jdb9608@ultb.UUCP (J.D. Beutel ) (12/14/88)
The future of Usenet looks, to me, like it could be in trouble because of the recent rumblings over racism and censorship. Usenet carries alot of stuff that alot of people don't like--alt.sex and alt.drugs, for example. Several weeks ago, a newspaper in Canada was turned onto the racism issue, and put pressure on the University of Waterloo to have them reconsider carrying rec.humor.funny. Recently, a newspaper in Montreal did a similar story. As the public's interest in Usenet grows (the virus, for instance), and Usenet grows, and the scope of Usenet grows (alt.sex, for instance), I wouldn't be surprised if Usenet dropped some or all of its non-technical newsgroups. In that event, what would happen? Considering the increasing power and ability of personal computers (many of the latest can run Un*x, UUPC, UUCP even, and are part of Usenet), the increasing speed of modems in the personal price range, and the success of BBS based networks like FidoNet, would a non-public (i.e., non-restricted) network pick up what Usenet might be forced to drop? The volume of data carried on Usenet doubled, from 2 mb/day to 4 mb/day, last year. I wonder where it's all heading. I'd like to hear some informed speculation. Wha'd ya think? 11011011
karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (12/14/88)
jdb9608@ultb.UUCP (J.D. Beutel ) writes:
The volume of data carried on Usenet doubled, from 2 mb/day to 4 mb/day,
last year. I wonder where it's all heading. I'd like to hear
some informed speculation. Wha'd ya think?
There's a 3B2/400 in my basement that has 140Mbytes of disc and a
modem on it. I pay my own electric and phone bills. As long as that
situation continues, that machine can get a full newsfeed. The volume
would have to more than octuple before I would be concerned. That
gives me a minimum of 3 years before I even get nervous - and by then
I'll have some higher-capacity hardware to accommodate it.
--Karlskrenta@eecs.nwu.edu (Richard Skrenta) (12/15/88)
Informed speculation? Just a guess. The nature of USENET/uucp is that it's distributed. You'd have a much bigger problem if all the notesgroups were only carried by some large computer in Washington, and you had to dialup to read them. The other extreme is isolated bbs's, any of which can carry whatever they want, provided other freedoms hold. Now, what if all the bbs's were networked, and any of them could swap data with the others in an organized timely manner? It's still possible to censor, but getting harder... Rich Skrenta
bzs@pinocchio.encore.com (Barry Shein) (12/21/88)
What gloom and doomers usually fail to address is the fact that USENET is an anarchy. There's no organization, office, address, person, corporation, nothing to go and complain to or pressure. That's the beauty of it. Now sure, individual companies (or whatever) can drop certain groups due to pressure, they've been doing that all along and it doesn't seem to much affect the general free-wheeling nature. The person or persons who take a stab at USENET are going to have to dabble in some really evil ideas to censor it, it won't yield to traditional attacks on the central organization cuz there ain't one. -Barry Shein, ||Encore||
snoopy@sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy) (12/22/88)
In article <KARL.88Dec13170438@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu> karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes: |jdb9608@ultb.UUCP (J.D. Beutel ) writes: | The volume of data carried on Usenet doubled, from 2 mb/day to 4 mb/day, | last year. I wonder where it's all heading. I'd like to hear | some informed speculation. Wha'd ya think? | |There's a 3B2/400 in my basement that has 140Mbytes of disc and a |modem on it. I pay my own electric and phone bills. As long as that |situation continues, that machine can get a full newsfeed. The volume |would have to more than octuple before I would be concerned. That |gives me a minimum of 3 years before I even get nervous - and by then |I'll have some higher-capacity hardware to accommodate it. | |--Karl Whether the machine can handle the load is only one part of the problem. The other part is the human interface. There is a lot of useful information in usenet, but it is often buried in garbage. How much time do you want to spend skimming through articles hitting 'k' or 'n'? KILL files help, but not enough. Moderation sometimes helps, but often the moderator bends a group far too strongly in the direction of their own interests. What do you do with articles that you might want to refer to later? Print them out? Ugh! Save them on disk? Uses up lots of disk space fast, leading to putting them on tape where they aren't very handy. After awhile, even saving directories of the tapes gets to be huge. And when you want to find that article that mentioned 'foo'? "egrep foo *" takes awhile. We need some method of automatically selecting articles that is an order of magnitude or two better than KILL files. Any ideas? Could AI help here? We need some method of efficiently storing useful information for later use. Something better than throwing an article on disk with a couple of keywords in the filename. _____ /_____\ Snoopy /_______\ |___| tektronix!tekecs!sopwith!snoopy |___| sun!nosun!illian!sopwith!snoopy