1<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> 2<html> 3<head> 4<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" > 5<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> 6<title> About Yarchive.net </title> 7<style type="text/css"> 8 img.center { display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; } 9</style> 10</head> 11<body> 12 13<img src="photos/self_reflection.jpg" width="1055" height="797" class="center" 14 alt="Norman, reflected in a hard disk" style="max-width:100%; height:auto;"> 15 16<div style="max-width:35em; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto" > 17 18<h2 style="text-align:center"> About this website 19</h2> 20 21<p> 22 23These are articles I've saved from <a 24href="http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/what-is/part1/">Usenet</a> 25newsgroups (and a few from web forums). The vast majority of these 26articles were posted by people who have a well-deserved reputation for a 27high level of accuracy. The most extreme case is perhaps that of Henry 28Spencer, who makes errors so rarely that in the space newsgroups it was an 29event, involving the awarding of a (virtual) "I corrected Henry 30Spencer" T-shirt, when anyone else found an error of his. Aside 31from that, the only endorsement I have of these articles is that looking 32at them, I didn't detect anything seriously wrong; and I at least think I 33understand them. Most of the time I haven't even looked at the rest of 34the thread that the articles came from, since I read Usenet chiefly by 35scanning for certain authors, and automatically discarding articles by 36everyone else. Even if corrections were posted a day later in the same 37forum, I may not have noticed them — unless, of course, the 38corrections were acknowledged, as often happens for the people whose 39articles I read: most of them are sharp enough to realize when a 40correction is accurate, and gracious enough to admit it, which is part of 41what makes their articles worth reading. But none of them is 42all-knowing, and a correction that lies outside their expertise often 43passes un-commented-on. Thus anyone who wants to stake anything serious 44on the truth of any article here — anyone who wants to rely on it 45for making money, choosing doctors, playing politics, or working with 46powerful machinery or vicious chemicals — would do well to look at 47the rest of the thread of discussion, such as is currently maintained by 48<a href="http://groups.google.com/">Google Groups</a>; this can be done 49by clicking on the link in the header of the article, which attempts to 50lead to Google's copy, and then clicking on Google's links to get the 51whole thread. This is not to imply that other articles in the thread are 52on the same level as these. If significant danger is involved, the 53serious reader should do even more checking than that. And significant 54danger often is involved. "Everything that is perfectly safe is 55perfectly useless", and many of these articles are very far from 56being either. 57 58<p> 59 60Articles are not put up here immediately; only a year or three after 61first saving them do I look at them again, sort them out, and make index 62pages for them. (By that time I've forgotten enough of them to make them 63worth rereading — and if I find they are not worth rereading, I 64discard them.) I've largely automated the making of index pages; the 65programs I've written for it (mostly in Perl) are available as a tar file 66(<a href="tools.tar">tools.tar</a>). The making of the links to search 67for Google's copy of each article is also automated. If it stops working 68because Google changed their query syntax, please let me know. Links 69that are on the Message-ID line of the header should link straight to the 70article in question; other links (from articles I've lost the Message-ID 71for) should invoke a search. For articles from the linux-kernel mailing 72list, links that are on the Original-Message-ID line of the header are to 73kernel.org's copy of the article. (They used to be to GMANE, but that 74service went away.) 75 76<p> 77 78Some changes have been made to these articles, but nothing that would 79destroy any possible meaning. When I reread them, it is with a text 80editor in an 80-column window, and I often automatically reformat 81paragraphs so that I can read them better. I also sometimes correct
82typos which annoy me (and which are unambiguously typos), or delete large 83blocks of text quoted from another article which I also saved in the same 84file. They have also all been converted to the UTF-8 character encoding. 