Pre-Web technologies (week 2)

 1) Finger protocol - considered obsolete and security issue

Created in 1977, Finger was an early way to send status information between two computers.

The finger daemon runs on TCP port 79. The client will (in the case of remote hosts) open a connection to port 79. An RUIP (Remote User Information Program) is started on the remote end of the connection to process the request. The local host sends the RUIP one line query based upon the Finger query specification, and waits for the RUIP to respond. The RUIP receives and processes the query, returns an answer, then initiates the close of the connection. The local host receives the answer and the close signal, then proceeds to close its end of the connection. That was an easy enough and effective way to get information about remote computer! And it was almost a predecessor to Twitter if computers could tweet about themselves.

Supplying such detailed information as e-mail addresses and full names was considered acceptable and convenient in the early days of networking, but later was considered questionable for privacy and security reasons.

For these reasons, by the late 1990s the vast majority of sites on the Internet no longer offered the service and modern Linux distributions and Unix flavours don't install the service nor the client by default anymore.

2) USENET - still kicking

USENET is a distributed discussion system built by Duke University graduate students Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott in 1980. Users read and write messages under different categories. It's most comparable to Internet forums that we see online today.

Over time, USENET grew to include thousands of discussion groups (called newsgroups), stored on special Internet servers, and millions of users. Users read and write posts, called articles, using software called a newsreader. (Modern Web browsers and e-mail software typically contain a built-in newsreader, eliminating the need for a separate program.) Each newsgroup covers a specific topic, and most new newsgroups have to go through an approval process. Alternative newsgroups, however, can be created by anyone and can cover nearly any subject. Newsgroups can be either moderated (every article is pre-approved) or unmoderated.

Unmoderated and alternative newsgroups have led to controversy. The lack of oversight and the anonymity of USENET has attracted people who post pornography and other indecent material. In addition, USENET has facilitated the illegal sharing of copyrighted material, such as software, music, and movies. This has led to anti-piracy measures enacted by governments and private companies. Despite the adoption of peer-to-peer (P2P) software, pirates often prefer the anonymous nature of USENET. USENET remains popular with a wide variety of legitimate users, however, and the American search engine company Google Inc. has added more than 20 years of USENET archives to its service Google Groups.

We can say that USENET right now is in some sort of limbo since the discussion part of it has been replaced by message boards and media content aggregating websites like Reddit, and illegal part of it has been replaced by Darknet / Tor anonymity network. However there are still people out there who prefer the text-only social network and as long as there are such people the USENET will continue existing.