Alice's NNTP Server

I'm not sure who wrote this originally

With apologies to Arlo Guthrie, and with great thanks to previous "Alice's Restaurant" filk authors Jon Kamens, Chris Stacy, Alan Wechsler, Noel Chiappa, and Larry Allen, who provided the inspiration.
No thanks or apologies to those who made the original decision which prompted this piece, but heartfelt thanks to those around me who also spoke out in opposition. This one's for you, gang.
- Nil Illegitimo Carborundum, Sometime-in-1993

This song is called "Alice's NNTP Server" and it's about Alice, and the NNTP server, but "Alice's NNTP Server" is not the name of the NNTP server, it's the name of the song, and that's why I called this song "Alice's NNTP Server".

You can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP.
You can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP.
Telnet over, it's a simple hack.
Port one-nineteen is where it's at.
and you can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP.

Now it all started two semesters ago, it's on two semesters ago when my about-to-graduate friend and I went up to read some news at Alice's server, 'cause the news didn't live on our server, it lived on Alice's server, with lots of forged messages and newgroups and rmgroups, and of course the news articles themselves.

Anyways, it was a nice system, and the University's network connection was wide, and Alice had the bandwidth and the diskspace and they figured they didn't have to worry about expiring their news articles for a long time.

We got up there, found all the articles, and we figured it'd be a friendly gesture for us to take the articles and distribute 'em around to our other friends at the University that also didn't get a full feed, 'cause that's what Usenet was supposed to be all about in the first place, right?

So we took about half a gig of diskspace and stuck it on a spare workstation which we were gonna make into our own news server, and we got ourselves educated on NNTP. We took spool directories, server software, a compiler, an editor, and other implements of destruction and headed on back to our new server. Well, we got there and there was a big chain across the machine room door and a mail message in our mailbox saying "Closed for end-of-semester". We'd never heard of a machine room that was closed at the end of the semester before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset, looking to find another place to stash the news.

We didn't find one until we came to our own home machines, and off the side of the /usr/spool partition, we noticed there were some old news articles. And we figured that one big pile of news is better than two little piles, and rather than copy that one to the free disk, we decided to just install our half-gig disk on the home machine and create a link from the new partition to /usr/spool.

That's what we did, and NNTP'ed back to Alice's, had an end-of-semester newsfest that couldn't be beat, went to sleep and didn't get up until next morning, when we got a phone call from the University Director of Computer Security. Said "Kid, someone found your user-id on a post to an unauthorized newsgroup, in the bottom of a subdirectory full of messages from unauthorized sources, on a disk partition that wasn't there the night before, on a hard drive that wasn't there the night before, and I just wanted to know if you had any information 'bout it..."

I said "Yes sir, Mister Director, I cannot tell a lie, I put that hard drive on the machine and imported those news articles".

After speaking to the Director for about forty-five minutes on the telephone we finally came to the truth of the matter and he said that we had to go down and remove the drive, and also had to go down and speak to him at the Undergraduate Office, and bring all our spool directories, server software, compilers, editors, and other implements of destruction with us, and so we did.

Now friends, there was only one or two things the University Director of Computer Security coulda' done at the Undergraduate Office and the first was he could have given us a medal for being so brave and honest on the telephone, which wasn't very likely, and we didn't expect it, and the other thing he could have done was bawled us out and told us never to be seen transportin' news and installing hardware about the vicinity again, which is what we expected, but when we got to the Undergraduate Office there was a third possibility that we hadn't counted upon, and we was both immediately arrested and handcuffed, and I said "Hey, Director, I don't think I can remove the hard drive with these handcuffs on", and he said "Shaddap kid, and follow me".

And that's what we did, walked right behind him and walked to the quote 'Scene-of-the-Crime' unquote. I want to tell you about this here University where this is all happening here. They got a T1 line here, so there's no stop signs on the network, but they got one System Administrator, and of course, the Director of Computer Security, but when we got to the 'Scene-of-the-Crime' there was the System Administrator, five Special Interest Group Representatives with five lawyers each, and three TAs acting as Assistant System Administrators, this being the biggest crime of the last five years, and everybody wanted to get in the newspaper report on it because it had something to do with computers and politically- incorrect content and all the artsies knew that all the had to do was spell "computer" correctly in order to get a cushy job writing anti-technology columns for the local paper.

