Clipper on Science Friday

[Phil Karn]

Today's NPR Science Friday show was on Clipper. Flatow's gFrom owner-cypherpunks  Fri May  6 14:28:41 1994
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Subject: Re: MBone cypherpunks session... 
Date: Fri, 06 May 94 17:27:19 EDT
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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