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From: ron@brl-sem.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.stargate
Subject: What really is suitable for STARGATE transmission?
Message-ID: <701@brl-sem.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 30-Mar-87 21:17:44 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-sem.701
Posted: Mon Mar 30 21:17:44 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 1-Apr-87 05:25:47 EST
Organization: Electronic Brain Research Lab
Lines: 44

First, I'd like to say that I think people who put restricted copyright
messages on their USENET messages are being rather silly.  I doubt that
it is really enforceable, it's sort of like putting a letter in a photo-
copier and expecting that copies won't be made.  In addition, STARGATE
would be foolish to be redistributing anything that was likely to have
these messages anyway.

NOW FOR THE REAL STUFF:

Frankly, I think people can settle down.  STARGATE has already decided
to transmit only moderated groups and other tame items.  I'm not sure
that the USENET MOD groups would even be a good idea.  First, finding
the moderated groups is a bit difficult these days now that the name
is not an indication of the distribution strategy.  But even when it
was, many "MOD" groups were not sufficiently moderated (if at all) to
meet any reasonable criteria that STARGATE could establish.  For example,
many of the groups are hot wired directly to Internet mailing lists that
are unmoderated.  Sending a note to the moderator address instantly posts
it to the Internet community and back into the supposed moderated news 
group.

Of the remaining moderated groups, STARGATE probably can not effectively
redistribute a group without the cooperation of the moderator.  They would
need to expect the moderator to exercise the type of discretion for which
they were looking when they chose to try the USENET moderated groups.  Of
the legitimate moderated lists, only a few are trully timely and interesting
enough to make the price of a STARGATE subscription worthwhile.

One idea that is very appealing, is to use STARGATE for some of the lists
that many people want but few are willing to pay the current backbone
charges to distribute.  The various source and binary distributions for
the variety of microcomputers comes to mind.  However, I certainly would
not wish to have the responsibility for blocking proprietary code that
someone maliciously or inadvertantly queued for transmission.  There has
been recent messages from AT&T about postings of UNIX proprietary code,
and a few years ago a couple of binaries of proprietary Mac programs were
posted.

I think STARGATE is going to have to look elsewhere for its program
material than just snarfing up a few existing USENET groups.  Of
course, this is exactly what they have been saying they want to do.
It can be done effectively.

-Ron