By "where is the Internet?" I mean the Internet that have conceived Jon Postel and others kind him. Now everything seems to be a giant web based application. But there are many thing that you can’t do through a web interfaces. I remember that in earlier years, I was able to connect to NNTP servers running Usenet news. Sharing, commenting and helping other people was granted by netiquete rules. Now seems to be ignored and everyone is going with HTML messages, sometimes with ugly implemented MUAs or NUAs, that uncover the right behavior of these kind of software tools.

Also, I’ve tried using Google Groups few days, but there I can’t sing my messages through GnuPG. The same happens on my Gmail Account. I hate the HTML messages, everything seems to be an unordered soup of html tags from many people as the mail has been replied or forwarded the original message. You loose levels of quotes and it’s hard to understand the unclear messages in a tag soup stack.

I prefer plain text messages, more sane and clear to read.

> I am trying to test if a character gets into an integer field and
> found no solution. Even just a single character has no way to test
> when the field is an int.

First of all, all input is done in the form of characters.
The thing is that some sequences of characters can be interpreted as
representing an integer and some can't.

For me is more clear the replies for each paragraph, than reading the message at the top of the original message, it the real sense of a conversation rather than a competition to get known who has the last word and better style. You can get really loosed on the conversation if you try to read a really old message and sometimes, if you have some kind of ordered notes somewhere, you can store a complete thread in a single message with the complete conversation without loosing sense of the topic that involves the message.

Some forums are able to quote previous messages. But if my Internet connection fails — here in Chile is common to get a failing connection from any ISP, because most of them s**ks — I will not be able to read offline the messages I want.

Most people now think that Internet it’s about Web Sites and Instant Messaging — aka Messenger, Google Talk and Yahoo! IM — and don’t know other kind of services such as NNTP, IRC or Telnet and everything seems to fulfilled of advertising messages. Sometimes I think that the netiquete is completely loosed lost and nobody is making some guidance on that to the n00bs that enters the Internet. I frequently see unindented code in some forums and newsgroups, and who owns these messages is praying for help, then I can’t help someone without netiquete criteria.

My current ISP I think is planning to close the NNTP service. The NNTP server that connects me to Usenet isn’t updated and I can’t see none of the groups I was visiting frequently and I’ve been force to pay to access Usenet to another provider. Also I see clear that many messages on the newsgroups are advertising messages.

Instead of creating new specialized services, everything is going to be Web Based and considering how was designed the HTTP protocol, most communications can’t be reached seriously. I just can’t imagine a security advisory announcing a high impact bug though a Web Interface without any proper signature to validate the authenticity…

2 Responses to “where is the Inernet?”

1. Matias | August 17th, 2008 at 00:04
   

   I guess you’ve got a typo.
   “netiquete is completely loosed” I think you meant “netiquete is completely lost”

   Good post BTW, I completly agree with you.

2. Recent Links Tagged With "nntp" - JabberTags | October 14th, 2008 at 17:49
   

   [...] public links >> nntp where is the Inernet? Saved by cguney on Mon 13-10-2008 NNTP Newsgroup Client for the Mac Saved by Ilikelogo on Tue [...]

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