Posts tagged with "usenet"

This bit of Emacs Lisp absolutely comes from a more innocent time on the Internet. Looking at it, it seems I wrote the first version, at least as a proper package, back in 2001. It's very possible that I carried a non-package version of it around as part of dp-lib.el¹ for some time before, so it might date from the late 1990s. While we weren't absolutely innocent back then, the idea of a slightly-risky-looking URL wasn't quite so bad as it is now.

So obfusurl.el came about from my time on Usenet, where sometimes you'd want to post a URL that would otherwise be a spoiler. This package was my solution to that. It's a simple idea: keep the protocol and domain and so on visible, just hide the remaining part. So rather than post:

https://blog.davep.org/about/

You'd post:

https://blog.davep.org/%61%62%6f%75%74/

I suppose this is still useful today, although I would expect a lot of people to be way less likely to want to attempt that click -- readable domain or not.

But, anyway, the code needed a tidy and cleanup for today's Emacs and Emacs Lisp. So obfusurl.el v2.2 now exists.

Earlier on today I needed a copy of wget on my iMac. It's not "native" to it so I got to wondering how you go about getting something like that onto it. Sure, I could have just grabbed the source and built myself, but really it's a lot nicer to use some sort of package manager.

A quick search lead me to Homebrew and I was then up and running in no time.

This in turn got me to thinking about how it might be fun to get some of the software I used to use on my GNU/Linux machine up and running again. The first one that came to mind was slrn. Sure enough slrn is available via Homebrew and installing it was dead simple.

But then I was faced with a problem: I needed an NNTP server. Way back I used to run a local one in my office that fed from and to my ISP's. Back then my ISP was Demon Internet; these days I'm with BT. A quick search lead me to an article or two that BT had a NNTP server, of sorts, provided by a third party. So I did a quick check:

Yay! This looked good.

After that I fired up slrn and.... problems. It kept asking me to log in, to provide a user name and password. The only problem was that I'd read in more than one place that a user name and password weren't needed for BT's server; all that was required was you be on a BT IP address. Checking the slrn docs I found force_authentication but ensuring that was off made no difference.

At this point I removed slrn and gave up.

Later, thinking it might be an issue with just slrn and perhaps it was worth trying a native NNTP client, I grabbed Unison (which is no longer supported but seems to work fine). I got that set up and ran into the same issue: it wanted login details.

Finally, after a bit more digging, I stumbled on the reason why I was struggling to make any of this work: BT had closed support for the server back in December last year!

A quick search around the web and I stumbled on Eternal September. Given all I was interested in was the good old text groups this looked perfect. I quickly registered an account, ran up Unison again and plugged in my details and....

Now that's all sorted I should try again with slrn. At which point I'll need to drag out and tidy up post.el (the version that was being maintained by some other people seems to have gone very stale, sadly).

This just turned up in email a little earlier:

What's of particular interest is the email address this was sent to. It was one that I only ever (to my knowledge) used for posts to Usenet. While my Gmail spam folder is filled with emails to that and other addresses I used for Usenet over the years this is the first bit of "proper" spam I've had to it in a long time.

It's significant that it's some sort of Xbase-related thing too. I think the Usenet group I posted to more than any other will have been comp.lang.clipper. Unless I had some lapse of judgement at some point in the late 1990s or early 2000s (I think I only got the davep.org domain in 1999, now I think about it) the address this was sent to was used nowhere else.

I've also never been a "Visual Objects and/or Vulcan.NET user". While I did once own a copy of Visual Objects (two copies actually -- a beta and then a final release) it wasn't in a way that I'd have been on some mailing list and even if I had the address in question wouldn't have been the one used.

So, yeah, great way to impress me with a new product: make your first contact with me look exactly like some old Usenet spam.

Edit to add: I've since had it confirmed by the sender of the email that my address was indeed pulled from comp.lang.clipper.