Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!pyrnj!mirror!xanth!kent From: kent@xanth.UUCP Newsgroups: news.stargate Subject: Re: A modest proposal Message-ID: <765@xanth.UUCP> Date: Sat, 28-Mar-87 11:48:14 EST Article-I.D.: xanth.765 Posted: Sat Mar 28 11:48:14 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 29-Mar-87 10:34:10 EST References: <1369@ncc.UUCP> <748@xanth.UUCP> <283@mcdchg.UUCP> Reply-To: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) Distribution: na Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va. Lines: 88 Summary: flames and fluff cost too In article <283@mcdchg.UUCP> heiby@mcdchg.UUCP (Ron Heiby) writes: >In article <748@xanth.UUCP> [I wrote] >>Stargate doesn't want to be >>responsible for the contents of my or anyone else's flames, either, I bet, >>so common carrier is the only safe way to go. > >Sorry, Kent. You're wrong (at least) here. Everything I've heard about >Stargate, including at a couple of open Usenix Board meetings and articles >in ";login:" indicate that Stargate does NOT want to be "safe". They want >to be *valuable*. [...] I have heard at least one >member of the Stargate team say that if Stargate were to end up as a "common >carrier", he wouldn't be interested in the project, either. I would love to >have someone else weed out the utter crap, flames, repeats, etc. and give me >timely, reliable access to what's left. > >I believe that there are still questions to be answered by the Stargate >team, but I don't think the "common carrier" question is one of them. >It has been answered quite well, already. I'm willing to give them some >more time to work things out and detail their plans before criticizing >them. >-- >Ron Heiby, heiby@mcdchg.UUCP Moderator: mod.newprod & mod.os.unix >Motorola Microcomputer Division (MCD), Schaumburg, IL >"There are only two of them that I think are idiots." Brian Reid Ron, I really don't think that the stargate folks can succeed at being censors of what goes over their net redistribution mechanism. First, it takes about 6 to 8 persons to thoroughly scan the net, reading 40 hours each per week, and, on their shoestring, they can't afford the help. Second, a lot of the "value" of the net is in entertainment. Group soc.singles, for example, is (one of) the highest message count group(s) on the net (don't know about byte count). That means lots of folks carry it, and lots read it, to get that much traffic. Evidently, it is not moderated! More important, it is frequently rude, obscene, insulting, etc. So, they cannot carry it safely as a broadcaster. Yet, it is a popular part of net traffic. So, if I, as a site administrator, want to save communications costs, finding a cheap way to copy soc.singles is high on my priority list, because it is high on my expense list. Stargate as presently planned doesn't make it. Substitute at least a hundred other newsgroups for soc.singles, and you begin to see the size of the problem. Third, there are tremendous differences of opinion among net users on what constitutes proper postings. Look through the recent postings in comp.emacs about the inclusion of sex.1 in the GNU emacs distribution. This also shows why a censor would have to read *all* the net traffic. (I guess even the arced, compressed, crypted, uuencoded part -- that should be fun!) As a net user, I would not be interested in letting someone else decide that my postings shouldn't be passed on, or that others postings should not be passed on to me. As a site administrator, I don't want to deal with defending such filtering to my users, nor do I want to spend the money for hardware, licensing, etc., for a facility that only solves part of my cost problem and worsens my administration problem. Fourth, a significant portion of the net traffic is email. Since it costs just as much in administration and maintenance costs to handle email as posted news (though, thankfully, less in message unit costs), a complete solution must account for email too. Censorship here is obviously out. I hope a stargate-like facility succeeds. I have a grudge against high phone costs, and want a better way found. To succeed, however, stargate must continue to support the creative anarchy which is the net, or lose its audience and not fulfill its promise of cost savings. I think, to do this safely, it must be a common carrier. Kent. -- Kent Paul Dolan, "The Contradictor", 25 years as a programmer, CS MS Student at ODU, Norfolk, Virginia, to find out how I was supposed to be doing this stuff all these years. 3D dynamic motion graphics a specialty. Work wanted. Unemployment is soooo nice though...I never have to disclaim anything! UUCP : kent@xanth.UUCP or ...seismo!decuac!edison!xanth!kent CSNET : kent@odu.csnet ARPA : kent@xanth.cs.odu.edu Voice : (804) 587-7760 USnail: P.O. Box 1559, Norfolk, Va 23501-1559 Copyright 1987 Kent Paul Dolan. All Rights Reserved. Incorporation of this material in a collective retransmission constitutes permission from the intermediary to all recipients to freely retransmit the entire collection. Use on any other basis is prohibited by the author.