Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet Part 32

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty are American radio stations that broadcast to the former Communist countries of eastern Europe.

Every day, their news departments prepare a summary of news in those countries, which is then disseminated via the Net, through a Bitnet mailing list and a Usenet newsgroup.

To have the daily digests sent directly to your e-mailbox, send a message to

[email protected]

Leave the subject line blank, and as a message, write:

subscribe rferl-l Your Name

Alternately, look for the bulletins in the Usenet newsgroup misc.news- east-europe.rferl.

Daily Brazilian news updates are available (in Portuguese) from the University of Sao Paulo. Use anonymous ftp to connect to

uspif.if.usp.br

Use cd to switch to the whois directory. The news summaries are stored in files with this form: NEWS.23OCT92;1. But to get them, leave off the semicolon and the 1, and don't capitalize anything, for example:

get news.23oct92

Daily summaries of news reports from France (in French) are availble on the National Capital FreeNet in Ottawa, Ont. Telnet to

freenet.carleton.ca

and log on as: guest. At the main menu, select the number for "The Newsstand" and then "La presse de France."

10.5 E-MAILING NEWS ORGANIZATIONS

A number of newspapers, television stations and networks and other news organizations now encourage readers and viewers to communicate with them electronically, via Internet e-mail addresses. They include:

The Middles.e.x News, Framingham, Ma.s.s. [email protected] The Boston Globe [email protected] WCVB-TV, Boston, Ma.s.s. [email protected] NBC News, New York, N.Y. [email protected] The Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa, Ont. [email protected] CJOH-TV, Ottawa, Ont. [email protected] St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times [email protected] Illinois Issues, Springfield, Ill. [email protected] WTVF-TV, Nashville, Tenn. [email protected]

10.6 FYI

The clari.net.newusers newsgroup on Usenet provides a number of articles about Clarinet and ways of finding news stories of interest to you.

To discuss the future of newspapers and newsrooms in the new electronic medium, subscribe to the Computer a.s.sisted Reporting and Research mailing list on Bitnet. Send a mail message of

Subscribe carr-l Your Name

to [email protected]

Chapter 9: ADVANCED E-MAIL

9.1 THE FILE'S IN THE MAIL

E-mail by itself is a powerful tool, and by now you may be sending e-mail messages all over the place. You might even be on a mailing list or two. But there is a lot more to e-mail than just sending messages. If your host system does not have access to ftp, or it doesn't have access to every ftp site on the Net, you can have programs and files sent right to your mailbox. And using some simple techniques, you can use e-mail to send data files such as spreadsheets, or even whole programs, to friends and colleagues around the world.

A key to both is a set of programs known as encoders and decoders. For all its basic power, Net e-mail has a big problem: it can't handle graphics characters or the control codes found in even the simplest of computer programs. Encoders however, can translate these into forms usable in e-mail, while decoders turn them back into a form that you can actually use. If you are using a Unix-based host system, chances are it already has an encoder and decoder online that you can use. These programs will also let you use programs posted in several Usenet newsgroups, such as comp.binaries.ibm.pc.

If both you and the person with whom you want to exchange files use Unix host systems, you're in luck because virtually all Unix host systems have encoder/decoder programs online. For now, let's a.s.sume that's the case. First, upload the file you want to send to your friend to your host site (ask your system administrator how to upload a file to your name or "home" directory if you don't already know how).

Then type

uuencode file file > file.uu

and hit enter. "File" is the name of the file you want to prepare for mailing, and yes, you have to type the name twice! The > is a Unix command that tells the system to call the "encoded" file "file.uu"

(you could actually call it anything you want).

Now to get it into a mail message. The quick and dirty way is to type

mail friend

where "friend" is your friend's address. At the subject line, type the name of the enclosed file. When you get the blank line, type

~r file.uu

or whatever you called the file, and hit enter. (on some systems, the ~ may not work; if so, ask your system administrator what to use). This inserts the file into your mail message. Hit control-D, and your file is on its way!

On the other end, when your friend goes into her mailbox, she should transfer it to her home directory. Then she should type

uudecode file.name

and hit enter. This creates a new file in her name directory with whatever name you originally gave it. She can then download it to her own computer. Before she can actually use it, though, she'll have to open it up with a text processor and delete the mail header that has been "stamped" on it. If you use a mailer program that automatically appends a "signature," tell her about that so she can delete that as well.

9.2 RECEIVING FILES

If somebody sends you a file through the mail, you'll have to go through a couple of steps to get it into a form you can actually use. If you are using the simple mail program, go into mail and type

w # file.name

where # is the number of the message you want to transfer and file.name is what you want to call the resulting file. In pine, call up the message and hit your O key and then E. You'll then be asked for a file name. In elm, call up the message and hit your S key.

You'll get something that looks like this:

=file.request

Type a new file name and hit enter (if you hit enter without typing a file name, the message will be saved to another mail folder, not your home directory).

In all three cases, exit the mail program to return to your host system's command line. Because the file has been encoded for mail delivery, you now have to run a decoder. At the command line, type

uudecode file.name

where file.name is the file you created while in mail. Uudecode will create a new, uncompressed binary file. In some cases, you may have to run it through some other programs (for example, if it is in "tar" form), but generally it should now be ready for you to download to your own computer (on which you might then have to run a de-compressor program such as PKXZIP).