Snoozenet
I'm sorry for the hotlist-gone-mad structure of this page, but it gets
updated really only sporadically, and it's pretty much this or nothing.
Certain things ought to be required reading for anyone interested
in hacking on news:
Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval 1.2
Much of my time and effort these days has gone into the fight to make
newsreaders compliant with RFC 1036. I think very highly of Ron Newman's
work on the Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval, and have included here a list of
some recent evaluations of popular Usenet agents. You may be interested
in knowing why
there isn't a chance in hell that Microsoft Internet News will ever receive
high marks from this project, and also how
they could do it right if they cared to try.
The following newsreaders have passed the requirements for the
Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval:
The following newsreaders have failed the requirements for the
Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval:
- America On-Line
- Forté Free Agent
1.1,
1.0.82
- Gnus 5.3,
5.0.15
- Internet In A Box (Spry's AIR News)
- Microsoft Internet Explorer
4.40.516
- Microsoft News for Windows 95
1.00.0132
- NCSA Mosaic for Windows 2.1b1
- Netscape Navigator
4.0b1,
3.0b5,
2.0b6,
2.0b1,
2.0
(also in French),
1.1N,
1.1b2
- NewsWatcher 2.0b24
- News Xpress
2.0b0,
1.0b3
- Nuntius 2.0.1
- OUI 1.5
- WinVN 0.99.7,
0.99.8
If you'd like to evaluate a newsreader against the Good Net-Keeping
Seal of Approval, please send your evaluation to me and I'll be happy
to include it here.
Research
Other projects affiliated with this religious war of mine:
- the Broken
Newsreader FAQ. This is intended as a comprehensive list of
software that's been observed violating RFC 1036 or the Good Net-Keeping Seal
of Approval, but I have not had time to maintain it actively in quite some
time. Hopefully it will find its way to these pages before long; if you
wish an old, stale copy feel free to send me mail.
- RFC 1036
syntax validation. This package examines a news article and
determines whether its
From header is syntactically
valid. This works beautifully in C news; it will probably not be
difficult to incorporate into INN, though I have not tried to do so.
- Son-of-1036
syntax validation. In the same vein, I've also been working sporadically on
an inews client that's compliant with Henry Spencer's "son-of-1036"
draft replacement for RFC 1036. Son-of-1036 is considerably stricter than its
predecessor in its syntax requirements, and I would like it to be possible
for servers to be strictly compliant before son-of-1036 actually
becomes standard.
- A modauth
package that performs some very simple checks on the server to prevent most
cases of moderator forging. A consistent problem on Usenet is that it's almost
trivial to forge a message to a moderated newsgroup, bypassing the moderator
entirely. This package is not a cure-all, but it is a low-cost solution, and I
expect that if used widely, it will cut down drastically on the number of
forgeries we see.
- Improved newsreader technology. In the last few months I've done some work
on modular article scoring. (I sort of wish that
didn't sound so pretentious.) Traditionally, newsreaders which allow their
users to filter articles automatically (e.g. kill files, hotlists, "twit
filters" and the like) do so with a rigid, idiosyncratic interface that's
hard-wired into the newsreader. My idea is that, instead, with only a small
amount of additional overhead, a newsreader could invoke an external program to
score articles rather than it all internally. By doing so, users gain an
enormous amount of flexibility: suddenly, you can filter articles in a
newsgroup using as much logic as you can put into the programming language of
your choice. I'm very excited about this, and welcome comments.
Some unofficial bug fixes that I wrote after becoming completely
fed up:
Documentation
Here are some other useful or innovative sources of Usenet-related
information.
Tim Pierce
<twpierce+www@mail.bsd.uchicago.edu>
Advertisements and other unsolicited commercial electronic mail
sent to this address will be proofread at my consulting rate of
$200/hour (one half-hour minimum). Questions relating to this
policy are welcome.