Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!ucbvax!agate!ig!uwmcsd1!mailrus!ames!joyce!gds From: gds@spam.istc.sri.com (Greg Skinner) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: "NNTP has had a number of very bad effects on the net..." Message-ID: <13462@joyce.istc.sri.com> Date: 24 Jul 88 16:51:30 GMT References: <4277@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> <7397@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> Sender: gds@joyce.istc.sri.com Reply-To: gds@spam.istc.sri.com (Greg Skinner) Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park Lines: 80 In article <7397@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> mangler@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Don Speck) writes: >Well, before NNTP, one needed UUCP to get Usenet. >But now individual ARPA sites don't need the UUCP sites anymore. Before nntp, there were arpa sites that received Usenet from uucp neighbors. However, they were at their liberty to use any file transfer-type protocol (smtp, rcp, etc.) to move news to arpa sites that didn't want uucp phone connections. With nntp, a standard was provided for news exchange among arpa neighbors. >NNTP has introduced a strong economy of scale, leading to a much wider >disparity in readers per machine - or more to the point, in *posters* >per machine. A typical college Usenet machine now serves hundreds of >posters. That's why Usenet now has a hundred thousand undergraduates >posting idle chit-chat. This has nothing to do with nntp. What about all the AT&T and DEC posters? They don't use nntp internally that I know of (perhaps not externally either, but I am not sure). Yet they are voluminous due to sheer numbers. >Unlike mailing lists, which can be received by any machine, >NNTP servers are one per department, with the trend being toward one >per campus. This extrapolates to one per regional network. Do you >see much rrn'ing across BARRNET, yet? You will... and caching slave >servers will hasten the day. NNTP was not designed for news to be *read* across gateway boundaries. As for your previous points, I've seen no trends towards one nntp server per campus. There are many reasons why this is so -- single point of failure, disk and cpu charges unfairly incurred on a single machine, for example. >As something becomes more and more centralized, it falls under the >purview of ever higher levels in the bureaucracy. It becomes *very* >visible, to more conservative people, something we never had to >worry about with mailing lists, because mail was private. Usenet >has a pretty radical reputation. Do you think it could withstand >a DARPA review? Are you implying that nntp is at fault for making Usenet more visible than the existing mailing lists? I disagree (although I agree in principle that as something becomes more centralized it becomes more visible). *Personal* mail is as private as the system administration permits it to be. Mailing lists, despite attempts to keep them secret or restrict information flow, eventually come under the scrutiny of administrators whose hosts list mail passes through. Lists I've known of (even those I have not been a member of) have caused far more damage than Usenet has, and there was no DARPA involvement to squelch those lists. More often than not, a word from the offended administrators to the list maintainers was enough to resolve any difficulties. >Centralization brings us back to having critical failure points, >where loss of a single machine knocks out a department, a campus, >perhaps a regional net. I'm not talking about machine failures; >I'm talking about *administrative* shutdowns. Again, nntp was not designed to serve large organizations (such as huge campuses or regional nets). If it's being used in that manner, naturally its lack of efficacy, not to mention the effect that will be felt if that service is discontinued, will be felt throughout the organization. >Usenet is beginning to come under public scrutiny, like it or not. Usenet came under public scrutiny long before nntp. >By giving away Usenet to the Internet, it now has to answer to a >new master, one that can be a lot harsher if crossed. Certainly this is the case of running a new service over any existing service. However, nntp will be no more at fault for causing problems than any mailing lists which existed prior to then. --gregbo p.s. It might be more appropriate to title this discussion "Usenet has had some ill effects on the Internet" but that is also highly debatable.