At 12:34 AM -0400 on 10/20/96, Scott McGuire wrote:
I've been thinking about the use of Usenet as a message pool and this seems to be a good place to bring up my thoughts. As an already existing, widely disseminated and easily used message pool, Usenet is very valuable to us. I'm concerned that it may not last though. Many people now complain about how low the signal to noise ratio is (even more than they complain about this list). I've heard people say that they have given up on newsgroups in favor of mailing list, web-zines, etc. So, if it gets too bad, might it just fade away? Or, if it remains but becomes unpopular, will it be easy to restrict if we use it for anonymous messages?
IMHO, it will end up similar to the late night infomerical spots on TV. Not puch of value there, but bored people will still look. Any effort to regulate it will come from a tangent; IDs of some sort to post in public, or have access to the net, or screening it out of the hypothetical InfoBahn II networks, or similar.
Not long ago on this list some people discussed possible changes to Usenet involving the elimination of newsgroups and their replacement with a searching system (ie. show me all articles with "cypherpunks" as a keyword). Has this gone anywhere? I was thinking that this could be done in a way as to be compatible with current implementations. A server could be written which would act like an nntp server if connected to on the nntp port, but which would work differently internally. When an nntp client makes a request regarding some news group, say alt.anonymous.messages, the server would search its single, unsorted pool of articles for all with "alt.anonymous.messages" in the newsgroup field of the header and respond to the request. Clients written for the new server would have access to its enhanced features (whatever they end up being).
Would the concept of moderated forum have to go away, too? People could look for messages signed by the moderator, but the overhead inherent in validating keys could make that unusable. The transition would be messy, once (if) two parallel systems were in place. Many people using the new system would start tagging messages with newsgroup names, of course, but the breakdown effect of lots of people posting messages that seem to go straight to the void would have a negative impact on the whole thing. Something similar to the namespace pollution problem large companies see with resumes would also start to happen, only in a much more shameless form (Spam, the Next Generation). Once enough specific search terms emerged as coherent analogues to groups, this might be functional, though.
Although this does not have any direct crypto relevance, preserving Usenet as an anonymous message pool seems like a good idea to me. And to preserve it as an anonymous message pool, it needs to be kept useful for its other uses. I'm willing to work on this but I don't have the experience to lead an effort. So, is anyone interested or is anyone already working along these lines?
I'm interested. I see a lot of problems, though, with implementation details, especially while both the old and the new exsist side by side. Something more akin to _Islands In The Net_ style data havens seems more workable, but with obvious disadvantages... -j -- "I'm about to, or I am going to, die. Either expression is used." - Last words of Dominique Bouhours, Grammarian, 1702 ____________________________________________________________________ Jamie Lawrence mailto:jal@cyborganic.net mailto:foodie@netcom.com