From: help...@suburbia.net
Subject: Suburbia.Net (Melbourne, Australia) non-profit ISP with a clue!
Date: 1996/10/31
Message-ID: <846790834.549238@suburbia.net>
X-Deja-AN: 193474817
distribution: world
cache-post-path: suburbia.net!unknown@localhost
organization: Suburbia.Net
reply-to: help...@suburbia.net
newsgroups: aus.net.access,alt.bbs.internet,alt.internet.access.wanted,
biz.comp.services,apana.general,apana.melb.general
Suburbia P.O. Box 2031 Barker 3122 Australia
FAX: +61-3-9819-9066
DATA: +61-3-9819-9066
-->
_________________________________________________________________
[IMAGE]
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those that favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
is also great
And would suffice.
- Robert Frost
_________________________________________________________________
[IMAGE]
SUBURBIA.NET: SYSTEM INFORMATION
* Fully Non-Profit
* Around 20-60x cheaper that Ozemail, Ozonline, Access1, etc
* No time charging
* Free press advocates
* No volume charging
* Governmentally unaffiliated
* Flat yearly fees
* Private and secure
* No hidden costs
* Supporting community groups and electronic self-publishing
* Home of the Internet-DevTeam
* Concessions for those living on Austudy, or DSS benefits
* Wide range of anonymous and cryptographic services
* On-line since 1990!
Quick links within this page About Suburbia Jump back to contents list
Suburbia has two real-time, 24 hour per day dedicated links to the
Internet. We are fully non-profit, governmentally independent and not
a business in any way. We encourage outspoken politics and opinions of
all persuasions. Our loyalty is to our members. Period.
Suburbia runs under a very powerful networking operating system called
Unix (Linux). Unix isn't exactly the most friendly OS in the world; so
the Suburbia DevTeam have developed a moderately friendly, yet
powerful menu system based around a customized version of the World
Wide Web client "Lynx".
Who runs Suburbia and why?
Suburbia is fully non-profit and is run by several Unix/Internet
programmers who have been very generous with both their time and
money. The time donated by these people to program, administrate and
maintain the system hardware & software and generally keep Suburbia
state of the art runs into well over $200k. It is for this reason
alone that our fees are so low. Suburbia's programmers and volunteers
all have other lives to lead - if you want glossy mailouts, a chic
voice on the phone, or instant "service", then Suburbia is probably
not the place for you. If on the other hand you want to be part of a
real, friendly and developing community of people with a common
interest in the free flow of information and ideas then you will
probably find it interesting here.
Suburbia has people form all walks of life. From magistrates and
politicians to convicted computer hackers! We have as users private
investigators, writers, programmers, QC's, record producers, musicans,
film directors, journolists, policemen, intelligence agents, chess
champions, members of obscure religious sects, netball umpires, many,
many types of scientists and engineers, security experts, doctors,
accountants, bartenders, choral conductors, comedians, nurses, DJ's,
military police, drivers licence testing officers, farmers,
haematologists, herbalists, unionists, lecturers, librarians,
paramedics, basketball umpires, air force pilots, singers, surgeons,
system opperators, linesmen, TV service men, solicitors, taxi drivers,
teachers, unemployed inventors, vetinarians, actresses, aerobics
instructors, art directors, athletes, chefs, bank clerks, cleaners,
prison officers, dentists, dishwashers, film marketers, housewives,
locksmiths, pensioners, radiologists, divers and waiters to name a
few!
All volunteers have unlimited, free access to Suburbia. If you believe
you have something significant to contribute, be it programming,
hardware or something else the system needs then shoot - the team can
always use more help. Volunteers are expected to spend on average
1/3rd of their time on-line performing work beneficial to Suburbia.
The value of hardware lent/donated to Suburbia will be evaluated on a
case by case basis.
_________________________________________________________________
Features of Suburbia
* Telnet
The ability to connect to any machine on the internet immediately and
interactively. The machine you wish to connect to could be anyone of
the millions of Internet connected systems anywhere in the WORLD. From
data centres close to Melbourne like the Austin Hospital to the CSIRO
run Australian National Observatory or Parkes radio telescope in NSW
to CERN in Geneva or the Library of Congress computer with its catalog
of over 8 Million books in Washington DC.
