Red Rock Eater News Service
The Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE) is the Internet's most respected
source of news and information about the social and political aspects
of computing and networking. Now entering its third year of operation,
RRE is a mailing list that consists of whatever its editor, Phil Agre,
finds interesting. No clutter, no flaming, no endless discussions, no
subscription fees. Just a steady trickle (five or ten messages a week
at most) of useful materials filtered from a wide range of different
sources.
To subscribe to RRE, send a message that looks
like this:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: subscribe firstname lastname
For more information about RRE, send a message like so:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: help
Read what others have said about RRE....
Of the many mailing lists that I subscribe to, RRE provides the most
consistently interesting and useful content. The information on the
RRE list comprises a diverse cross-section of technical, political,
and privacy related subjects, most directly relevant to anyone
interested in electronic communication/community.
Gregg R. Siegfried
Director, System & Network Engineering
Claircom Communications
Seattle, Washington, USA.
Phil Agre is the only person who furnishes information about the Net
that is not just technically and politically, but socially, savvy.
I wouldn't do without the Red Rock Eater for keeping up with what's
happening, and what it all means.
Howard Rheingold
author, The Virtual Community
Mill Valley, CA
Thank you for RRE! A lot of electronic communication is ephemeral.
Your material I save and re-read, think over what you are saying,
test it out against my understanding of how the world works.
The difference is like that between white bread bought from a
supermarket and a good light-rye sourdough bought from a wood-fired
bakery. Much chewier, and much healthier!
Andrew Treloar
School of Computing and Mathematics
Deakin University
Melbourne, Australia
Highest signal-to-noise ratio around! l find RRE to be consistently
high-quality and a useful way to find out about other sources of
information I hadn't already known about.
Alan Wexelblat
Intelligent Agents Group
MIT Media Lab
The Red Rock Eater News Service provides me with a small number of
highly focused articles about the relationship of telecommunications
and the social consequences of telecommunications. This kind of
high quality information stream allows me to know more about these
types of issues with less work filtering thru the noise of the
random newslist. I wish that there were more services like this on
other related topics.
John Sechrest
Executive Director
Computer Science Outreach Services
Oregon State University
Corvallis Oregon
Red Rock Eater cuts through the intellectual spam and delivers
the real meat of the Internet. If you need to know not only what
happened yesterday, but what is happening now and what may well
happen in the future, Red Rock Eater will spark insights, feed
intuition, and keep you entertained as well. It's all content;
no hype. Subscribe now and read it
every day.
Peyton Stafford
Peyton Stafford Associates
Portland, Oregon
I find the Red Rock Eater list to be a concise and intelligently
edited journal of informative articles and forwarded posts from
every far flung corner of the Net, with a ratio of delights to
clunkers running about 6 to 4. This is far from faint praise.
I belong to several lists, ranging from home educating to Tibetan
Buddhism, and the amount of thought provocation is higher on RRE
than any other list I to which I subscribe.
Ronald Morgan
Contractor/Home-educator
San Francisco, Ca.
I have been reading RRE ever since a friend sent me your piece about
the Oklahoma City bombing, and I've found the list to be the net's
single greatest source of items I feel compelled to forward to
others.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
senior editor, Tor Books
New York, New York
I have found RRE to be especially useful in filtering socio-
political developments in the US on telecommunications and
NII policy. As a foreign journalist in a country experiencing
rapid expansion from an already large base of Internet users,
US developments affect us in major ways. Concise reportage on
significant manoeuvres is vital to my work.
One series of bulletins I found outstanding was the coverage of
the Time 'cyberporn' cover story and the ensuing fallout. Posting
critical documents to the listserv saved me hours trolling through
Usenet group.
Dan Tebbutt
Contributing Editor
LAN Magazine (Australia/New Zealand)
I think the service you provide is a very useful one to the Net
community and I rely upon it as a source of useful and timely
information about current issues and off-beat topics that I would
not otherwise think about if not for seeing them in my emailbox from
your server.
Your service has a high signal to noise ratio -- in fact very little
noise. Perhaps, too much signal sometimes as one has to slow down
and actually read instead of scan the text on the screen.
Peter F. Harter
Executive Director & General Counsel
The National Public Telecomputing Network
The Red Rock Eater News Service is an excellent institution. Much
of the information I can use in my lectures -- and I have often
given articles from RRE to students for investigation and inclusion
in their papers.
Peter Gorny
Informatics Department
C. v. Ossietzky University Oldenburg
Germany
As a community activist in rural telecommunications access, I find
RRE to be the timeliest, most focused, and most concise source of
information on potholes in the vaporway.
Dave W. Mitchell
Acting Executive
Oregon Coast Rural Information Service Cooperative
The philosophy of human rights in cyberspace, which was made widely
available in RRE, contributed to liberalizing of access to the
Internet in Israel.
Omer Zak
Datacomm Coordinator
Association of the Deaf in Israel
As a freelance writer on Internet-related subjects I have found
your service to be invaluable. I write for Denmark's second
largest daily newspaper, Politiken, whose Computer-section published
each Thursday is read by ca 10 % of the Danish population. Thanks
to the Red Rock Eater News Service I have been able to monitor the
important issues concerning the Internet and have often relied on
your coverage in order to get a full view of the individual story.
Keep up the good work!
Jesper Vissing Laursen
Freelance writer
Politiken
Denmark
The Red Rock Eater News Service has become a valuable source of
the information I need to know but don't usually seek. Phil Agre
manages to generate a high "save to delete ratio," the ultimate
measure of list value.
Barry Orton
Professor of Telecommunications
University of Wisconsin-Madison
I have subscribed to many lists that deal with issues of politics
and policy in the area of high technology, but RRE is the only one
to survive my latest purge.
RRE has lots of content but doesn't beat issues to death. Phil
Agre is a good editor: he selects well, and he adds useful analysis
without bombast. He is a serious student of the issues. I have no
trouble discerning his viewpoint, but when he tells me something,
I never feel that he's twisted it to conform to an ideology.
Richard Mateosian
Freelance Technical Writer
Berkeley, California
The Red Rock Eater News Service consistently delivers a thoughtful
and eclectic mix of information drawn from a wide variety of sources
on how new forms of communication are influencing society.
Brian Kushnir
Senior Research Executive
Infoplan
Tokyo, Japan
I have found the Red Rock Eater mailing list a very useful,
fruitful, and entertaining source of information for my research
projects.
Ellis Weinberger
Senior Library Assistant
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London
I appreciate the service you provide. I like the eclectic mix
of philosophy, politics, internet culture, and technology theory.
I am subscribed to several lists and email newsletters and I find
yours the single most useful list. It doesn't flood my mailbox, I
don't have to weed out reams of useless information. It's great.
Niall O Dochartaigh (Dr.)
Research Officer - INCORE (Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity)
United Nations University/University of Ulster
Coleraine
N. Ireland
Posted to the Red Rock Eater newsservice by Phil Agre on
August 12, 1995. Reposted with permission.