Observer's defense of "Internet Pornography" article
If you haven't overdosed on the Observer articles yet, you can read their defense on http://www.observer.co.uk -- it is rather self-serving, but it could have been worse. The only revelation is that Demon (the major Internet provider) plans to block access to some newsgroups/sites. Also, assuming I read between the lines correctly, Demon receives three billion (with a "b") e-mail messages per day. I can never remember whether British usage is "thousand million," or "million million", but the numbers seem a bit large in any case. Perhaps they mean "3 billion bytes of e-mail." (Assume ten million Demon subscribers and three thousand million e-mail messages. This implies that the average subscriber receives 300 e-mail messages per day. Are they all subscribing to Cypherpunks?) Some other numbers: -- 180,000 newsgroup articles received per-day (per server). -- "tens of terabytes of data, (each equivalent to 750,000 floppy disks) move across a network of about 10 million machines." This seesm to refer to all of the Internet. Martin Minow minow@apple.com
Martin Minow wrote:
The only revelation is that Demon (the major Internet provider) plans to block access to some newsgroups/sites.
The only reason I ever used to use them was their lack of censorship. If they go ahead with this blocking, I doubt I'll ever use them again. Of course it's the principle, not the fact that I have nothing better to do all day long that download porn :-)
Also, assuming I read between the lines correctly, Demon receives three billion (with a "b") e-mail messages per day. I can never remember whether British usage is "thousand million," or "million million", but the numbers seem a bit large in any case.
They'll mean 3,000,000,000 (Brits hardly ever use billion to mean million million).
Perhaps they mean "3 billion bytes of e-mail."
I doubt it. A friend of mine, a demon subscriber, sends over a Gig of email every day.
(Assume ten million Demon subscribers and three thousand million e-mail messages. This implies that the average subscriber receives 300 e-mail messages per day. Are they all subscribing to Cypherpunks?)
I think there are in the order of 100,000 subscribers, so this would make the average 30,000 email message - definately not realistic. Gary -- "Of course the US Constitution isn't perfect; but it's a lot better than what we have now." -- Unknown. pub 1024/C001D00D 1996/01/22 Gary Howland <gary@systemics.com> Key fingerprint = 0C FB 60 61 4D 3B 24 7D 1C 89 1D BE 1F EE 09 06
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Martin Minow