newman@bgsuvax.UUCP (Tim Newman) (01/29/85)
All of the talk about the censorship of the newsnet has, quite frankly, got me worried. Whenever a forum of ideas is restricted, it is time for all Americans to wake up and scream bloody murder. But lest this merely become one more in a mounting pile of complaints about the relative merit of such a Stargate system, perhaps it should be most appropriate to investigate a few ways of saving the net. I don't know for sure how transmission is presently accomplished, but it seems to me that if phone bills are too high, then communication in code ought to be possible. For instance, build system software which would encode at a sending sight and decode at a receiving sight. A symbol dictionary could be built which would minimize transmission time. Software like Multimate and many other word processors have a dictionary of 50,000 words (or whatever), so this type of system ought not to be impossible. Instead of transmitting ASCII codes for each letter of a word, why not transmit ASCII codes for an entire word? Text could be compressed down quite remarkably. Also, I seem to get the impression that moderation would be done by humans. Why not program a machine to do much of the moderation. For instance, white space could be minimized. On net.jokes, often 20 lines are transmitted and only 4 contain text. Elimination of white space could be accomplished mechanically. Furthermore, perhaps redundancy could be eliminated by machine. If two people each submit the same answer to a trivia question or a question about a joke, why post both? Simple moderation, without censorship, could be accomplished easily by machine. Encryption and limited (very limited) moderation both could, I feel, substantially reduce telephone bills. This would avoid any ethical questions about censorship and would mean that no possible fraudulent behavior would be possible; it would not be possible for moderator X to delete my article because it contains anti-American comments, or some such idea(s). I really think that adoption of these and like suggestions would make full-scale moderation unacceptable. Phone bills would be lowered and a free forum of thought exchange would be preserved. Please consider my thoughts, Tim Newman @ BGSU
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (01/30/85)
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
jeff@gatech.UUCP (Jeff Lee) (02/01/85)
> 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. I'm not a usenet freedom of speech fanatic probably because I've seen of of the phone bills that we footed when someone decided to run $2000 worth of phone charges on us (we called them, but no more). Something is obviously going to have to give because with phone charges going nowhere but up and the amount of news following right behind, no-one is going to be able to afford such a luxury (see, I'm obviously not a fanatic because I see it as a luxury and not an inalienable right). As far as the idea (reprinted above) that we might do it like a newspaper (I know it was a suggestion; this is not a flame), let's take a closer look and I'll give my reasons why I think we need to do better than that. I'm sure that most of you have seen the outcome of Ariel Sharon libel trial. The jury decided that Time, Inc. had acted with reckless abandon when doing the story, but that they had been ignorant of the facts and obviously didn't know that they were defaming him (which was the only reason that they weren't libelous, since they didn't do it on purpose). Time heralded this as a win for them, but was it?? Jody Powell (this is probably the only time I will ever agree with him) said that if anyone else was convicted of doing their job the same way (a cab driver, doctor, steam shovel operator, or president) they would be branded criminals. I agree (I'll bet you couldn't guess that, could you). The point of this story is that the newspapers would be quick to bring judgement on one of these other people, but (at least the ones that I have seen) they do not bring judgement on one of their own. The only time recently was TV-Guide condemning CBS on the Westmoreland libel case. The reason that this happens is because the people in control decide what is important (presidential libel) and what is not important (newspaper libel). This is why I think that we need to come up with a way that contains more checks and balances. Maybe something based on the Constitution ?? Since money probably (hopefully) won't come into it maybe it will work as in theory, here. Thanks, (gasp....) -- Jeff Lee CSNet: Jeff @ GATech ARPA: Jeff.GATech @ CSNet-Relay uucp: ...!{akgua,allegra,rlgvax,sb1,unmvax,ulysses,ut-sally}!gatech!jeff