And they was makin' the System Administrator use up all kinds of net.cop equipment they had hanging around the machine rooms. They was greppin' mail, tracin' Path-IDs, following FTP and telnet logs, and they eventually came up with twenty seven mail messages, and they printed each one of 'em out and put circles and arrows and highlights on 'em and a paragraph on the back of each printout explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us. They took archives of the approach, the getaway, the activity in our home directories and /tmp, and the spool directories, and I already mentioned the mail grepping.

After the ordeal, we went back to our residences. The Director of Student Security said he was going to keep us under supervision and said "Kid, I'm going to take away your root access, but you can have your regular account back if you'll give me the userid and password for it first".

I said "Director, I can understand you wanting my root access and my regular userid so's you can put me in the list of users denied access to FTP and telnet, but why do you want my password?"

And he said "Kid, we don't want you reading /etc/passwd and running crack on it".

And I said "Director, did you think I was going to read /etc/passwd and run crack on it just to read Usenet News?"

The Director said he was making sure, and friends, the Director was, 'cause he changed my numeric user-ID so I couldn't chmod my old files, and he chmod'ed all my files and directories to 000 so's I couldn't use any information contained in 'em to build something with the setuid bit set and put it under someone else's directory under the name "ls" and use the fact that the default system environment had the user's current working directory appearing in the PATH before /bin, and he even changed my shell to "rsh", just in case.

The Director was making sure, and it was about four or five hours later that Alice (remember Alice? This is a song about Alice), Alice came by and with a few nasty words to the Director, bailed us out of our rsh accounts, had another session of newsreading that couldn't be beat, and didn't get up until the next morning, when we all had to go to the Student Disciplinary Tribunal.

We walked in, sat down, and the Director of Computer Security came in with the twenty seven mail message printouts with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, sat down. Man came in said "all rise". We stood up, and the Director stood up with the twenty seven mail message printouts and the judge walked in, sat down in front of a manual typewriter, and he sat down, and we sat down. The Director looked at the manual typewriter, and and then at the twenty seven mail messages with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the manual typewriter. And then at the twenty seven mail message printouts with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry, 'cause the Director had come to the realization that this was a typical case of minds from the 1950s trying to deal with the technology of the 1990s, and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the twenty seven mail message printouts with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us. And we was given a few lines on our transcripts and had to take the hard drive out of the machine the next morning, but that's not what I came to tell you about.

Came to talk about censorship.

We got a place up here, which I won't name publically, and among other things, one of the things they do is take a big newsfeed from the wide world of the Internet and select it, inspect it, detect it, infect it, neglect it, and then inject it into the news directories. I went down and got my job application papers, and I walked in wearing a suit-and-tie so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning.

'Cause I wanted to look like the all-politically-correct kid from university, man I wanted to feel like the all-politically-correct kid from university, man I wanted to BE the all-politically-correct kid from university, and I walked in and I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds of mean nasty ugly things. And I walked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said "Kid, do the oral personality profile test with the shrink in Room 101".

I went up there and said "Shrink, I want to be a productive employee. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna PRODUCE. PRO-DEWCE! I wanna work harder than the lowest grunt at Microsoft, I wanna be an efficient user of the NSFnet backbone for our corporate agenda, I wanna PRODUCE! I don't never wanna read any newsgroups other than those concerning the quarterly reports and company product announcements! Sure this is a Unix site, but I don't mind the castrated newsfeed and the mail greppers, 'cause it'll all help me to PRODUCE! I wanna see the stock of this company split ten times over the next year, I wanna make the Board of Directors so filthy rich, man, I tell you I wanna PRODUCE, PRODUCE, PRODUCE!", and I started jumpin' up and down, yellin' "PRODUCE, PRODUCE, PRODUCE!", and the shrink started jumpin' up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling "PRODUCE, PRODUCE, PRODUCE!", and the manager came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said "you're our boy".

Didn't feel too good about it.

Proceeded on down the hall gettin' all sorts of political injections, inspections, detections, neglections and all kinds of stuff that they was doin' to me at the thing there, and I was interviewed two hours, three hours, four hours. I was there for a long time going through all kinds of mean nasty ugly things and I was just having a tough time there and they was inspecting and injecting every single part of my political mindset, and they was leaving no part untouched. Proceeded through. And when I finally came to see the last man, the Commissar of Information Access, I walked in, walked in, sat down after a whole big thing there, looked at the big framed print he had behind him, (a signed original by Richard E. Depew!) and said "what do you want?"

"Kid, we only got one question. Have you ever read anything in the alt.* hierarchy from anywhere other than your local news spool?"

