-downstream transferring would need to be made more scalable; the line about "cmsg newgroup" exposes the problem even in the hundreds of users of USEFACE, let alone several orders of magnitude more newsgroups than exist today.
However, there aren't obvious ultimate scaling limits thanks to hierarchicalization; the hardest part is probably organizing where UAs will get their NNTP reader service from -- it's unlikely to be just one reader that happens to subscribe to all USEFACE hierarchies and stores all postings indefinitely. This was already a problem for USENET, although there are various partial solutions that already exist.
The way I'm imagining it, you can both use server based and P2P based distribution.
You can federate across servers, have channels/rooms with filters / blacklists set by the moderators.
You can have one-time user keys and PFS algorithms, with optional support for users later claiming authorship if they preserved their old keys.
And everything would be timestamped using transparency logs or a blockchain.
Edits are diff messages.
Yeah props to you, whatever your age! And fwiw I'm too young to have used the Usenet in its prime.
"<Imperative>, kids" is just an ideom. The proverbial kid would be somebody here that hasn't heard of the Usenet or didn't make the connection—not you.
>"<Imperative>, kids" is just an ideom. The proverbial kid would be somebody here that hasn't heard of the Usenet or didn't make the connection—not you.
Yeah, I know. I felt that it was an entertaining enough juxtaposition that I said it anyways.
