US government to announce new top level USENET hierarchy

[Jan Vroonhof <vroonhof@math.ethz.ch>]

As part of its ongoing efforts to improve life on the Internet, which
includes fighting ugly S-MIME and PGP headers by keeping cryptography
under control, the United States government today announced that it is
creating a new global top level hierarchy for USENET.  It will be
managed by an unnamed company under licence from the Government.
Currently has eight managed big top level groups (named like comp., sys.
etc).  These groups are currently managed by a NGO called the Cabal.

The new hierarchy has names starting with "not.".  For each newsgroup
in the 'big eight' there will a corresponding group under the "not."
hierarchy (i.e. not.comp.emacs, not.comp.sys.sun.admin).  Each of these
new groups will have as its charter the exact opposite of the charter
of the corresponding 'big eight' group.  Therefore all so called
off-topic or unwanted messages in one are exactly on-topic in the
other and vice-versa.

Speaking at a press conference broadcasted live over the Internet
vice-president All Gore said: "This new hierarchy will bring back the
usefulness of USENET to far above that before the expansion of the
Internet. First of all it will solve USENET's two biggest problems:
Currently people and automatons posting messages to USENET have
trouble finding the right group for their questions and even if the
discussion started in the right group it often drifts away becoming
more and more off-topic. Since any message will be off-topic in only
a few of thousand groups in the "not." hierarchy the chances of this
happening there are negligible."

"More importantly," Gore said, "with the new groups we will be able to
take advantage of new AI technology developed by such pioneers as
Cyperpromo Inc.. In recent years US firms at the forefront of this
technology, commonly known as SPAM, have developed software to
automatically post the most off-topic messages possible. Since any
message is off-topic in thousands of conventional groups these
messages were putting a strain on the USENET system. In the new
hierarchy this is no longer a problem as the message is only off-topic
in so few groups. More importantly users will be able to harness the
power of this software to increase the information available. For
instance these programs will fill no.comp.emacs.xemacs with loads of
useful messages about XEmacs, no.comp.sys.sun.admin with new tips
about Solaris 2.6 etc."

When asked about the matter, Lars Magne Ingebritsen, author of the
Gnus Newsreader said he was delighted: "I have kept it secret up to
now. But Emacs users world-wide will find it good to know that the new
nnspam back-end for version 5.8.x, that I have been working on on
weekdays, will be available real soon now." Rumour has it that the new 
Gnus merchandising item will be a can of cheap meat with the Gnus
logo.