gnu@sun.uucp (John Gilmore) (01/14/85)
I agree that lots of Usenet submissions are trash. Everything is trash to somebody. What I don't want is centralized control. That's the ONE thing that makes Usenet different from every other network, and it's a valuable difference. For example, I submitted a message to the Arpanet mailing list corresponding to "fa.telecom" describing the temporary shutdown of a telecom-related magazine (TAP). It was rejected by the "moderator" who would not publish it because he was afraid DARPA would object -- because the magazine was "out of favor" with the government. The message described how the magazine had received arson threats and how its offices were set afire, probably by government or telco agents. I'd have had no trouble posting it to net.telecom, unless of course it was mod.telecom and sensitive to the possibility that the uplink might be shut down by Reagan Administration or phone company nuisance suits for reporting sensitive political news. While the uplink IS a more likely target if someone tries to sue the net, it hasn't happened yet, and if "society" is ready for a fast-turnaround public access news medium, it won't happen. If society's not ready, then who are we trying to kid in creating such a medium? It seems to me that there's a larger incentive to get real moderated netnews going over phone lines than over a satellite, since the cost of sending all the trash over phone lines is much higher. Before agreeing that all satellite news must be moderated, can we attempt to run a complete landline network on that basis for a few months? We should have plenty of time before all the software and hardware for stargate are ready anyway, and this will let us see how much trash it really does filter, how much effort moderation is, how much slower such a network runs, and what effect it actually has on "sensitive" submissions. (I'm suggesting that we distribute net.all and mod.all in parallel for a few months, so we can really see the difference. We can arrange the software so that each moderated group contains a subset of the messages of the unmoderated group, avoiding retransmission and double storage.)
ron@wjvax.UUCP (Ron Christian) (01/18/85)
(Spotted the bug the other day...)
I came in on this discussion a bit late, but is there some reason
why we couldn't pass the professional (moderated) newsgroups through
stargate, and continue to pass the non-professional/narrow-interest/whatever
newsgroups through the present infrastructure? Then some biologist
in maine gets his professional-oriented newsgroup from stargate and
us original Usenetters still have net.rec and net.games. This cuts
down on the load at the backbone sites and still provides a moderated
stargate link. The backbone sites would have to remain as news senders,
though, so hopefully the reduced traffic would enable them to remain
in business.
Another question: If the backbones stop passing news altogether, would
they still pass mail? I would think so, since mail through stargate
would be impossible. (moderated mail! No Thanks!) What's to keep us
hackers from starting our own little net news service with aliases and
cc lists? Chaotic, of course, but if the 'free' net dies, what choice
would we have? Gee, I could probably write the mini-net software
myself.....
--
Ron Christian (Watkins-Johnson Co. San Jose, Calif.)
{pesnta,twg,ios,qubix,turtlevax,tymix}!wjvax!ron