Quothe Eric Dittman, from writings of Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 09:23:36AM -0600:
> I never really got into FidoNet for two reasons. The first was
> the highly political nature of FidoNet (splitting off, banning
> nodes, etc.).
Same here. Over a decade ago, I attended a local ACM chapter meeting
where the guest speaker was the sysop of a Fidonet BBS (and the MIS
dept. director of some random large corporation). This sysop made the
arrogant statement, backed up by a cop who was attending the meeting
(who was a co-sysop with him? I forget) with him, that most
non-Fidonet connected BBS's were likely to be used for criminal
purposes, by what were referred to as hackers. This sysop appeared to
have great disdain for non-Fidonet connected BBS's which had sysops
who weren't active censors and didn't restrict freedom of speech. It
was surmised that such independent BBS's were too "anything goes" and
needed to be watched more closely by Big Brother and perhaps shut
down.
Note that the aforementioned sysop wasn't just critical, and
suspicious, of the types of BBS's with "warez" and cracking/phreaking
info. on them, but any BBS that was independent of the Fidonet
censorship-craving crowd. My politely, but sternly, setting him
straight on both the correct, non-malicious, meaning of the word
"hacker" and the usefulness of many non-Fidonet connected BBS's
definitely wasn't appreciated by some attending the meeting. By the
way, I recall that, interestingly, most of those "computer
professionals" attending the meeting didn't appear to know the
difference between the Internet and a fish net. ROFL! From what I
recall, the topic of the meeting was originally supposed to have been
about using computers for communication... somehow, that topic had
somehow degenerated into the use of Fidonet, and the prevention of
BBS-related crime, as opposed to, more useful, information about UUCP
or the Internet being presented.
--
Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals:
All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature &
rdd_at_rddavis.org 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such
http://www.rddavis.org beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.
Received on Tue Feb 12 2002 - 12:53:19 GMT