lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (01/14/85)
Future postings on this topic should normally be sent to net.news.stargate only. Just a few comments: 1) I don't think any sort of complex contract scheme, with each site trying to get others to sign authentication contracts, could work. Good luck finding the right people at each site to sign the contract, and then GETTING them to sign it! And if an anonymous posting showed up (it's easy for people to forge both usernames and sitenames in articles) what do you do? How do you prove who sent the message, even if you did manage to get signed agreements? The big target for suits remains the broadcast point, since it's the ONE place where you know for sure who is operating it. Everything else is very foggy as far as identification is concerned, even if (as I doubt) you could get every site and every user to sign something (and had software to enforce authentication). I just don't think it's practical. 2) The analogy regarding suits is best not made with telco, which normally provides one-person to one-person links, but rather radio, TV, and magazines, where the legal history shows that in cases of suits, both the author AND the publishing/broadcast entity often get hit. Since with stargate it would be very hard to prove who was the original author, it makes it even more likely that the broadcast entity would be the target. Even if you knew the author, the entity would still be at risk. No matter how you try to decentralize, that central broadcast target is looming there. 3) One person (Steve Woods, I think) said that anyone who sent unscreened materials through something like stargate would be a "damn fool." I agree. In past messages, I've layed out the reasons why unscreened traffic is not practical, from technical, legal, logistical, and the purely practical financial aspects. I refer people to those (long) messages for details, or contact me directly. 4) I've detected before this looming fear that some people have that if stargate is successful, sites might drop their existing links and thusly Usenet (as we know it) might die. I find this to be an interesting fear, given the fact that it sounds like some people would like to prevent others from receiving only the materials that they wish to receive. Some people seem to feel that there is some sort of rule that every site has to be willing to pass along all the "stuff" of Usenet, as some sort of fundamental law. And these same people fear that once people have a technical means to choose only the stuff they would prefer to pay for, they will do so. This amounts to forced charity in a number of cases. And the charity is already beginning to break down as administrators arbitrarily start cutting back on netnews for purely financial reasons. The cutbacks are going to occur WITH or WITHOUT stargate. As the net grows they are inevitable. At least stargate provides an alternative. Right now, there is no alternative for users if their administrators cut back -- some sites have been forced to drop completely off the net. But the important thing is that if people feel that they want to continue passing along unscreened material by phone, they simply find other sites that feel the same way and are willing to pay the costs. That's how Usenet started. But it is unreasonable for these same people to act as if they have a RIGHT to force other sites to support such activities, to a virtually unlimited degree, if they don't want to (or can't afford to!) Someone suggested that there might be some legal way to force sites to keep running Usenet via various bizarre legal tricks. In other words, this person suggests that it's OK to force people to spend money to pass around netnews, even if they don't want to, just so that the undiluted flow will continue. What happens as the net grows and the phone bills increase? Are companies to fire employees so that they'll have the money for phone calls to support the "mandated Usenet service"? While Usenet traffic was relatively light, the costs involved (in money and time) of running Usenet were fairly small. But for many sites, this is no longer the case, and I can't see valid reasons to try hold back the clock and prevent alternatives that will help let people decide how they want to spend their money for such services. People who feel they can best use stargate would use it. Sites that wanted to participate in an unscreened network would do that. Or both. But unless there are alternatives like stargate, the site cutbacks are going to occur (purely for financial reasons) anyway, and there won't be any alternatives available. Usenet might *seem* to be a free ride to many people, but it is not, and in reality it never has been. At least individual sites should have the ability to make their own decisions, after considering their needs and resources, regarding the sort of role they wish to play in the nets, however expansive or limited that role might be. There will never be anything (as far as I'm concerned) to stop any collection of sites from sending whatever Usenet materials (on whatever topics and with whatever quality they choose) via the phone, just as they presumably do now. All that would be required is that those sites all agree that that's what *they* want to do. Then they call each other and do it! However, I feel that depending on the "forced" participation of sites who *don't* want to do this, and/or who aren't able or willing to pay those costs, is both unreasonable and impractical in the long run. The sites that want all unscreened news should obviously pay (among themselves, via whatever cost dispersal techniques they wish) for those transfers. Those who don't want that much stuff (or want different stuff) can decide to choose some alternative means for getting the info they *do* want. What it all amounts to, in the end, is for sites to pay for what they want (among themselves as a group if desired--nobody says that slave polling has to stop!) rather than to force sites into paying for things they don't really want or cannot afford. --Lauren--
dmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Martindale) (01/14/85)
This is another vote in favour of some source of moderated news - either via stargate or some other means. While at Waterloo, I've watched the information flow on USENET grow from under 1Mb/week to its current level of over 4Mb/week. I used to read almost everything that came in (except info-cpm, remember that?), now I read only a small fraction, and the valuable stuff is getting scarcer. Watmath continues to receive and forward all groups (it is a backbone site). And it continues to feed all of this to most of the other on-campus machines on the basis that it is easier to send everything than to try to determine what is "worthwhile", and each machine has a sizeable body of news readers who might be reading any given group. But I'm about to leave Waterloo, for a new machine that will have about 3 users. I want to get a USENET connection for it, but it will likely be impossible to justify the phone and machine time needed to get a complete feed, most of which would never be looked at by anyone. Once it is necessary to select particular groups, the only specific groups that can be justified are the explicitly technical ones. If stargate was up and running, it would be much easier to justify the "accept everything" policy, both because the real costs do not increase with the volume received, and because the quality would be sufficiently improved that more of it would be worth reading. Under these conditions (and I suspect they are becoming more common, as it becomes more expensive to join USENET as a full-feed site), stargate or something like it will allow me to read more, not less, news. And get more out of it at the same time. If some of you want to spend your hours flaming at each other, fine. But you cannot expect me to try to justify spending money which ultimately comes from taxpayers to pay for importing it to a site where it will not even be read.