Today's NPR Science Friday show was on Clipper. Flatow's gFrom owner-cypherpunks Fri May 6 14:28:41 1994 Return-Path: <owner-cypherpunks> Received: by toad.com id AA13801; Fri, 6 May 94 14:28:41 PDT Received: from research.att.com (ninet.research.att.com) by toad.com id AA13790; Fri, 6 May 94 14:28:34 PDT Message-Id: <9405062128.AA13790@toad.com> From: smb@research.att.com Received: by gryphon; Fri May 6 17:27:20 EDT 1994 To: cypherpunks@toad.com Subject: Re: MBone cypherpunks session... Date: Fri, 06 May 94 17:27:19 EDT Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Precedence: bulk I disagree with Perry, at least in the abstract. The mbone is not expensive, if no one is transmitting. First of all, there's no bandwidth reservation; if you're not sending anything, you don't consume anything. Second, the bits are sent only to the networks used by the recipients; a tree is constructed by the mbone routers based on IGMP (sic) packets emitted by the participants. So if IdiotS and IdiotD are having an mbone session, no one else is likely to see any impact... There are two exceptions: the IGMP packets themselves, and the sd announcements. But those are both sent once per minute or less, so they're not much of an issue. For technical information, see http://www.eit.com/techinfo/mbone/mbone.html; Rich Stevens' book ``TCP/IP Illustrated'' has a good discussion of IGMP, though I don't think he talks about mrouted, the mbone routing and tunneling protocol. Besides -- two of the important mbone tools, vat and wb, support encryption. What could be more ideal? That said, an open party line is probably a bad idea. The email load is bad enough on cypherpunks -- there's a *lot* of noise -- without having to listen to Cypherpunk Talk Radio (more likely Cypherpunk Shout Radio...) all day. But a semi-organized conference format, of a given duration, might work. It would be an interesting experiment to try. --Steve Bellovin