Gatepost

“ The West India merchants were perpetually forcing this point on the Postmaster General, and whenever a mail for Barbados or Jamaica was lost, the General Post-Office was beset with an indignant throng of merchants, loudly demanding that more and more guns should be assigned to every Packet which had to run the gauntlet of the West India Islands.
The influence of wealthy merchants upon the Post-Office is perhaps in our own day as great as is convenient. ”

“ Under the Internet model, all a system needs to know to get anywhere in the Internet is its own address, the address of where it wants to go, and how to reach a gateway which knows about the Internet. It doesn't have to be the best gateway. If the system is on a network with multiple gateways, and a host sends a packet for delivery to a gateway which feels another directly connected gateway is more appropriate, the gateway sends the sender a message. ”

“ By the way, you had better take this parcel with you, and open it when you reach the gate-post," and flinging a little parcel on the ground, the little old man disappeared. Sir Richard Byrde picked up the parcel, which was smaller than the smallest seed, and flew on over cloud and through air for seven times seven leagues. There, just as the old man had said, was the gate-post and the sign-board. He, too, read the directions:—
"'He that flies hither through the air,
Must bring a dark-faced maid,'
but I have not one!" ”

“ You are mentally using IQuest and not other online services. Technically, you are going through various gateways to reach the information libraries. You pay CompuServe for the privilege. In turn, they pay a fee to Telebase, and others. You can read The New York Times on Down Jones News/Retrieval through gateways from MCI Mail and GEnie. Accessing information through a gateway is often simpler than logging on to several online systems. Calling several systems often costs more, and it certainly takes time. ”

“ But, of course, if you do bad things like use session cookies and ignore the rules about GET and POST, the server cache will just screw everything up. (Notice that only GETs can be cached; you wouldn’t want to cache the result of something like adding a new blog post or the next blog post would never get added!)
GET and POST are, of course, part of the next piece of architecture, which Fielding calls “Uniform Interfaces.” Every web app works the same basic way: there are a series of URLs which you perform methods on. ”

“ For the Postmaster General by no means intend to depart from the principle which they have been ordered to adopt, of considering it to be the duty of the Packets to outsail the enemy whenever they can, and by no means to fight when it can possibly be avoided. ”

“ A cheap, efficient, general parcels post service must come and, now that the people are aroused—aroused as to the criminal wrongs inflicted upon them by a Postoffice Department and a Congress that have acted for thirty or more years as if indifferent to or not cognizant of those wrongs—it must come quickly, unless, of course, it should [244] develop that the people are, really and truly, as big fools as railroad, express companies and certain public officials have treated them as being. ”

“ For the whole world, with the exception of a few people in Cornwall and on the east coast of England, the Packet Service is dead, like all the men who made it, and fought in it, and laid their lives down for it. ”

“ Sure, being a hacker was suddenly cool, but was cool good for a community that thrived on alienation? Sure, the White House was saying all the right things about the Internet, even going so far as to register its own domain name, whitehouse.gov, but it was also meeting with the companies, censorship advocates, and law-enforcement officials looking to tame the Internet's Wild West culture. ”

“ The commander’s duties were summed up in this formula, “You must run where you can. You must fight when you can no longer run, and when you can fight no more you must sink the mails before you strike.”
Here at one blow perished the system of Privateering in the Packet Service. A ship armed so lightly could not afford to cruise after prizes, but was sufficiently concerned with her own safety.
The West India merchants prophesied disaster, and indeed it seems that the Postmaster General in framing their plans were not untainted by the proverbially excessive zeal of the convert. ”

“ Better to have a well-managed system in which official approval is required to put up a site, where only a few selected actions are permitted by the network protocols, where most of us are merely recipients of information, where spam, viruses, and piracy (and innovation and participatory culture and anonymous speech) are impossible. ”

“ I'm sure you'll all have a party. Back to comm: the Log Depot and the Terminal work sites have spunnel centers. Zolan will have the access codes to the Log Depot. At all costs, keep the construction site from becoming involved in this intelligence operation. If word got out that we used the Terminals for covert intelligence or military transmissions, the Outer Region governments would blow their collective tops. We can rationalize using the Log Depot if we experience piracy and harassment of our transports and citizens. It'll be extremely dangerous to go beyond that. ”

“ If you just can't wait, find a Usenet old hand to run the vote for you.
Readers may think this advice unnecessarily strict. Ignore it at your peril. It is embarrassing to speak before learning. It is foolish to jump into a society you don't understand with your mouth open. And it is futile to try to force your will on people who can tune you out with the press of a key.
If You're Unhappy... Property rights being what they are, there is no higher authority on Usenet than the people who own the machines on which Usenet traffic is carried. ”

“ We would restrict openness of access, decrease anonymity, and limit the number of actions that a network participant could perform. The benefits would be undeniable. It would cut down on spam, viruses, and illicit peer-to-peer file sharing. At the same time, it would undercut the iconoclastic technological, cultural, and political potential that the Web offers, the ability of a new technology, a new service to build on open networks and open protocols, without needing approval from regulators or entrenched market players, or even the owners of the Web pages to which you link. ”

“ The mere existence of a postal department of the government is not an establishment of monopoly. No government has ever organized a system of posts without securing to itself a monopoly of the carriage of letters and mailable matter ”

“ The principal deputy postmasters are empowered to erect cross-posts or stages, so that all parts of the country may have equal advantage as far as practicable, but only in cases where the postmasters are assured that such erections will be for "the better maintainance of trade and commerce, and mutual correspondences." ”