85 86<p> 87 88At first, URLs that appeared in these files were just plain text; then 89I converted them all into clickable URLs; then recently I wrote a test 90script to check whether they still worked, with the idea of making 91only the working ones clickable. That threw out about half of them as 92being dead. Unfortunately that wasn't nearly enough; many sites, 93though not yielding any HTTP error, had been taken over by vultures 94and were just feeding up advertising. In many other cases what was 95originally a link to some detailed piece of information now just 96redirects to the main page of the site. So I went through the list of 97'working' URLs by hand, and threw out about half of them. Thus if a 98URL isn't clickable, here, it most probably isn't worth going to 99(though if you must, you can still copy and paste it into the URL bar 100on your browser -- but trying <a href="https://archive.org/web">the 101Internet Wayback Machine</a> would be better). In a few cases, the 102content pointed to by some broken link seemed significant enough that 103I went to the trouble to track down its new location; those appear as 104clickable URLs which are displayed as the old URL, but send you to the 105new one. In the case of links that led to images, if those images 106were put up by the person writing the article, I've felt free to make 107a local copy of the image; when I've done so, those images appear 108inline in the article rather than as links to be clicked on. 109 110<p> 111 112Though few of these articles have copyright notices, by law they still 113are copyrighted by their authors. (This is a new and bad feature of 114copyright law; most of the time, when people write things without a 115copyright notice, they don't care whether or not it is copied.) 116Nevertheless, the act of posting them to Usenet, a network of servers 117that stores and forwards copies of articles, has implicitly given 118permission for them to be stored and reproduced — to what extent is 119uncertain; but in any event, I will remove articles if their authors so 120request, and have, when possible, notified authors whose articles 121comprise a significant portion of this archive. 122 123<p> 124 125This website was for several years entirely nonprofit, and then for 126years had Google ads on only some files, then for a couple of years 127had Google ads on them all, but now is back to not having ads, since 128Google's bots decided that the content here was insufficiently 129"unique" and "original". Then for a while I ran 130their ads only on <a href="blog">my blog</a>, but now I find that 131their terms of service have grown a predatory "indemnify" 132clause by which if they or their advertisers cause harm I would be 133legally responsible for that harm. To be held responsible for malware 134served by some advertiser is not acceptable, so this site currently 135has no advertising. For people contacting me about placing 136advertising here, I do not run ads that are not clearly identifiable 137as ads, nor ones that flash or blink. I've put an occasional Amazon 138associates link into the site; it's always to something I have myself 139and like. (Obligatory boilerplate: "As an Amazon Associate I earn 140from qualifying purchases.") 141 142<p> 143 144The authors of these articles are not responsible for the headings and 145names under which I have filed their articles. When several authors' 146articles have been put together in a single file, the ordering of their 147names in the index means nothing; it is usually alphabetical order (but 148by first name — an artifact of the index-making program). 149 150<p> 151 152Corrections and comments are welcome. 153 154<p style="text-align:right"> 155 156— Norman Yarvin ([email protected]) 157 158<p> 159 160(To guarantee that email to me gets past my spam filters, you can put the 161phrase "not spam" in the "Subject:" line of the email header.) 162<p> 163 164My current PGP public key is: 165<pre> 166-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- 167 168mQENBF8LmjIBCACoIJ0JRioio178ry7m7J9NL2A2SKe9rqtvNpQFQuJn/WyyY7fD 1697d1R/H0XvmO4cFdV7tfu6t+igAdED/G+wFMzYMsyeTT0YrE+RB1Nex5dV50bGZW2 170XnHye0QAmWLtEoSroO8/pBI8XngQMZ2OntJhhsIEb68WOpdbCn8uJ/8P+xpK15PO 171aQc3NBm482UkYGEvIvzmj3pQSW3SrKcr0E8jH1REnZhWJzVJUZ/Nj5yyftzI+dfI 17286UPE/fHQIUNp7R4eBGtUSOBYv08lgkrlVKliNYih53sJjQzGBtF14VRN2uw7jMO 173LVRBohw4PyT8QvPAU4cHQQGzKxCCOdH9AgSjABEBAAG0Lk5vcm1hbiBZYXJ2aW4g 174KDIwMjAga2V5KSA8eWFydmluQHlhcmNoaXZlLm5ldD6JAU4EEwEIADgWIQRAaOW8 175MT4VN8Vs/P7Jf9cS47L9IgUCXwuaMgIbAwULCQgHAgYVCgkICwIEFgIDAQIeAQIX 176gAAKCRDJf9cS47L9IhNOB/9h898Mo3T9gPfDTg/YdvmplICBOpgFI1VFzkGQsLMa 177jiEmNGKaDWdcjzhHICr5tLPvxiyJ2o0rf8zxdVVIWv0wZMvtUUOE+R2y3GvBnZxa 178ohIInhWoLFIr/jsyu6cDPsgzaOfOBWWoTZh3Iyrh8MJMlE5804jaHMSEbkDnrF51 1794WrOGUYvCj8FbIn6BNk0WBPF0skbyCB7xvORoub3xj4WO/o1SAgGH64Mt670YCKZ 180P4wAXWue+vdCYe99mGS+BZc82ofWXkjUKhNc11HLUoGhRSoS69oQy3aednB/X1cU 181sKSd43pyLk5UD+kkPfZiRHLzka/FECxe6bMpENAnsiKcuQENBF8LmjIBCAClzYzw 182lAFMxvOaF7j+QGL445p3vCgP3Nr15yFDzwHkwHGCZfAqlXjIKxc29RMY1i6WTotV 183ZXkoTCjDArkHMKO0KArwJv4wH6jZhIh4cxY009re2pMbyGMX1IBrQmVAsgJirMrC 184w9G6WDlEQ+mnSUdtfTYrkogY5vREgaShoueRcG84ZMJNtC5uOfid8EmEYrYlc4qi
185rxZfc2/lkOfiyZDzFX44WJSkzt70/kcHnfnFlyNx0ByZloAyjuSZsIx02TS8o8fY 1869IVwT8HTo9CMBYRNHyRGFsurAuyhlwxKgYE47DTXSHRQaIWCKhEhbzPK2HMfPfNx 1871OjxoB8ctGBUrdXfABEBAAGJATYEGAEIACAWIQRAaOW8MT4VN8Vs/P7Jf9cS47L9 188IgUCXwuaMgIbDAAKCRDJf9cS47L9IqpfB/9nAVepOY9LpqMcdND18HnUwGyIoxbd 189sdeB2WlcJ8VanAbDgqDIQTxAho/1wfabeW1EjkL4aUAlzfwKMby7uYN6lH7HZyVq 190RhloVjgK/jgn1tsxOkrGLAebtWgp0U8YZjof+Rur+bcMk4eDklWXuojTDEkjzgjF 1910B4rbrB+4f2FPR7rZ/ZKQlcuiOK4oFE1As6QC6mJqDHfxeeLBHC+hKeMpe0bbFfn 192i27zfvwZNopPqlQaVDrFctCYbQx8Zti8pvAoSulATFhKxJC9jr4FX6oSCP50irwA 1938TwH7DCB/nfbdJtyNaq+jZHU4VxaDfVnEzt5qLmvWTHlDfWTNQRVWfIO 194=Fk9q 195-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- 196</pre> 197</div> 198 199<hr> 200 201<a href="home.html">Home</a> 202 203</body> 204</html>
Line numbers count LF bytes from the start of the resource, as the search results do. Vendor segments are library code the classifier recognised; they are stored but not indexed. Bytes are shown as Latin1 characters, one per byte.