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From: era1987@violet.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: soc.women,news.admin
Subject: Berkeley news
Message-ID: <5170@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sun, 20-Sep-87 18:08:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: jade.5170
Posted: Sun Sep 20 18:08:23 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 21-Sep-87 00:37:02 EDT
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Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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Xref: mnetor soc.women:7260 news.admin:1019


In an earlier article Erik Fair explained that it isn't possible to
trace people who harass women or disrupt soc.women, or post to moderated
groups without authorization, using a pseudonym and phony site, because
that's the way he and others set up the usenet software.

When problems began developing posting to soc.women on Berkeley.edu,
I contacted the consult people who told me that the woman who
administrated their news had left to get a Ph.D.  Others who used
Berkeley.EDU also began to have problems.  And each time I use the
system the problems get worse.

I can undestand that Berkeley, being a low-income, underendowed,
poverty-stricken school, cannot afford to pay a news administrator--
it is all they can do to scrape up kegs for football games and frat parties.

But Berkeley has a computer science department and a lot of people who
are much more familiar with computers and software than I am.  Hasn't
anybody told them that computers do not act independently?  Do they
think that software degenerates all by itself?  That one day a program
operates properly, and that the next day it decides, all by itself,
not to operate properly any more?

If it has become more difficult to access usenet on Berkeley.EDU, and
impossible to post directly to soc.women any more (it can still be done
through Pnews, at least until the unix wizards like Erik Fair get around
to setting it up so that can't be done either).  This is not due to
the absence of an administrator.  This is due to the presence of
woman-hating unix wizards and hackers who delight in sabotaging the
software that Berkeley is charging me a 100% differential to use.

If I were an educated computer science major at a prestigious school
like Berkeley, perhaps I could be conned into believe that the software
degenerate all by itself.  Since I am a simple, self-educated person,
I tend to believe that software operates the way those with root
privileges set it up to operate.  Certainly if software can degenerate
all by itslf, it could self-repair also.  I would suggest to Berkeley.EDU
that if those who are proud of having set up the usenet software so that
it is impossible to trace saboteurs, don't manage to set it up so that
it works, their root privileges be removed until the software restores
itself or an administrator can be hired.

--Mark