Internet Surfer: Getting Started/Internet Surfer - Getting Started (Wayzata Technology)(7231)(1995).bin/pc/textfile/faqs/whitefaq.txt

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Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 17:41-0400
From: The White House <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Subject: White House Electronic Publications: FAQS 4.7.93
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     WHITE HOUSE ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS AND PUBLIC ACCESS EMAIL
              FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

            Updated April 7, 1993

              Table Of Contents

    I.    Signing up for Daily Electronic Publications.
        A.  Widely Available Sources.
        B.  Notes on Widely Available Sources.
        C.  Direct Email Distribution

    II.   Searching and Retrieving White House documents.
        -  WAIS
        -  GOPHER
        -  FedWorld BBS

    III.  Sending email to the White House.
        -  CompuServe
        -  America OnLine
        -  MCI
        -  Fidonet
        -  Internet




I.  HOW DO I SIGN UP FOR ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS BY THE WHITE HOUSE?

The White House Communications office is distributing press releases
over an experimental system developed during the campaign at the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

You can obtain copies of all the press releases from a wide variety of
on-line services or discussion groups devoted to either national
politics in general or President Clinton in particular.  These are
listed in sections I and II.

Section Ic explains how you can sign up to receive press releases
directly from the experimental MIT system by using an automated email
server.  The present system was not designed to handle high levels of
message traffic. A more powerful system will become available in due
course, and in the meantime, it would be appreciated if you used this
service sparingly.  One appropriate current use is secondary
redistribution and archiving. If you use it, you will be carried
forward when the more powerful system that replaces it.


A. WIDELY AVAILABLE SOURCES


1.  On USENET/NETNEWS, electronic publications are found on a variety
    of groups:

    Direct Distribution

        alt.politics.clinton
        alt.politics.org.misc
        alt.politics.reform
        alt.politics.usa.misc
        alt.news-media
        alt.activism
        talk.politics.misc

    Indirect Distribution

        misc.activism.progressive
        cmu.soc.politics
        assocs.clinton-gore-92

2.  On CompuServe: GO WHITEHOUSE

3.  On America Online: keyword WHITEHOUSE or THE WHITEHOUSE or CLINTON

4.  On The WELL: type whitehouse

5.  On MCI: type VIEW WHITE HOUSE

6.  On Fidonet: See Echomail WHITEHOUSE

7.  On Peacenet or Econet: See pol.govinfo.usa.


B. NOTES ON WIDELY AVAILABLE SOURCES


2.      CompuServe's White House Forum (GO WHITEHOUSE) is devoted to
    discussion of the Clinton administration's policies and
    activities. The forum's library consists of news releases and
    twice daily media briefings from the White House Office of
    Media Affairs. CompuServe members can exchange information and
    opinions with each other in the 17 sections in the forum's
    message area. The message board spans a broad range of topics,
    including international and United Nations activities,
    defense, health care, the economy and the deficit, housing and
    urban development, the environment, and education and national
    service.

3.      On America Online the posts are sent to the White House Forum,
    located in the News & Finance department of the service and
    accessible via keywords "white house" and "clinton."  The
    White House Forum on America Online contains the press
    releases from the White House, divided into the categories
    "Press Briefings," "Meetings & Speeches," "Foreign Policy,"
    "The Economy," "Technology," "Health Care," and
    "Appointments." The area features a message board so you can
    discuss the releases with other AOL members, and a searchable
    database for easy retrieval of releases in the topic that
    interests you.

4.      MCI Mail users can access daily information on the administration's

    programs provided by the White House through MCI Mail bulletin
    boards.  The available boards are: WHITE HOUSE ECONOMIC, WHITE
    HOUSE FOREIGN, WHITE HOUSE SOCIAL, WHITE HOUSE SPEECHES and
    WHITE HOUSE NEWS.  A listing of these boards can also be
    obtained by simply typing VIEW WHITE HOUSE at the COMMAND
    prompt.




C. DIRECT EMAIL DISTRIBUTION

If you don't have access to the these accounts or if you would prefer
to receive the releases via email, then the next section details how
to sign up for this service.  The server is not set up to answer
email letters, comments or requests for specific information. To
reach this MIT server, send email:

        To: [e-mail]
        Subject: Help

The server works by reading the subject line of the incoming message
and taking whatever action that line calls for. If you want to sign up
to automatically receive press releases, then your subject line would
begin with the word RECEIVE.  You can then specify what kind of
information you are interested in receiving. The categories of
information are:

ECONOMIC POLICY
        Get releases related to the economy such as budget
        news, technology policy review, etc.


FOREIGN POLICY
        Get releases related to foreign policy such as
        statements on Bosnian airdrop, Haitian refugee status,
        etc.


SOCIAL POLICY
        Get releases related to social issues like National
        Service (Student Loan) program, abortion, welfare
        reform, etc.

SPEECHES
        All speeches made by the President and important
        speeches made by other Administration officials.

NEWS
        Transcripts of press conferences released by the White
        House Communications office, as well as the
        President's remarks in photo ops and other Q&A
        sessions.

ALL             All of the above

So, if you wanted to sign up to get releases related to the economy
your email message would look like this:

    To: [e-mail]
    Subject: RECEIVE ECONOMY

When you send a signup message to the clinton-info server, it sends
you back a status message letting you know what distribution streams
you are signed up for. If you ever want to check on what groups you
are signed up for send the following message:

    To: [e-mail]
    Subject: STATUS

You can stop receiving email releases by sending a REMOVE message to
the clinton-info server. The word REMOVE would be followed by whatever
distribution stream you wanted to drop. If you wanted to stop
receiving message about the ECONOMY then your mail would look like
this:

    To: [e-mail] Subject: REMOVE ECONOMY

You could substitute SOCIAL, FOREIGN, SPEECHES, NEWS or ALL for
ECONOMY in the above message and you would be dropped from that
distribution list. If you send the subject line REMOVE ALL, then you
will be taken off the email distribution system all together and will
not receive further releases of any kind.

You can also ask for help from the automated server.  Send an email
query as follows:

    To: [e-mail]
    Subject: HELP

The server will respond by sending you a detailed form that will guide
you through the process of signing up for the various distribution
streams.  As you will quickly discover, there is a automatic form
processing interface that parallel the quick and easy subject line
commands discussed here. More detailed help is available by sending
an email query as follows:

    To: [e-mail]
    Subject: Please Help!

Finally, if you want to search and retrieve documents, but you do not
have access to the retrieval methods discussed in section II, you can
do this via email through the MIT server. You can obtain the WAIS
query form by sending an email query as follows:

    To: [e-mail]
    Subject: WAIS

Once you have identified the documents that you want, be careful not
to request them all at once, because you may be sent a message
containing all the documents and this message may be too big for some
mail delivery systems between the email server and you.




II.  HOW DO I RETRIEVE WHITE HOUSE PUBLICATIONS FROM INTERNET ARCHIVES?

Various sites are archiving the press releases distributed .  What follows is
an
incomplete list of some of the sites containing the documents that
have been released to date.  This FAQ will be updated to reflect new
sites as they become known.

     SITE                           DIRECTORY

1. SUNSITE.UNC.EDU              /HOME3/WAIS/WHITE-HOUSE-PAPERS
2. FTP.CCO.CALTECH.EDU          /PUB/BJMCCALL
3. FTP MARISTB.MARIST.EDU
4. CPSR.ORG                     /CPSR/CLINTON
5. FedWorld BBS                 703-321-8020  8-N-1

Notes:  The following are notes on how to log in and get
    information from the above sites.

1.      Office FOR Information Technology at University of
    North Carolina Maintains the full collection of White
    House electronic release available for search with WAIS and
    also accessible via Gopher.
1.a    WAIS
    (:source
    :version 3
    :database-name "/home3/wais/White-House-Papers" :ip-
        address "152.2.22.81"
    :ip-name "sunsite.unc.edu"
    :tcp-port 210
    :cost 0.00
    :cost-unit :free
    :maintainer "[e-mail]"

    :description "Server created with WAIS release 8 b5 on
    Feb 27 15:16:16 1993 by [e-mail] These are the
    White House Press Briefings and other postings dealing with
    William Jefferson Clinton and Albert Gore as well as members
    of the President's Cabinet and the first lady Hillary Rodham
    Clinton, Chelsea, Socks and others in Washington DC. Dee Dee
    Meyers and George Stephanopoulos.  Other good words:
    United States of America, Bill Al Tipper Democrats USA
    US These files are also available via anonymous ftp
    from sunsite.unc.edu The files of type filename used in
    the index were:
    /home3/ftp/pub/academic/political-science/whitehouse-
     papers/1993 ")

    Folks without WAIS clients or gophers that act as WAIS
    clients may telnet to sunsite.unc.edu and login as swais
    to access this information via WAIS.

1.b    GOPHER is a distributed menuing system for information access on the
    Internet developed at the University of Minnesota. gophers are
    client-server implementations and various gopher clients are
    available for nearly any computing platform.  You may now use
    gopher clients to assess the White House Papers and other
    political information on SunSITE.unc.edu's new gopher server.
    You may also add links from your local gopher server to
    SunSITE for access to the White House Papers.

    For gopher server keepers and adventurous clients to access
    SunSITE you need only know that we use the standard gopher
    port 70 and that our internet address is SunSITE.unc.edu
    (152.2.22.81). Point there and you'll see the references to
    the Politics areas.

    For folks without gopher clients but with access to telnet:
    telnet sunsite.unc.edu login: gopher The rest is very straight
    forward. Browsing options end with a directory mark (/),
    searching options end with an question mark (?). There's
    plenty of on-line help available.

2.      No special instructions.

3.      The CLINTON@MARIST log files which contain all the official
    administration releases distributed through the MIT servers
    are available via anonymous FTP. These logs contain in
    addition to the official releases, the posts that comprise the
    ongoing discussion conducted by the list subscribers.
    To obtain the logs:
    FTP MARISTB.MARIST.EDU - the logs are in the CLINTON directory
    and are named CLINTON LOG9208 thru CLINTON LOGyymm where yymm
    stands for the current year and month. Problems should be
    directed to my attention: [e-mail] or
    [e-mail].
    Posted by Lee Sakkas - owner, CLINTON@MARIST

4.      Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility is
    providing all Clinton documents on technology and privacy
    at the CPSR Internet Library, available via
    FTP/WAIS/Gopher at cpsr.org /cpsr/clinton (and in other
    folders as relevant). For email access, send a message
    with the word "help" at the 1st line of text to
    [e-mail].

5.      The FedWorld Computer System, operated by the National Technical
    Information Service, archives White House papers in a traditional BBS
    type file library.  Connect to FedWorld by calling (703) 321- 8020.
    No parity, eight data bits and one stop bit (N-8-1).  FedWorld
    accommodates baud speeds of up to 9,600.  White House papers are
    located in the W-House library of files.  To access this library from
    the main FedWorld menu, enter <f s w-house>.  Files are named with the
    first four digits being the release month and day (e.g. 0323XXX.txt).
    Some standard abbreviations after the date include:

        rem - Remarks by the President
        pc  - Press Conference transcript
        pr  - Press Release
        AM  - AM Press Briefing
        PM  - PM Press Briefing
        sch - The President's public schedule
        spch- Text of major speeches.

    These files are saved in ASCII format.  Files can be viewed online by
    requesting to download a file and then selecting (L)ist as the
    download protocol.   This will display the file a screen at a time.
    White House papers are kept in the above format for up to two months.
    Papers more than two months old are compressed using Pkzip into a
    single file that contains all of the files for that month (e.g.
    0193.zip contains all papers released during January 1993).  In
    addition to White Documents, FedWorld also provides a gateway to more
    than 100 government funded BBSs and computer systems.




III.  HOW DO I SEND EMAIL TO THE WHITE HOUSE?

The White House email system is under construction.  This is a new
project and suffers from all of the problems common to a startup
operation.  The Communications office is currently working on defining
what this system will do, as well as trying to come up with equipment
and staffing to make sure that it works.  Email messages are
currently being printed out and responses are being sent out via US
Mail.

Nobody wants this new venture to work more than the staff that has
devoted so many hours to getting it up and running.  But much time and
effort will be required before the system is truly interactive.  In
the mean time, they will need a little patience from the electronic
community.  If you send a message to the White House, please include a
US Post office address for replies.

    You can send email to the following accounts:

CompuServe:             75300,3115
            GO: WHITE HOUSE         finds White House forum

America OnLine:         clinton pz
            KEYWORD: WHITEHOUSE     finds White House area

MCI                     TO: WHITE HOUSE
            VIEW WHITE HOUSE    views bulletin boards

Fidonet                 TO: WHITEHOUSE@1:2613/333
            Echomail: WHITEHOUSE    views echomail conference

Internet:               [e-mail]
            [e-mail]
            [e-mail]

Please send corrections, deletion and additions to this FQA to:

            [e-mail]

------ End of Forwarded Message