>From spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU Thu Apr 4 23:11:22 1991
Path: ai-lab!mintaka!mit-eddie!wuarchive!usc!apple!amdahl!walldrug!moscvax!perdue!spaf
From: spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: news.announce.important,news.admin
Subject: Warning: April Fools Time again (forged messages on the loose!)
Message-ID: <4-1-1991(a)medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 1 Apr 91 00:00:00 GMT
Expires: 1 May 91 00:00:00 GMT
Followup-To: news.admin
Organization: Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue Univ.
Lines: 25
Approved: spaf(a)cs.purdue.EDU
Xref: ai-lab news.announce.important:19 news.admin:8235
Warning: April 1 is rapidly approaching, and with it comes a USENET
tradition. On April Fools day comes a series of forged, tongue-in-cheek
messages, either from non-existent sites or using the name of a Well Known
USENET person. In general, these messages are harmless and meant as a joke,
and people who respond to these messages without thinking, either by flaming
or otherwise responding, generally end up looking rather silly when the
forgery is exposed.
So, for the few weeks, if you see a message that seems completely out
of line or is otherwise unusual, think twice before posting a followup
or responding to it; it's very likely a forgery.
There are a few ways of checking to see if a message is a forgery. These
aren't foolproof, but since most forgery posters want people to figure it
out, they will allow you to track down the vast majority of forgeries:
o Russian computers. For historic reasons most forged messages have
as part of their Path: a non-existent (we think!) russian
computer, either kremvax or moscvax. Other possibilities are
nsacyber or wobegon. Please note, however, that walldrug is a real
site and isn't a forgery.
o Posted dates. Almost invariably, the date of the posting is forged
to be April 1.
o Funky Message-ID. Subtle hints are often lodged into the
Message-Id, as that field is more or less an unparsed text string
and can contain random information. Common values include pi,
the phone number of the red phone in the white house, and the
name of the forger's parrot.
o subtle mispellings. Look for subtle misspellings of the host names
in the Path: field when a message is forged in the name of a Big
Name USENET person. This is done so that the person being forged
actually gets a chance to see the message and wonder when he
actually posted it.
Forged messages, of course, are not to be condoned. But they happen, and
it's important for people on the net not to over-react. They happen at this
time every year, and the forger generally gets their kick from watching the
novice users take the posting seriously and try to flame their tails off. If
we can keep a level head and not react to these postings, they'll taper off
rather quickly and we can return to the normal state of affairs: chaos.
Thanks for your support.
Gene Spafford, Net.God (and probably tired of seeing this message)
> From: David C. Brock
> I'd like to read similar discussions of the data structures for ed, em,
> ex/vi. ... Similarly, if there are any pointers to references on some
> other data structures in editors like TECO, QED and E, I'd welcome them
> as well.
I don't have any discussions I can point you at, but I do have source - for
two things which are somewhat older than most of the ones you mention
(ex/vi/etc).
The first is a TECO from the fourth floor V6 machine (DSSR/RTS) at Tech Sq at
MIT:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/teco
There's some rudimentary documentation in there, in teco.doc, but don't expect
too much. You'll have to rely on the source, which is in MACRO-11 - but it
seems to be reasonably well commented. This actually predates V6; it was
originally written for an MIT OS called DELPHI, which ran on an -11/45 which
was the main EECS undergrad machine. At some point (probably post the Unix
port), it was modified to have '^R mode', which was a WYSIWYG display mode a
lot like the one in the ITS TECO in which EMACS was first written.
I have also put up the Montgomery Emacs for Unix:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/emacs
This is the version we were running on the 5th floor MIT V6 machine (CSR),
which by that point have absorbed a few V7isms (e.g. some ioctl() stuff). So
don't expect to be able to compile and run it, without a fair amount of
work. (I vaguely recall that it needs I+D space, so maybe not on a /23 at
all.) But at least the source is in C, so you can read it. I don't think
there's an un-modified version online (i.e. the original Montgomery source),
alas.
Noel
