To: Bill Stewart-Cole Cc: nmehl@bbnplanet.com, dbd@panacea.phys.utk.edu, twpierce@midway.uchicago.edu, stanley@OCE.ORST.EDU, golden@physics.harvard.edu Subject: Re: Jerks-L From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis) Comments: #include || echo '+' >$HOME/.rhosts Date: Thu, 29 Jun 95 20:13:15 EDT Organization: Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y. Bill Stewart-Cole writes: > > My question is this: why in the world do you let Stodolsky use your name > in his Judges-L silliness? > > And "silliness" is precisely the word I mean to use. I don't see it as > dangerous, or as a basis for a serious real judicial process for the net, > but as something so disconnected from the real world as to be on the edge > of humorous. I thought the first post of the FAQ was actually a troll > looking for people muddled enough to think it was serious, but having > read some of Stodolsky's other posts, I realize that it is either a > troll taken MUCH too far or else he really is that far disconnected > from Usenet as it is. Er, OK, and I'll try to be brief. Please don't quote this note to anyone, especially to Stodolsky himself, since I don't want to hurt his feelings. (This goes for the cc: recipients too.) JUDGES-L(TM)(R)[(C) Dr. David S. Stodolsky] :) :) :) :) was born when I saw DSS's article in, I think, news.admin.misc proposing a creation of a forum for mediating disputes (i.e., Usenet flame wars). I've seen DSS post before on comp.groupware and respected him (and still do, in fact), so I wrote him an e-mail offering to help set up a mailing list and to see how it all works out. I've known Jim Gerland, who runs LISTSERV@UBVM for many many years (been running the Russian TeX mailing list since 89), and he was kind enough to let us use his system. I felt that a mailing list would be better than a newsgroup for such an experimental enterprise because a newsgroup, even alt, doesn't go away if the idea turns out to be unworkable. I told DSS almost from the start that I'm not going to have time to help him with anything other than pure technical listserv setup; and after a few months he's read enough listserv documentation to do take over the technical aspects of list ownership as well; then he started doing fancy stuff with configuring the listserver that I never learned myself. (He is very sharp, by the way) My own grand vision at the begining was to prototype of forum to help resolve conflicts on Internet, where any user with e-mail access could volunteer to mediate disputes and be a self-appointed "judge". Something like this: user A: Waaa! Help, JUDGES-L(TM)(R), user B is calling me names on rec.pets. JUDGES-L(TM)(R): User B, please don't call user A names anymore. Play nice. user B: And who the fuck are you to tell me that? JUDGES-L(TM)(R): we're your friendly net.judges, a self-appointed net.jury of your peers. We have absolutely no authority to make you stop calling user A names, but we hope that you'll listen to this disinterested neutral third party and turn into a better human being. Please. user B: Gee, I'm so impressed with your selfless willingness to meddle in other people's flame wars that I promise not to call A names anymore! user A: Thank you, JUDGES-L(TM)(R), you're so cool! user B: They sure are. Let's all be friends! OK, this sounds naive and idealistic (not to say kooky), but if it worked, it would be a better way of conflict resolution than having Aburt and Keegan slug it out for all eternity in news.admin.misc. Not to mention Vorobieff, Alexplore, and the rest of the soc.culture.soviet/russian crowd cross-post their flames, in transliterated Russian, to news.admin.net-abuse.misc, which happens periodically. Not to mention self-appointed net.cops complaining to posters' places of work or study about their politically incorrect Usenet posts from commercial ISPs, which seems to happen a _lot lately. I honestly still think that a resource like this _might have been helpful on rare occasions when two parties want to resolve a Usenet-related dispute and get some outside non-binding advice in non-adversarial way. Another hypo: user B to root@xyz.com: Hey sysop! User A@xyz.com is calling me names. root: I have no time for this shit! Ask judges-l for advice. user B to judges-l: Waa! Can user A call me names? judges-l volunteer: Yes. Learn to use a killfile. It takes two to tango. user B: What's a killfile? Whatever. Kooky, but if user B takes it further (like xyz.com's feed), then xyz.com could site the "judges'" opinion in defense. Note that this is fundamentally different from posting a complaint to something like news.admin.net-abuse.misc because the "judge" would be supposed to respond and try to make peace. But, as you can see, this didn't work out at all. At the beginning the project seemed to go well: a number of people whose opinions I rather respect, such as Dave Hayes, Tim Pierce, and Brad Templeton, signed up for the mailing list list and expressed interest. Then it suddenly turned out that DSS was interested primarily in discussing forged cancels and in resolving disputes involving specifically forged cancels, and even in forging cancels upon a request to JUDGES-L(TM)(R), and not in flame war mediation in general. Please note that I firmly refuse to criticize DSS or to say that I could have done a better job running JUDGES-L(TM)(R) myself. I