This also means that if you are connected to any-other machine on the
Internet - then you can connect from THERE into Suburbia in real time.
From downtown Johannasburg or the GNU AI Lab at MIT in Boston, to the
St. Kilda Net.Cafe' you can telnet back home to your Suburbia account
to reply to your electronic mail, catch up with other Suburbia members
or code for the DevTeam.
With telnet, you can also use the Australian X.25 gateway to connect
to any Austpac address for free! Yes, you can effectively deprive
Telecom Australia of their $12 per hour plus volume charges plus NUI
rental. You can also connect via telnet directly to Compuserve, Lexis
and other metered services and typically reduce your fees by 50%
(because Compuserve et al normally have to pay Telecom a small fortune
in packet fees, but they they don't pay Suburbia a cent ;-\)
* FTP & FSP
Transfer files (be they programs, documents, images etc) or browse
through the file archives of systems such as Simtel/Oak, Archie at
Melbourne Uni, Funet in Finland or Wuarchive at Washington Uni
interactively; if you see a file that you want, just instruct Suburbia
to transfer it for you over the Internet into your Suburbia account.
You only pay for your call to Suburbia (local call fee from
Melbourne).
* IRC
Talk (type) interactively (like a data citizen's band) to groups of
people on the Internet located all over the world (in whatever
language you can think of!). Specialized live discussion groups exist
for topics like unix, politics, security, the web, feminism, soccer,
cryptography, life and winter in Helsinki, etc. There are typically
over five thousand people on IRC at any one point in time. Sometimes
you might find semi-intelligent "robots" on the IRC, doing their best
to look like one of the humans. Sometimes its hard to tell the
difference. This is not praise for the robots.
* MUDs
Short for Multi-User Dimensions or Multi-User Dungeons. These are
artificial interactive text-based worlds (like a sophisticated
interactive novel) in which dozens to hundreds of people and robots
congregate to explore, design, talk and socialize together. They are
usually thematic in nature, and there are dozens of different worlds
and settings although many appropriate elements of middle earth lore.
You can also connect to the International Chess, Backgammon and
Othello servers - which typically have 10-60 people playing at anyone
time from all over the world. The Internet Chess server is very good
and has graphical front ends available for most computer systems. The
FICS supports rated (elo) matches, some of the players and robots
being at grandmaster level, as well as many average or beginning
players. Suburbia has its OWN FICS server! (one of only a handful in
the world) and even runs Crafty (Humiliator) (son of Cray Blitz chess)
as a robot player!
* UseNet News
Suburbia has a supurb 15,000+ group news feed (we even get all the
regionals!) (we use our own Devteam developed multi-server news
caching software), updated hourly. Usually 5,000,000+ messages are
available at any one time!. To give you a sense of scale, if the
messages were printed on paper, it would add up to over 100 metric
tons of articles a week! But of course, Suburbia uses only the finest
100% recyclable electrons.
* WWW (World Wide Web) & Gopher
WWW is the fastest growing area of the Internet, it will literally
blow your mind to see the depth, breadth and types of information
available through WWW. It can range from the complete works of
Shakespeare or Dante Aligori, not even hour old images of sunspot
activity , computer underground and other subversive literature, to
the US constitution! If you have heard the term "Net Surfing" it was
almost certainly referring to the information waves of the WWW. That
said, don't be fooled by all the media hype. The is far more to life
on the Internet than a pretty Netscape screen.
Suburbia runs a WWW server of its own (with a 200Mb cache), so not
only can you use Suburbia to rifle through the rest of the world's Web
data, but you individually can become part of the Web itself i.e put
up your own information and links to other parts of the Web for the
rest of the Internet to view and peruse. This is true self publishing
at its best! Create a story? A paper? A program? A picture or
animation? A musical piece? A review? Run a non-profit club,
organization or political lobby group that produces a newsletter or
other information? All this and more can be put into your very own
Suburbia Web entry or "home page", at which point it will be freely
available to anyone in the world.
* E-Mail
INSTANT electronic mail to and from anyone on the Internet (well
nearly instant - it may take 60 seconds if its acting slowly). That
also means that mail to AppleLink, Compuserve, America Online,
Tymline, Keylink etc is also all instant. You can put your email
address on all your personal documents - or if you run a non-profit
organization, on your newsletter, magazine or other publications.
