There Is No Cabal (abbreviated TINC [1] ) is a catchphrase and running joke found on Usenet. [2] The journalist Wendy M. Grossman writes that its appearance on the alt.usenet.cabal FAQ reflects conspiracy accusations as old as the Internet itself. [3] The anthropologist Gabriella Coleman writes that the joke reveals "discomfort over the potential for corruption by meritocratic leaders". [2]
The phrase There Is No Cabal was developed to deny the existence of the backbone cabal, which members of the cabal denied. The cabal consisted of operators of major news server newsgroups, allowing them to wield greater control over Usenet. [4]
The backbone cabal was an informal organization of large-site news server administrators of the worldwide distributed newsgroup-based discussion system Usenet. It existed from about 1983 at least into the 2000s.
James Parry, commonly known by his nickname and username Kibo, is a Usenetter known for his sense of humor, various surrealist net pranks, an absurdly long signature, and a machine-assisted knack for "kibozing": joining any thread in which "kibo" was mentioned. His exploits have earned him a multitude of enthusiasts, who celebrate him as the head deity of the parody religion "Kibology", centered on the humor newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.
A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to read the content of newsgroups.
There are a number of disputes concerning the Church of Scientology's attempts to suppress material critical of Scientology and the organization on the Internet, utilizing various methods – primarily lawsuits and legal threats, as well as front organizations. In late 1994, the organization began using various legal tactics to stop distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard. The organization has often been accused of barratry through the filing of SLAPP suits. The organization's response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.
The Great Renaming was a restructuring of Usenet newsgroups that took place in 1987. B News maintainer and UUNET founder Rick Adams is generally considered to be the initiator of the Renaming.
The Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology started in 1991 to discuss the controversial beliefs of Scientology, as well as the activities of the Church of Scientology, which claims exclusive intellectual property rights thereto and is viewed by many as a dangerous cult. The newsgroup has become the focal point of an aggressive battle known as Scientology versus the Internet, which has taken place both online and in the courts.
Serdar Argic was the alias used in one of the first automated newsgroup spam incidents on Usenet, with the objective of denying the Armenian genocide.
The alt.* hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing all newsgroups whose name begins with "alt.", organized hierarchically. The alt.* hierarchy is not confined to newsgroups of any specific subject or type, although in practice more formally organized groups tend not to occur in alt.*. The alt.* hierarchy was created by John Gilmore and Brian Reid.
LOL, or lol, is an initialism for laughing out loud and a popular element of Internet slang. It was first used almost exclusively on Usenet, but has since become widespread in other forms of computer-mediated communication and even face-to-face communication. It is one of many initialisms for expressing bodily reactions, in particular laughter, as text, including initialisms for more emphatic expressions of laughter such as LMAO and ROFL or ROTFL.
alt.sex is a Usenet newsgroup – a discussion group within the Usenet network – relating to human sexual activity. It was popular in the 1990s. An October 1993 survey by Brian Reid reported an estimated worldwide readership for the alt.sex newsgroup of 3.3 million, that being 8% of the total Usenet readership, with 67% of all Usenet "nodes" carrying the group. At that time, alt.sex had an estimated traffic of 2,300 messages per month.
Mary Ann Horton, is a Usenet and Internet pioneer. Horton contributed to Berkeley UNIX (BSD), including the vi editor and terminfo database, created the first email binary attachment tool uuencode, and led the growth of Usenet in the 1980s.
Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993 when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.
Wendy M. Grossman is a journalist, blogger, and folksinger. Her writing has been published in several newspapers, magazines, and specialized publications. She is the recipient of the 2013 Enigma Award for information security reporting.
The Lumber Cartel was a facetious conspiracy theory popularized on USENET that claimed anti-spammers were secretly paid agents of lumber companies.
alt.atheism is a Usenet newsgroup within the alt.* hierarchy that discusses atheism. The group was originally created on February 6, 1990 by a member of the alt.pagan newsgroup, to provide an alternative forum for the numerous discussions on atheism that were overwhelming the pagan group. A survey of usenet groups in 1994–1995 found that, among 70 groups discussing "consciousness, spirituality, and religion ", it was the group with the highest traffic volume. Nash (2002) writes that "atheist and freethought newsgroups" including alt.atheism have "done much to remove the sense of isolation felt by many with antireligious opinions".
Arnaldo Pagliarini "Arnie" Lerma was an American writer and activist, a former Scientologist, and a critic of the Church of Scientology who appeared in television, media and radio interviews. Lerma was the first person to post the court document known as the Fishman Affidavit, including the Xenu story, to the Internet via the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology.
Chris Lewis is a Canadian security consultant from Ottawa, who fought spam on Usenet and the early Internet. Active in volunteer anti-spam efforts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lewis was described in Net.wars (1997) as "the best known active canceler of spam and other mass postings" at the time. In April 1998, he organized an unsuccessful moratorium with forty other anti-spam volunteers in an attempt to boycott internet service providers into doing their share against spam. He worked as a systems architect for Nortel and, as of 2017, is Chief Scientist at SpamhausTechnology.
A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.
Usenet, USENET, or "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
The history of humor on the Internet begins together with the Internet itself. Initially, the internet and its precursors, LANs and WANs, were used merely as another medium to disseminate jokes and other kinds of humor, in addition to the traditional ones. In lockstep with the progress of electronic communication technologies, jokers took advantage of the ARPANET, e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems, etc, and finally the Whole World Wide Web. Gradually, new forms of humor evolved, based on the new possibilities delivered by electronic means of communication. A popular form of internet humour is found in the form of 'internet memes'. Reaction videos, where amusement is expressed through a person's response to something, are another prevalent form of humor unique to the internet.
cabal.
cabal.
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