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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.news.stargate
Subject: Re: Options available which should be considered
Message-ID: <808@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-Jan-85 20:32:48 EST
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.808
Posted: Tue Jan 29 20:32:48 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 30-Jan-85 07:31:06 EST
References: <218@bgsuvax.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 94

What Tim refers to as "encryption" is commonly called "compression"
or "Huffman Coding".  In fact, this is being done in many places
right now.  Compression factors of 50% are being observed using the
new "compress" program.  With 2400 baud modems starting to become
popular, another 50% is possible.

However, this doesn't solve the problem, it just puts it off.  The
volume on the net is growing rapidly.  If we can transmit 4 times as
much news for the same phone bill, this just means it will be another
couple of years before the phone bills hit their current rates.  Sites
are now seeing $500/month phone bills.  If they run compress and get a
2400 baud modem, they could get it down to $125/month, for now.  But
how much is a reasonable amount to spend on phone bills each month?
Each site must decide that for itself; my guess is that $125 is somewhat
high too.

There are other problems besides phone bills.  cbosgd has had an
INCREDIBLY high load average lately - there are usually 4 uucico's
running, 2 or 3 of which are transferring news.  The system is dragging.
People are complaining about response time.  UUCP at 9600 baud (which
is the speed we use to send news to other local sites over Datakit or
our Dataswitch) REALLY beats on the system.  I've installed the various
sleeping hacks, but the high traffic level is still killing us.

Finally, there is the ability of people to read high volumes of
uninteresting stuff.  We only have a certain number of hours in
the day we're willing to spend reading news.  To cite a popular
example, look at Dear Abby.  She gets thousands of letters a day.
Can you imagine if she were required to print every letter she
gets in every newspaper?  This is the direction we're going.

Let me suggest another possible way of dealing with this.  The model
comes from two properties of the real world.  First, magazines, TV
stations, and newspaper columnists are all faced with a size limit;
they have so much space (or time) into which they must fit what they
publish or broadcast.  Second, real Usenet sites have only so much
capacity to carry news; anything more drains too many cycles from
their machine or dollars from their phone budget.

Now, suppose we place a limit on the total amount of unmoderated news
that can be passed along per unit of time.  This would allow anyone to
say anything, provided you got there first.  It would also keep the
volume from growing beyond the point of causing too many problems.

For example, we might allocate so many K bytes of traffic to the
moderated groups (and let the moderators decide what's the most
important among the submissions, much like a newpaper) and so many
other K bytes of traffic per day for unmoderated groups, much like
a "public access" TV station.

There are a lot of possible variations on this.  Allocations might
be subdivided into separate quotas for each newsgroup, or just have
lump sums.  (Or both; the total quota might be less than the sum of
the newsgroups, much like disk quotas.)  Time units might be per day,
per week, or per month.  Allocations might be fixed across the whole
net, or each machine might set its own quotas, or there might be
"recommended quotas" which each machine modifies to suit its own policies.

How would it be implemented?  Inews would have two more fields in the
active file - one for the total number of Kbytes allowed, another for
the number received so far.  When an article comes in, the count is
incremented by the length.  If the count is over, it's stored locally
but not transmitted elsewhere.  Perhaps a mail message goes back to the
sender saying that the quota has been exceeded, so they will know why
there are no responses.  A utility is run from crontab (or perhaps out
of expire) that resets the counts to zero each day, week, or month.

Another issue this would bring up would be new newsgroups.  We would
no longer create an unmoderated newsgroup just because there are twenty
people out there who want to see it.  To create a newsgroup, we would
have to take quota away from some other newsgroup.  I don't know who
makes this decision, but there are real world models we could copy,
for instance, when our newspaper gets a new comic strip, they take away
one of the others.  Perhaps there is an election, perhaps the newsgroup
is created in true Usenet anarchistic fashion by getting the contacts
of some key machines to give you some quota for it, perhaps there is
a czar or board of directors elected by the membership that makes the
decision.

By the way, these restrictions would primarily apply to world-wide or
usa-wide groups.  There is no reason why there couldn't be "local"
newsgroups (where "local" might mean "within a city" or whatever other
local interpretation was appropriate) with huge quotas that are never
exceeded.  In fact, if there were a newsgroup that was controversial,
some machines don't want it and others do, there is no reason why a
"local" distribution class could not be set up to carry that group.
For example, net.politics might be cut back on some machines, but those
that still want to carry it could easily form another network using the
same software to carry it - here "local" means "world-wide, but only
among parties agreeing to discuss it."

These are just ideas; comments are encouraged.

	Mark Horton