Suburbia has full support for PGP (encrypted email). If you send your
mail encrypted and it's intercepted en-route (it is widely held that
the NSA and DSD intercept all trans-pacific data traffic), not even
major government data collectors and cipher breakers like the ONA,
NSA, GCHQ, DSD, JIO, MOSAD or KGB will be able to decode it.
* Talk
If you have a friend or associate located on another machine elsewhere
on the Internet - it may even be in Amsterdam or Johannasburg (we are
letting our electrons thrugh now) you can talk to them (via the
keyboard) in real time!
* UNIX Shell
For the more adventurous, Suburbia has full shell access from which
you can of course directly execute all the menu functions and over
1000 other Unix programs including C, C++, Perl, Fortran and Pascal
compilers, debuggers & assemblers, networking, mathematical, document
processing/editing utilities and sundry others. This is a complete
Unix shell enviroment, more complete than those of most major
universities' (because we are modest enlightened ecletic post modern
techo humanist unix experts remember, not stuffy publics servents!)
and FAR superior to those of commercial entities like Ozemail or
OzOnline.
* Screen
The Suburbia Screen program allows you to multi-task on Suburbia, even
if your computer has no multi-tasking abilities at all. It means you
can for instance talk to someone in one screen, read your email in a
second, play Nethack in a third, FTP a file from Uni of Ontario in a
fourth, etc. Screen also allows you to copy text from one screen to
another, as well as capture the output of any screen into a file, and
so on. If you find one of the Suburbia admins a little distracted now
and then, this evil screen program is probably the cause.
* SLIP/PPP + term + mlink
These programs allow your computer to act as if it was directly
connected to the Internet, rather than connected via a modem dial-up.
This means you can run programs like Netscape, Mosaic, Eudora, FTP,
Trumpet Telnet etc which need to be run from your machine, so they can
access your graphics display and or soundcard. Its the graphical
output of these programs that you have probably seen the media call
`the web' (or the Internet for that matter. sad eh?).
Borrowed Time
Donation levels for access to Suburbia are based on time - although it
seems somewhat silly to 'kick people off' if they have run out of
time, and some lines are still free for other members to connect to.
Telstra might say nice words about us and wriggle about with delight
on its dais. What a thought!
Therefore, if there are free lines (as there often are between 12am
and 6pm) you can stay on and "borrow" time until the lines fill up.
Most users find this rather joyus and opportune. If there are unused
resources there, use them!
Connection Methods
* Dial-Up
Suburbia has 10 dial-up modem lines (10 x 14.4k/V42bis) which you can
connect to by calling the main Suburbia number (03)9819-9066
(+61-3-9819-9066 for overseas callers).
* InterNet
If you have access to the InterNet, you can telnet to suburbia.net .
Suburbia also supports HTTP (World Wide Web) and FTP as well as most
other standard Internet protocols.
* X.25
If you have access to Austpac (and an NUI) or another X.25 packet
service, you can connect to the X.121 Austpac NUA 262452036 (try
0505262452036 or 505262452036 if calling from networks other than
Austpac), login as "austpac" and route to "suburbia.net" from the X.25
gateway.
_________________________________________________________________
Costs of access to Suburbia PAN
Access Level : Unpaid Level 30
Time Limit : 4 hours a month, 30 minutes per call
Borrowed Time: No
Donation required : $FREE!
Period covered : Until we realise the error of our ways.
Services - Telnet : No
- FTP : No
- FSP : No
- IRC : Yes
- Mail : Yes
- News : Yes
- Talk : Yes
- MUD : Yes
- Screen : Yes
- Term : No
- PPP : No
- SLIP : No
- WWW : Yes
- Menus : Yes
- Shell : Yes (!)
