5 ms·

I am very curious but my search-fu has failed me. What was the requirement? Is there a link or jargon file or something I could read? I love this kind of stuf

I am very curious but my search-fu has failed me. What was the requirement? Is there a link or jargon file or something I could read? I love this kind of stuff. Thanks!

quesera 3y ago
To post to a moderated group, you would add an "Approved" header to your post before submitting. The content of the header was not important, just the presence. Equally fun, your "From" address (just another header) was also under your control. So it was fairly trivial to post articles From: anyone, Approved: yes. In this way, it was pretty similar to SMTP email in the same era. Before EHLO and reverse lookups and server identification and SPF and DKIM and DMARC and spam filters and universal skepticism, email was simple to spoof. Now, the readers of USENET at the time were also pretty savvy, and there were other noneditable headers attached to your message that might betray your malfeasance. If you were posting to a newsgroup that didn't permit such activity (there were some that encouraged/required it!), you might earn an angry email sent to your news administrator, who was generally connected to the authority structure (university or employer) and had little patience for your juvenile behaviour. It worked really well. ...until it didn't! But I don't think this "problem" was a meaningful contributor to the decline of USENET.
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  Interesting that the content off the Approved header didn't matter. I'm only familiar with Mailman's use of same, where the content has to be the moderator's password: incorrect is equivalent to not providing the header, and correct bypasses the moderation queue. Either way, it gets scrubbed immediately, for secrecy. Essentially, it's just to let listserv moderators send to a list without having to spend time using the queue for their own messages, or automation of any sort such as custom smtp client apps.
  - quesera 3y ago
    Ah, I'd forgotten about the similarity to Mailman's moderation. Right, that works because there's a centralized approval gateway (the mailman code on the mail server) which can also strip out the secret before distributing the message to the list members. Since NetNews had no central authority, every news server had to judge the validity of posts for themselves. And obviously they couldn't all know the moderator secret without it leaking immediately. Nowadays we'd have a moderator cryptographically sign the message contents. Actually this should have been possible back then too (RSA in 1977 plus a public key published in the newsgroup definition which already held the moderator email address?), but it was not used. Newsreaders did not show the Approved header. People often stuck fun or funny stuff in there, like easter eggs for those who knew to look.
- devilbunny 3y ago
  I know alt.hackers had a similar rule, and even had a testbed group (alt.hackers.test?) you could use to see if you had figured it out without polluting the main feed with test posts. The FAQ hint was "it's moderated with no moderator". Everything else was up to you.
forgetfreeman 3y ago
Man you're asking a lot here. I've had at least three concussions and the tail end of my drug use between when this was a thing and now. I cannot recall the exact specifics but what I do remember was that to get a post accepted to the group you had to include a custom x-header (name escapes me). The contents of that header could be anything, it didn't matter, the presence of the non-standard extra header was what was checked. The best part of it all was nobody, literally no one, would tell aspiring new members how to post to the group. There was the vaguest of hints dropped in the group FAQ and that was it. You could post if you could figure out how to post.

I am very curious but my search-fu has failed me. What was the requirement? Is there a link or jargon file or something I could read? I love this kind of stuff. Thanks!

quesera 3y ago

To post to a moderated group, you would add an "Approved" header to your post before submitting. The content of the header was not important, just the presence. Equally fun, your "From" address (just another header) was also under your control. So it was fairly trivial to post articles From: anyone, Approved: yes. In this way, it was pretty similar to SMTP email in the same era. Before EHLO and reverse lookups and server identification and SPF and DKIM and DMARC and spam filters and universal skepticism, email was simple to spoof. Now, the readers of USENET at the time were also pretty savvy, and there were other noneditable headers attached to your message that might betray your malfeasance. If you were posting to a newsgroup that didn't permit such activity (there were some that encouraged/required it!), you might earn an angry email sent to your news administrator, who was generally connected to the authority structure (university or employer) and had little patience for your juvenile behaviour. It worked really well. ...until it didn't! But I don't think this "problem" was a meaningful contributor to the decline of USENET.

hunter2_ 3y ago
Interesting that the content off the Approved header didn't matter. I'm only familiar with Mailman's use of same, where the content has to be the moderator's password: incorrect is equivalent to not providing the header, and correct bypasses the moderation queue. Either way, it gets scrubbed immediately, for secrecy. Essentially, it's just to let listserv moderators send to a list without having to spend time using the queue for their own messages, or automation of any sort such as custom smtp client apps.
- quesera 3y ago
  Ah, I'd forgotten about the similarity to Mailman's moderation. Right, that works because there's a centralized approval gateway (the mailman code on the mail server) which can also strip out the secret before distributing the message to the list members. Since NetNews had no central authority, every news server had to judge the validity of posts for themselves. And obviously they couldn't all know the moderator secret without it leaking immediately. Nowadays we'd have a moderator cryptographically sign the message contents. Actually this should have been possible back then too (RSA in 1977 plus a public key published in the newsgroup definition which already held the moderator email address?), but it was not used. Newsreaders did not show the Approved header. People often stuck fun or funny stuff in there, like easter eggs for those who knew to look.
devilbunny 3y ago
I know alt.hackers had a similar rule, and even had a testbed group (alt.hackers.test?) you could use to see if you had figured it out without polluting the main feed with test posts. The FAQ hint was "it's moderated with no moderator". Everything else was up to you.

forgetfreeman 3y ago

Man you're asking a lot here. I've had at least three concussions and the tail end of my drug use between when this was a thing and now. I cannot recall the exact specifics but what I do remember was that to get a post accepted to the group you had to include a custom x-header (name escapes me). The contents of that header could be anything, it didn't matter, the presence of the non-standard extra header was what was checked. The best part of it all was nobody, literally no one, would tell aspiring new members how to post to the group. There was the vaguest of hints dropped in the group FAQ and that was it. You could post if you could figure out how to post.