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

[Declan McCullagh]

A brief data point to add to Bill's interesting post:

I had dinner with someone from alt.net during my not-exactly-voluntary
visit to the Seattle area recently. He told me (this is from memory)
that Usenet is now on the order of 300 GB/day and they get a full feed.
90 percent is binaries.

-Declan


On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 09:19:58AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> 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