From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 1994 13:25:11 -0800 (PST) And part of the problem lies in Usenet itself, as we have been discussing. The "broadcast" model, without any form of postage along the way, means that any message can in principle be sent to thousands of sites (though dial-in users are of couse not obligated to read these posts, and hence don't have to incur expenses). Long range, Usenet will likely be restructured in some way so that users choose what they wish to receive. OK, well, at least I understand how digital postage would work, technically. But it sounds like we all agree that it's not enough. If we assume that Usenet is "broken", how do we fix it? Considering how many users there are (which must be at least one or two orders of magnitude more than there are of the thousands of news sites), how do you efficiently get articles only to the users who want them, and no others. And heck, how do you even have the users *describe* which postings they want? In some ways, rec.pets.birds is a rough description of what they want, by common consensus. The problem is that there's no enforcement on it, so anyone can become Detweilered. And if you do have to send your filter out across the network, there are obvious privacy implications as well --- it's one of the reasons why Usenet's flooding algorithm is somewhat useful. Users at MIT can read alt.sex.bondage without needing to send their identity out on the global network (and we *DON'T* keep logs on our news server!). For this reason, ``your long range solution'' has a lot of very tough technical challenges hiding behind it!!! Instead of just hearing people say that "Usenet is broken", I'd love to hear about some suggestions about how to re-architect it, at a real technical level. "Cypherpunks write code" --- well, it sounds like there's a really big and interesting problem here. - Ted