And I proceeded to tell him the story of the Alice's NNTP Server Censorship, with full orchestration and five-part harmony and stuff like that and suddenly he stopped me right there and said "Kid, did you ever have that written up on your transcript?"

I proceeded to tell him the story of the twenty seven archived mail messages with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one, and he stopped me right there and said "Kid, I want you to go and sit down on that bench that says group H ... NOW, KID!"

And I walked over to the bench there, and there's group H, which is where they put you if you may not be *moral* enough to join the company after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly-looking people on the bench there.

News forgers. Porno FTP site admins. Anon-server users! Promiscuous NNTP site admins. News administrators running promiscuous NNTP sites, with full feeds no less! Sitting right there on the bench next to me! And there was other mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, nastiest, ugliest one of the bunch, he had probably offended more people through his postings than the world's top ten sickest, most twisted fucks combined, he was coming over to me and he was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' nasty 'n' ugly 'n' horrible and all kinds of things and he sat down next to me and said "Kid, what'd ya get?"

I said "I didn't get nothing, they put a line on my transcript and made me remove the hard drive". He said "What were you busted for?", and I said "unauthorized hardware modifications". And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and a hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, 'till I said "to set up an NNTP server which could bring potentially-offensive newsgroups censored at my local site and grant full news access to my friends". They all came back, shook my hand, talkin' 'bout crime, underground FTP sites, promiscuous NNTP servers, what to do about Barney the Dinosaur, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench. And everything was fine, we was trading wares and all kinds of things, until the Commissar of Information Access came over, had some paper in his hand, and said...

"Kids, this-online-survey's-got-47-words-37-sentences-58-lines-we- wanna-know-details-of-the-crime-time-of-the-crime-all-the-things- you-gotta-say-things-about-the-crime-what-newsgroups-you-was-reading- at-the-time-the-contents-of-your-current-.newsrc-file-and-all-the- things-you-gotta-say", and talked for forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said, but we had fun filling out the form and making cool sounds with the relay keyswitches on the IBM 3101 terminals on the bench there, and I filled out the details of the Alice's NNTP Server Censorship and the hard drive with the four part harmony, wrote it down there, just like it was, and I pressed ENTER, and the screen cleared, and I saw the rest of the form.

In the middle of the screen.

Away from everything else on the screen.

In parentheses.

Capital letters.

Quotated.

Read the following words: "Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?"

I went over to the Commissar, said "Commissar, you got a lotta damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I'm just sittin' here, sittin' on the group H bench 'cause you want to know if I'm *moral* enough to join a Company to grep mail, burn electronic books, and censor feeds after bein' an NNTP hacker." He looked at me, said "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your .newsrc down to California..."

And friends, somewhere in California, enshrined in some little directory, is a study in ones and zeroes of my .newsrc. And the only reason I'm singin' you this song is 'cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or *YOU* may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that, there's only one thing you can do and that's post a message to your company's internal newsgroup, saying "Commissar, you can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP server."

And log off.

You know, if one person, just one person does it, they may think he's really sick and won't fire him just yet, just send him down to a Training Session until his brains are jellied up. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're starting a cascade and will only fire one of 'em to establish a precedent and put the fear-o-God in the rest of their workers. And three people, three, can you imagine, three people logging on, posting a message containing a bar of Alice's NNTP Server and walking out, they may think it's an organization. And can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day logging on, postin' a bar of "Alice's NNTP Server" and logging off. And friends, they may think it's a movement.

And that's what it is, the Alice's NNTP Server Anti-Censorship Movement, and all you got to do to join is quote it the next time it comes around on the screen.

With feeling.

So we'll wait for it to come around on the screen here, and follow-up with a quotation when it does.

Here it comes...

That was horrible. If you want to end censorship and stuff you got to post loud...

I've been writin' this song now for twenty-five minutes and over three hundred and twenty lines of text. I could write it for another twenty- five minutes and another three hundred and twenty lines -- I'm not proud...

...or tired.

So we'll wait till it comes around again, and this time with four part harmony and feeling. We're just waitin' for it to come around is what we're doing.

All right now...

You can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP.
(even .GIFs of Alice!)
You can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP.
Telnet over, it's a simple hack.
Port one-nineteen is where it's at.
and you can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP.

You can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP.
You can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP.
Telnet over, it's a simple hack.
And they can have the shirts right off our backs,
but we'll still read anything we want on Alice's NNTP.