Usenet

A News, originally known simply as "news," was the first widely distributed program for serving and reading Usenet newsgroups. The program, written at Duke University by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott, was released on a tape given out at the June 1980 USENIX conference held at the University of Delaware. Steve Daniel from Duke offered a presentation on the then-new Usenet network and invited attendees to join. ...more on Wikipedia about "A News"

The alt.* hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing all newsgroups whose name begins with "alt.", organized hierarchically. The alt.* hierarchy is not confined to newsgroups of any specific subject or type, although in practice more formally organised groups tend not to occur in alt. ...more on Wikipedia about "Alt.* hierarchy"

Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation (ARMM) was a program developed in 1993 by Richard Depew to aid in the control of Usenet abuse. Concerned by abusive posts emanating from certain anonymous-posting sites, Depew developed ARMM to allow news administrators to automatically issue cancel messages for such posts. This was a controversial act, as many news administrators and users were concerned about censorship of the netnews medium. ...more on Wikipedia about "ARMM (Usenet)"

B News was a Usenet news server developed at the University of California, Berkeley by Matt Glickman and Mark Horton as a replacement for A News. It was used on Unix systems from 1981 into the 1990s and is the reference implementation for the de facto Usenet standard described in IETF RFC 850 and RFC 1036. Releases from 2.10.2 were maintained by UUNET founder Rick Adams. ...more on Wikipedia about "B News"

B1FF or BIFF was the most famous pseudonym and the prototypical newbie on Usenet. ...more on Wikipedia about "B1FF"

The backbone cabal was a group (or cabal) of large-site administrators who pushed through the Great Renaming and reined in the chaos of Usenet during most of the 1980s. ...more on Wikipedia about "Backbone cabal"

Base 64 literally means a positional numbering system using a base of 64. It is the largest power of two base that can be represented using only printable ASCII characters. This has led to its use as a transfer encoding for email among other things. All well-known variants that are known by the name Base64 use the characters A–Z, a–z, and 0–9 in that order for the first 62 digits but the symbols chosen for the last two digits vary considerably between different systems. Several other encoding methods such as uuencode and later versions of binhex use a different set of 64 characters to represent 6 binary digits but these are never called by the name base64. ...more on Wikipedia about "Base64"

Battlecruiser 3000AD (aka [BC3K] in Usenet) is seen to be one of the most-hyped, most-panned, and longest-developed games in computer game history. It was under development for seven years (see vaporware), generating one of the longest and largest flame wars in history of Usenet, before publisher Take Two Interactive Software released it in November of 1996. It was even then released against the wishes of its primary developer Derek Smart, as it was still incomplete and buggy – although even in this state it was able to collect some positive reviews. Smart left Take Two and continued to develop the game on his own. Four months later a reasonably bug-free version, BC3K (v1.01C4), was released in Europe through Gametek (UK) via Smart's personal company, 3000AD. Later Smart acquired rights for the game and released it as freeware. ...more on Wikipedia about "Battlecruiser 3000AD"

The Breidbart Index, developed by Seth Breidbart, provides a measure of severity of newsgroup spam. The Breidbart Index is calculated over a 45-day window, and takes into account the number of newsgroups to which a message is posted. It is defined as the sum over each copy of the message of the square root of the number of newsgroups that copy is cross posted to. Articles are considered the same if they are substantively identical. ...more on Wikipedia about "Breidbart Index"

C News is a news server package, written by Geoff Collyer, assisted by Henry Spencer, at the University of Toronto as a replacement for B News. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX conference in Washington, D.C. ...more on Wikipedia about "C News"

A cancelbot ** is an automated or semi-automated process for sending out third-party cancel messages over Usenet, commonly as a stopgap measure to combat spam. ...more on Wikipedia about "Cancelbot"

A CfV (Call for Votes) is part of the Usenet decision making process. Usenet users are called upon to vote on a topical administrative issue, such as whether or not to create a particular newsgroup. ...more on Wikipedia about "CfV"

"Cindy's Torment", a graphic sex story published in Spring of 1990 on Usenet, led to an early example of censorship in cyberspace. The posting by "Anonymous John", which described repeated BDSM rape, sparked a far-reaching debate on the limits of freedom of expression on Usenet. ...more on Wikipedia about "Cindy's Torment"

The comp.* hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing all newsgroups whose name begins with "comp.", organized hierarchically. ...more on Wikipedia about "Comp.* hierarchy"

Completion rates measure the useful transmission of complete binary files across newsgroups. ...more on Wikipedia about "Completion rate"

Cow-orker (or sometimes, cow-irker) is a term widely used on Usenet for a co-worker, derived from a typographical error. The exhortation to "keep the dash to the left of the w" is linked to the word. It could also mean a "diss" of a co-worker, saying they're just a "cow-orker," an intentional misspelling of the word. ...more on Wikipedia about "Cow-orker"

The crackpot index is a number that rates scientific claims or the individuals that make them, in conjunction with a method for computing that number. The method, proposed (most likely as a joke) by mathematical physicist John Baez in 1998, computes an index by responses to a list of 34 questions, each positive response contributing a point value ranging from 1 to 50. The computation is initialized with a value of −5. ...more on Wikipedia about "Crackpot index"

Cross-Posting is the act of posting the same information to multiple mailing lists. It also refers to the practice of posting articles to multiple Usenet newsgroups at the same time. ...more on Wikipedia about "Cross posting"

The Deja News Research Service was an archive of messages posted to Usenet discussion groups, started in 1995 by Steve Madere in Austin, Texas. Its powerful search engine capabilities won the service acclaim, generated controversy, and significantly changed the perceived nature of online discussion. ...more on Wikipedia about "Deja News"

Eternal September (also Great September, September that never ended, perpetual September, or endless September) is a Usenet slang expressions for the period of time beginning September 1993. The use of these expressions implies the belief that standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet have declined since 1993 due to an unending influx of new users. ...more on Wikipedia about "Eternal September"

The Evil Atheist Conspiracy is a fictitious organization commonly known by its three-letter acronym: EAC. It originated as a satire on the alt.atheism Usenet newsgroup in response to fundamentalist Christians arguing that atheists were conspiring to achieve world domination by forcing " godless" ideologies on them, such as evolution, separation of church and state, and secular humanism. ...more on Wikipedia about "Evil Atheist Conspiracy"

Formosa's law is an unofficial rule of Usenet groups, coined by David Formosa, that states, "The truly insane have enough on their plates without us adding to it." That is, flaming someone with an obvious mental problem can't make it any better. Mr Formosa first came up with this rule for the net abuse newsgroups, which had many trolls and spammers, but also many people who got into trouble for not understanding or being able to deal with others effectively. ...more on Wikipedia about "Formosa's law"

The Great Renaming was a restructuring of Usenet newsgroups that took place in 1987. The primary reason was said to be the difficulty of maintaining a list of all the existing groups. ** An alternative explanation was that European networks refused to pay for some of the discussion-intensive groups regarding religion and racism; this resulted in a need for categorization of all such newsgroups. ** , ** The suggested category for the newsgroups less popular among European networks was talk.* In either account, B News maintainer and UUNET founder Rick Adams is generally considered to be the initiator of the Renaming. ...more on Wikipedia about "Great Renaming"

Hamilton 95 (or Ham95) is a non-existent operating system that was rumored to exist by many Usenet posters, beginning in 1995. ...more on Wikipedia about "Hamilton 95"

Hipcrime is both an anonymous Usenet vandal and the eponymous method he devised. ...more on Wikipedia about "Hipcrime"

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