“ This would seem to be one of the real promise of the Gateway Experience from the standpoint of its ability to provide a portal through which, based on months if not years of practice, the individual may pass in his search to find self, personal effectuality, and truth in the larger sense. ”

“ But, had he only known it, the signpost was a “bad” one, though, as we know, that was not the fault of the post itself.
Trudging along the road was easier now, and the boys made better time. But it was tiresome work at that. ”

“ A man got out of the buggy and hitched his horse to one of the old gate-posts, first trying it to satisfy himself that it was trustworthy, for stability in even a post on those premises, where everything was going to decay, seemed unreasonable to expect. ”

“ A postman, a sorting-clerk, or a letter-sorter, if he be dismissed from his employment cannot pick up his bag of tools and offer himself to the next workshop, for the simple reason that he has no tools, and his trade is one of such a peculiar nature that it is wanted nowhere outside the Post-Office. ”

“ Postmasters are instructed not to receive any letter, &c. which there is good reason to believe contains any thing likely to injure the contents of the mail-bag or the person of any officer of the post-office. If such a packet be posted without the postmaster’s knowledge, or if at any time before its despatch he should discover any such packet, he is directed not to forward it, but to report the case, with the address of the packet, to the secretary. ”

“ They then turn on our little party, which is in rapid retreat on the Post Office, but we stand them off until we are behind the iron gates. An angry mob howls outside, but when they get to shaking or scaling the gates a movement from the sentries inside is enough still to stop them. ”

“ On some systems, the user must give routing information in the BITNET address. For example, North American mail to BITNET can be sent through the gateway center CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU . To make mail to NOTRBCAT go through this gateway, its mail address must be changed as follows:
NOTRBCAT%[email protected] Explanation: The @ in the initial address is replaced with % . Then add the gateway routing: "[email protected]". If you must use a gateway in your address, always select one close to where you live. Ask your local postmaster for the correct addressing in your case. ”

“ What’s more, they’re going to open it up to the rest of the world and any yahoo who has a need to hide what he’s up to is going to use your network to commit unspeakable acts—you’re going to be every pirate’s best friend and every terrorist’s safest haven. ”

“ But how about this new development, in which the Postmaster General apparently decides from day to day and hour to hour as to [135] whether one class of periodicals or another shall be allowed to live or made to die?
Has there ever before been in America, or in Russia, or in China, a censor with this power? If the institutions of this country are to be so changed as to give this despotic censorship to one man, ought that man to be the official in charge of the political machinery, as patronage broker, of the Administration? ”

“ Hitchcock’s talk about making an experimental test of the general value of a parcels post service by putting it in operation on a few selected rural routes is a joke, or else it is an evasion in order to delay the installation of a service which every citizen wants, save, of course, the few individuals who now own and control our railroads, which individuals also own, to a controlling extent at least, our express companies. ”

“ And here we may observe that if the system of opening letters at the General Post Office were merely adopted for the purpose of discovering criminals and preventing crime, we should still deprecate the proceeding, although our objections would lose much of their point in consideration of the motive: but when we find—and know it to be a fact—that the secrets of correspondence are flagrantly violated for political and other purposes, we raise our voice to denounce so atrocious a system, and to excite the indignation of the country against the men who can countenance or avail themselves of it! ”

“ While this loose-knit band of anarchists that were defining an Internet based on open standards were free to ignore most of the nonsense coming out of the "standards professionals" and their "Open Systems Interconnection" effort—there was one thing we couldn't ignore and that was the telephone network on which we built our unreliable, best-effort datagram service. ”

“ It is said, that it is the interest of society to make some pecuniary sacrifice for the purpose of sending the post into remote places; because, generally speaking, they are the less penetrable retreats of ignorance. ”

“ So, with that in mind then, what we have is a system in which a series of private parties who have used immense amounts of power over culture, over bandwidth, over communications, in the course of the 20th century are beginning to find themselves all simultaneously under threat from the free layer of the net. ”

“ Not infrequently, mischievous children place lighted matches, rubbish, etc., in the Post Office letter boxes, and in the letter boxes of private houses and warehouses. The Post Office officials are always on the alert to discover the delinquents. It is desirable also that the public, in their own interests, should call the attention of postmen and the police at once to any case in which they may observe letter boxes being tampered with. ”

“ ELAR prominently signposts protocol throughout the website not only to guide users through the new interface [28] , but also to embody a commitment to depositors’ protocol choices.
Sometimes things play out in unpredictable but serendipitous ways. Recently a researcher described a West African community’s responses to some archive websites. The community has only recently been connected to the Internet, and they mainly use sites such as Facebook, for social purposes. ”

“ There is also a series of RFCs put out by the Network Information Center called FYIs; they address common questions of new users and many other useful things. RFCs for instructions on retrieving FYIs.
gateway A special-purpose dedicated computer that attaches to two or more networks and routes packets from one network to the other. In particular, an Internet gateway routes IP datagrams among the networks it connects. Gateways route packets to other gateways until they can be delivered to the final destination directly across one physical network. ”

“ The Portal:Susannah Lattin was also deleted BY YOU, because Portals are reserved for exceptional people only, and there is no firm rule on who is exceptional and who isn't, so a small group of people with deletion rights decide who gets a portal. The exceptions come when what we host about that notable person overwhelms an appropriate parent Portal and splitting that portal by person is the best way to manage the portal's subheadings. ”

“ And the staff at Craig's List is really too small to really supervise and monitor everything. But their community can simply, if you see something that is spam or is somehow inappropriate, they can simply flag it and if it gets flagged a certain number of times it just disappears. ”