The Culture of Secrecy, Disinformation, and , Propaganda...

[Bill Stewart]

I don't know if Jim meant to send that reply about Usenet;
the sentence was chopped off in the middle, just after the
glaring incorrectness :-)  Usenet's newsgroup conventions have
been controlled by various Cabals over the years, but participation
has always been optional, and John Gilmore created the alt.groups
precisely to make it explicitly continue to be optional.
That doesn't prevent most newsgroups from turning into
permanent flamewars or dumping grounds for spammers....

But Usenet today doesn't really work the way the original
decentralized Usenet did.  NNTP allows clients to connect to
big servers, and the volume of traffic has become too large
for small sites to get a complete feed, so there's increasing
concentration at the bigger ISPs' news servers.
A few years ago, a friend who runs a small ISP estimated that a
full Usenet feed required "3 T1s, or 1 T1 if you don't get the porn groups"
and it's presumably gotten much larger since then.
"Nobody goes there any more - it's too crowded."

Napster was designed for a central index server,
but that didn't scale and the protocols were reverse-engineered
to make it easy to provide OpenNap servers that aren't
part of the Napster.Com server cluster.
It's still more vulnerable than Usenet or Gnutella,
but the model does scale decently once everybody ignores
the main Napster folks and moves to offshore servers :-)


Jim Choate replied to Ray Dillinger:
 > > Usenet is an example of a system which is fully distributed.
 > Actually this has the same limitations as the 'Napster' model,
 > it requires a centralized

 > > If all the backbone nodes went down tomorrow, a thousand linux geeks
 > > across the country could work out the news routing software and
 > > could put it back up without them inside of a week.

 > The same could be said for Napster or any other software once the
 > 'intellecutal property' is widely enough know. Something to do with
 > 'advancing the state' I suspect.

At 12:13 AM 04/16/2001 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>...
>Napster is an example of a system which is partially distributed.
>If it were fully distributed, you could pull the plugs out of the
>servers at napster and the users would never notice.
>...
>Napster users couldn't choose to set up their own site as an
>indexing node, for example; it was a reserved role.  Some of them