pretty much refused to help DSS run JUDGES-L(TM)(R) when he asked for it, citing my lack of time. He took it and ran with it the best he could, and when he made mistakes, it's therefore my responsibility for not doing it myself. Soon after the mailing list was created, DSS proposed that the list subscribers put together a FAQ. Again, I still happen to think that a FAQ explaining to new Usenet users what forgeries, cancels, forged cancels, etc are would be a good idea. AFAIK, these topics are not explained in any of the FAQs in news.newusers.announce, and users don't realize how easy it is to forge. Just the other day I saw a discussion in alt.2600, where an apparent novice user was calling another mentally unstable for imagining that someone else's name and e-mail could somehow be put on a Usenet article. So, a number of people, including, I think, Tim Pierce, Brad Templeton, myself, et al contributed pieces to the FAQ and DSS glued them together. (I should note that DSS has his own perculiar writing style, which you can observe if you read his FAQ for comp.groupware.) Brad's piece discussed the appropriateness of forging cancels for other people's articles when they quote your copyrighted material. DSS deleted that part in a later version of that FAQ, not sure why (something to do with CoS's forged cancels??) I think Tim Pierce was responsible for a lot of the remaining non-kooky text, but I think he asked DSS to remove his name from the FAQ once it got too contraversial. About the time the first FAQ was posted (plus or minus a few months) certain folks (notably Mitch Golden and Dave Hayes) started posting repetitive and boring flames to the mailing list about the obvious fact that JUDGES-L(TM)(R) has no authority to compel anyone to listen to their "judgments" (which was, clearly, a design decision, so I can't imagine what their agenda was, except to make much noise). Then DSS suddenly announced that to remain subscribed to the mailing list, everyone must supply him with a postal address and a phone number within a week; when about 2/3 of the subscribers refused to go along, he unsubscribed them all. Since nearly everyone in the world can see my home address and phone number by typing 'whois dm.com', I had no objection to sharing this info with DSS, but I can very well understand those who refused! Indeed, this requirement contradicted our original fundamental idea that anyone at all can be a self-appointed net.judge. Indeed, the entire good idea got totally perverted, although I refrain from pointing any fingers (if I wanted to influence this project, I should have done some work myself). These strange events were described in detail on news.admin.misc by one of the former participants (I forget who) and that description was pretty accurate. I suppose that DSS's motivation for doing this could have been to kick the few flamers off of the mailing list (something I would not have done if I were in his place), but the effect was to kick nearly everyone off and effectively to kill the list. There's been no relevant traffic since, AFAIK. I'm pretty sure that the JUDGES-L(TM)(R) archives can be FTP'd from ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu (if not, you can retrieve them through an e-mail server, as described in the FAQ itself :), and anyone can see that nothing is going on in that list anymore. And then DSS started doing more unusual things, like trying to trademark the name "net.judge" (I _hope we was joking!) Sigh. Well, anyway, I've learned quite a bit from this project, and this is by far not the first and probably by far not the last idea that didn't work out. As to DSS's reposting his FAQ, I think it's a _still good idea because, in addition to all the things kooky, it contains a lot of useful and correct information about cancels and forgeries that new Usenet users should be aware of. I'd prefer to see it replaced by a more conventional FAQ (or partially incorporated into one of the exising FAQs) without the kooky-sounding stuff, like the $256 copying fee or the instructions for sending ritual complaints to JUDGES-L(TM)(R), described there as some Cabal that can forge cancels for others' articles. This is factually incorrect, since folks who issue most of the forged cancels these days, like Chris Lewis or Seth B., have nothing to do with JUDGES-L(TM)(R). In other word, the FAQ that DSS reposts has some very kooky parts and and some very good parts (the ones I wrote :) and in my opinion this is better than no such FAQ at all. I don't know what DSS thinks (I haven't exchanged any e-mail with him in quite a few months), but I personally view his FAQ as a terrific troll: I'm greatly amused by the hysterical reaction it provokes from certain net.personae _every _time DSS reposts it, and I suspect that so does he. DSS's latest response to Boursy may indicate that he's not taking JUDGES-L(TM)(R) seriously either. So that's the story -- pretty sordid, but as my late grandfather used to say, the only people who never fuck anything up are those who never do anything. Perhaps the next logical step is to convince Steve Boursy to join forces with DSS and become Lord Chief Net.Justice(R)(TM)[(C) Dr. David S. Stodolsky] in charge of enforcing all consumer protection legislation on Usenet. :) :) :) --- Dr. Dimitri Vulis Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps