A brief data point to add to Bill's interesting post: I had dinner with someone from alt.net during my not-exactly-voluntary visit to the Seattle area recently. He told me (this is from memory) that Usenet is now on the order of 300 GB/day and they get a full feed. 90 percent is binaries. -Declan On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 09:19:58AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
I don't know if Jim meant to send that reply about Usenet; the sentence was chopped off in the middle, just after the glaring incorrectness :-) Usenet's newsgroup conventions have been controlled by various Cabals over the years, but participation has always been optional, and John Gilmore created the alt.groups precisely to make it explicitly continue to be optional. That doesn't prevent most newsgroups from turning into permanent flamewars or dumping grounds for spammers....
But Usenet today doesn't really work the way the original decentralized Usenet did. NNTP allows clients to connect to big servers, and the volume of traffic has become too large for small sites to get a complete feed, so there's increasing concentration at the bigger ISPs' news servers. A few years ago, a friend who runs a small ISP estimated that a full Usenet feed required "3 T1s, or 1 T1 if you don't get the porn groups" and it's presumably gotten much larger since then. "Nobody goes there any more - it's too crowded."
Napster was designed for a central index server, but that didn't scale and the protocols were reverse-engineered to make it easy to provide OpenNap servers that aren't part of the Napster.Com server cluster. It's still more vulnerable than Usenet or Gnutella, but the model does scale decently once everybody ignores the main Napster folks and moves to offshore servers :-)
Jim Choate replied to Ray Dillinger:
Usenet is an example of a system which is fully distributed. Actually this has the same limitations as the 'Napster' model, it requires a centralized
If all the backbone nodes went down tomorrow, a thousand linux geeks across the country could work out the news routing software and could put it back up without them inside of a week.
The same could be said for Napster or any other software once the 'intellecutal property' is widely enough know. Something to do with 'advancing the state' I suspect.
At 12:13 AM 04/16/2001 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
... Napster is an example of a system which is partially distributed. If it were fully distributed, you could pull the plugs out of the servers at napster and the users would never notice. ... Napster users couldn't choose to set up their own site as an indexing node, for example; it was a reserved role. Some of them