_________________________________________________________________
Access Level : Donator Level 2-90
Time Limit : 90 minutes a day, 45 minutes per call = 27 hours a month
Borrowed Time: Yes
Donation required: $115 (employed), $95 (concession)
Period covered: 12 months = $9 / $7 per month = $0.35c/$0.29c per hour
Services - Telnet : Yes
- FTP : Yes
- FSP : Yes
- IRC : Yes
- Mail : Yes
- News : Yes
- Talk : Yes
- MUD : Yes
- Screen : Yes
- Term : Yes
- PPP : Yes
- SLIP : Yes
- WWW : Yes
- Menus : Yes
- Shell : Yes
_________________________________________________________________
Access Level : Donator Level 2-180
Time Limit : 3 hours a day, 90 minutes per call = 90 hours a month
Borrowed Time: Yes
Donation required : $150 (employed), $120 (concession)
Period covered: 12 months = $12 / $10 per month = $0.13c/$0.11c per hour
Services - Telnet : Yes
- FTP : Yes
- FSP : Yes
- IRC : Yes
- Mail : Yes
- News : Yes
- Talk : Yes
- MUD : Yes
- Screen : Yes
- Term : Yes
- PPP : Yes
- SLIP : Yes
- WWW : Yes
- Menus : Yes
- Shell : Yes
_________________________________________________________________
Access Level : Donator Level 2-300
Time Limit : 5 hours a day, 150 minutes per call = 150 hours a month
Borrowed Time: Yes
Donation required : $200 (employed), $160 (concession)
Period covered: 12 months = $16 / $13 per month = $0.11c/$0.08c per hour
Services - Telnet : Yes
- FTP : Yes
- FSP : Yes
- IRC : Yes
- Mail : Yes
- News : Yes
- Talk : Yes
- MUD : Yes
- Screen : Yes
- Term : Yes
- PPP : Yes
- SLIP : Yes
- WWW : Yes
- Menus : Yes
- Shell : Yes
_________________________________________________________________
Access Level : Donator Level Unlimited!
Time Limit : None.
Borrowed Time: Irrelevant ;-)
Donation required : $350 (employed), $320 (concession)
Period covered: 12 months = $29 / $25 per month = $0.03c/$0.03c per hour
Services - Telnet : Yes
- FTP : Yes
- FSP : Yes
- IRC : Yes
- Mail : Yes
- News : Yes
- Talk : Yes
- MUD : Yes
- Screen : Yes
- Term : Yes
- PPP : Yes
- SLIP : Yes
- WWW : Yes
- Menus : Yes
- Shell : Yes
_________________________________________________________________
Access Level : Permanent Connection
Please email "helpdesk" you wish to discuss getting a permanent
connection to suburbia. Yes, we are talking large twinkies. (about $1200 for
the first year and $700 for sucessive years). This is about 1/4 to
1/30th of the rate other ISPs charge.
_________________________________________________________________
How to apply for an account
To apply for an account, call (03)9819-9066 (modem) or telnet to
suburbia.net and login as "register".
_________________________________________________________________
How to donate to Suburbia and upgrade your access
You can pay by credit card (while on-line!), or cheque or money order.
To Donate by credit card (bankcard, visa, mastercard only):
Suburbia's on-line credit system provides an way of instantly
upgrading your existing account to superior access levels entirely
without human intervention. The basic steps follow below (its easier
than it looks).
1. Decide on what sort of access you need.
2. Ready your VISA, Bankcard or Mastercard.
3. Connect to Suburbia and choose `Credit Transactions' from the
menu, or login as the user "credit" or type "credit" from the
shell prompt.
4. Choose "(c)redit account with credit card".
5. Enter in the card type, card number, name on card and expiry date.
6. Enter the number of Suburbia credits you would like to purchase.
7. Goto the Nipopin "(p)urchasing" menu and choose your desired
access level (you can `trade in' the full value of an old access
level towards a new one).
8. Your account has now been upgraded! Your enhanced status will kick
in on your next call (unless you logged in as "credit" - then the
changes will take effect immediately).
To Donate by cheque or money order (ask your post office/bank how get one
if you don't know):
Make the Check/M.O payable to 'Julian Assange' and post it to:
.---------------------.
l Suburbia.net l
l P.O. Box 2031 l
l Barker 3122 l
`---------------------'
Remember to include your login and real name if you want your access
upgraded.
If you would like your photograph (or something else) added to your
WWW home page for other users to see, just post it in, and we will
scan it for you.
_________________________________________________________________
Back to Suburbia
If you have any questions, please forward them to the helpdesk:
help...@suburbia.net